AUSTIN, TX — A Longview man will spend the rest of his life in prison after DNA evidence connected him to two child sexual assaults committed nearly 40 years ago – one in East Texas and the other in Arizona.
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, David Roy Mundt, 62, was sentenced last week by a Rusk County grand jury to two consecutive life terms following his conviction in the 1992 abduction and assault of a 7-year-old girl in Rusk County. Investigators also linked him to a similar 1986 case in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Texas case had gone cold for decades. On October 28, 1992, a man broke into a home, dragged a young girl from her bed, and assaulted her in the backyard. Despite collecting DNA at the time, authorities were never able to identify a suspect, and the case remained unsolved.
That changed in late 2022 when the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Lab found a possible DNA match between the 1992 Texas assault and the 1986 Phoenix case. The Texas Rangers and Phoenix Police began working together, sending evidence from the older case for advanced testing and genealogical analysis.
In June 2024, forensic experts narrowed the DNA down to two brothers. One was ruled out through the national DNA database, but the second, David Roy Mundt, was not in the system. Using grant funds from the Department of Justice’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI), investigators collected and tested Mundt’s DNA and confirmed the match.
He was arrested at his Longview home on August 7, 2024, by the Texas Rangers, Texas Highway Patrol, and Longview police.
A Rusk Co. grand jury indicted Mundt on two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child in the 1992 Texas case, and on April 25, 2025, he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison.
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