An Anchorage grand jury has indicted 52-year-old Lawrence Andrew Lekanoff on two counts of sexual abuse of a minor — a five-year-old child in an Anchorage park in 1994.
Lekanoff, whose address one time showed him as homeless and living in the woods in Muldoon, has a history of other charges. He was arrested in the Lower 48 on Feb. 27, and faces extradition to Alaska.
In 2018, Lekanoff was arrested in Thurston County, Washington, where he was a transient who was required to register as a sex offender due to a 1996 conviction in Anchorage on one count of first-degree sexual abuse of a minor.
For that 1996 conviction, he had received a 12-year sentence with four years suspended. When he was 24, he was accused of sexually assaulting two girls, ages 4 and 6. He’s also been registered as a sex offender in Montana and Colorado.
The Anchorage Police Department had investigated this 1994 case, but efforts to identify a suspect were unsuccessful at the time and the case went cold. The sexual assault kit collected in the case was tested in 2020 as part of the Capital Project, a State initiative to analyze untested sexual assault kits collected by 47 police departments across the state.
One of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s priorities was to get all the rape kits that had been on the shelf processed. Thousands of untested sexual assault examination kits from across Alaska were processed by the end of 2021. A new law requires rape kits to be tested within one year to avoid backlogs and delays of justice.
DNA evidence linked Lekanoff to the 1994 sexual assault, bringing his known victims in Anchorage to three. The Anchorage Police Department reopened the investigation, and the Department of Law’s Office of Special Prosecutions presented the case to the grand jury.
If convicted, Lekanoff faces a sentence of up to 30 years imprisonment.
