Kansas City rape suspect ruled out in series of California sex assaults, burglaries

Kansas City rape suspect ruled out in Calif crimes

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A former Sacramento resident charged this month in a series of rapes in Missouri has been ruled out as a suspect in seven sexual assaults and burglaries in California in the mid-1980s, prosecutors said Thursday.

Bernard Jackson, 52, was charged with one Sacramento burglary and sexual assault in 1984. He was never prosecuted in California because he already was serving a lengthy sentence in Missouri, and Sacramento District Attorney Jan Scully said time has since run out.

Jackson faces 15 felony charges relating to Missouri rapes in the mid-1980s, and is a “person of interest” in five Kansas City rapes since September 2009.

He was investigated in numerous attacks in a 2-mile area of Sacramento over 18 months in the mid-1980s. The new charges in Missouri prompted Sacramento police and prosecutors to revisit the 26-year-old attacks and reconsider whether Jackson should have been prosecuted.

But Scully said fingerprints linked another man to three of the burglaries around that time. Fingerprints comparisons also eliminated Jackson as a suspect in three rapes.

Fingerprints found at the scene of a fourth rape weren’t clear enough for a comparison, but no other evidence linked Jackson to that or any other crime, Scully said Thursday.

“Really the only case against Bernard Jackson was the case for which we filed charges,” Scully said. “There were no other sexual assault cases or anything in Sacramento that connected him.”

Jackson spent most of his adult behind bars for rape, serving six years after pleading guilty to raping a Kansas City woman in her home in 1977, when he was 19. He was paroled in April 1983.

In December 1984, he was picked up in Colorado on a Missouri warrant. He was extradited to Missouri, where he spent more than 20 years in prison on another rape conviction before he was paroled in 2008.

Fingerprints taken after his December 1984 arrest connected him to the Sacramento burglary and rape, Scully said. He would have served no more than 4½ years in prison if he had been convicted of the California rape under the law then in effect, she said, so prosecutors apparently decided against seeking his extradition.

Had Jackson been convicted of the same crime today in California, he would face 25 years-to-life in prison, she said.

Jackson, who has not entered a plea in the Missouri charges, is set for a preliminary hearing on June 2. Prosecutors there have said they would bring the case to a grand jury before moving to trial.