A California rapist has been sentenced to life in prison after DNA testing linked him to rapes in the 1990s – despite efforts to frame his identical twin brother.
Kevin Michael Konther, 58, was sentenced to 140 years in prison on Friday after an Orange County Superior Court jury last year found him guilty of committing multiple rapes.
Konther raped a nine-year-old girl in Lake Forest in 1995 and a 31-year-old woman in Mission Viejo in 1998.
Investigators employed the same DNA testing that was used to catch the Golden State Killer and determined both rapes were committed by the same person.
Testing led investigators to Kevin and Stephen Konther, who – as twins – share DNA, and the brothers were taken into custody.
Kevin Michael Konther (pictured), 58, was sentenced to life in prison for committing two rapes in the 1990s
The suspect was unknown until 2018 when cutting-edge DNA testing technology, also used to catch the Golden State Killer, linked Konther and his twin brother Stephen to the crimes
The twins were secretly recorded in a police vehicle while waiting to be booked in jail – during which Kevin admitted to his brother ‘I’m a criminal in my past. I have serious issues. Now I’ve got to pay for it, and I don’t want to.’
Kevin told his brother ‘I just hate women. That’s my problem,’ and said he’s been fighting that demon for a long time – also mentioning a ‘chemical imbalance’ in his brain.
Judge Richard M. King on Friday described Konther as a ‘sexual carnivore’ before sentencing him to the longest possible sentence – 140 years with no parole and life in prison.
King described the nature of Konther’s attacks as ‘heinous’ and said Konther was a ‘calculated’ rapist and a ‘sexual carnivore’.
‘The defendant committed heinous acts upon these women in a serial manner. This is a man who deserves no leniency,’ King said.
‘This is like a cat, a lion, a cheetah looking for prey,’ the Judge said in court. ‘Vultures don’t do this to their young, rats don’t do this.’
Konther’s first known attack was of a nine-year-old girl who was walking home from a store near a heavily wooded community park in Lake Forest .
The young girl was pulled into the bushes and raped – she testified that a man came up to her and put his hand over her mouth, telling her he had a knife.
She pleaded with him to not kill her as he forced her to take off her clothes and raped her.
When she told the rapist she was only nine-years-old, he reportedly laughed.
The victim, now 37, testified in court in January, 2023.
‘I was terrified, I thought he was going to kill me,’ she said. ‘I begged him not to hurt me. I still had quarters in my pocket I told him he could take. I didn’t know what he wanted.’
Both of the rapes took place in California – one in Lake Forest (pictured: Serrano Creek Park) and the other in Mission Viejo
In 2018 – Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes (pictured) announced the significant arrest of Kevin Konther in the two cold-case rapes from the 1990s
Konther’s next reported attack came three years later – when a woman was running along a secluded bike trail in Mission Viejo.
She was attacked and dragged down an embankment where she was raped.
Another crime that Konther was accused of came from a previous girlfriend who he lived with in Hunting Beach and Highland.
His at-the-time girlfriend claimed that Konther committed lewd acts on her pre-teen daughter – including going into her room at night naked and standing uncomfortably close to her bed.
It was reported that on several occasions he pulled her pants down and stared at her while she pretended to be asleep.
After the cutting-edge DNA technology matched the Konther twins to the previously unknown suspect – Kevin’s lawyer tried to pin the crimes on Stephen.
Deputy Public Defender Jessica Ann Sweeny argued during the trial that Kevin had taken the blame for his brother’s crimes – suggesting that he had heard details of the sexual assaults and repeated them to save his brother.
Sweeny told jurors that Kevin was the ‘black sheep’ of the twin brothers, but said that they had been close all their lives.
‘Kevin was not the one who committed these crimes, it was (his brother),’ the defense attorney said. ‘Just as he has his entire life, Kevin covered for (his brother) and decided he would be the one to take the blame.’