The I-70 Rapist

Lucille Gallegos was 43 and worked as a housekeeper, cleaning units at an apartment complex in west Wichita, Kansas. On June 25, 2002, a maintenance man went into a vacant apartment because a smoke detector was sounding. A fire had been set inside and had burned itself out. Lucille had been stabbed and decapitated. Her head has never been recovered.

Douglas Belt, a truck driver who lived at the complex, was questioned that first day and released. Months later, DNA from blood on a patio railing was matched to him. In November 2002 he was arrested over an armed robbery, and officers took oral swabs on the stated pretext of comparing him to a BB gun; the sample matched the railing. The same profile linked him to seven rapes committed across three Kansas counties between 1989 and 1994, a series tied to the I-70 corridor.

Belt was convicted of capital murder, attempted rape and aggravated arson in 2004 and sentenced to death. The rape charges never reached a jury: in 2008 the Kansas Supreme Court held that the John Doe warrants filed to beat the statute of limitations, which described a suspect only by DNA testing loci, were too vague to be valid. A state lab mix-up had wrongly cleared him of the whole series in 1991. He died at El Dorado Correctional Facility on April 13, 2016, aged 54.