Career criminal indicted in Clifton Park home invasion

PHOTOGRAPHER: Justin Mason

Authorities had little to go on from a brutal pre-dawn home invasion at a Clifton Park apartment complex in early August.

An intruder forced his way into an apartment and made his way to a bedroom, where he brutally assaulted a woman sleeping there. Had it not been for her training in self-defense, prosecutors believe the attack would have included a sexual assault.

“She struggled,” Saratoga County District Attorney-elect Karen Heggen said Thursday. “We’re very fortunate she is a woman with some self-defense skills and was able to fight off her attacker.”

The only lead in the case was some trace DNA evidence the assailant left behind, and after a search of the state’s DNA database, they came up with a suspect: 58-year-old Alvin DuBois, a Level 3 sex offender who has spent roughly 24 of the past 35 years either in prison or on parole for sexual assaults, burglaries and, most recently, a felony attempted stalking charge.

“A hit was obtained, and it identified the perpetrator in this case,” Heggen said.

The gangly, 6-foot-4 DuBois was arrested in late October and indicted by a grand jury this week on eight counts, including sexually motivated felony charges of burglary, assault and strangulation. DuBois remained quiet in court as public defender Oscar Schreiber entered a plea of not guilty on all counts before DuBois was ordered held without bail.

DuBois didn’t speak to the media as he was led out of the courthouse and attempted to shield his face from cameras as he was led into a sheriff’s cruiser. After the arraignment, Schreiber declined to say much about the case until he reviews the paperwork.

“[After that,] we’ll see where we’re going with it,” he said.

DuBois’ criminal record dates back to 1979, when he was convicted on two counts of burglary and sexual assault in Albany County Court. He was paroled in the mid-1980s, around the same time the Capital Region was struck by a string of 15 sexual assaults that led authorities to form a task force to track down the perpetrator.

Police ultimately caught DuBois violating his parole in 1987 and took him into custody as they built a case against him for sexual assault. They were able to link him to an assault in Guilderland, where he broke into the Woodlake Apartments, robbed a 23-year-old woman and then dragged her outside and sexually assaulted her at knifepoint.

Though DuBois concealed his identity with a ski mask, the woman was able to identify her attacker by his voice. She was able to pick his voice out from a series played for her, giving prosecutors the evidence they needed to elicit a plea from DuBois in 1989.

Prosecutors also attempted to secure DNA evidence from DuBois to link him to samples collected from several of the unsolved assaults, but at the time, the science was new and still relatively untested in court, leading DuBois’ defense attorney to challenge a judge’s order for a sample.

At least one justice from the Appellate Division of the state Court of Appeals sided with DuBois until the full panel could review the case. The result of that review, however, wasn’t clear.

DuBois was ultimately ordered to serve 10 to 20 years in prison on a sodomy charge, but was never tried on the other assaults he was suspected of committing. He served 13 years in prison before being released in 2002.

Eight years later, DuBois was convicted of attempted stalking in Albany County and served three years before being released on parole last year. He was released from parole in May, less than four months before the attack occurred in Clifton Park.

The DNA hit generated by the state police crime lab this fall led to a search warrant of DuBois’ home in Rensselaer that turned up items from a number of burglaries around the Capital Region, authorities said. At least three different local police agencies are also reviewing cases to see if they can link them to DuBois.