Kevin Tuckfield, a convicted rapist who roamed Anchorage after escaping from jail in 2015, was sentenced to 50 years in prison this week for the robbery and attempted kidnapping of a woman he attacked while he was on the lam.
Anchorage Superior Court Judge Eric A. Aarseth handed down the sentence Tuesday, ordering the 36-year-old Tuckfield to serve 20 years on the robbery charge, 20 years on the kidnapping charge and 10 years for escape — all maximum sentences for those crimes, according to assistant attorney general Daniel Shorey, who prosecuted the case.
Aarseth found that Tuckfield was “probably one of the worst offenders this court has sentenced,” Shorey said in a statement.
Evidence presented during his five-day trial in June showed that a few hours after Tuckfield escaped from the Anchorage Correctional Complex in March 2015, he approached a 36-year-old woman vacuuming her car outside a car wash on Lake Otis Parkway.
The woman testified during the trial, Shorey said in an interview Wednesday. Tuckfield told her he had a gun, threatened to kill her, forced her into the car, then struck and punched her, forced her seatbelt around her torso and told her to put her head between her legs, according to Shorey.
The woman managed to escape and yelled for help. Witnesses helped her and tracked Tuckfield, who was apprehended by Anchorage police a few blocks away.
At the time of the escape, Tuckfield was serving a long sentence for a similar crime: In 2008, he told a woman unloading groceries in the parking lot of a Government Hill apartment complex that he’d shoot her if she didn’t comply, then raped her, according to prior reports.
Tuckfield is already serving a 99-year sentence handed down last year for a sexual assault involving a civilian employee in the Spring Creek Correctional Center library in 2015.
He is awaiting trial next year on murder charges filed in 2015 involving an attack on two people in East Anchorage. Tuckfield faces charges of first- and second-degree murder in the shooting death of 22-year-old Travis Villa and attempted murder charges in the shooting of Villa’s 20-year-old roommate Morgan Meadows.
The trial, like many court proceedings, was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which left Alaska’s court system with a significant backlog, even at the level of murder cases. Asked if Tuckfield’s trial was also delayed because he is already incarcerated, Shorey said no.
“Everyone who is facing murder charges is of the utmost priority to the Department of Law,” he said.
In 2003, Tuckfield was charged with attempting to sexually assault a worker at a state home for delinquent youth where he was living, holding a potato peeler to her throat. He was later convicted of several charges in a plea deal. After his conviction for the 2008 sexual assault of the Government Hill woman, he was charged in Juneau with sexual harassment in 2012, presumably while he was incarcerated.
Tuckfield is being held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.