Suspect on trial in 1977 Boca rape
Her husband was out working and her two young sons were in bed. She was watching TV in her Boca Raton duplex when suddenly a tall stranger with a “really horrible wig” and glasses approached her with a gun and ordered her to the bedroom.
It happened at 8:30 p.m. on the last day of February 1977. But it wasn’t until Tuesday that a jury heard the 26-year-old victim’s account of the rape.
“I was scared to death; I was shaking,” the woman, now 67, testified, as the first witness in the trial of her alleged assailant, career criminal John Arthur MacLean, 71.
Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, the woman, who has a law degree, struggled to recall details from the rape 41 years ago. “I tried to forget, and now tried to remember,” she said, adding she thinks the rapist told her not to scream and promised not to hurt her if she cooperated.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel is not identifying the woman due to the circumstances of the case.
It wasn’t until 2012 that Boca Raton police — using DNA evidence — charged MacLean with two counts of armed sexual battery, in the attack on the young mother, as well as a 15-year-old babysitter in October 1976.
MacLean’s lawyers have attacked the DNA evidence as tainted and unreliable, but less than two months ago a different jury needed only 45 minutes to convict MacLean in the babysitter case.
While MacLean hasn’t been sentenced yet for that crime yet, the focus turned to the second charge and the cold case detective work that led to it.
The six jurors alternate selected and one Tuesday will not be told about the babysitter rape, to avoid potential bias toward MacLean.
Nor will the jurors learn about MacLean’s colorful past — he’s a convicted serial burglar from South Florida who used to call himself the “Superthief.”
A Massachusetts native with a reportedly high IQ, MacLean has bragged about using his locksmith expertise to pull off some 2,000 burglaries along the East Coast in the 1970s, claiming to have pocketed more than $100 million.
He was convicted of stealing $1 million in jewelry from the Fort Lauderdale mansion of a Johnson & Johnson heiress in 1979. For that and other burglaries, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Police then also considered him a suspect in numerous sexual battery cases, but he wasn’t prosecuted.
But in 2005 and again in 2007, MacLean was forced to provide samples of his DNA, or genetic fingerprint, after he finished a prison sentence for early 1990s Arizona convictions for attempted sexual exploitation of a minor and burglary.