Man Indicted For 1994 Rape In Decatur

A Morgan County grand jury has indicted a man in a 1994 rape. The suspect, Kenneth Jackson, is currently serving time in the Alabama Department of Corrections for three rape convictions.

The rape happened on June 7, 1994 at Stonegate Village Apartments in Southwest Decatur. Sgt. Rick Archer with the Decatur Police Department says a 16-year-old girl was asleep in her room. Around 3:45am, a man climbed through the girl's bedroom window, held the girl down and raped her. He escaped through the window.


Police say the girl was taken to Decatur General Hospital, where examiners performed a sexual assault examination on her. In 1994, the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences did not perform DNA testing, and DNA databases were not available at the time. So, police weren't able to identify the suspect.

The case sat cold for many years. In the fall of 2008, the Decatur Police Department's Violent Crimes Unit reviewed several unsolved sexual assault cases, including this one. Police say the victim, who is now 31, was still eager to have the case solved so she could find closure.

In December 2008, police took the victim's sexual assault kit back to the Alabama Department of Forensics for DNA analysis. Scientists took the DNA profile and put it in the CODIS database. CODIS is the Combined DNA Index System, which contains DNA profiles, many of which belong to convicted criminals.

Alabama's CODIS system contains more than 170,000 profiles.

Sgt. Archer says scientists got a match consistent with the unknown DNA profile. It belonged to Kenneth Jackson. Jackson is currently serving a life sentence in the Alabama Department of Corrections. He was convicted of three rapes in the early 1990s. One was in Tennessee, another was in Huntsville and the third was in Birmingham.

Sgt. Archer interviewed Jackson in July of 2009, in the St. Clair Correctional Facility. Archer says Jackson cooperated with the investigation. Police presented the case to the Morgan County Grand Jury in October and the grand jury indicted Jackson on a charge of first-degree rape.

Police say Jackson was a drifter who briefly lived in Decatur and north Alabama in the early 1990s. Police say Jackson has cooperated with them, and they don't believe Jackson was responsible for any other sexual assaults in the area.

Stonegate Village, the apartment complex in Decatur where the rape took place, has since been razed.