A Maryland man was arrested Sunday, one day after the television show “America’s Most Wanted” aired a story about a brutal rape near Washington, D.C., in 2001 for which he had been charged.
Jacob Corey Gordon, 28, was arrested Sunday in Florida by the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force and Tampa police after authorities received a tip from a television show viewer who recognized Gordon.
Gordon was charged last year after DNA evidence linked him to the rape near Jessup six years earlier. But by the time an arrest warrant was issued, the Parkville, Md., man had vanished.
On Oct. 19, 2001, Gordon and a friend, Thomas Howell Heddinger, met the young woman while all three attended a Stone Temple Pilots and Linkin Park concert at the MCI Center, police said.
Gordon and Heddinger offered to take the young woman home in the old van after she became ill, police said. Instead, authorities say, Gordon and Heddinger drove to a wooded, remote location and sexually assaulted her for nearly three hours before dumping her in a field.
The girl stumbled through the field, and wandered to the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women, police said. She was bruised and beaten, but was able to describe her attackers and the van in which she was held.
Five years passed before Maryland State Police received a solid lead. In June 2006, a state police technician came across a DNA match entered into a database, linking Heddinger to the attack, the TV showreported. Heddinger, 36, was already in a Maryland jail. He committed suicide earlier this month, awaiting trial on the first-degree rape charges.
Six months after the first tip, authorities received another. An informant reported having conversations with Gordon in which he admitted to sexual intercourse with the victim, authorities said. Gordon, however, claimed the sex was consensual.
The victim identified Gordon as one of her attackers in a photo lineup. Cops also confirmed that Gordon owned a 1987 Ford van at the time of the attack.
Police got a warrant to collect Gordon’s DNA that confirmed that he was the second assailant, authorities said. By that time, Gordon was on the run.
