Elderly woman returning home from grocery shopping forced into trunk, driven to home where she was raped and left bound in a closet: Cops

Tony White (WVTM/YouTube)

An Alabama judge sentenced a man to nearly two centuries behind bars for kidnapping a 75-year-old woman and taking her back to a home where he raped her and left her tied up in a closet.

Birmingham NBC affiliate WVTM reported the judge on Friday sentenced 49-year-old Tony White to 198 years in prison for kidnapping, rape , sodomy and burglary, all in the first degree. White pleaded guilty on July 11.

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According to the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office, the victim was returning home from grocery shopping on July 4, 2022, when White came up from behind her and forced her into the trunk of his car at knife-point. He then drove her to a home where he raped her and bound her with duct tape and left her in a closet, deputies said.

Her family members reported her missing around in the early afternoon after they showed up to her home and she was gone. Her disappearance set off a frantic search for the woman affectionately known as Ms. Betty for volunteering with the Quad Cities Fire Department for over three decades.

The search ended after about six hours when the found the woman in White’s closet bound to a chair A manhunt ensued and authorities in Kentucky located and arrested White the next day south of Lexington.

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The victim spent several days in the hospital but survived the encounter. She testified at a court hearing a couple weeks after the incident.

“He got on top of me,” she said in court, according to WVTM . “He raped me a couple of times. I was crying and begging, trying to get him to stop.”

Despite it being a holiday, hundreds of people joined the search described as the “mom” of the Quad Cities Fire Department, local Fox affiliate WBRC reported .

“For any wreck call, any medical call, any fire call, even at 75, Ms. Betty is still there,” Lt. Tim Hicks told the outlet. “If she’s not there, you can bet someone is going to ask ‘where is Ms. Betty.’”

Further investigation tied White to similar rapes in 2012 and 2013 where he followed women home from stores and attacked them, authorities said.

“While no sentence can truly account for the gravity of such a heinous crime, it is the hope of the Sheriff’s Office that Tony White will never again be free in our society,”  Sheriff Matthew Wade said in a statement sent to local media outlets.

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