Convicted ‘rapist’ free after 16 years DNA clears him of crimes
‘Prosecutors now believe three offences for which Luis Lorenzo Vargas was convicted were work of notorious serial offender dubbed ‘the teardrop rapist’
A court has overturned the conviction of a man who served 16 years in jail for attacking three women after advanced DNA techniques showed the crimes had probably been committed by another suspected offender, dubbed ‘the teardrop rapist’, The Telegraph has reported.
According to the report, Luis Lorenzo Vargas was given a 55-year sentence in 1999 for the assaults, despite warning at the time that the true culprit was still at large and committing further rapes.
On Monday, he bursted into tears in a Los Angeles courtroom after a judge cleared him.
Looking at his weeping mother sitting in the public gallery, Mr Vargas, 46, mouthed ‘I love you’, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Judge William Ryan overturned all three convictions after prosecutors said they no longer had confidence in them following fresh DNA evidence that exonerated Mr Vargas, 46, in at least one case.
The prosecution argued at his trial that the three crimes were so similar that they must have been committed by the same person.
Officials now blame the rapes on the ‘teardrop rapist’, an unidentified attacker who was already believed to have raped 39 women, mostly at knife-point, over the past 20 years. Although he is not known to have committed crimes any since 2013, police believe he is still alive.
He is so-named because his victims have described him as having at least one teardrop tatooed beneath his left eye, although investigators now say the marking may be a scar or a mole.
Mr Vargas has a faded teardrop tattoo underneath one eye, which he got at age 13 to ‘fit in’ with youths in his neighbourhood, his defence lawyer said.
Mr Vargas, who has a 26-year-old daughter, was accused of raping a 15-year-old girl and sexually assaulting another, aged 17 in separate incidents in 1998.
He was also charged with threatening a woman of 24 with a knife and ordering her to unzip her trousers before running away when the victim told him there were people watching.
Detectives focused on him because he lived in the south-east Los Angeles area where the attacks happened and fitted a composite sketch compiled from victims\’ descriptions. All three later identified him as the attacker.
After several failed appeals, Mr Vargas successfully petitioned California’s supreme court for a DNA examination of the denim shorts and underwear of one of the victims.
The tests showed the DNA of the ‘teardrop rapist’. Officials say the sophisticated technology used in the tests did not exist at the time of Mr Vargas’s original trial.
The youngest victim recently told investigators that she stood by her identification. Prosecutors said she had ‘honestly but mistakenly’ identified Mr Vargas as her assailant.