A man charged with raping and killing a 5-year-old North Carolina girl was expected in court Friday, a day after authorities revealed what they believed happened to her in her final days.

A young woman who was raped at gunpoint last year by a local church official benevolently forgave her attacker yesterday shortly before he was sentenced to 33 years in prison. But Oscar A. Rivera-Licona, 35, rebuffed his victim’s offer of absolution. Instead, the former head deacon of the Richmond Evangelistic Center of Seventh-day Adventist questioned the veracity of the woman he raped despite DNA evidence linking him to the crime.

Authorities in Ohio now confirm six bodies were found in the home of a rape suspect arrested Saturday.

Four teens could appear in court as early as Thursday after being charged in the alleged gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside her high school homecoming dance in Northern California.

The Supreme Court of Virginia has exonerated an inmate on one of his two rape convictions after DNA evidence tied another man to the crime. It is the first time the court has granted a “writ of actual innocence” based on biological evidence. The writ was issued for Thomas E. Haynesworth, who was convicted in 1984 of raping a woman in Richmond.

Richmond police last night released composite sketches of two possible suspects in the assault and rape of a woman last month in a parking deck in the Virginia Commonwealth University area. The woman was attacked about 1:45 a.m. on June 21 in the 1300 block of West Broad Street between North Lombardy and North Harrison streets, police said.

A man charged with raping a woman whose husband is accused of arranging the encounter on Craigslist appeared in a North Carolina court yesterday and was appointed a defense lawyer. Last year in Chesterfield County, the husband pleaded guilty to flashing a pizzadelivery woman at a hotel in the Chester area. Court officials said Rodney Liverman Sr., 39, of Norwood made a firstappearance hearing in Cabarrus County District Court. He was given a courtappointed lawyer and ordered held under $250,000 bond.

A North Carolina man charged this week with arranging on Craigslist for his wife to be raped by another man pleaded guilty in Chesterfield County last year to flashing a pizza delivery woman at a Chester-area hotel. The man, 25, was given a 30-day suspended jail term on his conviction of misdemeanor indecent exposure at a motel in the 1900 block of West Hundred Road, court records show. The Richmond Times-Dispatch is not identifying the man to avoid identifying his wife.

It never fails, said filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, that after her documentary on rape is shown, someone in the audience will confess to her that she, too, is a survivor.  “Very often, so many women live in shame and blame themselves,“ said Simmons, whose film “NO! The Rape Documentary” will be shown today at 6 p.m. at Virginia State University in Ettrick.

Violent and property crime collectively dropped 1.5 percent in central Virginia last year despite a worsening recession. Officials say that’s a positive sign for the region, considering that economic downturns tend to trigger increases in certain types of criminal behavior. A total of 39,159 major offenses were reported in 2008 in the 24 localities that make up the greater Richmond metropolitan region, down from the 39,760 offenses reported the year before, according to state police data analyzed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

In the 25 years since Thomas E. Haynesworth went behind bars as a 130-pound teenager, he has befriended two inmates who, like himself, were convicted rapists. Earlier this decade, DNA testing of evidence discovered in old state forensic laboratory files proved those friends, Marvin Anderson and Julius Ruffin, innocent and implicated the real assailants.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine yesterday pardoned two men whose rape convictions were brought into question by DNA testing in recent years. Kaine spokesman Gordon Hickey confirmed that the governor granted absolute pardons to Victor Anthony Burnette in a 1979 rape in Richmond and Arthur Lee Whitfield in two 1981 rapes in Norfolk. “I was so excited I started crying. . . . I got teared up,“ said Burnette, 56, of Richmond. “I still have a hard time thinking about it,“ he added. Burnette got the news from his lawyer, Murray J. Janus, yesterday morning.

A Virginia Military Institute cadet has been charged with rape after an investigation into an assault reported by a female cadet. Stephen J. Lloyd, 21, is being held in the Rockbridge Regional Jail, according to VMI spokesman Stewart MacInnis. Lloyd, a senior from Mason Neck in Northern Virginia, was arrested Tuesday by the VMI police after consultation with the commonwealth’s attorney.

Doubt has been raised about a conviction in a series of rapes and other attacks against women in Richmond and Henrico County a quarter-century ago. Recent testing in the Virginia Department of Forensic Science’s groundbreaking post-conviction DNA project failed to find the genetic profile of Thomas E. Haynesworth, 43, in semen preserved from a Jan. 3, 1984, rape in Richmond.

A man accused of fathering his daughter’s seven children as he locked her in a basement for decades pleaded guilty to incest but insisted he was innocent of murder and enslavement charges as his trial opened.