MIAMI _ More than three decades after a man broke into a woman's house in Coral Springs and brutally raped her, police said Friday they found him at a West Virginia federal prison where he was serving time for bank robbery.
Timothy Norris, 60, will be extradited back to Broward for the 1983 rape.
A police spokesman said Friday morning the woman was inside her home in the southeast part of the city when she awoke to an armed stranger in her bedroom in the early morning of Aug. 22, 1983. Her husband was away at work, and the other people home was the family's grandmother, who had cancer, and the woman's two small children.
Police say the man, later identified as Norris, got into the house through a rear door. At the time, police had few identifying details other than his race and that he was clean cut, slim with brown hair, had a heavy Southern accent and, at the time of the attack, was wearing strong cologne.
Evidence was sent to the Broward Sheriff's Office, but the technology available at the time didn't lead investigators to a likely suspect.
Coral Springs police began to re-evaluate the case in March after the rape victim _ who had seen social media accounts about the solving of a different cold case _ reached out to detectives to remind them her case remained unsolved.
Several items were identified and sent to the Broward Sheriff's Office Crime Lab for processing utilizing current technology, police said.
Thanks to advances in technology these days, police made a match from a sample of her clothing that had Norris' DNA on it, said police spokesman Tyler Reik.
Norris, who is currently serving a federal sentence in West Virginia for armed bank robbery, has prior arrests for armed burglary, aggravated assault, assault on a female and kidnapping.
In 2016, a North Carolina television station, WXII-Ch. 12, reported that Norris was arrested after he entered a credit union and passed a note that demanded money and indicated he had a gun.
