Trial of Serial Rapist Suspect Gets Under Way : Court: A defense attorney for Robin Scott Dasenbrock says in opening statements that his client is guilty of some but not all of the 44 charges against him.

A lawyer for Robin Scott Dasenbrock, accused of a series of rapes and attempted sexual assaults on more than a dozen women at their Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley apartments, told jurors in his opening statement Thursday that he would make their job a little easier.

“Mr. Dasenbrock is a burglar, a thief, and he did sexually assault several of these women,” said the attorney, James S. Odriozola. “The evidence is going to show that he is responsible for many of these crimes. But the evidence will also show he’s not responsible for all of them.”

Dasenbrock, a wiry 25-year-old with a thin mustache, faces 44 counts of rape, rape of an unconscious person, oral copulation, sexual assault, burglary and robbery involving 16 victims during a 14-month period beginning in November, 1985.

One of the victims was a young Fountain Valley woman who was raped in 1985, then raped more than a year later by the same man--who taunted her about the first incident.

“Remember last time, when I had to wait for your boyfriend to leave,” the woman said her assailant told her.

She has identified her attacker as Dasenbrock, a warehouse worker who later moved into the same apartment complex where she lived.

In one particularly terrifying incident, the assailant allegedly dragged a young woman from her bed to her living room and raped her. When the victim’s 5-year-old child got up to ask for a glass of water, the assailant walked the woman to the kitchen for it, holding a knife to her back. After the child was back in bed, police said, the man sodomized and raped the woman again. That victim also has identified Dasenbrock as her attacker.

Seven of the victims were raped. Some of the others were sexually assaulted, but most managed to scare off their assailant. In one incident, the attacker left after asking the victim: “Is that a man (asleep) in the other room?” When the victim said yes, the assailant sprinted toward the door and left. Two of the victims, one a man, are included in the case because they were burglarized while they were not home.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Koski said he does not have to rely on just victim identification of Dasenbrock. The defendant left his fingerprints at more than half the apartments involved in the charges, Koski said.

“Some of these cases weren’t solved for some time because we didn’t have any fingerprints to compare to those found at the scene,” Koski told jurors in his opening statement.

Dasenbrock was arrested in February, 1987, after he was spotted by a police dog crouching in the bushes near an apartment where a sexual assault had occurred. Police discovered that his were the fingerprints they’d been searching for in the 14-month series of attacks.

Koski said he has other evidence, besides the fingerprints, that it was the same man who raped the women.

In every instance, he said, the assailant used a knife or threatened to use a knife. Several victims will testify, Koski told jurors, that the rapist took a knife and ran its blade up and down their backs. Koski told jurors they will also hear testimony from a former girlfriend of Dasenbrock who claims that he used to run a knife up and down her back during sex.

Koski claimed that Dasenbrock also told several victims that he had a friend waiting in another room who would hurt them if they resisted. In one instance, Koski said, Dasenbrock threatened to stab to death a victim’s 5-year-old child, who was sleeping in a tent in his room.

It took Koski almost two hours to run through the litany of details surrounding each of the charges. Many of the jurors appeared to be taking voluminous notes.

When it was defense attorney Odriozola’s turn, he told jurors that they wouldn’t need their notebooks for his opening statement. He openly admitted that his client did much of what Koski said he did.

But the defense attorney warned that some of the crimes could not be proven because the witness identification process was tainted by a newspaper picture of Dasenbrock. He added that his client was primarily a burglar and that while there will be no dispute that Dasenbrock’s fingerprints were left at some of the scenes, “no expert can tell you when a print was left.”