Police: Suspect in rapes posed as photographer, lured women
CLEVELAND — The man had a simple pitch: “Have you done any modeling?”
It was a line prosecutors say he used versions of at least twice while posing as a department store photographer to approach pretty young women and lure them on board a boat called Happie Tymes II to rape them.
It took tests of the women’s rape kits and sleuthing by county investigators, who sifted through boat ownership records more than a decade later, to build a case that led to the indictment last month of Walter Thornton, a former maintenance man for the city of Cleveland Heights.
Thornton, 64, pleaded not guilty to charges in both cases and is currently out on bond.
When confronted in April, investigators showed Thornton photos of the girls. He said they were pretty but that he’d never seen them.
“I never forget a face,” said Thornton, who is now wheelchair bound, a complication from meningitis a decade ago.
Attorney Mark Stefan, who represents Thornton, said he had no comment on the case and asked a reporter not to communicate with his client.
The rapes Thornton is accused of were reported several years apart: in 2004 and 2007.
County prosecutors say they were strikingly similar.
So similar that Assistant County Prosecutor Oscar Albores and Anthony Kratsas, an investigator with the county’s Sexual Assault Kit Task Force, suspect there are more victims. They shared details of the cases with The Plain Dealer so that others, who were possibly too scared or embarrassed to report being raped on the boat, might come forward.
Thornton had access to the 1975 Concorde Sedan motor boat, which was docked at the East 55th Street Marina, for more than a decade, investigators said.
The boat was owned by his friend and co-worker, who has since died. Thornton purchased it, but later abandoned the boat, and it was sold at auction, according to state records.
During the investigation, Kratsas tracked down the boat’s current owner, who revealed that after he purchased the boat he had to clear a cache of sex toys and sex tapes from the vessel.
In the two cases now charged, both victims were young and were approached by Thornton, who introduced himself as “Waldo.” He asked if they wanted to be models, and used that premise to invite them to the boat during afternoon hours to pose for photos, Kratsas said.
One of the victims, who reported she was raped in 2007, told Kratsas she was waiting at a bus stop on her way to work at a community theater when Thornton drove up in an old blue sedan.
The woman, then 19, said she was hesitant, but went to the boat where Thornton quickly snapped a few digital photos and then drove her to work.
A few days later, they again met at the bus stop and the woman went to the boat for what Thornton said was a business meeting. Once there, he tried to get her into a small bedroom on board. When she refused, he overpowered her and raped her, she said.
A co-worker later noticed something was wrong with her demeanor and took her to the emergency room, records show.
Cleveland police interviewed the woman at the time and submitted her rape kit to a lab. A detective traced “Waldo’s” phone number and based on that showed her a lineup with a photo of a suspect. But she didn’t recognize her rapist’s face among the photos.
The case was closed a few months later and the woman signed a “no prosecution” form.
During a recent interview, the woman told investigators that at the time she was leaving town to join the military and didn’t want the rape investigation, which had hit a wall, to interfere.
But she wasn’t the only woman the man handed his card to at the bus stop, Kratsas said.
The woman told investigators that after she reported her rape, she returned to the bus stop at East 125th and Arlington Avenue and another young woman showed up to tell the others that “Waldo” was “bad news.” “Something happened to that girl that made her go back to the bus stop and warn the other girls,” Kratsas said.
Making connections
Albores, the prosecutor, said in 2015 that the rape kit collected in 2007 was linked to another rape kit collected at MetroHealth Medical Center in 2004.
That kit was submitted for testing by Cleveland police in 2014 as part of a larger initiative to test more than 4,000 rape kits that the department had stored for decades.
The 2004 case involved a 23-year-old nursing student who went to the hospital for treatment but declined at the time to talk to police.
Investigators approached her after the rape kits matched. She shared with them that she had met the “photographer” at a Cleveland State University dorm party. He told her she could be a model and offered to take photos of her at his boat.
She went to the boat and after she used the boat’s bathroom, she told investigators, the man pushed her down on a bed inside the boat, held her down and raped her.
Though the two rape kits contained the same DNA, indicating a common suspect, Thornton’s DNA was not in CODIS, a database that contains profiles from arrests, convictions and crime scenes.
Follow-up
In 2002, Thornton had been indicted on felony charges after a woman accused him of picking her up from a bus stop in a city truck and groping her in a park. The charges were later dismissed after defense attorneys asked for evaluations of the victim’s mental competency. But Thornton resigned from his city job.
His DNA wasn’t collected at the time, as the law didn’t yet require it.
It was the investigative follow-up, the phone number from the original business card, and the records and interviews about the boat’s ownership that led investigators to Thornton, whose DNA was later obtained through a swab of his cheek