A man serving prison time in Oregon appeared Monday in Clark County Superior Court to face rape, burglary and kidnapping charges stemming from a 1998 incident in central Vancouver. Willie A. Tanner, 52, appeared on a summons for the charges. Tanner refused to admit his identity to the judge under advice from his attorney, he said. His attorney, Renee Alsept, said she advised him to do so because Tanner could be facing his third strike offense and, if convicted, could be facing a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Tanner’s criminal history includes multiple convictions in Oregon and Washington in the 1990s and 2000, according to the prosecution. Court records show he was convicted in 1999 in Multnomah County, Ore., on a slew of charges, including rape, burglary, kidnapping and multiple counts of robbery. An Oregon Department of Corrections database lists Tanner’s earliest release date there as 2049. A judge agreed to hold him without bail because of a detainer agreement to return him to custody in Oregon following the resolution of his local case. He’s scheduled to be arraigned Feb. 13.

Vancouver police responded about 5 a.m. Nov. 21, 1998, to an apartment in the Ogden neighborhood for reports of a burglary and sexual assault. When officers arrived, they met with a woman who said she ran from her apartment to a friend’s house, according to a probable cause affidavit. The woman told officers she had returned home from a friend’s house about 3:30 a.m. and went to bed. She said she believed all of her apartment’s doors and windows were closed and locked. She woke up, she said, to find a man in her room. He put something over her mouth, bound her hands with an unknown object behind her back and sexually assaulted her. She said at one point, the man told her he knew who she was and threatened to harm her children, court records state. After the assault, the woman said she asked the man for some water, and he left her bedroom to get some. After some time, she found the man had left her apartment. She also said she couldn’t find her phone, court records state. The woman said she noticed the dead bolt on her front door was still locked, but the back door to her apartment was open. She closed the back door and ran from the apartment, she said.

Police searched the area but were unable to find a suspect or the woman’s phone. The woman was taken to an area hospital and underwent a sexual assault examination. Investigators said despite the exam, they were unable to identify a suspect, and the case went cold, the affidavit states. In June 2020, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab notified Vancouver police that testing of the exam kit collected from the woman returned as a match to Tanner, whose DNA was in a national database. Oregon State Police collected a reference DNA sample from Tanner while he was in prison custody. In August 2021, Vancouver police were notified Tanner’s DNA sample again matched the DNA collected from the woman’s sexual assault exam, according to court records. When police told the woman about Tanner, she said she did not know someone by that name and she did not recognize his photo, the affidavit states.