A Tennessee man has been charged in connection with the June 2004
rape and robbery of a Bath County woman who was later abandoned in
Woodford County.
DNA evidence led police to arrest Michael Sheppard, 54, of
Nashville. Sheppard is charged with rape, sodomy and robbery and is
in the Wilson County jail in Lebanon, Tenn., east of Nashville,
Kentucky State Police said.
Sheppard was in jail there to face trial on a charge of armed
robbery, state police spokeswoman Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said.
"He's actually a federal prisoner facing life with no parole on a
federal kidnapping conviction," she said. Sheppard served time for
rape in Alabama, and also was convicted in North Carolina and
Florida on kidnapping and sexual battery charges.
"There's a string of investigations involving numerous police
departments regarding similar patterns of conduct," Rudzinski
said.
Kentucky authorities will try to extradite Sheppard to face
charges in Woodford County, Rudzinski said.
The crimes that Sheppard allegedly committed in Kentucky happened
on June 22, 2004. The Bath County woman, whom police did not
identify at the time, had car trouble late that afternoon and pulled
off at Interstate 64's Exit 123 near Owingsville. A man approached
and offered to help, and the woman got into his car, leaving a
cousin with her car.
After a couple of hours, the cousin called relatives, who called
state police that night.
Sometime between 6 and 8 a.m. the next day, the woman was
discovered near I-64 in Woodford County. "She came crawling up out
of a field and a motorist stopped to pick her up," Trooper Ralph
Lockard, spokesman for the Morehead post, said at the time.
The unidentified motorist took the woman to the Citgo Food Mart
at the Midway exit and just off the eastbound lanes of I-64. From
there, she called her family.
State police searched a nearby field and tobacco barn off U.S.
421 (Leestown Road) about a half-mile west of the Midway
interchange. The woman was treated at Bluegrass Community Hospital
in Versailles.
After a long investigation, evidence was submitted to the
Kentucky State Police Central Forensic Laboratory and entered into a
national DNA database. Rudzinski could not discuss the specific
evidence.
Confirmation was received from the evidence submitted to the DNA
database, and that led to Sheppard's arrest, police said. They said
more charges are coming.
