Ex-Officer Gets 36-Year Term for Rape of Girl

A business executive who was once a Beverly Hills police officer was sentenced to 36 years in prison Friday for raping at knifepoint an 11-year-old Irvine girl who was home alone last year because of illness.

Steven Rush McCoy, 37, who pleaded no contest to five sex-related counts, claimed that he had been seriously mentally ill for two years and that he committed the rape during a period when he was off his medication.

But Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey could barely control his anger when McCoy’s attorney, Jan M. Heger, said that the defendant’s mental illness made him “just as much a victim as the little girl in this incident.”

“I don’t know how as an officer of this court you can even think something like that, let alone say it out loud,” Dickey responded. “It shows we are on totally different wavelengths.”

The judge said McCoy deserved a harsh sentence because the crime was highly aggravated and showed much planning.

“No one can calculate the damage that has been done to her, possibly for her entire lifetime,” Dickey said.

McCoy admitted that he posed as a parcel delivery worker and told the girl he had a package for her. McCoy knew the girl’s name, age and where she attended school.

Inside the package, McCoy brought his own bedsheets, to reduce the risk of leaving any evidence behind. McCoy threatened to cut the victim’s face with a knife if she did not obey.

The girl was raped and forced to commit other sexual acts on her parents’ bed. McCoy then told her that he would come back and hurt her if she told anyone.

Last week when the sentencing hearing opened, the victim’s mother told the judge: “This is my child we are talking about. For the rest of her life, when she thinks about her first sexual experience, this is what she’s going to think about: being raped and having a knife put to her stomach.”

The defense produced evidence from doctors asserting that McCoy had been suffering from a manic-depressive disorder for two years. The rape was a onetime incident that resulted from his failure to take needed medication, McCoy contended.

But Dickey said that defense was undermined by testimony Thursday by a young woman who said that she and a schoolmate about her age had been molested by McCoy when she was 8 years old, in 1981.

“That belies the defense contention that the (Irvine) incident was a result of his mental illness,” the judge said. “I view it that Mr. McCoy was a child molester who became mentally ill, not the other way around.”

The maximum sentence McCoy could have received was 48 years. Dickey said it was his responsibility to consider the sentence in the perspective of punishment for other crimes, noting that the penalty for first-degree murder is 25 years to life.

Dickey said he wanted to sentence McCoy to a prison term long enough to ensure that the Irvine victim would be an adult before he could ever be released on parole.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Debbie Lloyd estimated that McCoy would be 60 years old before he is released. The judge stayed a six-year burglary sentence, then ordered McCoy to serve four consecutive eight-year terms for the other offenses. The judge added four years for the use of the knife during the attack.

At one point Friday during Heger’s argument, Dickey told him to address a third incident, involving a 15-year-old runaway McCoy had befriended and allegedly molested during the period of time the Irvine rape occurred.

Heger responded by saying he did not want any further interruptions of his argument. The judge then warned Heger to remember who he was addressing, and said the defense should be “realistic” in argument.

After Heger’s remark that McCoy was just as much a victim as the girl, Dickey called the argument so far from reality that “I really don’t think I can take into consideration anything you have said.”

At last week’s sentencing hearing, Heger blamed the court system for the crime. McCoy had been arrested on a bad-check charge several months before the rape and his attorney’s request for psychiatric help was denied.

Last week, Dickey called the claim outrageous. When Heger repeated it Friday, Dickey said that “no one is responsible for what happened but Mr. McCoy.”

Lloyd said outside the courtroom later that Heger’s remark comparing McCoy’s suffering to the victim’s was “ridiculous.”

“Mr. McCoy isn’t a victim, he’s a predator,” Lloyd said.

In court, Lloyd called McCoy a con man who would rape again after he is released from prison.

McCoy was a Beverly Hills police officer in the 1970s who left after two years to go into business. He was a successful executive in two investment firms before his arrests. McCoy and his wife once had their picture taken with Ronald and Nancy Reagan at a political event at which McCoy won an outstanding citizen award.

Staff writer Catherine Gewertz contributed to this story.