A Jackson County judge sentenced Bernard Jackson to 18 consecutive life sentences today for rapes he committed in the Waldo and Armour Hills neighborhoods almost 30 years ago.

A jury convicted Jackson, 53, in July of seven counts of rape, seven counts of sodomy and four counts of robbery in one of the city’s biggest cold-hit rape cases of the last decade.

Because of Jackson’s history as a prior and persistent sex offender, he faced minimum 30-year sentences for each of the sex-related convictions.

Jackson robbed and sexually assaulted four women who lived alone in 1983 and 1984. Each of the women testified at trial how an intruder surprised them in their homes, either late at night or early in the morning, demanded money and then raped them.

In addition to victim testimony, a crushing load of DNA evidence factored in the prosecution’s case. An analyst testified that she found six complete DNA profiles that matched Jackson to a certainty in that only one in 143 quadrillion unrelated people would have that genetic sequence.

Jackson already has spent more than 30 years behind bars, all on sexual assault charges. He also was a suspect in a string of rapes in Sacramento, Calif., in 1983 and 1984.

Read the complete story at kansascity.com