APRIL RHODES - 7 yo (1986)/ Charged: Jasper Everett Goddard - Las Vegas NV

Police: DNA links sex offender to rape, killing of child in '86

Jul. 3, 2013
Written by Rance Burger

Authorities said a registered sex offender is jailed in Ozark on a warrant accusing him of murder in the long-unsolved rape and slaying of a 7-year-old Nevada girl.

DNA evidence routinely collected from sex offenders and entered into a national database led North Las Vegas police to file the murder charge.

Two decades ago, the man charged, Jasper Everett Goddard, 61, of Springfield, was sentenced in Greene County for the sodomy and molestation of an 8-year-old girl.

Ozark Police Officer Scott Forrester stopped a Chevrolet van on June 26 near the U.S. 65 interchange and Route CC after police received a complaint of road rage from another driver.

Forrester discovered that Goddard was wanted in North Las Vegas on a felony warrant in the November 1986 death of April Marie Rhodes.

Goddard on Monday refused to waive extradition, and Associate Christian County Circuit Judge John S. Waters set bail at $4 million cash, according to records at the Christian County Jail in Ozark.

Goddard had been sought after he was linked to Rhodes’ slaying through DNA evidence collected in October by a sex offender registry official in Greene County, according to a North Las Vegas police affidavit.

North Las Vegas Police Department Public Information Officer Tim Bedwell explained that detectives in Nevada identified Goddard as a potential suspect after examining his DNA.

“Because he’s a registered sex offender in Missouri, he’s required to give a DNA sample every year. We were able to get a sample of DNA that was taken from April’s body back in ’86, and that DNA got entered into the database last year,” Bedwell said. “We got a CODIS hit on it, and that is what first linked him to the homicide.”

It’s unclear why the DNA was not in the database sooner.

CODIS stands for Combined DNA Index System, a computer software program that stores and allows police to access local, state and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence and missing persons.

The first match between Goddard to the Rhodes homicide occurred Oct. 25. However, North Las Vegas detectives requested that Goddard’s DNA undergo a second analysis at the Missouri State Highway Patrol crime lab.

After the DNA was processed a second time, North Las Vegas Detective Allen Antoniewicz filed an affidavit against Goddard on June 7. The affidavit contains three pages of explanation of the procedure by which detectives say they used DNA to match Goddard to the death.

The DNA evidence will be critical for the Clark County district attorney to prosecute Goddard because no one witnessed April’s death. The case’s age — about 27 years have passed — makes it difficult for the state to call potential witnesses. However, Bedwell remains hopeful that Goddard will be successfully tried.

“Every factor could add difficulties,” Bedwell said. “This is a case that there remains a great deal of evidence, and we believe the evidence is sufficient to prove that (Goddard) is the one that did this.”

Greene County Sheriff Jim Arnott confirmed that authorities in Springfield had been assisting with the Las Vegas investigation, although he declined to discuss specifics. He did say Greene County authorities had been involved for about seven months.

He also confirmed that Goddard is a registered sex offender in Greene County. Goddard first registered in December 1999 and has been compliant with registration requirements since then.

One of those requirements includes providing a DNA sample under Missouri law.

Arnott said Goddard had registered with the county as recently as April 23. Goddard no longer appears on the Sex Offender portion of the sheriff’s website, Arnott said, because he is in jail in Ozark.

Arnott said his office was awaiting a warrant to arrest Goddard, in collaboration with Nevada authorities, but was never alerted to the issuance of that warrant.

The police report says in 1986, Goddard lived in a Statz Street apartment two doors away from where the Rhodes girl lived, not far from a storage room where the girl’s bloody body was found.

April Rhodes went to a drive-in movie with her mother, Katherine, and 11-year-old brother, Thomas, on Nov. 23, 1986. The family came home from the movie and the children went to bed. It would be the last night Katherine saw her daughter alive.

Katherine Rhodes heard a scream about 4 a.m. She later told North Las Vegas police that she thought the scream came from other people in the apartment complex and went back to sleep.

Katherine Rhodes later discovered that her daughter was missing and called police at 8:31 a.m.

Police began a door-to-door search of the neighborhood. Apartment manager Cornelia Brewer found April lying in a nearby storage room.

Clark County Chief Medical Examiner Sheldon Green determined that April died as a result of trauma to the head. She appeared to have been bludgeoned with a cinder block that measured 8-by-8-by-15 inches. Green also determined that she had been sexually assaulted.

On Dec. 19, 2008, Detective Alan Fox of the Reno Police Department in Nevada contacted North Las Vegas Detective Ian Ryan regarding the similarities between the death of April Rhodes and the kidnapping and slaying of 7-year-old Monica DaSilva in Reno in September 1990. At Fox’s urging, Ryan sent several items taken into evidence from the 1986 crime scene to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department crime lab for updated DNA analysis.

DaSilva’s remains were found three weeks after her disappearance, buried in Lagomarsino Canyon east of Reno.

It’s unclear if the timeline is possible for Goddard to be connected to that crime. News-Leader records show him sentenced in Greene County on a molestation case months before DaSilva was kidnapped. The newspaper records are not specific about when he started a five-year prison term, however, and state online corrections records do not go back that far.

It was in July 1990 that Goddard was sentenced to the five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to the sodomy and molestation of the 8-year-old Republic girl. The crime he admitted took place, police say, in July 1989, but a sentencing report said he had sexually abused the girl for several years.

At the time, Greene County Circuit Judge David P. Anderson denied probation, saying the incident wasn’t isolated. Goddard was accused of molesting the child over a period of time.

“She was defenseless and you took advantage of that defenselessness,” Anderson told Goddard at the sentencing.

A News-Leader article about the sentencing hearing noted that the charge was Goddard’s “first felony conviction.”

Ron Cleek, who was then assistant prosecutor, opposed probation under the plea agreement, noting the “serious” nature of the charge. “The child was very young,” he said at the time.

http://www.news-leader.com/article/20130703/NEWS01/307030104/-1/7daysarchives/Police-DNA-Greene-County-sex-offender-links-him-rape-killing-Nevada-child-1986?nclick_check=1

Trial Set In 1986 Child Murder

January 7, 2014 8:41 AM
Chuck Meyer

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A 62-year-old registered sex offender pleaded not guilty to murder, sex assault and other charges in the long-unsolved rape and slaying of a 7-year-old North Las Vegas girl.

A judge on Monday set a May 2015 trial date for Jasper Everett Goddard in the November 1986 death of April Marie Rhodes.

Goddard was arrested in July in Ozark, Mo., after he was linked to the girl’s slaying through DNA evidence collected for a Missouri sex offender registry.

He was indicted in Las Vegas in December.

Police say Goddard lived in 1986 in a North Las Vegas apartment near the girl’s family, and not far from a storage room where the girl’s body was found.

Investigators believe she was abducted at night, raped and beaten to death with a cinder block.

http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2014/01/07/trial-set-in-1986-child-murder/