A man has been jailed for 25 years for a series of rapes and burglaries over two decades, with advances in forensic investigation leading to his capture.
The High Court last week said that Tu Ming-lang (涂明朗) had committed at least 11 burglaries, breaking in to homes and stealing valuables.
On eight occasions, he sexually assaulted women and girls who were at home at the time, the court said.
Photo: Yang Kuo-wen, Taipei Times
The court found Tu guilty on eight counts of sexual assault and burglary and ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
It said he posed a high risk of recidivism.
Investigators said that they had collected forensic material at the crime scenes, including bodily fluids and fingerprints, but no match was made for many years, as Tu apparently paused his criminal activity in 2005.
He lived alone and did not use a mobile phone, investigators said.
Tu’s criminal activities were committed mostly in the Taipei area, investigators said.
An initial probe linked him to cases dating to 1998.
He would scout wealthy households and break in when he thought nobody was home, investigators said.
However, he would sometimes encounter lone females in the home, they said.
He would rape them at knife-point, they said, adding that one was aged 11 and one 16, while others were migrant workers who lived in the home as carers, investigators said.
It was not until the Criminal Investigation Bureau’s Forensic Science Center was upgraded in 2018 and a national database of data was compiled that a breakthrough was made in the case, they said.
Through DNA profiling, a burglary case in 2014 was matched to DNA collected in eight previous cases, which led investigators to obtain fingerprints from the crime scenes.
The fingerprint work led to a match to a burglary case in which Tu had been identified as the perpetrator, leading police to pinpoint him in 2019.
However, his whereabouts could not be determined immediately, investigators said.
In April last year, he broke into a home in Taipei, they said.
Police launched a search using surveillance camera footage and tracked him to an abandoned military compound the following month, they said.
Tu, who was 60 when he was arrested, was kept in custody due to high risk of flight and likelihood of committing more crimes.
He appealed, with the second ruling reducing the term to 25 years, as the judges said there was a lack of evidence for the charge of raping the 11-year-old.
Tu’s DNA was found on the girl’s chest, but not on her sexual organs. Tu had told the court he had not raped her.
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