A man convicted of trying to sexually assault a Chicago woman he was staying with for the night in 1996 has been declared a sexually violent person and ordered held in state custody for treatment, according to officials and court records.
A jury last week found Craig A. Childress, 50, guilty of being a sexually violent person following a trial before Cook County Judge Steven G. Watkins, according to court records and a news release Wednesday from the Illinois attorney general’s office.
Childress, a registered sex offender originally from Kentucky, most recently had been found guilty of attempted criminal sexual assault and sentenced to 29 years in prison in a 1996 attack involving a woman who had offered to let Childress sleep at her apartment for a night after he had been staying with her brother and sister-in-law, according to court records. Childress was paroled in 2010 but taken back into custody and charged in 2011 with being a sexually violent person.
The woman’s sister-in-law dropped Childress off at the Bucktown-area bar where the woman was working, and after she was done, they went to two others before Childress started falling asleep while drinking, according to court records. The woman brought Childress to her apartment, and when she tried to show him which room he was going to stay in, he attacked her, according to records.
Childress hit the woman, choked her and told her he was going to rape and kill her, according to her testimony. After she tried to escape, Childress started ripping off the woman’s clothes and took off his own shirt.
A downstairs neighbor heard the woman scream for help and yell, “I’m not going to let you rape me!” according to his testimony during Childress’ trial.
When the neighbor came to the door, the woman was able to escape, but Childress was gone by the time police arrived. Childress was found in Texas two weeks later.
Childress’ record of sexual violence dates to a 1987 rape conviction in Quebec, when he was in the U.S. Navy, according to the news release. After he was discharged from the Navy for that conviction, he pleaded guilty in 1989 to rape, attempted sodomy and other charges in an attack on a woman within three months of his leaving the Navy. He was released from prison in 1994 after serving time on those charges.
Childress originally was paroled in the 1996 case in 2010, and the Illinois attorney general’s office first sought to have him declared a sexually violent person in 2011, according to records.
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Someone declared a sexually violent person can be held for treatment even after his criminal sentence has ended, with their status periodically evaluated. Childress has been returned to the custody of the Illinois Department of Human Services’ Sexually Violent Persons facility in Rushville, in western Illinois.