NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — It took 32 years, four months and 20 days, according to the prosecutor’s closing statement, but the man who broke into a Norfolk woman’s apartment with a knife, threatened her children and raped her in her own bed in May 1992 finally stands convicted.
Shortly before 4 p.m. following about two hours of deliberation, the judge quickly read the jury’s verdict: guilty on both counts.
Vernon Gay, 56, was direct-indicted on charges of rape and statutory burglary with a deadly weapon in November 2023. After the guilty verdict, Judge Jamilah D. LeCruise set his sentencing hearing for Dec. 20.
The incident occurred before state forensic scientists could use DNA evidence, and before the existence of the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS. The case was the first case in Virginia under the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, or SAKI to go to trial and reach a conviction through a jury trial.
“It wasn’t until there was a DNA match between the perpetrator, whom our survivor could never identify, and the man who went on trial today, that the police were able to crack the case,” Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi told 10 On Your Side after the verdict.
The trial began with jury selection Tuesday morning, and members heard testimony from the modern-day investigator on the case, Norfolk PD Sgt. Brian Williams, as well as the hospital workers who were present for the victim’s PERK (Physical Evidence Recovery Kit) examination following the incident, and the forensic scientists who analyzed it in the early 1990s.
A former forensic serologist told the jury of identifying biological material on a piece of clothing.
“All we could tell was there was a male,” she said.
The court also heard from the lab scientist who found a 1-in-5.7 trillion chance the DNA belonged to someone other than Gay.
The DNA was never in question in court. The defense attorney acknowledged to the jury in opening statements that they were stipulating to those facts.
The expert testimony was, effectively, procedural. Gay’s defense wasn’t that it wasn’t him; it was that the incident was consensual.
On the stand, Tuesday, the victim said she had complained to management about the windows: they had locks, but they effectively didn’t do anything. She’d worried about them before the incident.
She recounted to the jury how, on the night of May 5, 1992, she had awakened to an unknown man in her bed with a dangerous object. She sat, stoic, as the 911 call she made that night, preserved for three decades, blasted over the courtroom speakers.
In it, she said the man had held a knife to her throat. He had come in through her son’s window and raped her. Three children were in the home at the time, and one of them was in bed with her at the time, with another child in a crib in the same room. The other child was in the bedroom next door.
“He said he knew I had children; if I didn’t do anything, he wouldn’t hurt them,” she testified in court. She obeyed when he said not to look at him as he left. The victim went to Sentara Leigh Hospital and a PERK was collected.
During arguments over a defense motion to strike the charges, with the jury excused from the room, the judge noted that only she and the jury could see Gay “smirking” during the victim’s testimony.
Later Wednesday, Gay took the stand, an optional move for defendants. He said the victim was one of several women he was involved with at the time of the incident. He said he brought her a sandwich from work that night and entered the apartment through a door left unlocked for him.
He also said he never knew her real name, but referred to her as a fictional children’s character.
According to his account, that was the last time they ever saw each other. She became upset when he declined to become more exclusive.
“I was young, I wasn’t into no commitment stuff,” he said.
“So you agree, she never mentioned you in 1992, in the 2000s, in the 2010s,” the prosecutor asked Gay during cross-examination, possibly rhetorically.
The commonwealth’s rebuttal argument aimed to take apart Gay’s version of events.
“When asked about his photo in 2023, she couldn’t identify him,” the prosecutor stressed to the jury during closing arguments. “Why would she false accuse and never identify?”
Fatehi said he didn’t buy the defense’s argument for a second.
“We didn’t think that anything in the evidence supported the idea of consent burden, but that was the defense that the defense chose to present; it was their prerogative,” he told us after the verdict. “The jury weighed all of the evidence — and from our understanding of the case, they made the right call.”
He explained that the funding for the DNA analysis that solved the case was provided by the state through the attorney general’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, known as SAKI. That took place in July 2022, and in August 2023, the Virginia Department of Forensic Science found that the DNA evidence matched that of Gay.
“Once again, Norfolk leads Virginia with the first SAKI jury to go forward in the Commonwealth,” Fatehi said. “Thank you to former Attorney General Mark Herring and Attorney General Jason Miyares for devoting resources to test back evidence cases in cases like these. The wheels of justice may move slowly, but they never stop, and we have served justice today.”