In a decades-long journey for justice, Collin County Criminal District Attorney's Office announces that Nicholas Carney, a 65-year-old Oklahoma man, has been handed a life sentence for a crime that stretched back to 1991. An 8-year-old child was the victim of a kidnapping and sexual assault in Plano, Texas, a case which remained unsolved for years until DNA revived a trail gone cold. Carney was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault of a child, a vindication that arrives a haunting 34 years after the initial crime, with jurors imposing a symbolic $34 fine—one for each year lost to waiting, reported the Collin County DA's Office.
The abduction, occurring under the broad daylight of an August day, saw the child taken while en route to a community pool with a friend. After enduring hours of assault, she was discarded 20 miles from her home. Detectives, at the time, gathered DNA evidence and engaged with artistry and imagination, hopeful to sketch the face of terror; yet, the assailant remained a ghost in the justice system. The break in the case came much later, in 2023, when the tenacity of Plano Police Detective Aaron Benzick, Dallas Police Detective Elizabeth DeAngelis, and Texas Ranger Jason Shea resubmitted the DNA evidence for forensic investigative genetic genealogy analysis, a modern-day tool that unwound the spirals of history to reveal Carney's identity.
This revelation was not an isolated incident; before getting pulled into the relentless orbit of justice, Carney's DNA betrayed him again, connecting him to another unspeakable act—a 1999 kidnapping and assault of a nine-year-old in Dallas. A composite sketch in that instance, like an echo of the first, failed to immediately lead to an arrest. But working with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation helped investigators to close the loop, extracting a DNA sample from Carney that sealed his fate by matching the DNA profile of the perpetrator in both cases.
The verdict and sentencing followed a grim recounting of evidence, where a jury, bearing witness to Carney’s dark past, which included a conviction for indecent exposure to a child in 1980 while he posed as an ice-cream truck driver in Tulsa, delivered life imprisonment upon him. Distilling the years of anguish and pursuit of justice, DA Greg Willis said, after hearing the evidence, "My office is here to protect children and remove dangerous predators from our communities," indicating no rest in the relentless pursuit of justice, no matter how fleeting time becomes, the Collin County Criminal District Attorney's Office remarked.
The prosecution team, led by Assistant Criminal District Attorneys Ashleigh Woodall and Ann Mathew, along with DA Investigator Laurie Gibbs and Victim Assistance Coordinator Valerie Miller, presented a case that pieced together Carney's predatory legacy, securing a sentence that echoes into the decades of his evasion. A community now faces what was once uncertain—the assurance that a predator won't walk among them, and that time won't erode the grip of justice.
