Man found guilty of five charges in 2000 kidnapping, sexual assault of Ottawa teen

Franklin County Jail mugshot of Ralph E. Corey.

A Franklin County jury on Monday — for the second time — found a former federal inmate and cross-country truck driver guilty of five charges stemming from the February 2000 kidnapping and sexual assault of an Ottawa teenager.

The three-day trial of Ralph E. Corey, 53, wrapped up Friday, with the jury deliberating most of Monday before returning guilty verdicts on all five counts: aggravated kidnapping, attempted rape, two counts of aggravated sexual battery and criminal threat.

The verdicts bring some closure to a case that went cold for more than a decade, after a 16-year-old girl was kidnapped in the parking lot of the Ottawa Walmart as she ended her work shift. The girl was then driven to several locations in Ottawa and sexually assaulted.

A jury had found Corey guilty of the same charges in July. But after the verdict, a juror told a court employee that the juror accessed information about the case from a smartphone during the trial — in violation of the judge’s instruction — and a mistrial was declared on July 16.

No arrests had been made in the case until 2011, when Corey’s DNA profile in the national DNA databank matched evidence collected at the scene. When the profile matched, Corey was serving time in a federal prison in Arizona on counterfeiting charges. Corey also spent time in a Virginia prison after he was caught smuggling 500 pounds of marijuana through Virginia in a semitrailer.

Corey is scheduled to be sentenced at 2:30 p.m. Dec. 11.