The first sexual assault in Cameron, Texas, was on the 16th of August, 2006.
A 72-year-old woman reported to police that a man had broken into her house and raped her, but she was unable to provide a good description of her attacker.
Investigators took the woman to the hospital and a sample of the man’s DNA was collected, but the authorities had very little information other than that. No witnesses were found, and nobody reported anything suspicious in the area.
Then, just less than a month after the attack, the police received a call from a woman who was worried someone was inside her mother-in-law’s house. The woman had called her mother-in-law and thought she was acting strangely.
The police arrived and entered the house to find 38-year-old Willie Dwayne Whitfield naked and raping the 72-year-old woman.
The first officer on the scene said:
It was very unexpected, it just blew my mind away. It was horrible.
Whitfield was arrested, charged with aggravated sexual assault of an elderly person and taken to the county jail. Police and residents thought the arrest meant the end of the assaults.
Two days later, however, there was another assault, against the same 72-year-old victim
The police knew Whitfield was in jail and that something wasn’t right, but the attacker disappeared for a while.
Then, five months after the last attack, on the 12th of February, 2007, the man assaulted the 72-year-old a third time.
Women in the area began taking self-defense classes. Others installed security systems, which were rare before the attacks, and purchased guns to protect themselves.
Despite all this, on the 19th of March, 2007, another attack occurred. This time, the woman assaulted was 69 years old and lived near the other victims.
Based on the information from the victims, they could only narrow the attacker down to a black man between 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing between 170 and 270 pounds.
Officers said:
We were thinking, that could be any black man in town.
A break in the case happened on the 26th of March, 2007, when the rapist tried to strike again. This time, his victim was only 42 and fought him off, kicking the rapist in the crotch and making him run off.
The man ran into a nearby store from which police were able to obtain security tapes.
Another Cameron resident stepped forward to say that she saw a man standing outside the woman’s house about 10 minutes before the attack. She identified the man as 18-year-old Lloyd Anthony Nelson.
Lloyd Nelson was questioned and a sample of his DNA was taken to the Waco crime lab on the 2nd of April to compare with the samples obtained from the victims.
On the 4th of April, Cameron police got a call from the Texas Rangers saying that Nelson’s DNA matched samples for all four assaults.
Lloyd Anthony Nelson faces three charges of aggravated sexual assault of an elderly person. That’s a first-degree felony that could possibly put him in prison for a long time - up to 99 years or possibly life. He was also hit with a rape charge and a charge of aggravated robbery.
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