A Fort Cavazos sergeant was convicted on April 22, 2025, of attempted murder for strangling a woman with a lamp cord in her barracks room and for raping her and another woman, among dozens of other crimes that he committed against fellow soldiers. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
FORT CAVAZOS, Texas — A Fort Cavazos sergeant was convicted Tuesday of attempted murder for strangling a woman with a lamp cord in her barracks room and for raping her and another woman, among dozens of other crimes that he committed against fellow soldiers.
Sgt. Greville Clarke, 32, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for his crime spree that spanned more than a year at the central Texas Army base. Military Judge Col. Maureen Kohn will hear evidence this week to determine a sentence for Clarke.
He was convicted of other charges, including assault with the intent to commit rape, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, aggravated sexual contact, aggravated assault, assault with intent to commit kidnapping, assault consummated by battery, indecent visual recording and obstruction of justice.
The court-martial is expected to conclude this week.
From March 2021 until October 2022, Clarke broke into the rooms of five women living in the barracks at Fort Cavazos. In four of the attacks, he held the women in their rooms using a knife or a gun. He tied up three of the women and stole from them. He sexually assaulted the women and raped two of them.
Sgt. Greville Clarke enters the Lawrence H. Williams Judicial Center at Fort Cavazos, Texas, on Dec. 10, 2024, for a hearing. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
In one attack, he held a woman for three to four hours before he strangled her with the cord of her Army-issued lamp. He only stopped because he thought she was dead, according to evidence presented in court.
The woman remained unconscious for more than a day, only waking twice to vomit. Doctors later determined she had experienced seizures because of the loss of oxygen, Maj. Allyson Montgomery, the Army prosecutor for the case, said Monday during her closing argument.
“She barely made it out alive,” the attorney said.
Stars and Stripes does not name sexual assault victims, unless given permission to do so.
Montgomery spent nearly four hours Monday describing in detail how Clarke committed his crimes — often using the soldier’s own words when he confessed to an investigator with the Army Criminal Investigation Division on the October 2022 day that he was caught.
In each of the attacks, Clarke learned, adapted and found ways to better shield his identity, Montgomery said.
In Clarke’s first attack on March 16, 2021, he broke into a woman’s room using the window and woke her, showing her a pre-typed message on his cellphone: “You’re being robbed. Don’t make a sound.”
She saw his knife as he ordered her to the ground to be tied up, Montgomery said. However, the woman and her girlfriend had both fallen asleep during a video chat, and the girlfriend woke up to the noise of the attack and began to ask questions. This scared Clarke away.
“He admitted that she was on Facetime with a woman who said things to him that made him panic,” Montgomery said.
In the next attack roughly one year later, Clarke entered the room with a key that he had from living in that barracks building. He couldn’t successfully tie up the woman, but he threatened her with the knife, blindfolded her, forced her to undress and then ordered her to tell him where to find specific lingerie and high heels in her room. She told the court that he seemed to know what he was looking for.
At one point, he held her by the throat and rubbed his clothed body against her naked one, Montgomery said. Then he told the woman that they had the entire weekend together before he would kill her.
She “had a physical reaction to being so repulsed by him” and began to have a panic attack, Montgomery said. Clarke fled, promising to return.
In his third break-in on July 15, 2022, Clarke banged on the woman’s barracks room door at about 2 a.m. with a gun tucked into his uniform pants. The young private answered because she saw a sergeant at her door in uniform. But her roommate spoke up and frightened him away, Montgomery said.
That same night, he banged on the door to another room, where he held a woman captive at gunpoint for hours. He tied her up, raped her, took explicit photos and forced her into the shower.
She began to panic and get loud, prosecutors said. In Clarke’s own words, he “freaks out” on her, first trying to pour water on her blindfolded face to calm her down. It escalated her volume as she began to choke. He then took the lamp cord and wrapped it twice around her neck attempting to strangle her.
He was acquitted of two charges — a second attempted premeditated murder count and a charge of attempted fraudulent use of an access device. Both related to his fifth and final attack in October 2022. He used the woman’s cellphone to try and move $14,000 from her bank accounts to his.
He hid in the woman’s shower while she was in the barracks laundry room. After hours, she escaped while he was emptying a large plastic bin that he said he planned to use to move her to another location and kill her. As she ran from him naked and screaming, he pointed his pistol at her but never fired a shot.
He was caught that day because he dropped one of his cellphones as soldiers chased him from the building. While in police custody, he still had access to his second cellphone and created a cartoon version of himself smiling behind a shower curtain.
Clarke, who has been in pretrial confinement at Bell County Jail since he was arrested Oct. 2, 2022, has been absent from court since the trial began April 7. He waived his right to be present and the judge accepted.
Maj. Kimberly Hurt, an attorney for Clarke, successfully argued Clarke should not be convicted of premeditated murder in this attack because he did not have a plan to kill this woman, only threats.
“While in those rooms, he’s often confused about what he intends to do,” she said Monday in her closing argument.
