Twice-Victimized Woman Testifies at Rape Trial : Court: She has identified Robin Scott Dasenbrock--who faces 44 sex-related charges involving 16 victims--as her assailant in both incidents.

She had just bought a huge, live lobster, and she had fun showing it to a good friend who lived near her in a Fountain Valley apartment complex. She had just returned to her own apartment and put water on to boil the lobster when she heard a noise.

A man was in her living room. It was the same man who had raped her 14 months before. He raped her again, then taunted her about the earlier rape.

“Remember when I was here before, when I had to wait until your boyfriend left?” he asked her.

Jurors at Robin Scott Dasenbrock’s serial rape trial sat transfixed Monday as the woman, in her mid-30s, described the two assaults.

“I was terrified,” she said softly. “I couldn’t believe that it happened twice in my life. I couldn’t believe it.”

The woman was one of four victims who have testified so far at Dasenbrock’s trial on 44 sex-related charges involving 16 victims. One is a man whose home was burglarized, and several others are women who were not home. But the rest were either raped or assaulted or managed to scare off their assailant, who attacked them in the middle of the night.

Dasenbrock, 25, of Fountain Valley has admitted to committing many of the assaults and burglaries but denies that he is responsible for all of them. One attack he has not admitted to is the rape of the woman who testified Monday.

She, however, has identified him twice in court, and during a police lineup, she picked him out of six men and wrote on a card: “No doubt about it!”

The woman told jurors that she had not seen the rapist the first time she was attacked, in November, 1985, but that when he returned in January, 1987, she knew his voice and his build, and he told her he was the one who had raped her before.

She was hysterical afterward, she said. She could barely make it up the stairs to knock on her friends’ door. They urged her to call the police, but she wouldn’t do it.

“He said that he lived in the area and that if I called the police, he would return and kill me and my daughter,” she said. “I believed him.”

But the police called her; they had found her purse, which the rapist had stolen. Through that contact, she eventually told police what had happened.

Her testimony left people in the court audience shaking their heads in sympathy.

In both rapes, the woman said, she had searched for some kind of understanding about what had happened. The first time, she said, she had tried to stop the rapist as he was leaving.

“I told him, ‘Wait, don’t go; we can talk about this,’ ” she said.

The woman said that since then she had followed in the newspapers the series of rapes in Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley apartments, which were all attributed to the same man. During the second assault, she said, she asked the rapist: “Why are you doing this to us?”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Koski asked her if the second rape was more terrifying than the first.

Yes, she said, because the rapist only threatened her the first time. In the second incident, she could see his knife, and he put it point-first to her head as he forced her head into a pillow.

During the second rape, she testified, her mind was not on what was happening to her but rather on her daughter, who was at a gymnastics class. She was thankful that her daughter wasn’t there and at risk of being hurt, she said.

When the rapist left, she testified, “I was just thankful I was still alive.”

The woman said she moved out of the apartment, where both rapes had occurred, within a week of the second assault.

Dasenbrock listened to the testimony with his left hand to the side of his face, to avoid a news camera. He also sniffed loudly throughout the woman’s testimony, which his attorney, James S. Odriozola, said was because of a sinus condition.