URBANA — A Tennessee truck driver might end up spending the rest of his life in prison after a Champaign County jury found him guilty Thursday of rape at the conclusion of a four-day trial.
Jurors deliberated for approximately an hour and a half Thursday before convicting James R. Hill, 55, of Medon, Tenn., on four counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault with a firearm, in the April 19, 2023, incident.
On April 20, another man driving through Iroquois County called police after finding a naked woman bound in handcuffs walking down the middle of a highway near Buckley.
That woman testified Monday at the Champaign County Courthouse that she had used an online service to arrange a meeting with a truck driver she identified as Hill in a parking lot in west Champaign to exchange oral sex for $80 that Wednesday.
She testified that after she got into Hill’s truck, he threw her phone out the window, put a gun to her head and told her he was going to abduct her for a couple of days, then kill her.
The victim said Hill handcuffed her, put duct tape over her mouth and raped her in the vagin* and anus.
The charges involve only the local woman, but prosectuors called three other women to the stand Tuesday who recounted being abused and raped by a truck driver in 2017, 2019 and 2021. Two identified the driver as Hill, and prosecutors said DNA evidence tied him to the third.
“This case is about a man obsessed, not just with sex, but with inflicting pain and humiliation,” Assistant State’s Attorney Joel Fletcher said during closing arguments. “A man who targeted a woman on the fringes of society because he knew from experience that she would be easy prey.”
Fletcher broke down each charge into three parts: Hill was armed with a firearm, sexually penetrated the victim in four ways and he did so without their consent, by force or threat of force.
The prosecutor noted a state trooper found a loaded black and silver handgun in a backpack about 2 feet away from Hill’s bed when he was pulled over April 20. The gun fit the description of the one the victim in the Champaign incident saw, and it was located exactly where she said it would be.
Hill needed merely to have access to the firearm in order to be considered armed, Fletcher said.
In recorded interviews with detectives last spring, Hill admitted he arranged to meet a sex worker on April 19 in Champaign, penetrated her with his penis and fingers, and pushed her naked and handcuffed out of his truck the next morning but maintained that the sex was consensual.
Fletcher emphasized that the victim was found with a black eye that Hill couldn’t explain, reported that Hill choked her and told her he had murdered a woman before, that Hill was physically larger than her, and that she was handcuffed for many hours in a confined space.
The victim could not have freely given consent under those circ*mstances, and it didn’t make sense that a sex worker would consent to so many acts — as Hill said she did for $150 — when her online ad only mentioned oral sex, the prosecutor said.
Fletcher posited that Hill preyed on drug addicts and sex workers because their accounts are less likely to be believed by authorities.
Though the victim initially lied to police about being a sex worker, Fletcher argued she is credible as it is logical she didn’t want to get in trouble, and because she told police that Hill stole her white Calvin Klein underwear and used a drill to try to open the handcuffs. Officers later found a pair of white Calvin Klein panties, a drill and duct tape when they searched Hill’s truck.
Fletcher argued that Hill’s version shouldn’t be trusted because he denied stealing the underwear to police, and his argument that he threw the victim’s phone out his window because of the threat of being tracked by her boyfriend was illogical because he remained parked in the same spot.
Regarding differences between the local victim’s account and the abuse the three other women testified to — only the local victim saw Hill with a gun, for example, and one woman said she wasn’t tied up — Fletcher said “you can pick apart the trees; you cannot pick apart the forest.”
Hill’s attorney, Chief Public Defender Elisabeth Pollock, acknowledged that her client patronized sex workers, harbored “fantasies which many of you may find abhorrent, offensive and inappropriate,” and engaged in those sexual behaviors with people, which was a “huge mistake.”
But Pollock argued that the story the victim provided about the events of April 19-20 was filled with issues and investigators neglected to pursue evidence that could have confirmed competing narratives.
Police didn’t digitally analyze records from Hill’s cellphone or the victim’s two cellphones, one of which officers later found in the grass. Doing so could have revealed the two’s negotiations over whether they would only exchange $80 for oral sex or $150 for more, Pollock argued.
Investigators also failed to test DNA from the barrel of Hill’s gun, which could have confirmed whether he put it to the victim’s head as she testified. And while the victim described being brutally raped, a hospital exam did not record signs of bruising or swelling near her genitalia, Pollock said.
Pollock argued it was possible that the sexual contact or parts of it were consensual until the point Hill could not remove the handcuffs, and the encounter did not become unlawful until victim sobered up from the crack cocaine Hill said she had smoked.
Pollock also asked the jury not to place too much weight on the three other women’s stories as their accounts changed in multiple ways from when they first reported to police, with some initially leaving out significant allegations, like being gagged or forced to perform oral sex on Hill.
Convicted of all four enhanced Class X felony counts, Hill now faces 84 to 90 years in prison when he is sentenced on Sept. 6.
