Thirteen years after raping a woman in a Missouri City veterinary clinic and then cutting her throat, a man identified through DNA profiling as her attacker has pleaded guilty to the crime.
Louis Charles Harper, now in his early 40s, reached a plea agreement with members of the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s Office, entered a guilty plea Thursday before Associate Judge Pedro Ruiz and was sentenced to 47 years in prison.
The victim, 37 at the time of Harper’s attack and now a Utah resident, told Assistant District Attorney Chris Delozier she was satisfied with the prison sentence and the plea agreement. The woman did not want to go through the psychologically stressful experience of facing her attacker during testimony at a trial, Delozier said.
The woman, unidentified because FortBendNow does not name rape victims, was working alone at Quail Valley Animal Clinic at 1619 Cartwright Road on March 3, 1994, when a man walked in and robbed her, according to a Missouri City Police Department report.
“During the course of this offense, the suspect sexually assaulted the victim, cut her throat and left her for dead” and ran out the back door of the clinic, the report said. Missouri City Police Capt. John Bailey said the attack was extremely violent, adding, “he cut her throat from ear to ear” and “did his best to kill her.”
But the woman, flown by helicopter to Memorial Hermann Hospital, survived.
Police had a description – a slender black man in his early 30s with short hair, a light mustache and wearing gold wire-rimmed glasses – and evidence gathered from the crime scene, but little else.
With the advent of technology, detectives obtained a DNA sample from crime scene evidence, and entered the information into the national Combined DNA Index System, Bailey said.
But there were no matches, and the case of the Quail Valley Animal Clinic attack grew cold.
Until 2005, when Harper was convicted of a robbery and sentenced to a Utah prison. A DNA sample was taken there. Delozier said it matched the sample from the 1994 rape and attempted murder.
After a lengthy extradition process, Harper was transported to the Fort Bend County Jail in Richmond, where he was to have gone to trial Monday for the 13-year-old assault. Instead, he pleaded guilty to attempted capital murder.
In similar cases, Delozier said, someone sentenced in such a crime can be expected to serve at least half of the sentence before becoming eligible for parole. If that happened in Harper’s case, he’d be in his mid 60s when released.
