Man Sentenced to 650 Years in Prison in Brutal 1980s Sex Crimes

For many years, the police in Shelby County, Ind., couldn’t determine the person who broke into homes at night time, armed with a knife or a gun, woke his victims, after which sure and sexually tortured them. He typically disguised himself in a cumbersome coat and coated his face with a ski masks or leggings.

Then, in 2020, 35 years after his final identified assault within the county, investigators have been lastly in a position to determine the attacker as Steven Ray Hessler, and arrest him. The breakthrough got here, prosecutors mentioned, when DNA extracted from the envelope of a water invoice that Mr. Hessler had licked matched DNA that had been left on the scene of his final identified crime within the county, on Aug. 17, 1985.

On Friday, Mr. Hessler, 59, was sentenced to 650 years in jail. The sentence got here a month after a jury convicted Mr. Hessler of two counts of rape, six counts of illegal deviate conduct, seven counts of housebreaking leading to bodily harm, three counts of felony deviate conduct and one rely of theft.

James B. Landwerlen, the prosecutor in Shelby County, southeast of Indianapolis, mentioned that from Aug. 14, 1982, to Aug. 17, 1985, Mr. Hessler brutally assaulted 10 victims: seven ladies, a 16-year-old lady, and two males, together with a former Marine whom he had handcuffed, hogtied and beat with a gun, leaving him in a coma for months.