Stranger followed, raped teen girl in 1993, Alaska officials say. Now he gets prison
A man accused of raping a 14-year-old girl near her high school decades ago is headed to prison, Alaska prosecutors said.
Michael Williams, now 55, was ordered to serve 25 years behind bars in connection with a conviction for first-degree sexual assault, the Alaska Department of Law said in a Feb. 25 post on Facebook.
The 1993 case was cold for close to 30 years until Williams was identified through DNA, according to prosecutors.
His attorney, Phillip Paul Weidner, told McClatchy News in a phone call Feb. 26 that “there will definitely be both a merit appeal and a sentence appeal, and we are confident we will prevail on both with reversals and remand.”
The attack happened near a high school in Ketchikan, prosecutors said.
The 14-year-old girl said she was walking across the school baseball field on the way to her locker when a stranger followed and accosted her, according to prosecutors.
“The man grabbed her from behind, covered her mouth, dragged her behind a nearby dugout, and sexually assaulted her. The man told her he had a knife and threatened to use it on her if she screamed or told anyone what happened,” prosecutors said.
The girl “ran to a nearby house and reported the rape,” prosecutors said.
She didn’t see the attacker’s face because a scarf was masking it, but swabs were taken and a sexual assault kit was sent to be tested, according to prosecutors.
Police did “extensive investigation,” but “the case went cold,” prosecutors said.
Then more than 10 years later, in 2004, “the Alaska State Crime Laboratory developed a DNA profile from semen collected during the victim’s sexual assault examination,” and it was uploaded into a national database, according to prosecutors.
A match wasn’t found — at least not immediately.
But that changed in 2021, “when testing of an unrelated sexual assault kit … led to a potential match to Michael Williams in the” national database, prosecutors said. That kit was tested as part of a project to work through previously unsubmitted and untested sexual assault kits in the state.
The state lab “confirmed the match (to Williams) by comparing the DNA sample from the victim’s sexual assault kit to a known sample taken from (him),” per the release.
Ketchikan is about 300 miles southeast from Juneau.
This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 11:59 AM with the headline "Stranger followed, raped teen girl in 1993, Alaska officials say. Now he gets prison."
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