The man convicted of the 1995 rape and beating of a Penn State student in State College was sentenced on Monday to at least a decade in prison.
Scott R. Williams, 52, was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in state prison by Centre County Judge Brian Marshall.
Williams, of Mifflin County, was found guilty in February of rape by forcible compulsion and aggravated assault after a stipulated bench trial in which the prosecution and defense submitted an agreed-upon set of facts for Marshall to render a verdict.
As part of the bench trial agreement, Williams faced sentence ranges of no less than 7.5 to 15 years in prison and no more than 11.5 to 23 years.
“The sentence was on the high end and I think the belief was that the judge rendered justice in the case,” First Assistant District Attorney Sean McGraw said.
Williams was arrested in 2021 after a detective filed a criminal complaint based on a DNA profile more than 20 years ago, and investigators were later able to use a genetic genealogy process to identify the suspect for the decades-old crime.
State College police responded in the early morning hours of May 13, 1995 to the 900 block of South Pugh Street, where a woman was found in the middle of the road, covered in blood and naked from the waist down. A Penn State senior at the time, she had suffered a fractured skull, face and jaw and was flown to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville.
The woman was attacked from behind and dragged to a flower bed, where she was raped and beaten with an object, according to an affidavit of probable cause.
A subsequent investigation using evidence collected through a rape kit developed a DNA profile of the alleged perpetrator, and nearly five years later, on March 29, 2000, former State College detective Thomas Jordan filed an arrest warrant for a John Doe with the DNA profile. It was the first John Doe DNA criminal complaint filed in Pennsylvania.
Detective John Ralston continued the investigation and updated the DNA profile as technology advanced. In 2019, Detective Stephen Bosak took over the investigation with the help of former Detective Nicole Eckley.
They worked with two private labs to use the DNA samples in a genetic genealogy process that first identified distant relatives of the perpetrator. Through interviews and further DNA samples, they built out a family tree that by January 2021 brought them to Williams’s mother, who provided a DNA sample that showed the probability she was the mother of the perpetrator was 99.999%, prosecutors said at the time of Williams’ arrest.
Bosak and Eckley went undercover to a banquet Williams was attending in February 2021 with the goal of obtaining his eating utensils to collect a DNA sample. According to the complaint, they noticed he did not eat or drink during the banquet.
The detectives did, however, collect discarded items used by Williams’ son. The DNA samples taken from those showed a probability beyond 99% that he was the son of the man whose DNA was collected from the victim in 1995, according to an affidavit of probable cause.
Bags of trash later collected from outside Williams’s home contained items associated with Williams that yielded DNA samples.Those tested by the FBI, which confirmed a match with the DNA of the perpetrator, according to the affidavit.
McGraw called the guilty verdict in February the “culmination of decades of some of the finest police work I have ever seen.”
Williams has maintained his innocence, and prior to the bench trial his attorneys challenged evidence, as well as the legality of the John Doe complaint that enabled his arrest.
Stipulated bench trials are sometimes requested by defendants seeking a verdict to be able to then move forward to appeal the denial of pre-trial motions. Following Williams’ arrest in 2021, his attorneys filed a series of pre-trial motions seeking to have the case thrown out that were denied.
The genetic genealogy process used in Williams’s case has also been used to make arrests in recent years for two other Centre County rape cold cases.
Jeffrey P. Fields, of Port Matilda, was arrested in 2020 for the serial rapes of four Penn State students between 2010 and 2017 in State College. He pleaded guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to 29.5 to 61 years in state prison.
In April 2023, Kurt A. Rillema, of Michigan, was arrested for allegedly raping a 19-year-old Penn State student at knifepoint in 2000 at the Penn State Blue Golf Course. He is also charged for a similar rape in September 1999 in Michigan, where he is scheduled to stand trial first.
