DNA credited for charges in 1996 rape

Suspect is serving time in prison

Friday, July 4, 2008

James Clinton Cole, 50, who is incarcerated in the Maryland House of Correction Annex in Jessup, was charged with first-degree rape, second-degree rape, first-degree sex offense and second-degree sex offense in the rape of a 12-year-old girl from Bannister on Aug. 20, 1996. He was indicted last month after the Charles County Sheriff’s Office matched his DNA to a sample investigators collected after the incident, according to Diane Richardson, Charles County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman.

Richardson did not say why the department decided to test the sample against Cole’s DNA.

An article in the Maryland Independent from 1996 said that at the time of Cole’s arrest for a different crime two weeks after the rape in Bannister, officers also questioned him about the rape of the 12-year-old, but he wasn’t indicted for the crime until last month.

Police reported the girl had been walking in a field close to the Benjamin Stoddert Middle School in Waldorf at about 3 p.m. the day of the rape when a man approached her and dragged her into the woods, according to the article from 1996. After tying her to a tree using her own clothing, the man raped and beat her before running away, the girl told police.

The girl freed herself from the tree and ran with her hands still bound to a home in the 3000 block of Lovelace Court, according to the article.

An ambulance took her to Physicians Memorial Hospital, now Civista Medical Center. The girl described her attacker as a man in his early 20s who was about 5 feet 10 inches tall, according to the article.

A few days later, Charles County sheriff’s officers arrested Cole at the Waldorf Howard Johnson Inn in connection with another rape, this time of a 16-year-old member of Cole’s family.

The 16-year-old told police Cole had ordered her to the second floor of his Waldorf home, according to a different Maryland Independent article from 1996. When she went upstairs, he threatened her with a knife, ordered her to take her clothes off and raped her, the article reported from Cole’s charging documents.

Cole was tried in the incident and was found guilty of first-degree rape, first-degree sex offense, child abuse and incest, according to court records.

On the day of his arraignment in Charles County Circuit Court, Cole is also set for a post-conviction hearing in the case involving the rape of the 16-year-old.