CLARKSBURG, W.Va. - A Clarksburg man will spend decades in prison for sexually assaulting and robbing an 83-year-old woman during a 2001 home invasion.
Media outlets report Adam Derek Bowers, 29, was sentenced Monday in Harrison Circuit Court.
Bowers was sentenced to 30 to 70 years for first-degree sexual assault, 40 years for robbery and up to 15 years for burglary. A jury convicted him in late May.
Another man, Joseph A. Buffey of Clarksburg, received a 70-year sentence in 2002 for the sexual assault. Buffey pleaded guilty to two charges, but has been trying to have his conviction thrown out with the help of the Innocence Project, a national legal clinic dedicated to freeing wrongly convicted people through DNA testing.
Advanced DNA testing showed in 2010 that Buffey's DNA was not present in the sexual assault kit gathered as evidence. The DNA in the kit matched Bowers, who was already in prison for another crime and who lived a few blocks away from the elderly victim when she was assaulted in 2001.
