CLEVELAND — A 61-year-old Cleveland man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to a pair of rapes that occurred in the 1990s.
Last month, 61-year-old Leo Bradley Scott pleaded guilty to one count of rape and one count of sexual battery in connection with the incidents that occurred in 1994 and 1998, respectively. Scott, who previously served more than six years in prison for a prior 1983 rape in East Cleveland, was identified by Cuyahoga County investigators through genealogical testing provided by their Genetic Operations Linking DNA (G.O.L.D.) Unit.
“This individual was able to evade justice due to his prior rape conviction occurring before CODIS [Combined DNA Index System] existed,” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley said in a statement on Tuesday. “He assaulted two additional women over 20 years ago, and now through the great work of our G.O.L.D. Unit and our law enforcement partners, he will deservedly serve time behind bars.”
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According to prosecutors, the October 1994 crime involved Scott grabbing a 22-year-old woman walking on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland before dragging her, threatening her, and eventually assaulting her. Four years later in April of 1998, a 23-year-old female victim was walking home from an East Cleveland club when Scott apparently pulled her into his car and drove her to a Shaw Avenue parking lot, where she, too, was assaulted.
Doctors collected samples from both survivors using rape kits, but the results went untested until 2013, when the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation began running tests on a backlog of such kits from 1993-2011. Moreover, Scott's 1983 guilty plea for rape occurred before the establishment of the felony DNA database, meaning his DNA was not collected at the time.
When the testing of both victims' rape kits initially yielded no matches, the DNA was placed in the national database as "John Doe #64." In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded a $1 million grant to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office that helped established the G.O.L.D. Unit, and authorities soon launched a pilot program to review 20 "most wanted" profiles linked to cold case sexual assaults. "John Doe #64" was selected as one of those profiles.
Through a partnership with testing company Gene by Gene, officials hoped to find familial links to the DNA profiles which they could then use to trace back for positive identification. Following extensive analysis, "John Doe #64's" DNA was indeed traced back to Scott, and prosecutors say this was later confirmed through testing his own DNA that was secretly obtained.
Scott was arrested for the assaults on July 20, 2021, and has been held in the Cuyahoga County Jail ever since. Besides his prior guilty plea for rape, he also has prior convictions for grand theft, carrying a concealed weapon, violating his probation, and attempted assault of a peace officer in the 1980s and '90s.