TRIAL BEGINS FOR MAN ACCUSED OF 1976 RAPE
The trial of a now-elderly man charged with sexually assaulting a mother of two young children 41 years ago in Boca Raton began Tuesday with the woman testifying that she was raped while her kids slept nearby.
John MacLean, a 71-yearold registered sex offender who was convicted in April of raping a teenage baby-sitter in Boca Raton in 1976, is facing a charge of armed sexual assault. He faces life in prison.
MacLean is accused of breaking into a Boca Raton duplex on Feb. 28, 1977 and raping the 26-year-old woman while holding a gun to her head.
The Palm Beach Post is not naming the woman because of the crime’s nature.
The accuser, a former immigration attorney in Palm Beach County now in her late 60s, said she’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and entered the courtroom Tuesday with the aid of a walker. She spoke of the events leading up to the assault and the crime itself in a quiet tone and little emotion in her voice.
With her husband off to work and her 6- and 2-yearold sons in bed, the woman said she was laying down watching a TV show when a man broke in and forced her into a bedroom. Just before the rape took place, her 6-year-old woke up and asked his mother what was going on.
Repeatedly pleading with the man not to hurt her children, the woman said she was pushed onto a bed and raped.
“I was scared to death and I was shaking,” the woman said, adding that her assailant wore a “horrible wig” and left the home following the assault by asking, “Are you OK?”
The case hangs on a vaginal swab that was used during a medical examination of the victim. Much of the evidence gathered has been lost or destroyed in the ensuing four decades.
In 2012, Boca Raton police used DNA to tie MacLean to the rapes of the babysitter and, prosecutors believe, the young mother.
“He didn’t realize that what he left behind helped to solve this case years and years later and that was his DNA,” prosecutor Marci Rex said.
But Assistant Public Defender Stephen Arbuzow, who is representing MacLean, told the seven-member jury that the forensic evidence being used against his client is unreliable because it’s been contaminated. Other evidence, including fingerprints, were lost long ago.
That’s evidence, Arbuzow argued, which “would prove that Mr. John MacLean is an innocent man.”
While serving time in a Florida prison for a 1979 burglary conviction, MacLean wrote a 1983 book titled “Secrets of a Superthief,” where he boasted of committing thousands of breakins and walking away with millions of dollars.
After his release from a Florida prison in April 1987, MacLean moved to Arizona, where he was arrested for armed burglary and sexual exploitation of a minor, and several other crimes.
MacLean was charged in 1981 with rapes in Miami and Boca Raton, but the cases were later dismissed.
MacLean is awaiting sentencing for raping the teenage babysitter in 1976. That case hinged on a small piece of the victim’s jeans that contained MacLean’s DNA.