PREDATOR FREED
Jury acquits child rapist Wayne Chapman in lewdness case
• Victim: ‘Disgusting’
• Murphy: System broken
Serial child rapist Wayne Chapman is a free man after a jury found him not guilty of lewdness Friday, putting the Level 3 sex offender who has claimed to have raped as many as 100 boys back on the street after four decades behind bars.
Chapman, 71, got up out of his wheelchair and climbed into the front seat of a Toyota Prius outside Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn Friday to be taken away to an undisclosed location.
“He’s completely free,” his lawyer, Eric Tennen, told the Herald. “He’s old, he’s frail and he needs to be cared for. But for his own safety, we’re not saying where he’s going.”
Chapman’s listing as a Level 3 sex offender was changed Friday from “incarcerated” to living “on the street” in Boston.
“I do know his history, and people are going to worry. I agree he’s considered a monster,” Tennen said soon after the verdict. “I agree he’s caused a lot of harm … but at some point men like him have served their time — no matter how horrible the things you have done.
“He’ll completely abide by the law,” Tennen said, adding he’s “worried” someone may “go after” Chapman for his past crimes.
Chapman has long been a suspect in the unsolved disappearance of 10-year-old Andy Puglisi of Lawrence in the summer of 1976. In the 1970s, at the height of his attacks on “50-100” boys, Chapman said: “I need help because I cannot help myself from doing these things.”
But two state-appointed examiners said Chapman, who had been held on a civil commitment since he completed his sentence in 2004 for raping two Lawrence boys, cleared him for release last year. They said he was too old and infirm to commit
any more sexual assaults.
The state’s highest court ruled in May that Chapman, who had been jailed since September 1977, could not be held indefinitely.
Chapman was then accused of allegedly exposing himself in front of nurses on June 3, 2018, at MCI-Shirley state prison and reportedly masturbating the following day. He faced up to three more years in jail, but the jury Friday cleared him. He was being held on $25,000 bail.
Around midafternoon Friday, the jury sent a note to the judge that they were at an impasse over one charge but had reached a verdict on the other. Chapman, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, sat calmly in a wheelchair beside his lawyer as the judge sent the jury back to continue deliberations.
“I do not find there has been due and thorough deliberations,” Associate Justice Maureen Hogan said in court, noting that there had been 11 hours of testimony and about four hours of video evidence to weigh. The case did not go to the jury until late Thursday afternoon.
About a half-hour later, the two not-guilty findings were announced and the jury was sent home. The foreman declined to comment as he left the court. The jury deliberated for just under seven hours following the weeklong trial.
Wendy Murphy, a lawyer for some of Chapman’s victims, said she had been notified Thursday that Chapman’s attorneys had gone to Suffolk Superior Court to get an order to immediately free him from any civil commitment, in the absence of any criminal conviction.
Tennen, who has represented Chapman for a long time, said all the logistics were worked out ahead of time for a man who didn’t “have a penny in his pocket” or identification. “We figured it all out ourselves,” Tennen added. “It’s not easy at 4 o’clock on a Friday … with no help from the DOC.”
A spokesman for the state Department of Correction confirmed Chapman was free to go once the jury ruled.