Suspect indicted in rape-torture of Columbia grad student

NEW YORK -- Saliva from a trash basket where an ex-convict spat had DNA that matched that in skin cells from a shirt worn by a man who raped, tortured and burned a Columbia University graduate student over 19 hours, a prosecutors said.

Assistant District Attorney Ann Prunty disclosed the DNA match in papers she filed Thursday at Robert Williams' arraignment on a 71-count indictment related to the attack on the 23-year-old journalism student.

Williams, 30, pleaded not guilty to charges that include kidnapping, arson, burglary and predatory sexual assault. He faces life in prison if convicted.

Williams, forcibly taken from his jail cell at Rikers Island to court, was surrounded by eight court officers wearing helmets, visors, bulletproof vests and other riot gear in Manhattan's state Supreme Court.

Prunty said that when Williams was taken from the jail for a lineup on May 22, a metal detector revealed that he was smuggling two razor blades wrapped in tissue and stuffed into a balloon inside his rectum. She said he was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where the razor blades were removed.

She also said mental health professionals there evaluated him and found him fit to continue legal proceedings.

In her request for the court to order Williams to give a DNA sample, Prunty said the rape victim reported her attacker had put on one of her T-shirts and had worn it while inside her apartment. Her court papers say skin cells were recovered from that T-shirt.

On April 18, Prunty said, the victim identified a photograph of Williams as the man who had assaulted, cut, raped and tortured her during 19 hours from late April 13 into the afternoon of April 14 before trying to burn her alive.

On April 20, the prosecutor said, investigators from the city medical examiner's office searched the exterior of Williams' body in a room in the Manhattan district attorney's office. She said Williams spat in a waste basket numerous times.

"I observed defendant request to spit and observed one of the detectives, in response to defendant's request, hold a waste basket near the defendant's mouth so the defendant could spit his saliva into it," Prunty said in court papers.

After the exam, Prunty said, pieces of paper from the waste basket that had the saliva were examined by the medical examiner's Forensic Biology Department.

A supervising analyst in the department told Prunty that "the male DNA profile obtained from the T-shirt matches the male DNA profile obtained from the saliva sample recovered from the waste basket," her court papers said.

The prosecutor quoted a technician as saying the waste basket saliva provides a less than ideal DNA sample so she asked for a sample directly from Williams.

Williams' lawyer, Uzamah Saghir, told Acting Justice Laura Ward that the defense was opposed to investigators taking a DNA sample from her client.

The judge reserved decision on the request and scheduled Williams' next court date for June 13.

Williams, who served eight years for attempted murder, is accused of slipping into the student's building about 9:30 p.m. on April 13 and forcing his way into her apartment. For hours on April 13 and into the next day, Williams raped the woman on her futon bed, tied her up with computer cables and used a knife to slit her eyelids, police said during the announcement of his arrest days later.

Police said he forced the student to swallow large doses of over-the-counter pain medicine as a sedative, which damaged her liver, and inflicted burns by dousing her with bleach and scalding water in an apparent attempt to destroy DNA evidence.