DNA testing leads to arrest in decades-old Houston sexual assault cases
DNA testing linked Phillip Cerf, 62, to four Houston sexual assault cases, and police said more victims may still be out there.
Houston police said advances in DNA testing helped lead to the arrest of Phillip Cerf, 62, who now faces four counts of aggravated sexual assault tied to alleged crimes investigators said stretched from 1996 to 2016. The case shows how evidence collected years ago can be revived when forensic methods improve and DNA databases expand.
Police said Cerf allegedly offered rides to each of four victims in Houston before taking them to locations where he physically and sexually assaulted them. The victims underwent forensic sexual assault examinations, and the evidence was preserved in the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, where investigators later used DNA database work to identify Cerf as a suspect.
Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz said the case underscored why cold cases do not disappear with time and credited victims for coming forward. Investigators said more victims may exist, and they urged anyone with information to contact the HPD Special Victims Division at 713-308-1180. Detectives also followed up after a woman who saw Cerf’s booking photo contacted them about a possible 1988 assault.
The arrest comes as Harris County continues to lean on older evidence in a large, high-volume forensic system. The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences said 22,152 cases were submitted to the crime lab in 2025 by 86 agencies, a workload that makes cold-case review and evidence preservation especially important. The Texas Department of Public Safety’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative was created to help process older untested sexual assault evidence and move dormant cases back into the investigative pipeline.
Houston has seen DNA change the outcome of past sexual assault investigations before, and the Cerf case adds to that history with an arrest instead of an exoneration. Prosecutors will still have to prove the charges in court, but the forensic breakthrough has already reopened cases that investigators once would have had little hope of solving. For survivors who waited years for a name, the arrest shows that preserved evidence can still produce answers long after the original attacks.
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