An Indiana man was sentenced to 17 years in an Ohio prison after DNA linked him to the 2006 rape of a university student.

Lloyd Wendell Ailes, 59, pleaded guilty in May to multiple charges related to the rape and robbery of a 21-year-old student at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, according to NBC Cincinnati affiliate WLWT. On Thursday, a Butler County judge ruled that Ailes must serve the next 17 years behind bars, with just over 200 days credit for time served, as reported by Fox affiliate WXIX-TV.

“I’m sorry,” Ailes said at sentencing. “If I could take it back, I would. I can even tell the court. I mean, if there’s anything I could do to change it, I would.”

The victim, whose name was not released, was also present in the courtroom.

On Jan. 9, 2006, Ailes wore a mask and raped the student at an off-campus residence, according to Butler County’s Journal-News. The former construction worker — who’d been working in Oxford at the time of the attack — revealed his face to the victim, which allowed her to help authorities create a composite sketch of the suspect. Butler County prosecutor Mike Gmoser noted at the time of Ailes’ arrest that the sketch “was virtually the same as the face of this defendant at the time of the assault,” WLWT reported.

Ailes also stole $60 from the victim’s purse.

According to WLWT — which covered the story in 2006 — the victim was robbed at gunpoint before the masked man tied her up and sexually assaulted her at the North Campus Avenue address.

“Someone just got in our house,” a roommate told 911 dispatchers. “My housemate just got raped. Please, come. He has a gun and told her he’d kill her.”

A similar attack occurred two months later, this time in Fayette County, Indiana — less than 50 miles away — according to the Journal-News. Although investigators determined that DNA found at both crime scenes were a match, they came up empty-handed when submitting the samples into law enforcement databases at the time.

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Eventually, the investigation grew cold.

Prosecutors say that advances in genetic genealogy and the work of Parabon Nanolabs helped investigators link Ailes to the crime years later, according to WLWT.

“We were ultimately able, through thousands of hours of work and the analysis of many genetic details, we [were] able to determine, first, who the father of this defendant was,” said Gmoser.

But therein lay a problem, prosecutors said: Ailes’ biological father was unaware…