WILMINGTON – For 28 years, justice was delayed in a Wilmington rape case.
READ MORE: Jury seated in 1995 Wilmington rape case
On Friday, it was not to be denied. A New Hanover County jury found a Pamlico County man guilty on all counts in the 1995 rape of a woman at a local convenience store.
Freddie Anthony Jackson, 56, was convicted of two counts of first-degree rape, two counts of first-degree sexual offense, two counts of kidnapping and one count of common-law robbery. New Hanover Superior Court Judge Frank Jones then sentenced him to 36 to 44 years in prison.
Jackson will be 92 years old when he is first eligible to be released. After that, he will be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and have no contact with the victim.
“Our community, and any community in which this man lives, or would live, if he were to be released from prison, is safer, because anyone who comes into contact with this man where he has the opportunity to take advantage of them, he will do it,” New Hanover County Assistant District Attorney Connie Jordan told Port City Daily after trying the case. “And I fear for anyone who finds themselves in his path.”
Prosecutors said convicting Jackson would have been impossible without DNA evidence because of the lack of a usable fingerprint mark at the scene and no other eyewitnesses to the crime.
“Had he just robbed her and left, had he not robbed her and completely terrorized her, he wouldn’t have left his DNA behind,” Jordan said.
During the five-day trial, in addition to the DNA evidence, Jordan went through Jackson’s prior criminal history to establish a pattern which led to the 1995 rape. Thirty-four days before the incident, Jackson robbed another convenience store on Oleander Drive and attempted to take the clerk into a cooler, but he was interrupted by a customer. He was later arrested for that crime, but was released on bail three weeks later.
Two years later, in December 1997, Jackson was arrested and charged with kidnapping after holding a woman hostage in her vehicle for two hours. He was later convicted for both kidnappings and common-law robbery.
The 1995 victim testified that Jackson attacked her while she was getting a pack of cigarettes, then forced her into a cooler, where he sexually assaulted her multiple times. Thereafter, he took money out of the drawer, stole a pack of beer and left the scene on foot.
The victim, 25 when the incident happened, said on the stand Wednesday she was expecting her second child at the time. She eventually suffered a miscarriage due to the stress of the rape.
She also testified she immediately quit her job at the convenience store because she could no longer return; her marriage fell apart shortly after. Even today, she is hypervigilant, she said; for instance, she cannot go into elevators with multiple people inside.
Jackson testified in his own defense. While taking responsibility for all of his past crimes, the soft-spoken man denied raping the victim, saying he had been in the store only a couple of times with coworkers.
“The only times I had ever been in that store was to go get coffee, that kind of stuff,” he said.
Jackson was unable to explain away how his DNA ended up inside the rape kit during a nearly 30-minute cross-examination. Though he admitted swabs were taken, and the profile might be his, he continued to deny he was the person who committed the crime.
Jordan said it was the preservation of those swabs for almost three decades that sealed Jackson’s fate.
“The integrity of that evidence was maintained, and the DNA evidence caught up to it,” Jordan said. “The technology finally got to the point where we could submit something, and get a hit from the North Carolina Crime Lab, because we have a database, where in 1995, we didn’t have one.”
District Attorney Ben David credited the efforts of Jordan, as well as passage of the Standing Up for Rape Victims Act, also known as the “Survivors’ Act,” for opening a pathway to a conviction. The Survivors’ Act was a 2019 law signed by Gov. Roy Cooper that cleared a backlog of old rape kits and allowed them to be tested.
“This case demonstrates justice never sleeps,” David said. “We would not have been able to solve this without the Survivors Act, which created a database with over 20 million offenders in it, technology that was just on the cusp of being used in the criminal justice system when this occurred in 1995.”
The Jackson case was one of the first kits to be tested in New Hanover County in 2020 after the law was passed. Since then, two other local rape cases have been solved and led to convictions.
Former Port City cab driver Timothy Iannone was sentenced to 48 years in prison after his conviction in December 2022 of a 1996 rape. Iannone is also a prime suspect in the unsolved murders of Allison Jackson Foy and Angela Rothen, whose remains were found in 2008, but no charges were ever filed.
In August of 2021, Wayne Soller was sentenced to 24 to 29 years in prison after convictions of second-degree rape, first-degree sex offense, and first-degree burglary in a 1996 case. His conviction was upheld after appeal in December 2022.
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