The suspect arrested in the case of a 14-year-old found murdered, is set to appear in court on Saturday.
44-year-old Christopher Whitaker is accused of killing Alianna Defreeze. He's being charged with aggravated murder.
Records show Whitaker was last in jail in 2014. He was released in June of that year, after serving time for pleading guilty to aggravated theft and theft charges.
However, his criminal past in Cuyahoga County alone begins in February of 1996, when he was hit with a criminal trespass charge.
That would be the first time, according to county court records, Whitaker plead guilty.
However, it wouldn’t be the last.
Between 1996 and 1999 Whitaker was involved in three separate cases in Cuyahoga County.
Charges of aggravated robbery and felonious assault were thrown out in 1998, but less than a year later, Whitaker would plead guilty to burglary and grand theft charges.
When he arrived back in court in 2005, he was accused of the most serious crimes on his rap sheet after a woman claimed she was violently raped.
Whitaker was charged with sexual battery, rape, attempted murder, kidnapping, and two counts of felonious assault. Only one count of felonious assault and one count of sexual battery stuck.
Whitaker plead guilty to both charges.
It was April 2005, Bedford Heights Police showed up to the Trinity Towers, inside they would find a woman who said Christopher Whitaker had raped her, then came out with scissors and assaulted her.
She said she told Whitaker “don’t do this to me.”
The victim couldn’t say what happened next because she thinks she was knocked out.
The next thing she remembers is waking up “on the floor in a back bedroom.”
Then she allegedly “crawled into the living room” to call for help.
The woman says she only knew she’d been sexually assaulted when “she felt wetness…… and saw “what appeared to be semen on her body.”
When police interviewed the victim they saw “bleeding from her neck”
Police note they collected a “DNA sample for Whitaker.”
That might have been the DNA investigators used to link Whitaker to the Fuller Avenue home they discovered Alianna inside of, dead.
The discovery, several sources have said, was truly awful.
The attorney who represented Whitaker in 2005 said his client only served about four years in jail, because he made a plea deal.