Washington police announce arrest of 'Potomac River rapist'

A man known as the "Potomac River rapist" who sexually assaulted at least 10 women and murdered one in the Washington area in the 1990s has been arrested, police said Thursday.

Giles Warrick, 60, was taken into custody on Wednesday in the state of South Carolina, Washington police chief Peter Newsham announced at a press conference.

"Between 1991 and 1998, a man terrorized our community as he brutally preyed upon and attacked multiple women across this region," Newsham said.

Warrick was identified as a suspect in the sexual assaults and the murder through forensic genealogy, he said.

File Photo: A 1998 sketch and age progression sketch of the Potomoc River rapist suspect. [Photo credit to FBI]

Several of the attacks occurred along footpaths next to the Potomac River, which runs through Washington.

The last known attack attributed to the "Potomac River rapist" was in August 1998, when a 29-year-old woman was beaten to death with a rock while walking home from a party.

File Photo: Incidents map and timeline. [Photo credit to FBI]

Police said they managed to solve the cold case by matching DNA left behind by the suspect at the crime scenes to family trees in online genealogy databases.

Several high-profile criminal cases have been solved recently through this technique, including that of the notorious serial killer and rapist known as the "Golden Gate Killer."

Joseph DeAngelo, a former policeman, is suspected of at least a dozen murders and 50 rapes between 1976 and 1986 and is awaiting trial in California.

DeAngelo was arrested in April 2018 after investigators tracked him down by plugging crime scene DNA into an open-source genealogy database.