THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 27, 1995 TAG: 9501270739
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LYNN WALTZ, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
A 27-year-old Virginia Beach woman was lying in bed watching television on July 21, 1993, when a shadowy figure, illuminated by the flickering light, appeared in her bedroom door.
What happened next in that apartment on 26th Street - a brutal sodomy at knifepoint - added the woman to a growing group. She became the latest victim of the North End Serial Rapist.
Thursday, the woman became the third victim to testify against defendant Kerri Charity in a rare legal proceeding that has allowed prosecutors to present four sexual assault cases before a jury at once.
In two of the cases, prosecutors have DNA evidence that they say matches Charity. They will try to link two other cases to Charity by showing that the victims' descriptions of the suspect and his methods were so similar that the crimes had to have been committed by the same man.
Thursday's testimony revealed a crime similar to the others: The woman was attacked in an apartment at night by a tall, slender man who covered his own face with his clothing and covered her face with blankets.
He cleaned up evidence from the scene, including semen and articles he had touched. He took clothing and a purse. He degraded the victim with vulgar language and threatened to kill her.
``I thought he was going to suffocate me,'' the woman told the jury. ``I was trying not to go insane. . . . Finally my mind went somewhere else.''
After she was certain he was gone, the woman ran screaming out of her apartment in just a bra, grabbed an empty waterbed mattress from the yard to wrap around herself and tried to make it up the fire escape to her girlfriend's apartment on the second floor.
Apparently, the woman blacked out because the next thing she remembered, she was sitting in the middle of the floor of her friend's apartment.
The testimony came after a long day of basic education about DNA evidence in one of the other attacks, the rape of a 37-year-old woman on East Piney Branch Drive.
Forensic scientist David Pomposini told jurors he had matched DNA from that crime to Kerri Charity with a probability of from 1 in 9 million, using conservative standards, to 1 in 3 billion.
Defense attorney David Baugh argued that the state's data base of 2,000 people was not representative of the world's population and that the data base represented only three races: black, white and hispanic. Charity is black.
The victim in that case told the jury on Wednesday that she was watching television in her apartment when she heard a clicking noise outside the sliding glass door of her apartment.
When she found the door open, she turned to find a tall slender man with a bandana covering his face.
``For a few seconds, I just stood there, not knowing what was going on,'' she said. ``He was looking directly toward me and made a motion for me to be quiet.''
When the woman ran, the intruder wrestled her to the floor, threatened her with a knife, then took her to her bedroom where he raped her. As in the other cases, the suspect covered her face with blankets, used lotion from a bottle he later took with him, threatened to kill her with a knife and stole her purse.
Today, the jury will hear from the fourth victim, who was attacked in her Marina Shores apartment on Jan. 10, 1993, after she returned from jogging. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Kerri Charity is charged with committing four rapes, known as the
North End Serial rapes.
KEYWORDS: RAPE SEX CRIME TRIAL TESTIMONY by CNB