The New Jersey lawyer charged in a Boston rape spree from 15 years ago was tracked down through DNA evidence left behind on a drinking glass, prosecutors revealed Monday – as his stone-faced fiancée clutched rosary beads at his arraignment.
Matthew Nilo, 35, pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated rape, kidnapping, assault with attempt to rape and indecent assault and battery in Suffolk Superior Court on Monday.
During the hearing, Nilo’s new fiancée Laura Griffin held rosary beads with a cross attached and stared blankly ahead.
She declined to comment to the Boston Globe before leaving, the newspaper reported.
Since-deleted social media posts indicated that Nilo, a Boston native, proposed to Griffin just weeks before he was arrested at his Weehawken home for the alleged attacks on four women in the city’s Terminal Street area between August 2007 and December 2008.
The lawyer’s arrest came after investigators in Boston used genetic genealogy — which combines DNA technology with historical record searches to find new suspects in cold cases — to link him to the unsolved assaults.
Prosecutors allege that when he was in college, Nilo drove three women to a remote, industrial part of Boston after offering them rides home. In all of the instances, he would allegedly tell them he had a weapon before he assaulted them.
Prosecutors said that in one instance, Nilo had a gun, and in another he flashed a knife in front of his victim, NBC Boston reported.
The women willingly accepted rides from Nilo, who was about 19 or 20 at the time, though at least one believed he was a taxi or rideshare driver, prosecutors said.
In a fourth case, Nilo allegedly tackled a woman who was jogging on Terminal Street in Charlestown, and sexually assaulted her with his hand. The woman was eventually able to fight Nilo off, even as he repeatedly screamed “I have a gun.”
The alleged victims ranged in age from 23 to 44 at the time of the assaults.
Now over 15 years later, advances in genetic genealogy and DNA made solving the cases possible, investigators said.
Last year police “revisited the investigation” in the four assaults using “forensic investigative genetic genealogy” that resulted in Nilo becoming a person of interest, according to a statement prosecutors filed in court.
Nilo was placed under surveillance in the New York Metropolitan area and FBI agents obtained utensils and drinking glasses that he used during a corporate event, a court filing said.
“From one of the glasses, the Boston Police Crime Lab obtained a male DNA profile, which was found to match the suspect profile from the three Terminal Street rapes,” prosecutors said.
In the fourth attack, a glove the victim used to poke her assailant’s eye was tested for DNA and investigators “determined that this profile was 314 times more likely to belong to Matthew Nilo than to any other male in the population,” prosecutors said.
Nilo worked as a cyber claims lawyer with the Cowbell insurance firm at the time of his arrest, but his employment was suspended pending the ongoing rape investigation.
Nilo pleaded not guilty to the charges Monday and was order held on $500,000 bail. If he posts bail, he must submit to GPS monitoring, stay away from the women he is accused of assaulting and keep at least 1,000 feet away from Terminal Street in Charlestown, where the alleged assaults occurred.
A trial date has been set for June 2024.
