CHILD RAPIST TO BE FREED
Psychologists: Man held since ’77 no longer sexually dangerous
A serial child rapist who has been locked away for 41 years — the past 11 as a sexually dangerous person civilly committed by the state — is set to be released this week after two forensic psychologists said he no longer poses a threat.
Wayne S. Chapman, who was convicted of offenses in three states and named as a suspect in the 1976 disappearance of a 10-year-old Lawrence boy, could be set free as soon as tomorrow on the basis of testimony in Suffolk Superior Court from psychologists Gregg Belle and Katrin Rouse-Weir, who found him to be no longer sexually dangerous, Department of Correction officials said.
“If both found him to no longer be sexually dangerous, it’s game over,” said Carrie KimballMonahan, a spokeswoman for Essex District Attorney Jonathan W. Blodgett. “He can’t be held beyond that because it’s a civil commitment and he completed his criminal sentence long ago.”
Chapman was sentenced in 1977 to 15 to 30 years in prison for raping two Lawrence boys.
While incarcerated at MCIShirley, Chapman declined to take part in the prison’s sex offender treatment program, according to testimony in a prior commitment hearing.
In 2007, after Chapman completed his sentence, he was civilly committed as a sexually dangerous person. Since then, he has repeatedly petitioned the court for release — unsuccessfully until now. Efforts to reach a current lawyer for Chapman were unsuccessful yesterday.
“Clearly, I don’t think he feels like he needs treatment,” psychologist Michael Henry testified in 2009. “There is no indication that he is truly interested in changing who he is as an offender. There are few ideas about what he might do.”
And Billie Scharn, who attended one of Chapman’s trials, said she can’t understand what could have changed that.
“People like him should never be put back on the street, ever,” said Scharn, whose nephew, Angelo “Andy” Puglisi, vanished from a public swimming pool in Lawrence in August 1976. “We don’t know for sure he had anything to do with Andy, but he’s definitely very, very sick. I believe he played a game, played a part to get himself free.”
“Would they want him to be their next-door neighbor?” she added, referring to Belle and Rouse-Weir, who could not immediately be reached for comment.
In 2009, then-Lawrence police Chief John J. Romero told the Herald that Chapman was a “strong” suspect in the unsolved Puglisi case, “given his history.”
At his Suffolk Superior Court bid for freedom that year, Henry said Chapman, a former University of Rhode Island youth advocate, was once pulled over in New York state, and police found pornographic pictures of children on the dashboard “in a way that someone may have their own child playing soccer.”