Man, 71, will do life for ’70s Boca rapes
One-time ‘Superthief’ attacked woman, 26, and 15-year-old girl.
WEST PALM BEACH — A Palm Beach County judge Monday sentenced a 71-year-old man to life in prison for raping two women more than 40 years ago in Boca Raton.
John MacLean, who is a registered sex offender, was sentenced by Judge Jeffrey Colbath nearly two months after a jury convicted him of armed sexual battery.
MacLean was found guilty of raping a 26-year-old woman at her home in 1977 as her two sons slept. The woman said MacLean broke in and held a gun to her head as he assaulted her. The woman, who is now in her 60s, said she was “scared to death” during the attacks.
In June, MacLean asked, and was permitted by the judge, not to have to appear when a verdict was read because he didn’t want to be “part of the party,” motioning back at the victims in the courtroom. Similarly on Monday, he did not appear for sentencing.
In addition to the June conviction, MacLean was also found guilty in April of raping a 15-year-old babysitter in 1976 at a home in Boca Raton.
DNA was at the center of both of MacLean’s trials.
At the end of the 1970s, MacLean served time for several burglaries in Florida and wrote a book titled “Secrets of a Superthief.” In the 1990s, MacLean was convicted of attempted sexual exploitation and burglary in Arizona.
Because of those convic- tions, his DNA was put into a national database. When Boca Raton police later went through cold cases and sent DNA for testing, they were able to get a match.
MacLean was arrested at his Pompano Beach home in 2012 and was linked by DNA to at least four women who said they had been raped between February 1976 and February 1977. All of the attacks happened within miles of each other in Boca Raton.
DNA connected MacLean to the rape of sisters in 1976 who were 14 and 18 years old. Because lawmakers didn’t remove the statute of limitations for armed sexual batter- ies until late 1976, after the sisters were attacked, police cannot charge MacLean with those crimes now.
The sisters testified during MacLean’s June trial.
MacLean’s defense team argued then that the DNA evidence had been contaminated and that all other evidence in the case, such as fingerprints, had been lost over the decades.
“It’s evidence that is old, dated, crusty,” said Assistant Public Defender Stephen Arbuzow. “Everything is missing, and where did it go? Nobody knows.”