Serial rapist is sentenced to nearly 300 years
SAN JOSE >> More than a year after he fled the country in the middle of his trial for repeatedly sexually assaulting and raping his friend’s daughter, a Santa Clara man was sentenced to nearly 300 years in prison in a saga that finally reached closure thanks in part to an alert tipster living near his Caribbean hideaway.
Apollo Ray Johnsen, 57, will serve a 240 years-tolife term and an additional 44 years, 8 months, as ordered by Judge Linda Clark during a long-awaited sentencing hearing Monday.
It wasn’t always assured that this court touchstone would be reached in Johnsen’s case. In the summer of 2019, while free on $1 million bail, he was granted a three-month recess for a medical procedure, and when he was due to return to court for the trial to resume in mid- September, he wasn’t heard from. Prosecutor Jason Malinsky said Johnsen found a way to remove his GPS monitoring dev ice w ithout triggering any alarm.
The trial resumed anyway, and Johnsen was convicted of 16 felonies for repeatedly sexually assaulting the victim at his Santa Clara home over a fivey ear pe- riod starting in 2005, when she was about 6 years old, and later raping her at her East Bay home when she was 16. Johnsen was arrested in 2016.
There was no trace of Johnsen following his disappearance until January, when Malinsky said he got a tip from a woman in the Dominican Republic who said Johnsen, now going by his original name of Dennis Ray Johnsen, had befriended her husband and came over for dinner.
“She got a weird vibe from him,” Malinsky said.
Johnsen changed his name af ter his release from prison in the 1990s for robbery and false imprisonment after he posed as a heating and air- conditioning repairman to get access to a Santa Clara credit union before business hours, then holding one employee at gunpoint and tying up another.
The woman, who wished to remain anonymous with authorities, confirmed her feeling when she looked Johnsen up on the internet and discovered news stories about his fugitive status. Soon after, Johnsen was detained by local authorities in Boca Chica and handed over to agents with the U. S. Marshals Ser vice. Within a few weeks, he was extradited back to Santa Clara County.
Malinsky said she later got a note from the woman reiterating her refusal to receive any formal credit for her tip, that read, “You don’t have to say thank you. I AM A MOTHER. We are not all pure and have mistakes, but you can’t close your eyes to that.”
“She’s a hero of the story,” Malinsky said of the woman.
But even with convicted defendant in hand, the court proceedings would encounter more delays, this time in the form of closures and a court schedule decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Which made Monday a longawaited chance for the victim and her family to exhale after 14 months of uncertainty following the conviction.
“It was a long and terrible journey she had to go through,” Malinsky said of the victim. “Delay after delay, convicting him in absentia, then we finally find him, then delayed yet again … it tore the family apart, and now they have a chance to start healing and put this behind him, a real sense of closure and relief.”