Man faces 84 years for rape.

Byline: BILL BISHOP The Register-Guard

A Coos Bay man arrested after a DNA test tied him to a bizarre rape of a Eugene woman faces up to 84 years in prison after his conviction Thursday on a dozen felony charges in the attack that stymied investigators for several months.

Without emotion, Robert Jerome Byers, 29, agreed during an 18-minute trial that the state could prove its case against him. Lane County Circuit Judge Mary Ann Bearden found him guilty on multiple counts of rape and sodomy.

The Sept. 18 attack baffled police at first: The woman never saw the rapist because he covered her face. He also injected her with a drug that numbed her limbs. Later tests determined that he had used methamphetamine.

The rapist also tried to clean up fingerprints and other evidence, even using a pillowcase to collect bedsheets, the woman's nightgown and other items he touched while in her house, police said.

But a break came in early December, when the Oregon State Police Crime Lab matched DNA from Byers, a convicted burglar, to DNA found by hospital workers who treated the 53-year-old victim. Oregon law requires all felons to submit a DNA sample for use in future criminal investigations.

The DNA test determined that the sample from Byers and from the crime would be found in one in 43 trillion people, Deputy Lane County District Attorney Bob Lane said.

After the DNA match, investigators arrested Byers and matched one of his fingerprints to a fingerprint from the crime scene. Investigators hadn't been able to use the crime-scene fingerprint earlier to track down Byers because it was of poor quality and wouldn't work in the state's computer fingerprint comparison system, Lane said. But a side-by-side comparison made the match.

In court, Lane detailed the attack, which began after Byers slipped into the woman's Whiteaker neighborhood home while she slept sometime before 6 a.m. After beating her, raping and sodomizing her, Byers injected methamphetamine into her arm before continuing the attack, Lane said.

Before leaving, he took steps to clean up the scene, but one of the victim's daughters apparently interrupted the effort when she arrived and knocked on the door, Lane said.

Byers fled, leaving the collected materials behind. The fingerprint was found on a spray can inside the pillowcase, he said.

The attack caused initial alarm among the woman's friends and co-workers, who feared that the man might strike again. Police submitted details of the attack to a statewide computer database that compares crimes to help identify suspects, but it matched nothing that would indicate that a serial rapist was involved, police said.

Byers has prior convictions for burglary, car theft, unlawful weapons possession and forgery dating back to 1995, according to state prison records. He was on parole at the time of the September attack.

Defense attorney Terry Gough said Byers wouldn't contest the facts of the crime recited by Lane, but would most likely appeal the conviction on other legal grounds.

The judge convicted Byers on six counts of first-degree sodomy, three counts of rape, and one count each of unlawful sexual penetration, assault and burglary.

All of the convictions except burglary are covered under Measure 11, the mandatory sentencing law enacted by voters in 1994. Byers could face up to 84 years in prison if he serves all the sentences back-to-back. Sentencing is set for July.

Earlier in the day, lawyers from both sides were in the midst of selecting jurors for a trial when Gough asked to withdraw from representing Byers. The judge denied the request. Byers then insisted that he be allowed to fire Gough. The judge refused that as well.

The reason for the disagreement wasn't clear. In court, Bearden said only that Byers placed his attorney in "an untenable position" and that any other lawyer appointed to the case would be in the same position.

In pretrial hearings, investigators said Byers indicated that he would attempt to blame the crimes on another man. Byers had asked for three prison inmates to be brought in to testify at his trial, according to court records.