DNA links Humble man to decades-old Houston rapes, police say 8%
By John Wayne Ferguson20% Nicole Hensley27%
7/31/2026, 11:28:26 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 16 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Negativity Bias, and Anchoring Bias, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 11.1% saturation with 115 hits. Analysis detected 788 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,037 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 18.4% and a BS Rank of 8% (25,368 of 27,366 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.70% of the article peer group.
A 62-year-old man was arrested earlier this month and accused of committing a series of sexual assaults on women in north Houston over the span of decades.
Officials from the Houston Police Department and FBI said Friday that the man, 62-year-old Phillip Cerf, might have committed even more assaults and asked potential victims to come forward.
"Today's announcement is about accountability, but it's also about the victims," Police Chief Noe Diaz said during a news conference.
"These investigations remained active because victims had the courage to report these crimes and participate in the investigative process."
Cerf, of Humble, on July 21 was charged with four counts of aggravated sexual assault.
A warrant for Cerf's arrest detailed the accounts of four different women who said a man raped them between 1997 and 2016, though Cerf has only been charged in connection to the assaults of two of the women, court records show.
In each case, the women said they had gotten into a man's car for what they thought would be a ride home.
After the alleged assaults, they underwent sexual assault exams, meaning DNA gleaned from their bodies and clothes were uploaded to CODIS, a national database of DNA collected from crime scenes, according to court documents.
The tests confirmed that the attacks involved the same man, but didn’t provide a named suspect, Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Luis Menendez-Sierra said during the news conference.
Cerf was first identified as a suspect in February, records show.
Police officials said advances in DNA evidence – particularly the ability to trace familial DNA back to an unidentified suspect, a technique known as investigative genetic genealogy – helped lead them to Cerf.
The police department’s cold case unit passed the DNA evidence to the FBI’s Houston-based investigative genetic genealogy team.
That team used DNA from public genealogy databases to locate possible family members of the attacker, said FBI Special Agent in Charge Jason Hudson.
The FBI team then built family trees from that information and used it to identify potential suspects.
Investigators compared the people identified through the tracing to other known evidence, like physical descriptions and crime location, to narrow down the suspects, Hudson said.
“We hope that somewhere on that tree our perpetrator exists,” Hudson said of the strategy
The work eventually led investigators to focus on just Cerf and one other person, Menendez-Sierra said.
Officials didn’t say which DNA databases they used in the investigation.
Police in April began surveilling Cerf at an apartment complex in the 19800 block of Atascocita Shore Drive in Humble.
One day, a police officer saw Cerf spit on the ground, and investigators collected his discarded saliva for testing.
The DNA matched the profile of the women who were attacked and a warrant was issued for Cerf’s arrest.
He was taken into custody on July 21.
During his interview with police, Cerf denied having sex with three of them, and denied ever assaulting the four or anyone else.
He said one of the women, however, looked familiar, according to a complaint.
Cerf's defense attorney, Jeff Erskine, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Harris County District Attorney's Office plans to seek the denial of Cerf's bail as his case proceeds in the 496th District Court, records show.
He is due to return to court in August.
Cerf has convictions for two drug offenses and two misdemeanor cases for assault and driving with a suspended license going as far back at 1998.
Charging documents detailed the account of the first known woman, who accepted a ride home to Acres Homes in 1997, about a year before Cerf's first arrest.
The man instead drove her to a park in Independence Heights, raped her a gunpoint and hit her in the back of the head with the firearm.
A deputy constable found her naked at the park the next morning, according to the charging document.
The woman died before Cerf’s arrest, police said.
In 2009, another woman reported being sexually assaulted by a man she encountered while walking home, records show.
He was in a car and she had seen him with an acquaintance earlier that day.
She got into the vehicle and the man grabbed her by the neck and raped her, according to the complaint
The woman provided more details to authorities in May.
She said the man offered drugs to get into the car.
As they approached her home, he placed something she thought was a gun against her back to keep her inside, drove her to a nearby cemetery and assaulted her, according to the complaint.
Police also reviewed a 2013 report in which Cerf allegedly raped a woman who was walking down street in Kashmere Gardens.
The woman said she mistakenly thought Cerf was a friend of her father and got in his vehicle.
He assaulted her in a vacant lot while holding a knife to the back of her neck, then ordered her out of the car afterward and drove away before the woman could get his license plate, according to court records.
She flagged down a police officer, who took her to a hospital for an examination.
In a May interview, the woman told police that she quickly realized Cerf was not her father's friend.
He offered her money for diapers, then drove down the wrong street and asked her sexually explicit questions before he attacked her, court records state.
The arrest warrant details another sexual assault in 2016.
A woman said she accepted a ride home from a man, but he went the wrong way, pulled out a gun and assaulted her, according to the complaint.
When authorities approached her in April, the woman said she had put the assault "out of her mind" in the years since.
Since Cerf was arrested, police identified him as a person of interest in two other sexual assaults, one of which dated back to 1988.
Officials on Friday asked other women who may have been attacked to contact investigators by calling the sex crime unit at 713-308-1180.
“Please come forward,” Hudson said.
“We know it might be difficult to do so, but it's important, and you deserve justice.”
Speakers
6speakers23%attributed speech802writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageNoe Diaz
39 attributed words17% of attributed speech57% writer coverage
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