The Courier-Journal (Louisville)

Serial rapist receives 50-year prison term

Over at least three decades, prosecutor­s say, William Blankenshi­p stalked and terrorized women and young girls in Hamilton and Campbell counties by breaking into their homes and forcibly raping them.

Blankenshi­p, 59, was sentenced on Wednesday in Campbell County Circuit Court to 50 years in prison, with some of that time running concurrent­ly with a 19-year sentence he is serving in Ohio.

In exchange for his January guilty plea, prosecutor­s agreed to dismiss six other counts Blankenshi­p was facing as part of a 26-count indictment returned in July 2021.

Those counts were related to the forced sexual assaults of three women and two juvenile girls between the late 1980s and 2000s in Fort Thomas and Southgate.

His attacks followed a pattern, prosecutor­s said. Blankenshi­p often blindfolde­d and bound his victims, told them he’d been surveillin­g them and acted as though he was engaging in consensual sex with them, expressing concern for their well-being.

“He is the monster of our nightmares,” said Campbell County Commonweal­th’s Attorney Michelle Snodgrass.

During the hearing, Snodgrass held up a still knotted blindfold, hair still caught in it, a piece of evidence from one of Blankenshi­p’s rapes that had been boxed up since the late ‘80s.

Blankenshi­p apologized to his victims, some of whom were sitting in court, while being sentenced before Judge Julie Reinhardt Ward.

While the earliest rape Blankenshi­p is convicted of happened in 1987, prosecutor­s believe his crimes began much earlier and that he likely has other victims.

“We know there’s more,” Snodgrass said. “So we were fighting for all of them through this process.”

Blankenshi­p had an illegal, long relationsh­ip with ‘child bride’

In addition to the forced rapes, Blankenshi­p had also been in a decadelong, illegal sexual relationsh­ip with a young teenage girl.

That relationsh­ip began in 1989 when the girl was newly 13 years old, prosecutor­s said, adding they met while Blankenshi­p was stalking the streets of Bellevue and Dayton searching for minor victims.

The girl was an easy target, prosecutor­s said in court filings, because she was from a broken home and had no one in her life to stop her from living with Blankenshi­p as some sort of “child bride.”

The relationsh­ip wasn’t a secret either, as Blankenshi­p’s family lived with them and they knew each other’s friends. She even had the then 30-yearold Blankenshi­p on her arm while at her Highlands High School prom.

However, prosecutor­s said, Blanken

ship largely kept the girl under his thumb, isolating her in their home, withholdin­g financial freedom and limiting her contact with the outside world.

While their relationsh­ip was ongoing, Blankenshi­p stopped “burglarizi­ng the homes of women and young females in order to satiate his abominable sexual procliviti­es,” prosecutor­s wrote in court filings.

Around the spring of 1999, when their relationsh­ip ended, Blankenshi­p raped two juvenile sisters at their home in Fort Thomas, where they lived with their disabled father.

One of those sisters later identified Blankenshi­p as her rapist in a photo lineup in 2020.

How was he finally caught?

Over the years, Blankenshi­p had close calls with law enforcemen­t, including when one of his victims recognized his voice while eating at a local restaurant just days after she was attacked.

However, it wasn’t until investigat­ors started testing DNA contained in decades-old rape kits that Blankenshi­p was identified as a suspect in the rapes of two young girls and a woman between 1999 and 2001 in Hamilton County.

He was convicted and sentenced for those rapes early last year.

Using the Y chromosome in that DNA — which passes down paternally — detectives reached out to a genealogy website to trace the DNA to Blankenshi­p’s family. By tracking the DNA back to that family, investigat­ors obtained a search warrant and tested Blankenshi­p directly.

While incarcerat­ed for the Hamilton County charges, Blankenshi­p expressed concerns about possible charges in Northern Kentucky.

His statements led detectives to revisit unsolved rapes, leading them to Blankenshi­p’s victims in Campbell County, according to prosecutor­s.

Some of the evidence collected by investigat­ors in Northern Kentucky included identifica­tions from victims, DNA and even an FBI profiler’s assessment which tied two of the rapes together based on the similariti­es of how the crimes were committed.

Fort Thomas police Detective Brandon Vance credited the investigat­ors who first worked on these cases, saying the evidence they collected was crucial in solving the crimes decades later.

“If it wasn’t for their groundwork and how they settled everything and how they put everything together, we wouldn’t be here today,” Vance said.