A Mifflin County man was convicted on Wednesday of the 1995 rape and beating of a Penn State student in State College, a case that saw investigators use DNA evidence to identify the suspect for the decades-old crime.
Scott R. Williams, 52, was found guilty of rape by forcible compulsion and aggravated assault by Centre County Judge Brian Marshall after a stipulated bench trial. The prosecution and defense submitted an agreed-upon set of facts for Marshall to render a verdict.
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.
Sentencing is scheduled for March 25. As part of the bench trial agreement, Williams will face sentence ranges of no less than 7.5 to 15 years in prison and no more than 11.5 to 23 years, First Assistant District Attorney Sean McGraw said.
“The victim has shown a lot of courage and perseverance in getting through this process and we’ll be looking forward to the sentencing proceeding,” McGraw said.
In the early morning hours of May 13, 1995, borough officers were dispatched to the 900 block of South Pugh Street, where the 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.
Police said evidence showed the woman was attacked from behind and dragged to a flower bed, where she was raped and beaten with an object.
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.
“That exercise of really resourceful ingenuity stopped the statute of limitations and enabled the subsequent work that ultimately led to Williams’ arrest,” McGraw said.
Another former State College detective, John Ralston (now the Centre County detective), continued the investigation and updated the DNA profile as technology advanced. That proved crucial for Detective Stephen Bosak, who in 2019 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.
Detectives later took bags of trash from outside Williams’s home. Items inside them associated with Williams yielded DNA samples that were tested by the FBI, which confirmed a match with the DNA of the perpetrator, according to the affidavit.
“This verdict is a culmination of decades of some of the finest police work I have ever seen,” McGraw said on Thursday.
Williams has maintained his innocence, and his attorneys have challenged evidence, as well as the legality of the John Doe complaint that enabled his arrest.
The genetic genealogy process 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.
