Sixteen years ago, Cheryl Webster prayed for death every day.
She drank to kill her emotions. She tried to take her own life twice. She battled alcoholism for years, and it wasn’t all because of the rape, but the rape was part of it.
It happened 33 years ago — July 31, 1984 — in a Greeley alley. At the time, Webster was a 19-year-old waitress at a Denny’s. She worked that night and was headed home to her children.
In the early hours of that summer morning, Rusty Barnhart and Inocencio Trevino approached Webster, forced her into the alley and raped her multiple times. Although she went to police and nurses collected evidence, she did not know who the two men were, and police were unable to identify them.
The case stalled for almost three decades, but officers kept the DNA evidence.
In 2013, Colorado lawmakers ordered the state’s police departments to submit all stored evidence kits to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for testing. Barnhart and Trevino came back as matches. More than 30 years later, prosecutors charged them with kidnapping because the statute of limitations on sexual assault in Colorado is 20 years.
Barnhart was found guilty of first-degree kidnapping and in May was sentenced to 24 years in prison. Trevino later pleaded guilty to second-degree kidnapping and Tuesday was sentenced to 16 years in prison, bringing the decades-old case to a close.
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