She was 15 and baby-sitting two neighborhood kids when a man wearing pantyhose over his face and holding a gun in his hand suddenly appeared in a hallway of the Boca Raton home.
It happened before midnight on Oct. 16, 1976. Yet her memory of the terror she felt nearly 42 years ago hasn’t faded.
“I was afraid,” the woman, now 56, recalled for a jury on Wednesday. “He said, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. Don’t scream.”
But she was hurt — she was raped in the master bedroom. And she said her disguised attacker fled the home when the children’s parents returned.
Her testimony began the trial of the man accused of raping her, along with other girls and women back then — John Arthur MacLean. He’s a convicted serial burglar from South Florida who used to call himself the “Superthief,” but he’s denied the rape charges.
As the 71-year-old defendant sat between his attorneys, the victim said she survived the ordeal to become a mother of three, earn a doctorate degree, and spend years as an educator.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel is not identifying the woman due to the circumstances of the case.
She said she never before spoke publicly about the rape, and never expected she would do so until a Boca Raton Police cold case detective knocked on her door out of the blue in 2012.
It was then she learned that a piece of her jeans from that night — stained with the attacker’s semen — had provided a DNA match to MacLean. There is no time limit for cops to bring armed sexual battery charges.
Assistant State Attorney Brianna Coakley said the DNA link is solid and is all that’s needed to convict MacLean, who’s been held at the Palm Beach County Jail since his arrest five-and-a-half years ago.
“John MacLean is the person that 42 years ago went into that house, threatened a 15-year-old girl with a gun and raped her,” the prosecutor said. “He left that evidence behind. That’s why we’re here today.”
But Assistant Public Defender Christopher Fox-Lent called the DNA “unreliable” because the denim suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
“This piece of cloth was completely unaccountable for decades,” he said, promising the jury they would have a reasonable doubt in the case. “Where was it in the 1980s? Who had possession of it in the 1990s? Who handled it in the 2000s? These are the sorts of questions that the prosecution cannot answer for you.”
The defense attorney also said other evidence collected from the Malaga Drive crime scene, including bedsheets and fingerprints are long gone.
“You will hear about lost evidence, destroyed evidence and evidence with a broken chain of custody,” Fox-Lent said, adding that the memories of witnesses are also questionable after so many years.
But the victim said she hasn’t forgotten the horror. She said she couldn’t make out the attacker’s face through the stockings, but she knows he was white and how he hurt her.
“When he penetrated me, that was painful,” she said in response to a question from prosecutor Marci Rex.
The woman said the rapist paused once to rummage through bedroom drawers and then returned to the bed.
“I was in fear for my life at this point,” she said. “It felt like an eternity.”
She said he warned her not to call the police, but her family did so after she returned home. She remembers feeling “scared, embarrassed, and humiliated” after the rape.
Assistant Public Defender Stephen Arbuzow questioned the victim’s memory about the height of her attacker. She testified that she remembers she was not especially short or tall.
MacLean, who is 6 feet tall and above average height, also is charged in a second case, concerning the Feb. 28, 1977, rape of a 26-year-old mother of two, also in Boca Raton.
Prosecutors say the circumstances of that attack are similar to the baby-sitter case: the mom was inside her Northeast First Avenue home at 8:30 p.m. while her young sons slept. She was approached by a man wearing a short, curly brown ladies’ wig. He told her not to scream as he held a pistol to her head.
And DNA from a vaginal swab from a hospital rape kit in the case matches MacLean, police said.
Police obtained MacLean’s DNA from a national database because he is a convicted sex offender from an Arizona crime. He was living with his wife in a Deerfield Beach mobile home park when he was charged with the Boca Raton rapes.
The trial in the 1976 case will continue through at least Friday.
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