Ohio prosecutors are asking the public for help after a suspect’s arrest on Wednesday in relation to a premeditated Cincinnati rape case dating back to 1989.
The suspect, 66-year-old Frederick Louis Tanzer, from Sycamore Township in Dayton, Ohio, was arrested after being recently identified as the prime suspect in the rape cold case.
Tanzer is a medical doctor who has lived and practiced medicine in Ohio, Kansas, and Colorado.
According to court documents, the victim was violently raped on Aug. 1, 1989, in her condominium on Creighton Place in Cincinnati after arriving home from work.
As she entered her home, she noticed an odor that was likened to brewed tea or burnt marijuana.
Then she was startled by a man dressed from head to toe in black Lycra, including black gloves and a face mask. The man held a knife to the woman’s throat, as he wrapped white surgical tape around his victim’s head to cover her eyes and mouth.
Next, he grabbed stockings and pantyhose from the woman’s dresser and used them to bind her to her bed with her hands and feet. He then cut and tore off her clothing and raped her repeatedly, in an assault that lasted for more than five and a half hours, prosecutors said.
The man took several breaks in between sexually assaulting his victim, during which he rummaged through the apartment, unplugging phones and looking through papers. He also listened to recorded answering machine messages and deleted them.
Before leaving, the man cut a piece of paper from a newspaper he found in the living room and taped it to the phone in the bedroom where he’d tied up his victim. On it, he wrote:
“No police or I’ll be back Mis [sic],” and then referred to his victim by her employer’s name.
The woman described the rapist as white with dark brown hair, about six feet tall with a thin or athletic build.
According to an affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint, detectives recently managed to collect a DNA sample from a coffee cup that Tanzer discarded at a local BMV.
The DNA extracted from the coffee cup was sent to a forensic laboratory and confirmed as matching the DNA the Lycra-clad rapist had left at the 1989 crime scene.
Prosecutors said Tanzer made several materially false statements to federal investigators after his arrest, including denying having seen or interacted with the victim on the date she was raped.
Officials are now asking anyone with information regarding this or any other similar rape cases to contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI.
Strides in forensic DNA analysis are allowing detectives to unravel decades-old cases. Last month, detectives were able to identify the killer in a 1979 murder-rape case in Riverside County, California.
The killer, a prime suspect at the time, was cleared of any wrongdoing after passing a lie-detector test.
Forensic DNA analysis of old evidence showed a clear match, but the killer escaped sentencing for a second time—he had already passed away in 2014.