A jury at the Boone County Courthouse will hear from additional witnesses on Thursday morning in day three of a case involving a 1984 Columbia abduction, rape and throat-slashing.
61-year-old James Frederick Wilson, a former Columbia resident, is charged in Boone County with forcible rape and first degree assault for the 1984 incident involving a woman who was abducted near Providence and Wilkes while walking to work at Naugles.
939 the Eagle News was back at the Boone County Courthouse on Wednesday, where November video was played in court featuring testimony from DNA forensic scientist Samantha Cabrera, who worked for Sorenson Forensics at one time.
Our news partner Channel 17’s Haley Swaino reports the jury heard an audio recording Wednesday afternoon of a call that Wilson placed to a Columbia police detective in 2022. KMIZ reports that Wilson told police that he wanted to confess. Wilson told Columbia Police that the incident happened when at a time in his life where he was drinking and using drugs. KMIZ quotes Wilson as saying on tape that he didn’t know what came over him. “I think of that every single day and it tears me up,” KMIZ quotes him as saying on the recording.
Wilson, who grew up in Columbia and attended Rock Bridge high school, has been jailed without bond since being captured in North Carolina in 2022.
The victim in this case, who now lives in another state, took the witness stand as a prosecution witness on Tuesday. She testified she was a 17-year-old Hickman student and a Columbia police cadet who was walking to her job at Naugles on a stormy early-evening in 1984. She spent ten days at University Hospital in Columbia after the incident.
