Decades-old Bay Area rape cases linked through DNA to Texas man

Berkeley police announced Friday that a multiagency, multistate investigation had linked a series of rapes and kidnappings in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond and Texas — going back to 1994 — to a Texas man who was identified through DNA.

In all, Lashay Durisseau, 56, has been linked to a total of seven cold rape cases in the East Bay as well as in Texas, which occurred in four jurisdictions between 1994 and 2008, according to a Berkeley police news release. On Monday, Bay Area detectives traveled to Texas and, with local authorities, including a Houston-based FBI task force, they arrested Durisseau without incident at his home in Richmond, Texas.

Berkeley police didn’t offer any specific information on the allegations against Durisseau, except to say that, in the majority of attacks, the suspect either physically assaulted the victims or threatened them with a firearm.

The Berkeley Scanner reported that the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office filed charges against Durisseau on Tuesday, alleging two counts of forcible rape and one count of forced oral copulation. Citing court documents, the Berkeley Scanner said three of the cases involved a 17-year-old Texas girl who was assaulted in 1994, a 35-year-old woman who was raped in Berkeley in 2002 and a 19-year-old woman who was attacked in Oakland, also in 2002.

According to the Berkeley Scanner and KTVU, the October 2002 Berkeley assault involved a sex worker who was punched, threatened and forced to have sex with her assailant at the Berkeley Marina. A month later, the 19-year-old woman was attacked at an Oakland bus stop and threatened with being shot.

The Berkeley police news release said that evidence from the Berkeley case was tested in 2015 through a grant obtained by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to process previously untested rape kits. That testing resulted in a case-to-case DNA match linking five additional cases.

A 2021-22 grant from the California Justice Department also allowed detectives to process more than 500 cold sexual assault cases, including the Berkeley cold case. Through that testing, police in Richmond, Oakland and Beaumont, Texas, also identified cases linked to the same suspect. The Department of Justice furthermore helped detectives zero in on Durisseau as a possible suspect through a familial search. The FBI subsequently obtained the suspect’s DNA for comparison testing, leading to the issuance of an arrest warrant.