A convicted sex offender on supervised release is accused of raping a woman last fall in Anoka and then asking his fellow jail inmates to kill her with fentanyl-laced coffee.

Kelly Eugene Jenkins, 33, of Anoka, told an inmate at the Anoka County jail he would pay him $3,000 to lure his accuser to a coffee shop and put the powerful synthetic opioid in her drink, according to a Feb. 5 criminal complaint charging Jenkins with two counts of witness tampering and one count of attempted witness tampering.

Kelly Eugene Jenkins (Courtesy of the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office)

Jenkins was on intensive supervised release after serving nearly nine years in prison for raping a 16-year-old girl in Oak Grove in August 2013.

Less than five months into his supervised release, Jenkins was jailed and charged with first-degree and third-degree criminal sexual conduct for allegedly raping a 35-year-old woman in her Anoka apartment.

According to the criminal complaint, she told police Jenkins asked to come over on Oct. 16 and that she said it was a bad idea because he was on intensive supervised release. He said he wasn’t worried because he had a “burner phone” and couldn’t be tracked. She tried to dissuade him, but he showed up 15 minutes later.

While they were watching a movie, Jenkins began touching and kissing her. She told him they were not going to be intimate, but he forced himself on top of her and raped her despite her repeatedly telling him to stop, the complaint says.

Jenkins was arrested and told police the sex was consensual. He pleaded not guilty and has been held at the Anoka County jail ahead of a trial scheduled to begin April 29.

Spiked coffee scheme

Sheriff’s detectives began monitoring his jail phone calls in late October. In one, Jenkins told his ex-girlfriend the woman’s name and said “she needs to recant her statements,” according to last week’s complaint. In another, he told her the woman “needs to understand the severity of this and it’s not a (expletive) game … you understand where I’m coming from?”

Detectives were given screenshots of Facebook messages between the woman and Jenkins’ ex-girlfriend that showed her “attempts to impress upon the victim the severity of the accusations the victim made,” the complaint says.

Detectives were then told that Jenkins was asking inmates at the jail to kill the woman for money.

An inmate said Jenkins asked him “how he could get this girl to disappear before trial” and believed the inmate would be released in time to carry that out, the complaint says. Jenkins told him the woman’s name and age, and described where she lived and the color of the building. He described the vehicle she drove.

Jenkins then concocted a plot by which the woman would be lured into a coffee shop and drink coffee laced with fentanyl, the charges allege. He told the inmate she “likes to go to coffee.”

Jenkins admitted to the inmate that he violated his supervised release to go to the woman’s apartment and said that if she disappeared he would do much less prison time, the complaint says.

Jenkins is due back in court April 5 for a pretrial hearing on the sexual assault case.

A public defender who is representing Jenkins on both cases did not return a call for comment Tuesday.

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