An Anchorage man acquitted in a 2009 sex-assault case has been indicted on new charges stemming from two cold-case rapes that police say they have solved using DNA.
Anthony Dillard, 49, was indicted Tuesday on two counts of first-degree sexual assault and one count of second-degree assault in the cases after DNA from the crime scenes matched his profile, police said.
The first rape took place in February 2005, when a woman who had been drinking was grabbed and dragged by her hair to a tent at the Fur Rendezvous Carnival near West Third Avenue and E Street, according to police.
The rapist choked the woman, nearly causing her to pass out, and smothered her into submission before sexually assaulting her, said Detective Jade Baker with the special victims unit.
Then in August 2007, two men lured a woman who had been drinking into an alley behind the Panhandle Bar, where one man held her down and the other raped her, according to police.
Dillard in January 2009 was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault, felony assault and kidnapping but was subsequently acquitted after a jury trial, court records indicate.
That case is likely where authorities got the known DNA profile for Dillard that helped break the old cases, Baker said.
Police, using a grant for cold-case DNA cases, in January 2009 began re-examining the cases, Baker said. This spring, samples from the rape scenes that had been run through the Combined DNA Identification System matched a known sample from Dillard, Baker said.
Dillard was arrested Wednesday morning at his Fairview home, police said. He was booked into jail with bail set at $100,000 with a third-party custodian required for his release.
Police say Dillard is a suspect in several other sexual assaults that are under investigation and that they suspect there may be more victims. Anyone with information on the cases is asked to call police at 786-8530.
Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.
By JAMES HALPIN
jhalpin@adn.com