Police arrest man suspected of nearly 30 cold case rapes across 3 counties

ATLANTA — Police announced Tuesday that they have arrested a suspect in a string of rapes they dubbed the "maintenance man rapes."

Police believe the suspect is connected to up to 29 rapes in Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties in the mid-'80s and '90s.

Several years ago, investigators said they re-sent a few of the victims' rape kits to a national database to be re-tested. A bunch of the kits got hits, and that's when they said they started piecing everything together.

At the time, Channel 2 Action News covered case after case of a man going to apartment complexes throughout the Atlanta metro area pretending to be a maintenance worker and then allegedly raping victims ranging from teens to seniors

"He may have come in and said something to the victims to make them think that he worked at the apartment, he was maybe doing maintenance work," cold case investigators A.B. Calhoun said.


Now, more than 20 years later, investigators said they were able to charge Daniel Wade, 62, with five of the rapes through DNA evidence.

"We started getting some DNA hits and we noticed that in these hits we were getting the same profile for a single individual," Calhoun said.


In order to button up his case, he had to re-interview the rape victims

"When this happens to you, you think you put it to one side one way or another, and then for investigators to, out of wanting to do something good, bring this up, it probably brings back a lot of bad memories," Calhoun said.

Wade is currently in federal prison on unrelated charges of robbery.

WSBTV