Cold case solved: Plano police arrest man for 1990s sex assaults of 2 young girls
Plano police arrest man for 1990s child sex assaults
A suspect has been arrested after DNA evidence connected him to a pair of crimes committed against children in the 1990s.
A suspect has been arrested after DNA evidence connected him to a pair of crimes committed against children in the 1990s.
He was wanted for more than 30 years for aggravated sexual assault of a child in Plano and was connected to another one in Dallas.
New forensic DNA technology led detectives to Ardmore, Oklahoma, where they found the 64-year-old suspect.
What we know:
Nicholas Ray Carney was arrested in Ardmore, Oklahoma, on charges of abduction and aggravated sexual assault of a child connected to incidents in 1991 and 1999.
Carney is currently being detained by the Plano Police Department. His bond is pending.
On Aug. 15, 1991, an 8-year-old girl was walking with a friend to a neighborhood pool on Lake Hill Lane in Plano when a man approached them in an alley. The man, later identified as Carney, who was 35 years old at the time, lured the girl into his car and drove away.
Carney forced the child to view pornography and threatened her by saying she would "never see your family again" if the girl didn’t do what he ordered, according to the affidavit.
The girl was sexually assaulted and later found at a residence in Garland. She suffered neck and throat injuries.
"They've gone 30-plus years without knowing, thinking about this case every day. It’s a story of perseverance on the victim's part and survival that she survived that afternoon and that terrible day that the offense happened," said Plano Police Det. Aaron Benzick. "But then to go on for 30-plus years and not have answers and to wonder about that definitely carried a lot of responsibility as a detective working on that case and trying to bring answers to them "
Police developed composite sketches of the suspect in both cases, describing him as a man about 6 feet tall with brown eyes, brown hair, a mustache, and a heavy cigarette smoker. The girls were also both lured into Carney’s car with animal-related manipulation tactics.
"This story for this particular case is really a story of evolving technology helping us revisit this case," Benzick said.
Thirteen years after the assault in 2004, Plano police uploaded DNA preserved from 1991 into the FBI National Crime DNA database and got a hit on a similar sexual assault in Dallas that happened in 1999.
"We get that match between the two cases, which is wonderful. It opens up the case, gets us more things that we can compare and look at," Benzick said. "But it still goes without identifying the offender for about 24 more years."
On March 25, 1999, a 9-year-old girl was walking home from school with a friend in Dallas when Carney approached them in his car. He lured the girl into his vehicle and sexually assaulted her.
In both cases, police collected DNA evidence from the victims' clothing.
Timeline:
1991: Aug. 15: First assault (8-year-old girl).
1999: March 25: Second assault (9-year-old girl).
2004: March 8: DNA evidence from both cases linked.
2023: May: Investigators began using new technology to review the cases.
2024: February: Another search conducted; no DNA matches found.
October: Investigators began searching for possible family members of the unidentified suspect.
November: Police began investigating Carney at his Oklahoma residence.
December 16: DNA evidence matched Nicholas Carney.
December 19: Carney arrested.
Nicholas Carney Mugshot: Plano Police Department
How police solved the case:
This year, Plano police turned to Bode Technology’s Forensic Genetic Genealogy, which compares DNA to commercial DNA databases.
Family trees are built by identifying the possible DNA source.
DNA profiling is used to confirm or exclude everyone else except the person who is a match to the DNA sample.
Investigators explored a potential family connection to a deceased woman with six children.
This led to the identification of Keith Carney, a man convicted of murder in Utah in 1990. Investigators then searched for Keith Carney's siblings, which led them to Nicholas Carney.
Background checks revealed a 1980 indecent exposure arrest for Nicholas Carney in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A comparison of Carney's 1996 driver's license photo with the composite sketches further supported his identification.
DNA from a discarded trash bag belonging to Carney confirmed the match to the assault cases.
"We're going to want to learn everything we can about this person we've arrested, Nicholas Carney," said Benzick. "Where has he been living? what timeline has he lived in different places? What open cases are in those areas? What other victims can we work for? How can our partnership with our victim from 1991 help other victims that we don't even know about yet?"