Elyria man pleads guilty in 1999 Cleveland rape case

An Elyria man has pleaded guilty in a Cuyahoga County courtroom to raping a woman in Cleveland in 1999, a case solved by DNA testing. Bart Mercurio, 52, of Georgetown Avenue, pleaded guilty to felony rape, burglary and abduction charges in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court last week and was found guilty of those charges by Judge Peter Corrigan, according to court records. A trial had been scheduled to begin in Corrigan's courtroom on Jan. 11. Mercurio has been free on bond since July 2021, and remains free but on GPS monitoring pending sentencing in Corrigan's courtroom scheduled for Feb. 16. He has been ordered not to leave Lorain or Cuyahoga counties or have any contact with the victim in the case, according to court records. Mercurio was identified as a suspect in the more-than 20-year-old unsolved rape thanks to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office's Genetic Operations Linking DNA Unit — or GOLD Unit. The prosecutor's office said the victim, a 33-year-old woman, left home to go for a walk in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood on May 6, 1999. Mercurio broke in and was hiding inside her home when she returned. Prosecutors said he beat her into unconsciousness, sexually assaulted her and fled. Evidence, including a sexual assault kit, was collected but the case went unsolved for more than two decades. It wasn't until 2013 after prosecutors assembled their Sexual Assault Kit Task Force that previously unsubmitted rape kits from 1993 to 2011, including that of the victim in the 1999 rape, were tested by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. The DNA didn't return any hits in CODIS, an FBI database that stands for Combined DNA Index System. The profile itself was indicted by a grand jury under the name "John Doe #133" so that the statute of limitations on the rape did not run out until police could find the culprit. Grants from the U.S. Department of Justice to the task force helped launch the GOLD Unit in late 2020, and it began doing genealogical DNA searches for 20 unknown DNA profiles connected to cold case sexual assaults, according to the prosecutor's office. "John Doe #133" was among 20 "most wanted" profiles selected for review. Investigation linked the then-unknown rapist's sample to Mercurio's DNA. Investigators secretly obtained a sample of Mercurio's DNA for comparison and verification, and tests confirmed his DNA matched genetic evidence in the victim's sexual assault kit, prosecutors announced in July 2021.