By Bruce Cadwallader
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Bound with duct tape and threatened with a gun, the store clerk was attacked twice on the same day by the man known as “the blue-eyed rapist.”
Yesterday, she faced David S. Hopper in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.
“I’m the one who has control now,” she said, fighting back tears as she spoke in court. “I’m the one with all the freedom while you sit in jail.”
Hopper, already serving 46 years in prison for robberies and rapes in three states, pleaded guilty yesterday to the attack on the woman at a Grove City General Nutrition Center on Nov. 28, 2003.
Judge Patrick E. Sheeran sentenced Hopper, 46, of Burlington, Ky., to an additional 23 years in prison for the Franklin County attack.
“I accepted this plea to these monstrous facts because ... you will not be eligible for release until you are 115,” Sheeran said. “In effect, you are going to die in prison.”
A bearded Hopper, wearing glasses, shifted his weight back and forth as he pleaded guilty to one count each of aggravated robbery and rape.
He has no chance of parole and has been labeled a sexual predator in Ohio.
He was described as “the blue-eyed rapist” by law-enforcement officers because victims remembered his use of duct tape and a gun and his penetrating blue eyes.
The Grove City victim said she was alone in the store when Hopper came inside to look at merchandise. He left to get his checkbook from the car, then came back and confronted her with a gun. He forced her to undress, then bound and fondled her. When he left and she was struggling to free herself, she noticed he had left his checkbook. She picked it up and tossed on a shelf.
He came back to retrieve the checkbook, then put the gun in her mouth, threatening her.
The Dispatch does not identify victims of sexual assaults.
“I had moved past this,” she said in court. “I feel bad for the people you’ve done this to who don’t have support.”
Hopper did not respond.
“He is living in his own private hell and in his own way I know he is sorry,” defense attorney Mary Younger told the judge.
Prosecutors said Hopper has admitted to crimes in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky dating to 1992. A DNA match in 2004 linked several of the attacks. In 2006, police arrested Hopper after he tried to pawn the rings of his last two victims in suburban Cincinnati.
He still awaits sentencing in Hamilton County and Indiana for similar assaults.
Copyright 2010 The Columbus Dispatch