US man sentenced to 650 years in prison in brutal 1980s sex crimes

For decades, police in Shelby County, Indiana, could not identify the man who broke into houses at night, armed with a knife or a gun, woke his victims, and then bound and sexually tortured them. He often disguised himself in a bulky coat and covered his face with a ski mask or leggings.

Then, in 2020, 35 years after his last known assault in the county, investigators were finally able to identify the attacker as Steven Ray Hessler and arrest him. The breakthrough came, prosecutors said, when DNA extracted from the envelope of a water bill that Hessler had licked matched DNA that had been left at the scene of his last known crime in the county, on Aug 17, 1985.

On Friday, Hessler, 59, was sentenced to 650 years in prison. The sentence came a month after a jury convicted Hessler of two counts of rape, six counts of unlawful deviate conduct, seven counts of burglary resulting in bodily injury, three counts of criminal deviate conduct and one count of robbery.

James B Landwerlen, the prosecutor in Shelby County, southeast of Indianapolis, said that from Aug 14, 1982, to Aug 17, 1985, Hessler brutally assaulted 10 victims: seven women, a 16-year-old girl and two men, including a retired Marine whom he had handcuffed, hogtied and beat with a gun, leaving him in a coma for months.

Hessler plans to appeal his conviction, according to his lawyer, Bryan L Cook.

Hessler wasn’t linked to the assaults in Shelby County until investigators sent DNA from the last local crime scene, in 1985, to Parabon NanoLabs, a company in Virginia that uses DNA technology to help solve cold cases.

In 2020, the company identified Hessler as one of two potential suspects, which led investigators to subpoena a utility company for Hessler’s water bill so that they could extract his DNA from the envelope, Landwerlen said.

After the DNA on the envelope matched the DNA from the 1985 crime scene, investigators later obtained another DNA sample from Hessler’s cheek, which confirmed the link, Landwerlen said.

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