Nearly four decades after an 85-year-old woman was sexually assaulted in her Deerfield Beach apartment, her alleged attacker has been extradited to Broward County to face charges.
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Gregory Rollison, 60, who faces charges of sexual battery and armed burglary, is being held in the North Broward Bureau after he was extradited from California over the weekend, the Broward Sheriff’s Office announced Monday.
In the middle of a summer night in 1987, the woman woke up to find a man standing over her bed, Detective Andrew Gianino said in an episode of BSO’s cold-case web series “Open and Unsolved” announcing the development in the investigation.
The man climbed up the side of an apartment building in the 300 block of North Federal Highway and went inside the woman’s unit through a sliding door on her balcony, the Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Monday. The attacker first tried to get into a different apartment before he entered the 85-year-old woman’s, tied her up and sexually assaulted her twice at knifepoint, BSO said.
“I never forgot this case because of the brutality of the crime — to scale the exterior of the building, to enter an 85-year-old-woman’s bedroom in the middle of the night, to assault her, to tie her up, to beat her — is not something that you forget,” Gianino told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Monday.
The suspect scoured the woman’s apartment and stole $25 from her purse, then assaulted her again before leaving, Gianino said in the video shared Monday announcing Rollison’s arrest.
Within days of the attack, police released a sketch of the suspect based on the woman’s description of the man she saw in her third-floor unit, the Fort Lauderdale News reported on July 23, 1987.
At the time of the attack, Deerfield Beach had its own police department. When the city contracted with BSO in 1990, the agency took over the investigation. Evidence collected, including a sexual assault kit, remained in BSO’s custody.
One of the detectives who originally investigated the attack, Gianino told the Sun Sentinel he never stopped thinking about where the investigation ended up.
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With advancements in DNA testing technology, Gianino and BSO Crime Lab analysts revisited the investigation earlier this year.
New testing was done with the sexual assault kit, leading to a match with Rollison, who has a criminal history in Florida, California and Illinois and was a suspect early in the investigation, Gianino said.
Rollison’s criminal history in Florida dates to the early 1980s and includes past convictions of arson, grand theft and burglary, among others, Gianino said.
While he waited to be placed in long-term housing after his prison sentence on a 1982 arson charge, a woman who ran his release program allowed Rollison to live with her, Gianino said, which was within a short walk or bike ride away from the victim’s apartment building.
Within 10 days of the attack against the 85-year-old woman, another alleged sexual assault of a woman led authorities to Rollison. A man broke into a bridgetender’s office and allegedly sexually assaulted a woman about a mile away from the apartments on North Federal Highway, the detective said.
Rollison was seen fleeing from the scene on a bicycle, stopped and arrested, Gianino said. He was charged with sexual assault and burglary and ultimately acquitted of the sexual assault charge at trial.
The bridgetender’s alleged assault “all fit in line” with the earlier attack, and Rollison “was immediately looked at as a possible suspect,” Gianino said. Detectives hoped to present charges in the attack of the 85-year-old woman, he said, but DNA testing technology at the time was limited and she could not identify the suspect. She died years after the attack.
Once the new testing showed a match to Rollison, he was serving a nine-year sentence in a California prison on charges of assault on a firefighter, resisting with violence and felony fleeing and eluding stemming from an arrest in 2023, Gianino said. He has not yet served the full prison term in California and will later return there.
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