YOUNGSTOWN — A Mahoning County grand jury has issued a superseding indictment against Jack Sheetz, 57, formerly of Canfield, in a cold-case rape and kidnapping.

Sheetz was indicted in October on one count of rape and two counts of kidnapping in the Nov. 22, 2000, kidnapping and rape of a woman taken from an accounting firm on Broad Street in Canfield. The abduction took place at 6:20 a.m.

The superseding indictment released Thursday adds several specifications. Each of the three charges now has a notice of prior conviction specification, two specifications of Sheetz being a repeat violent offender and a specification of Sheetz being a sexually violent predator. Both kidnapping charges also now contain a specification of “sexual motivation.”

In a news release, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost stated that adding the specifications will allow prosecutors to “detail the defendant’s criminal history at trial and could lead to a more severe penalty in the case of a guilty verdict.”

The Special Prosecutions Section of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office is prosecuting the case.

Sheetz is scheduled for a pretrial hearing today and is set for trial April 29.

According to Vindicator archives, the victim was walking into work from the parking lot of the accounting firm on North Broad Street in Canfield. She was accosted, dragged to a nearby wooded area and raped, according to Vindicator archives.

A special edition Mahoning Valley Scrappers baseball bat was used in the attack. Only about 1,000 of those particular bats were made, The Vindicator reported in November 2015 at the time that Canfield police detective Brian McGivern provided details on the cold-case investigation of the case.

McGivern had been working on the case since 2007. But in 2015, McGivern said new types of DNA analysis were available at the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation lab that could analyze touch DNA, for instance, from fingerprints.

By November 2015, Senate Bill 316 had gone into effect that that required Ohio law enforcement agencies to submit any remaining previously untested sexual assault kits associated with a past crime to a crime laboratory within one year.

The attorney general’s office, then under now-Gov. Mike DeWine, undertook testing rape kits associated with old cases in 2011, and SB 316 meant that all

departments in Ohio’s 88 counties would send in their kits, the story said, attributing the information to Dan Tierney, DeWine spokesman.

Sheetz has been in the Mahoning County jail since Oct. 28, 2025, according to jail records.

Sheetz had just been released from the Ohio prison system in September 2025 at the time of his indictment in the Canfield case. He also was on Ohio Adult Parole Authority supervision at the time for his 2018 convictions in Trumbull County on charges of aggravated burglary, rape and aggravated robbery, according to Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction records.

Those 2018 convictions were for another cold-case prosecution involving the rape of a 75-year-old Howland woman in 1996. Trumbull County Common Pleas Judge W. Wyatt McKay sentenced Sheetz to nine years in prison in that case.

In that case, Sheetz was picked up by local authorities in Utica, New York, after a secret indictment was unsealed Sept. 15, 2016, in Trumbull County, according to Tribune Chronicle archives.

Sheetz was a neighbor of the victim, who was raped and robbed Dec. 17, 1996, at her Howland home. The woman has since died.

“The Howland Police Department did a wonderful job in digging into the DNA evidence in this case,” Trumbull County Assistant Prosecutor Chris Becker said at the time of Sheetz’s sentencing.

Becker also lauded the efforts of Utica police who got a DNA swab from the defendant. Howland detectives Jeff Edmondson and Tony Villanueva then resubmitted the evidence from the scene of the crime and the DNA matched that of Sheetz.