Man pleads guilty to Esplanade rapes
Previously convicted in Uber attack
The Esplanade rapist who terrorized women in and around the Charles River park for nearly a decade has pleaded guilty to multiple rapes after his DNA was linked to another rape he committed as an Uber driver.
Alejandro Done, 49, pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated rape, one count of rape, one count of assault with intent to rape, two counts of kidnapping and one count of armed robbery, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.
He is already serving up to 15 years in prison for raping a woman in Cambridge or Somerville after picking her up in Boston when he was working as an Uber driver.
But his stalking and attacks on women near the Esplanade — an emerald jewel on the Boston side of the Charles River and home to the Fourth of July Pops extravaganza — gripped the city for years.
Police sketches and computer-assisted composite images were posted, warning of the rapist — especially as summer approached, when he would strike. Appeals were made for witnesses and the park was patrolled by undercover officers. He always attacked at night and brutally.
As his July trial was looming, he caved and pleaded guilty,
Conley said.
He admitted to attacks on three women in 2006, 2007 and 2010. The DA said a victim in a fourth assault returned to her native country shortly after the assault and was not expected to be available for trial.
Done faces sentencing July 18. “Our team of prosecutors and police detectives labored for more than a decade to reach this point,” Conley said. “The defendant’s admission of guilt is the direct result of countless hours spent in pursuit of a predator, first to identify him and then to build an ironclad case against him. The victims in this case, and all survivors of sexual assault, can take some satisfaction knowing that he’s finally been held accountable.”
It was his DNA sample from his 2015 arrest for the Uber rape that proved a match in the Esplanade case, the DA’s office said. His DNA had been uploaded to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, in the course of that investigation.
Done is now at MCI-Cedar Junction.
As Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan said in 2015 after Done’s rape conviction in the Uber case: “The defendant preyed upon a young woman who trusted that he was who he portrayed himself to be.”