Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Superthief ’ convicted in ’77 Boca rape case
Ex-detective opened cold cases, used DNA in pair of convictions
A jury on Friday convicted the rapist who attacked a 26-year-old mother of two in her Boca Raton home 41 years ago.
In a case where DNA evidence weighed heavily, John Arthur MacLean was found guilty after nearly five hours of deliberations. He opted to remain in his cell at Palm Beach County Jail and skip the verdict from the six jurors.
It was another conviction for a notorious South Florida felon — a man who once boasted he was a “Superthief” for his ability to break into countless homes in the 1970s.
But the serial burglar got caught along the
way, and became a convicted sex offender in Arizona in the 1990s.
And just in the past eight weeks, MacLean, 71, was found guilty of raping a 15-year-old baby sitter at gunpoint in Boca Raton in 1976, and the young mother in 1977.
Circuit Judge Jeffrey Colbath said he plans to give MacLean his sentence for both armed sexual battery convictions Aug 13. The charges are punishable by up to life in prison.
“After 42 years these women were finally able to get justice,” prosecutors Marci Rex and Brianna Coakley said in a joint statement after Friday’s verdict.
They praised the efforts of Mynor Cruz, a former Boca Raton police detective who reopened the cold cases eight years ago and used DNA matches to arrest MacLean in 2012.
MacLean’s DNA was identified on a swab from a hospital rape kit in the 1977 case, and on a stain from the victim’s jeans in the 1976 case, the prosecutors said.
His DNA also was matched a stain on a robe worn by one of two sisters, ages 14 and 18, who were raped in early 1976, also in Boca Raton.
The law did not allow charges to be filed in the sisters’ case, but the sisters, now in their 50s, were allowed to testify at the trials for the other victims.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel is not identifying any of the women because of the circumstances of the crimes.
MacLean declined to testify in his own defense in either trial. 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 contaminated and unreliable, because it has been placed into a storage box that was unchecked for at least 30 years.
“It doesn’t get any worse than this,” Assistant Public Defender Christopher FoxLent told the jury this week.
The defense also said that police lost or destroyed all other evidence from the crime scenes, including fingerprints.
Prosecutors “don’t have the goods,” Assistant Public Defender Stephen Arbuzow said. “Apparently they were losing evidence left and right from the ’70s.”
But the prosecution argued that not only is the DNA evidence strong, there’s solid proof of a pattern with the rapes that identified MacLean as the assailant.
In the baby-sitter rape on Oct. 16, 1976, the attacker slipped into a home on Maher laga Drive with pantyhose over his face and pointed a handgun at the girl. The victim testified that two children were in another room.
“Don’t worry,” the intruder said, before proceeding to rape her in a bedroom at 11:30 that night. “I won’t hurt you. Don’t scream.”
Then on Feb. 28, 1977, the young mother was inside Northeast First Avenue home at 8:30 p.m. while her two young sons, ages 2 and 6, slept. She was suddenly approached by a man wearing a woman’s wig and horn-rimmed glasses. He told her not to scream as he held a pistol to her head.
“He said, ‘If you cooperate, I won’t hurt you,’ ” she recalled, while testifying Tuesday.
The defense attorneys agreed the rapes were horrible, but argued the evidence against MacLean was too weak. After the guilty verdict, they declined to comment.
MacLean has written letters from jail accusing police of tampering with evidence from the rapes and framing him.