YOUNGSTOWN — The Ohio Attorney General’s Office on Friday identified Jack Sheetz, 57, formerly of Canfield, as the man secretly indicted Thursday on one count of rape and two counts of kidnapping in the November 2000 kidnapping and rape of a woman taken from an accounting firm on Broad Street in Canfield. The abduction took place at 6:20 a.m.

An Ohio Attorney General press release states that Sheetz was arrested Thursday in Akron by the U.S. Marshal’s Service on the Mahoning County indictment.

The Canfield Police Department investigated the November 2000 assault, and the Special Prosecutor’s Section of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office is trying the case in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, the release states.

The rape and kidnapping occurred Nov. 22, 2000, when the victim was walking into work from the parking lot of the accounting firm on North Broad Street in Canfield. She was accosted, dragged to a nearby wooded area and raped, according to Vindicator archives.

A special edition Mahoning Valley Scrappers baseball bat was used in the attack. Only about 1,000 of those particular bats were made, The Vindicator reported in November of 2015 at the time that Canfield police detective Brian McGivern provided details on the cold-case investigation of the case.

He had been working on the case since 2007, but in 2015, McGivern said new types of DNA analysis was available at the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation lab that could analyze touch DNA, for instance, from fingerprints.

By November of 2015, the state had Senate Bill 316 that went into effect March 23, 2015, that required Ohio law enforcement agencies to submit any remaining previously untested sexual assault kits associated with a past crime to a crime laboratory within one year.

The attorney general’s office, then under now-Gov. Mike DeWine, undertook testing rape kits associated with old cases in 2011, and SB 316 meant that all departments in Ohio’s 88 counties would send in their kits, the story said, attributing the information to Dan Tierney, DeWine spokesman.

According to the Summit County jail, Sheetz is housed there now after being arrested Thursday. He is likely to be brought to the Mahoning County jail this weekend.

Sheetz was just released from the Ohio prison system in September and is on Ohio Adult Parole Authority supervision for his 2018 convictions in Trumbull County on charges of aggravated burglary, rape and aggravated robbery, according to Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction records.

Those 2018 convictions were for another cold-case prosecution involving the rape of a 75-year-old Howland woman in 1996. Trumbull County Common Pleas Judge W. Wyatt McKay sentenced Sheetz to nine years in prison in that case.

In that case, Sheetz was picked up by local authorities in Utica, New York, after a secret indictment was unsealed Sept. 15, 2016, in Trumbull County, according to Tribune Chronicle archives.

Sheetz was a neighbor of the victim, who was raped and robbed Dec. 17, 1996, at her Howland home. The woman has since died.

“The Howland Police Department did a wonderful job in digging into the DNA evidence in this case,” Trumbull County Assistant Prosecutor Chris Becker said at the time of Sheetz’s sentencing.

Becker also lauded the efforts of Utica police who got a DNA swab from the defendant. Howland detectives Jeff Edmondson and Tony Villanueva then resubmitted the evidence from the scene of the crime and the DNA matched that of Sheetz.

Prior to sentencing, Sheetz told the judge he was sorry for what he did. “I had been drinking and using drugs at the time,” he said.

Edmundson said Sheetz had been interviewed by the original investigators in the case, as were several other neighbors of the victim more than two decades earlier.

Court records show that attorneys for Sheetz had attempted to have their client plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but after Sheetz was examined by psychiatrists, McKay ruled he was competent to stand trial.