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Man sentenced to 376 years for Capitol Hill rapes dies in prison

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DENVER A 46-year-old man known as the “Capitol Hill Rapist” for attacks on seven Denver women in the 1980s died of heart disease in a state prison, where he was serving a 376-year sentence, officials said Thursday.Quintin Wortham was found dead in his cell Monday at a state prison in Limon, Corrections Department spokeswoman Alison Morgan said.Wortham was convicted in February 1988 of first-degree sexual assault and burglary in the rapes of five women and the attempted rape of a sixth in Denver’s Capitol Hill area. At the time, his sentence was the longest prison term ever imposed in Colorado.A year later, in a trial that was moved to Aspen because of publicity from the first trial, Wortham was convicted of burglary and of raping a seventh woman. He was sentenced to an additional 24 years, but that sentence was to run simultaneously with his first sentence.Morgan said Wortham’s body was found during a routine inmate count. He did not have a cellmate, she said.Lincoln County Coroner Jennifer Nestor said Wortham had a history of heart problems. Wortham told the Colorado Court of Appeals in the late 1990s that he had failed to file court documents on time in part because he was recovering from a heart attack.Nestor said Wortham’s family has claimed his remains.Prosecutors said threatened his victims with knives and robbed them. Police said he may have been involved in as many as a dozen rapes and burglaries in a string of attacks that terrorized the area from June 1985 to May 1986.He was convicted of an unrelated trespassing charge in 1985 and freed from a Denver jail after his mother and her husband put their home up as collateral for a $10,000 appeal bond. He disappeared in May 1986 after police began seeking him in connection with the Capitol Hill assaults.Wortham was arrested by FBI agents in May 1987 in Atlanta, where he was working in a factory.


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