Attack in Central Park one of many
By the time he was 17, Matias Reyes had developed a stalkand-surprise system of sexual predation that he used in a series of assaults on women.
He would pounce on isolated victims in Central Park. He would follow others into unlocked buildings on the Upper East Side, then finesse his way into their flats.
His MO included a richly depraved detail: Fearing their ability to pick him out of a lineup, he offered several victims a choice: your eyesight or your life.
At least twice, Reyes sliced ritualized knife cuts around the eyes of victims.
His horrific spree ended 30 years ago on Aug. 5, 1989, when he was outfoxed by a determined final victim, a 24year-old woman named Meg who lived alone at E. 91st St. and Lexington Ave.
She made the mistake of opening her door to Reyes, posing as the building superintendent’s son. But Meg managed to stay outwardly calm throughout the sexual assault and threats of murder.
She forced herself to chat amicably with her attacker, which put him at ease just enough to allow her a moment to unlock the door and dash down two flights to the lobby, clutching a towel. Reyes chased her but was throttled by the super and another tenant, who pinned him down for police.
He confessed during a sixhour sit-down with Mike Sheehan, the late Manhattan homicide detective who used street smarts and empathy to prompt criminals to reveal their unspeakable acts.
“The detective broke me down,” Matias later said. ”You get me going and I just start talking.”
And Sheehan got him going.
In addition to the assault on Meg, he admitted to the attempted rapes of a woman praying in a Fifth Ave. church in September 1988 and of another practicing tai chi in Central Park in April 1989; the rapes and eye-slashing of women in apartments on E. 116th St. in June 1989 and E. 95th a month later; and another foiled attack that July in a Lexington Ave. building.
He also confessed to the rape and stabbing murder of Lourdes Gonzalez, a pregnant mother, on E. 97th St. in June 1989 as three her young children huddled nearby.
Sheehan liked to describe Reyes as one of his “top five lunatics” in two decades on the murder beat. Mental health pros deemed him a psychopath — remorseless, egotistical and lacking the sort of empathy that Sheehan used to draw him out.
Born in Puerto Rico in 1971, Reyes split time between the island with his father and New York with his mother. He was a chronic runaway and school truant. Estranged from his family, he returned to the city for the last time in the spring of ’88.
He worked at a bodega on Third Ave. uptown, flopped with friends at the nearby Washington Houses, and began making sneaking forays to scratch his violent itch.
He pleaded guilty to his attacks and was sent to prison for 33 years to life, but that crime closure didn’t get much attention.
More than 1,900 people were murdered here in 1989, an average of five every day, as crack madness rose in a crescendo. Police, prosecutors and the press made tough— and often flawed — decisions about which cases mattered.
And of the 5,242 rapes reported that year in New York, one case cast a very long shadow: the April 19 Central Park attack on jogger Trisha Meili, 28.
In 2002, 13 years after his guilty plea, Reyes stepped into that spotlight.
He had kept a secret during his tell-all with Detective Sheehan: That he — not the five young men convicted in the case — had attacked Meili.
Reyes said he decided to do the right thing after a chance meeting inside Auburn prison with Korey Wise, one of the Central Park Five. Some say he was looking for attention, which he certainly got — including earlier this year in the Netflix mini-series about the case, “When They See Us.”
Reyes gave a detailed account of the crime that mirrored the facts. Most importantly, his DNA matched semen evidence. The teenagers’ did not.
The convictions were quickly set aside, and a long, expensive civil lawsuit to force the justice bureaucracy to admit its mistakes began.
Reyes, as a key witness for the former defendants, was perplexed by the city’s inability to admit the gigantic screw-up.
“I think that it’s incredible that everybody that was involved in this case knows the damage and the destruction that was done here, especially by my part to the woman that I hurt,” Reyes said in an angry exchange with the city’s attorneys during a 2010 deposition. “I thought that coming forward I would find more people that…would admit that we made an error in this whole situation…It’s a shame that they can’t admit their fault.”
After more than a decade of relentless lawyering, the city paid $41 million and the state $3.9 million to the five — Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana Jr.
Now 48, Reyes bunks at Shawangunk prison in Walkill. He escaped prosecution for the Meili attack by a now-defunct five-year statute of limitation for forcible rape.
He will be eligible to apply for parole in three years, but his admitted culpability in the infamous case is likely to obstruct his chances for freedom anytime soon.