Authorities announced Monday the arrest of a suspect in several decades-old crimes in the Sacramento region, including the brutal 1994 sexual assault of a UC Davis student on a South Davis greenbelt.
Mark Jeffrey Manteuffel, 59, was taken into custody Friday in Decatur, Georgia, the result of what officials called a “collaborative and extensive ongoing investigation” that involved DNA technology to make the long-elusive identification.
“This is evidence that does not forget,” Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said Monday at a news conference announcing Manteuffel’s arrest.
“At a time when DNA was barely even heard of when it came to solving crime, law enforcement found the evidence in these cases, meticulously collecting it and preserving it, never really knowing if someday they would find an answer,” Schubert said.
The crimes occurred between May 1992 and March 1994, involving three female victims in Davis and in both the city and county of Sacramento.
In the Davis case, the 22-year-old UCD student was jogging a greenbelt in the area of Cowell Boulevard and Washoe Street when a suspect grabbed her and disabled her with a Taser stun gun on the night of Jan. 11, 1994.
“She was going to get dinner at the local market,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig said at Monday’s news conference. “He tased her and dragged her away, where he committed monstrous crimes.”
“This crime haunted the community of Davis for 25 years,” Reisig added, noting that the woman was “very happy” to learn of an arrest in the case. “Predators and monsters can’t hide forever any longer — the clock is ticking on these criminals, and their time is up.”
Davis police Chief Darren Pytel said his agency will make contact the woman to ensure she’s offered support during the legal process that lies ahead. Manteuffel is expected to be extradited to California to face criminal charges.
“This victim has been waiting far too long for this perpetrator to be brought to justice,” Pytel said. “This was a terrible crime that at the time caused many residents to question their safety, rightfully so. Our hope is that those who commit crimes will stop, because recent technology advances are now bringing them to justice.”
Yolo Superior Court online records show a complaint against Manteuffel was filed on Friday, the same day of his arrest in Georgia, charging him with a single felony count of kidnapping with intent to commit robbery. A warrant for his arrest also was issued.
In the Sacramento County cases, Manteuffel faces multiple counts of rape, torture with use of a knife and sodomy, according to Schubert, whose office used the DNA identification to file a “John Doe” complaint in the case back in March 2000, shortly before the statute of limitations expired for those crimes.
Officials declined to reveal specifics about how DNA was used to identify Manteuffel, a former student and part-time lecturer in criminal justice at Sacramento State University Student as well as a retiree from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, for which he worked in several states.
However, in two other high-profile cold-case investigations with Davis ties, Sacramento investigators used the online genealogy database GEDmatch to identify suspects in the East Area Rapist and NorCal Rapist cases by uploading DNA left at the crime scenes and building “family trees” that led them to the alleged perpetrators.
The suspects in those cases, Joseph James DeAngelo and Roy Charles Waller, continue to await trial in Sacramento County.
Meanwhile, the investigation into Manteuffel’s alleged crimes remains ongoing, authorities said. Anyone with information is urged to contact the Sacramento Police Department’s investigations unit at 916-808-0650.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene