Man serving time for ’94 rape pleads guilty to ’92 rape

NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — A man currently serving a 30-year sentence for a cold case rape that took place in Norfolk 30 years ago pleaded guilty last week to raping another woman in a 1992 cold case.

Linwood Scott Jr., 72, was sentenced, by his plea agreement, to 30 years in prison for the 1992 case, five years which will be served consecutively to his sentence in the 1994 case.

Scott's identification in the 1992 case became possible due to the grant-funded Virginia Sexual Assault Kit Initiative by the state attorney general's office and its partners, which put into place new procedures in recent years to be able to test a statewide backlog of physical evidence recovery kits in cold cases.

Her parents' gravesite is the place where Margaret Smith stopped to process the end of a long road to justice.

Scott raped the young mother in the middle of the night in March 1994, but two years earlier, there was a similar case in Ghent.

"A victim was at home, asleep, when Mr. Scott came in through a kitchen window and sexually assaulted her," said Norfolk Police Special Crimes Sgt. Brian Williams. "It was a knife, I believe, taken from her residence."

Previously: 28 years later, justice served in rape of Norfolk woman

Early in the morning on Sept. 27, 1992, Scott went into Shawn Kuzel's apartment in the Ghent part of the city while Kuzel was sleeping, entering through the kitchen window, taking a knife from the kitchen stealing cash from inside a purse and then went into Kuzel's bedroom, taking her into the living room and raping her at knifepoint, according to the Norfolk Commonwealth's Attorney's office.

"There was a knife, I believe, taken from her residence," Williams said.

Scott cut Kuzel's hand with the knife as she tried to fight him off, and, asked by Scott whether anyone else was at home, she said no in order to protect her roommate, who had been asleep in another bedroom. After the attack, Scott left, Kuzel woke up her roommate and then called Norfolk Police.

Kuzel was treated at a local emergency room, getting stitches for her hand, and she underwent a sexual assault nurse examination, where a nurse recovered Scott's semen. At that time, the DNA testing done produced no leads on a suspect for polcie to investigate, and it turned into a cold case, the Commonwealth's Attorney's office said.

The case went unsolved until a DNA hit came back through the attorney general's sexual assault kit initiative in 2023. The list of charges included rape, attempted forcible sodomy, burglary, abduction with intent to defile and malicious wounding.

At that point, he had been found guilty in 2022 of rape, burglary and abduction with intent to defile in the 1994 cold case. The DNA from that case was tested at the request of the victim, who had called Norfolk Police in 2019 after she had heard about modern retesting of physical evidence recovery kits, or PERKs, on TV.

Retired Det. Larry Hockman returned to help with the Smith and Ghent cases.

"Yes, Larry worked there for a number of years, so he's in the chain of custody for a lot of these cases," Williams said. "And his memory is phenomenal, so he's always an asset in these types of cases back in the 90s."

Scott was in custody for the Smith case when he was tried days ago in the 1992 Ghent case.

It was set to go to trial, but on the day it was scheduled, he entered a guilty plea.

If you are the victim of an unsolved rape case, call the Norfolk Police Special Crimes Unit at 757-664-7033.