Rape case over after 41 years
Ex-‘Superthief’ to be sentenced for Boca crimes
John Arthur MacLean, the former South Florida serial burglar called the “Superthief,” will be sentenced today on two rape convictions in cases from the 1970s.
Both crimes happened in Boca Raton over a four month period back then, but it took decades for police to bring charges based on DNA breakthroughs.
MacLean, 71, and his lawyers attacked the evidence as contaminated, but juries in April and June trials returned guilty verdict son the charges filed in 2012.
Now, he faces up to life in prison on both armed sexual battery convictions when he receives his punishment from Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Colbath.
MacLean was convicted of raping a 15-year-old baby sitter in October 1976, and a 26-year-old mother of two young boys in February 1977.
The victims in both cases testified, providing harrowing accounts of a man in disguise who attacked them at gunpoint and promised not to hurt them if they didn’t scream.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel is not identifying any of the women because of the circumstances of the crimes.
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 EastCoast inthe1970s, claiming to have pocketed more than $100 million.
Hewas convicted of stealing $1 million in jewelry from the Fort Lauderdale mansion of a Johnson & Johnson heiress in 1979. For that and other burglaries, hewas sentenced to15 years in prison. Police then also considered him a suspect in numerous sexual battery cases, but hewasn’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 early1990s Arizona convictions for attempted sexual exploitation of aminor and burglary.
MacLean declined to testify in his own defense in either trial this year. But he’s written numerous letters from jail accusing police of tampering with the evidence from the rapes and planting his DNA to frame him.
MacLean’s lawyers argued that the DNA evidence was unreliable, because it had been placed into a storage box that was left unchecked for at least 30 years.
mjfreeman@sunsentinel.com, 561-243-6642 or Twitter @marcjfreeman