African-American Bernard Jackson gets 18 life terms for Waldo rapes

Jackson was sentenced to 18 consecutive life sentences for crimes committed against four women nearly 30 years ago in the Waldo and Armour Hills neighborhoods of Kansas City. Because of Jackson’s long history of sex crime convictions, Jackson County Presiding Circuit Judge Charles Atwell sentenced him as a prior and persistent sex offender, which means that 14 of the life sentences include no chance of parole. The judge characterized the crimes of the black rapist as horrendous beyond description, and said that Jackson had inflicted unspeakable terror and ultimate indignity on his victims. Jackson has already spent more than 30 years behind bars, all on sexual assault charges. He also was a suspect in a string of rapes in Sacramento, California, in 1983 and 1984. He was first convicted of sexual assault in 1977, when he was sentenced to 15 years for attacking a Kansas City woman in her home. But he served less than six years before he was paroled, and within three months, he committed the first of a series of assaults that led to his latest sentencing. The first four went unsolved, but the fifth attack in March 1984 led to Jackson’s arrest and subsequent 30-year prison sentence. Jackson completed a sex offender treatment program while in prison. He was paroled in 2008, and less than a year later the first of the more recent Waldo attacks took place.