A man who violently attacked at least four women, raping three of them, pleaded guilty to multiple charges last week and was sentenced to 35 years in prison by a DeKalb County judge.
Dionte Mapp, 39, of Covington, was arrested in July 2016 and has remained in the DeKalb jail, according to online records.
Mapp was accused of assaulting a woman the year before, but thanks to a federal grant and the formation of the Georgia Sexual Assault Kit Initiative in 2018, his DNA was linked to three unsolved rapes going back to 2006, DeKalb District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Yvette Jones said in a news release.
Mapp pleaded guilty to three counts of kidnapping, three counts of rape, two counts of aggravated sodomy and two counts of sexual assault, Jones said. He received a life sentence, with 35 years to be served in prison and the remainder of his time on probation as a sex offender.
According to DA Sherry Boston’s office, Mapp’s series of rapes began in 2006 when the 23-year-old met a 17-year-old girl near her South DeKalb home and asked her on a date. Mapp drove the teenager to a nearby park, where the date turned violent. He slapped the victim and forced her to perform sex acts on him before raping her, Jones said in the release. The girl was later able to escape and call police.
In 2013, Mapp struck again when he began following a 23-year-old woman walking home along Candler Road near Flat Shoals Road, Jones said. Mapp tried to persuade the woman to give him her phone number, but when she wouldn’t, he grabbed her and threw her down in a wooded area. Mapp raped the victim there, then fled. The woman immediately reported the incident.
Two years later, Mapp assaulted his third victim, also a 23-year-old woman walking on Candler Road, according to Jones. The woman was walking to a bus stop on her way to work when Mapp grabbed her from behind. He put the woman in a headlock and stuck a gun to her back, then threatened to shoot her if she screamed. Mapp took the woman to a wooded area, where he strangled and raped her. The woman was able to escape after she flagged down a passing driver. She was later hospitalized for her strangulation injuries after she reported the assault to police.
Investigators finally got a break in the case a few months later in 2015 when a fourth victim was able to escape from Mapp before being raped, Jones said. The woman was walking in the same area while talking to her boyfriend on her cellphone when Mapp attacked her from behind and began strangling her. He forced her into the woods but she was able to fight Mapp off and run home to her boyfriend.
The man came back to the area looking for his girlfriend’s attacker, Jones said. He was able to find Mapp and beat him badly enough that the serial rapist was taken to the hospital. He was later arrested and spent more than three months in jail before he was released in September 2015, according to online records.
Detectives investigating the last assault recognized the similarities to the 2015 rape, which remained unsolved, the DA’s Office said. When that sexual assault kit was tested, it linked Mapp’s DNA to the 2015 case as well as the additional unsolved cases from 2006 and 2013. Mapp was rearrested in 2016, and the cases were consolidated in 2019.
Mapp’s DNA was already known to law enforcement thanks to a felony conviction. He served nearly two years in prison from 2006-2008 for false imprisonment and went to prison again for less than a year between 2014-2015 for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, according to Georgia Department of Corrections records.
The sexual assault kits collected in each of the cases in the indictment were tested by the task force, which was created in 2018 as part of a multimillion-dollar federal grant program called the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. The Georgia task force helps prosecutors by checking previously untested kits or any cold case kits.
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