Arrest warrants issued in decade-old sexual assault case, Columbia police say
Arrest warrants were issued for a man in a Columbia sex crime that had gone unsolved for more than a decade, the Columbia Police Department said.
James Wayne Ingersoll, 51, will be charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct and kidnapping, Police Chief Skip Holbrook said Tuesday in a news release.
On March 13, 2010, Ingersoll kidnapped and sexually assaulted a 25-year-old woman in the 300 block of Harden Street, according to the release. That’s not far from the University of South Carolina campus.
After the crime, the victim went to a hospital, where the attacker’s DNA was collected with a sexual assault kit, and that evidence was entered in to the Combined DNA Index System — a national law enforcement database operated by the FBI.
There was no DNA match until recently, police said.
The match was made by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department during its investigation of a sexual assault there from 1994, according to the release. A DNA sample was taken at the time from the Charlotte female victim, and testing of the evidence was conducted multiple times in the past five years. A test in 2019 proved a case-to-case match with the Columbia police investigation; however a suspect or person of interest was not identified.
Earlier this month Charlotte-Mecklenburg police used advanced technology in the form of forensic genetic genealogy to identify a person of interest in their 1994 sexual assault investigation, police said. Recently, a DNA sample from a suspect was obtained and submitted to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Crime Laboratory for testing and comparison, according to the release.
That DNA sample matched the DNA samples initially obtained in both sexual assault investigations, thus naming Ingersoll as the suspect in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Columbia crimes, police said.
Ingersoll was arrested May 4 in North Carolina and is currently locked up at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Detention Center after bond was set at $600,000, according to the release.
Ingersoll refused to waive extradition, and a Columbia Police Department member of the U.S. Marshals Service’s Carolinas Regional Fugitive Task Force is in the process of obtaining a governor’s extradition warrant for Ingersoll’s arrest to face charges in Columbia, police said.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division assisted police in the investigation.
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