By Sharon Turco and Jane Prendergast
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The arrest of a suspected serial rapist in Pleasant Ridge has all the intrigue of an episode of CSI: Elderly victims. DNA. A cigarette butt.

But it was low-tech, old-fashioned police work - tenacity and repeated canvasses of the neighborhood - that led to an apprehension and, police believe, the end of 10 years of brutal attacks in Pleasant Ridge, Golf Manor and Roselawn.

Veteran sex-crimes detective Sgt. Ken Wells, on the Cincinnati force 23 years, picked up that cigarette butt. He'd been talking to the man who threw it down, Timothy Ferguson, and thought Ferguson a likely suspect in the crimes. By then, members of the Serial Rape Task Force knew the same person committed rapes dating to 1993, but they still didn't know to whom that DNA match belonged.

"Sgt. Wells is a hero here today," said Detective Steve Ventre. "We just had a general idea of where we thought he lived, so we saturated the area again."

The butt was "fair game," he said. "He threw it away. It's trash."

The crime lab at the Hamilton County Coroner's Office made the match.

"It was a hell of an investigation," said Capt. Vince Demasi. "We've been staking that area out for quite some time now. This was about refusing to quit."

He called it a model for how to investigate cold cases.

"It's that CSI stuff,'' said Lt. Kurt Byrd, referring to the popular prime-time television show in which police use DNA and high-tech equipment to crack cases.

Ferguson, 43, of Pleasant Ridge, was indicted Thursday on 21 charges of rape, attempted rape, aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery. He was arrested April 16 in an attack on one woman and has been in jail since then under a $500,000 bond. The indictments involved six women between the ages of 63 and 86 who were attacked. Two were his neighbors.

Hamilton County Prosecutor Mike Allen called the sexual assaults "persistent, violent and brutal." One victim, Allen said, fought her attacker off, but he returned, shined a flashlight in the window and fondled himself.

If convicted, Ferguson faces multiple life prison terms. His attorney, Rhett Baker, said Ferguson plans to plead not guilty. He had no further comment.

Three of the incidents happened in the last 11/2 years, according to the indictments. Investigators are tracing Ferguson's whereabouts in the mid-1990s because of a five-year gap between the first attack and the second, in October 1998. They believe he was out of state at least part of that time, and they're talking to investigators where they think he lived.

They're also not ruling out the possibility of more local victims.

"All indications are that he's clean, a low-key guy," Allen said. "There's nothing to indicate a crime like rape."

Ventre said it felt good to be able to report back to the victims that someone had been arrested. "The families were elated," he said.

Wells, Demasi said, "keeps emphasizing to me that it was a good team effort. I keep emphasizing to him that it was leadership and a tremendous amount of patience."

E-mail sturco@enquirer.com and jprendergast@enquirer.com