DNA provides clue in ’77 rape

A single hair left at a rape scene almost 30 years ago could be the evidence that keeps a convicted rapist behind bars.

DNA testing linked the hair from a 1977 sexual assault to Robert L. Fellows. He is in prison for a conviction in another rape that same year but is eligible for parole.

Fellows, 55, remains a suspect in more than a dozen so-called pillowcase rapes that terrorized the midtown and Country Club Plaza areas in 1976 and 1977. A serial rapist used a pillowcase or other cloth to keep victims from seeing his face.

The attacks began shortly after Fellows’ August 1976 release from prison for another rape, Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders said, and ended after his May 1977 arrest for one pillowcase rape. He was convicted in that case and sentenced to 75 years.

Now authorities contend that DNA from a hair left in a bathroom during a March 16, 1977, sexual assault matched his DNA in a felon database. Sanders unsealed new charges against Fellows: two counts of rape and one each of sodomy and robbery in a crime that reaches back almost three decades.

"This is the oldest cold-hit DNA case to be charged in this region’s history," Sanders said at a courthouse news conference.

The previous record, he said, involved Lorenzo Gilyard, an alleged serial rapist and murderer whom DNA linked to a woman found dead in April 1977.

Sanders would not comment on the other unsolved rape cases. Kansas City Police Sgt. Kevin Kilkenny of the sex crimes unit said the crime lab was working on physical evidence from some of them.

"The evidence is almost 30 years old," he said, "and some of it is degraded."

He and Sanders praised past police work in which officers found and saved such evidence long before DNA testing existed.

According to the new court records Tuesday:

Fellows entered the apartment of a sleeping woman in the 600 block of East 40th Street. He told her he had a knife and covered her head with a pillow. He tied a dish towel around her eyes, bound her hands with pantyhose, stuffed a gag into her mouth and took her money.

As he raped her, he kept asking if she enjoyed it. Then he went into the bathroom, cleaned up and returned to rape her again and sodomize her.

Then he asked her to meet him in a park and left. She called police. The next day, the rapist phoned her and wanted to know where she was when she didn’t meet him in the park.

Sanders said Tuesday that the victim was pleased about the charges.