Venice Man Gets 108-Year Term in Five Kidnap-Rapes

A Venice carpenter was sentenced Friday to 108 years in state prison for kidnaping and sexually assaulting five females--four of them 15-year-old girls--whom he had offered rides in his car.

Daniel Gordon Watson, 36, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, sat with his head slumped as Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dion G. Morrow pronounced sentence. The penalty is akin to life without parole, since Watson will not be eligible for release for 54 years.

Watson’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Martin Mizel, had asked that his client, who faced a maximum of 136 years in prison, be given a lighter sentence so that he might be eligible for parole while in his mid-50s.

Watson, the lawyer said, did not beat up his victims as do many rapists. Rather, Mizel argued, “Mr. Watson wants to be intimate and he forces that on women.”

But one young victim, who brought her infant daughter to court, countered: “I don’t want him ever to be able to get out of jail. . . . I don’t want him to ever do it to my daughter.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Margaret Barreto-Morehouse, who had urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence, said she was satisfied because “he (Watson) has only one life to give.”

Remote Area

The prosecution said Watson drove his victims to a remote area in the Santa Monica Mountains and raped them after picking them up at bus stops or while they were hitchhiking in Santa Monica, the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the West San Fernando Valley in mid-1982.

Watson became known to authorities as the “Five-Point Rapist,” because he would not release his victims until they had completed five sexual acts.

In court, Mizel also presented documentation that Watson earned a Bronze Star and an Air Medal while serving with the Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam in the late 1960s.

“The man seems to be a Vietnam War hero,” Morrow acknowledged. But the judge said Watson’s crimes indicated “a descent into mental confusion that seemed to me to be escalating.”