Lorenzo Hawes, 64, Pleads Guilty to 1994 Cold Case Rape Solved by DNA
DNA resubmitted 30 years after the crime finally put a name to a composite sketch: Lorenzo Hawes, 64, who was already convicted of rape in Knoxville.
Lorenzo Hawes, 64, pleaded guilty to rape on Wednesday, March 19, 2026, for a sexual assault he committed more than three decades ago in James City County, Virginia, closing a cold case that had outlasted an entire generation of investigative technology.
At approximately 12:45 a.m. on September 27, 1994, a man entered a home on Las Brisas Court in James City County and raped a 32-year-old woman. At the time of the offense, Hawes lived in the same neighborhood as the victim. Investigators worked the case, releasing a composite sketch of the suspect to the public, but the case eventually went cold.
It stayed cold for nearly thirty years. In February 2024, investigators resubmitted DNA evidence in the case, and newer forensic DNA analysis produced a match: Hawes. After the DNA match was discovered, James City County Police Department detectives traveled to Knoxville and interviewed Hawes, who was later indicted for sodomy and rape.
The Knoxville connection is not incidental. Lorenzo Hawes had previously pleaded guilty to rape and assault charges in Knoxville, according to Knox County court records. That prior conviction, which documents place in 2000, meant Hawes had already been through the system once before the cold case caught up with him.
After initially being scheduled for a trial on Thursday, Hawes pleaded guilty to rape on Wednesday. The sodomy charge was dismissed as part of the plea agreement. Sentencing is scheduled for April 6, 2026, and Hawes remains incarcerated at the Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail.
For the true crime community, this case lands squarely in the canon of cold cases cracked by renewed forensic investment. The original composite sketch from 1994 couldn't close it. A neighbor's face, a name attached to a crime, wasn't enough without the science to back it. What finally broke it open was a decision made in February 2024 to resubmit decades-old evidence for modern DNA analysis. Thirty-one years after the assault on Las Brisas Court, that resubmission produced the match that a composite sketch never could.
Sentencing on April 6 will be the last procedural chapter in a case that technically never ended, even when it looked like it had.
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