Elias Diaz – who authorities identified last week as the suspected Fairmount Park rapist – is being charged with rape, kidnapping and other crimes in connection with three incidents tied to the attacker, police said Wednesday.
He was charged with murder on Dec. 20 for the 2003 killing of Rebecca Park, a 30-year-old medical student who was found strangled and sexually assaulted in a wooded area of the park.
DNA evidence connected Park’s homicide to the rape of a 21-year-old jogger that same year on Kelly Drive and the 2007 sexual assault of a woman in Northeast Philadelphia’s Pennypack Park, authorities said at a news conference last week.
In October 2003, a woman was able to fight off an attacker who tried to pull her toward the edge of the Schuylkill River, according to police. Investigators have said the suspect matched the description of the Fairmount Park rapist.
Diaz, 46, was apprehended in Pennypack Park earlier this month after he allegedly slashed multiple people with a machete in November along the trail. He has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault in relation to those recent attacks.
He was denied bail after the murder case was filed and is being held at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, according to court records. The Defender’s Association, which is representing Diaz, did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Police believe he was most recently living in a makeshift shelter in a section of Pennypack near Lincoln High School in Mayfair.
In 2021, a DNA analysis helped create a series of composite sketches of the man believed to be the Fairmount Park rapist. Earlier this year, Diaz’s name came up during a genealogical investigation into the attacks, police said.
PPD leaders have said that detectives did not know where Diaz lived, or whether he was still alive. He had a minimal criminal history before he was arrested Dec. 17.
Diaz’s preliminary hearings in the Pennypack slashings and Park’s murder are scheduled for early January. Dates for the other cases have not been set.
