Rapist Begins Term but Says Guilty Plea Was a Sham to Avoid a Longer Sentence

Maintaining his innocence even as he served out the first day of a 3-year prison sentence, a fired Orange County deputy marshal insisted Tuesday that he pleaded guilty to charges of raping several women only to avoid the prospect of a longer prison term.

Former court bailiff and police officer Don De La Mater asserted in an interview in Orange County Jail: “I’m guilty of having sex--not of forced rape. . . . In my heart, I know I’ve raped no one.”

The jail interview was the only comments he has made publicly since initial charges were brought against him a year ago.

Attacked Four Women

Prosecutors said that within the last 4 years, De La Mater attacked four women with whom he was acquainted, raping three of them, and was linked with as many as 10 assaults on women in the last 2 decades.

De La Mater pleaded guilty in July to the charges and was sentenced Monday by Superior Court Judge Myron S. Brown to serve 3 years in prison.

De La Mater was the first deputy marshal to be sentenced for a serious crime in recent memory, said Capt. Donald Sears of the Orange County marshal’s office, which conducted its own investigation of the allegations, then fired De La Mater last year.

“It’s always a shock to the department when something like this happens, and it’s a detriment to the law enforcement community as a whole,” Sears said Tuesday.

But other court officers who worked with De La Mater in Santa Ana said they were not surprised by the outcome. “He was always walking around the courthouse with this air about him, always trying to put the make on the girls,” said one deputy who asked not to be identified by name.

De La Mater, while acknowledging that “it’s different to be on this side of the prison bars,” said Tuesday that he has no regrets and maintained that the women he pleaded guilty to raping agreed to have sex with him.

“If I’m telling the truth, I’m in a hell of a spot. If I’m lying, I’m where I deserve to be. The only person that knows is God, and if he comes to me he’ll know,” said the 42-year-old Tustin man, who described himself as a practicing Roman Catholic.

De La Mater also disclosed the reason behind his 1974 firing from the Costa Mesa Police Department: slapping the face of a former girlfriend who De La Mater said was trying to get him to divorce the woman to whom he was then married.

Costa Mesa police investigators were unavailable for comment Tuesday.

De La Mater has been divorced twice. He has a 16-year-old girl from his first marriage and two daughters, ages 4 and 6, from his second.

He worked for the Fullerton Police Department at one time. De La Mater said he agreed to plead guilty and accept a 3-year sentence because he wanted to “put all this behind me,” see his children again out of jail and start a new career in the construction industry.

“I took the deal not because I was guilty, but because if I fought (the charges) and lost, I would get 30 years,” he said.

“If the truth had come out, I know I wouldn’t have lost. But I’ve been told that the truth doesn’t matter in these things--all that matters is what a jury believes.”

An Orange County lawyer first came to police last year to accuse De La Mater of raping her. The woman told police that she had been on a date with him when De La Mater stopped at a vacant parking lot in Newport Beach and forced her to have sex.

But De La Mater insisted: “We had consensual sex. She never said no, and I never used any force on her.”

He maintained that after the lawyer came forward with her rape allegations, investigators then sought out other women De La Mater knew to “say bad things about me. . . . I’ve probably gone out with a hundred women in my life, and I could probably come up with 20 or 30 to say something good about me.”

He was asked whether he will leave prison in a few years with any change in attitude toward relations with women. Staring through the wire screen that enclosed him, he chuckled and quipped bitterly: “I’ll have a consensual sex form signed, with a witness around next time.”