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DNA links sex offender to 9-year-old Tampa rape

A police detective says he will continue to investigate whether Kenneth Dehart's DNA matches other crimes.

By REBECCA CATALANELLO
Published March 10, 2006

TAMPA - When he raped her, he told her he'd done this 200 times before.

He'd talked his way into the 46-year-old woman's business, restrained her and used her body to commit a felony.

Nine years later, she still remembers his face.

When Tampa police asked her on Friday to pick out his photo, she identified him swiftly.

The man she pointed to was Kenneth Dehart, 34, a convicted sex offender who'd recently been released from an Illinois jail. It was just what Detective Mark Sutkoff suspected.

After nine years, a national DNA database linked evidence collected in the Sept. 4, 1997, Tampa rape to Dehart, whose path has wound through Florida and Arizona, Arkansas and Nebraska, possibly even Oklahoma.

"I've just begun to scratch the surface," said Sutkoff. Based on Dehart's criminal record and his statement to the Tampa rape victim, Sutkoff believes Dehart's arrest might shine light on other unsolved rape cases locally and nationally.

"He is a serial rapist," Sutkoff said.

The Times does not disclose the names of rape victims.

Sutkoff first got word of the link on Feb. 17, when the Florida Department of Law Enforcement notified him that the FBI's Combined DNA Index System discovered Dehart to be a match.

According to records Sutkoff obtained, Dehart's criminal history goes back to age 16 when he was arrested for burglary. But his complete criminal history is a confusing hodgepodge of charges being levied, then dropped, of extraditions and convictions, of incarceration, probation and then more violations levied against him.

The last time police knew Dehart was in Florida was Sept. 25, 1997, when he was extradited from a Pinellas County jail to Illinois.

Before that, he was arrested in Hillsborough County in June 1996 on aggravated assault and criminal mischief. Public records show those charges were dropped.

On Wednesday, Dehart was located and arrested in Brooklyn Center, Minn., and charged with raping the then-46-year-old Tampa woman. He was traced to the Minnesota address in part because Dehart registered as a sex offender in Chicago on Feb. 23, 10 days after being released from an Illinois jail.

Chicago police tracked down a tenement house address where Dehart told police he would be living when he registered. But a 75-year-old man there told police that Dehart had planned to relocate to Brooklyn Center, Minn.

Sutkoff said the case shows that finding and matching DNA evidence takes time, even in an age when viewers of television shows like CSI expect it to provide solutions to crimes overnight.

"The key is, it doesn't happen in an hour," Sutkoff said. "It's an ongoing fight."

The Tampa victim did the best thing she could do at the time and went straight to police, Sutkoff said. Without that action alone, Sutkoff said, solving the crime all these years later would have been far, far more difficult.

Statistics show most sexual crimes go unreported, or victims wait to go to police, which can result in the loss of crucial evidence. "Don't bathe and don't change your clothes," Sutkoff offered as advice to people who find themselves victimized by a sex crime. "Your body becomes a crime scene and we have to collect evidence."

Dehart could be transported to Tampa as early as this weekend, or longer if he refuses extradition. He has several distinctive tattoos, including a star on his left arm and the name "Amy" on the right side of his neck.

Sutkoff said he will be spending long hours now piecing together Dehart's past to see if he might be responsible for other unsolved crimes.

Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report.

[Last modified March 10, 2006, 01:57:57]