noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646
DURHAM — The Duke University Police Department has suspended, with pay, an officer charged in a “bondage rape” in Alabama where he allegedly gagged and handcuffed a woman in his car before violating her.
And the sheriff in Dothan, Ala., where Webster Delenn Simmons, 37, was charged Monday with felony first-degree rape and felony first-degree sodomy, said he believes the crime may not be an isolated event.
“I think there’s a real distinct possibility he’s done this before,” Sheriff Andy Hughes of Houston County said Tuesday. “We are alerting other law enforcement agencies nationwide to see if they have unsolved rapes like this. We would not be shocked at all if he had done this before.”
John Dailey, the Duke police chief, said his department was in touch with Alabama officials and trying to gather more information about the case.
Simmons has “clearly been suspended, and that is the standard procedure in something like this,” Dailey said. “Now we need to get more official information from the agency in Alabama and we will proceed from there once we get that information.”
Simmons, who had served on the Duke police force for around a year, was arrested after the woman reported the assault Sunday. According to authorities, the victim and Simmons had been together at a local nightclub in the hours leading up to the assault. Hughes said the victim bought all her drinks at the nightclub except her last one, which the woman said Simmons purchased.
“That’s why we think he drugged her,” the sheriff said. The sheriff said when the woman woke up early Saturday morning she was handcuffed with a ball gag in her mouth and was being sodomized.
After obtaining a search warrant, detectives found inside Simmons’ vehicle two pairs of handcuffs, a ball gag, thick white rope, an electrical wire attached to a nail, a whip and a flog. “The items corroborated what the victim had told us,” Hughes said.
The fact that the evidence was found in the car, Hughes said, led authorities to question whether similar crimes might have been committed elsewhere.
“If we had found all this stuff in his home, that would have been one thing, and we would assume the sex had been consensual,” Hughes said. “But in a vehicle, that really concerns us, because that means he was traveling to do this.”
Simmons, who lives in Rougemont, is being held at the Houston County Jail on $120,000 bond. He faces 20 years to life in prison for each felony charge.
Officials believe he is originally from the Dothan area and was visiting family when he was arrested. Dailey said that Simmons’ shift was not scheduled to work over the weekend. According to his personnel file with the Duke department, Simmons previously had served 10 years as an officer with the Raleigh police.
Hughes called the charges “very, very unusual.”
“We have our share of forcible rapes, but this is the first one I can remember in over 20 years where there was definitely some bondage involved,” he said. “It’s deeply disturbing to have this kind of crime to start with, but it’s even more disturbing to think that this involves a law enforcement officer.”
Dailey agreed, also calling it very disturbing that “a law enforcement officer could have committed this type of crime.”
Simmons is scheduled to make his first court appearance today.
