(WBAP/KLIF) — Texas has sent the first man arrested under Molly Jane’s Law to prison.
26-year-old Jessie DeWayne Ray pled guilty in District Court, Wednesday, to an aggravated sexual assault from 2019 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Ray was the first person arrested under Molly Jane’s law, named for Molly Jane Matheson, a 22-year-old Fort Worth woman raped and murdered in 2017. The law requires police to upload sexual assault information in to an FBI database.
Prior to the law, rapists could commit numerous sexual assaults in various cities without police connecting the crimes. Ray had sexually assaulted a woman in September of 2019, at Crystal Canyon Park in Arlington and recorded it on a cell phone. That phone was seized by police who would not have known where the crime occurred had not information about the assault been uploaded to the FBI database.
In 2017, 22 year old Molly Jane Matheson of Fort Worth was raped and murdered by a serial rapist. Kim D’Avignon of the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office says the Matheson family couldn’t believe police didn’t have the killer off the streets prior to Molly’s murder since he had a lengthy history of rapes. Molly’s death led to the Texas Legislature passing Molly Jane’s law.
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