Man Gets 89 Years for Rape, Kidnap of Woman

As he was led back to jail Friday, Manuel V. Gutierrez considered the implications of the 89-year prison sentence he had just received.

“I’m never going to see the street again,” he said.

Since 1969, when he was convicted of rape, Gutierrez has been sent to prison on several occasions. Each time, he was paroled.

He was on parole for the 1969 rape conviction when he used a tire iron to beat a Camarillo woman to death in 1975. He was on parole for that slaying when he committed felony spouse abuse in 1983. He was released several times in that case, but always ended up back in prison for violating parole conditions, according to court records.

Finally, in July, when the state could hold him no longer, Gutierrez was set free.

But the very next month, he was back behind bars, accused of kidnaping and raping a Moorpark woman.

On Friday, the father of Gutierrez’s latest victim begged Ventura County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Storch to “end this cycle of horror.”

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if he is ever released, there will be other victims,” the father said. He asked for a long prison term, “not in the name of vengeance, not even in the name of justice, but in the name of plain common sense.”

Storch agreed, calling Gutierrez “the epitome of a sociopath” and “one of the more dangerous people I’ve seen in my 18 years here.”

The judge gave Gutierrez the maximum prison term on all 12 rape and kidnaping charges and ran most of them consecutively, for a total of 89 years. Gutierrez, 43, will be close to 90 years old before he can even be considered for parole, officials said.

“He’ll probably die in prison,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrice Koenig said.

Gutierrez apparently had expected that, even if he was arrested in the latest rape, he would be released after a few years. According to a probation investigator’s report, he warned the victim not to call police because he said he would serve only three years and would then come back and kill the woman and her children.

“We don’t have to worry about him carrying out those threats,” the victim’s father said after the sentencing.

But in his comments to the judge, he said the family remains angry at passersby who, he said, refused to help prevent the kidnaping.

“During the abduction, my daughter pleaded and screamed for help from onlookers. A man in a blue truck. A woman in a car. And others. . . . They couldn’t be bothered. For them, it was just another day in paradise.”

Court records give this account of the incident, which occurred about 9 p.m. Aug. 14:

The 23-year-old victim went to a supermarket in Moorpark to rent a carpet shampooer, accompanied by her sons, ages 22 months and 5. As she put the toddler in a car seat for the trip home, she felt a hard object against her back and heard a man say: “Shut up and get into the car.”

She complied, then realized that the man was not armed. She screamed for help, but he clasped his hands around her throat. Then he put his hands around the 5-year-old’s neck and told her to drive, threatening to kill the boy if she refused, according to court records.

The man ordered her to drive to a secluded place in the hills above Moorpark. While the two boys waited in the car and eventually fell asleep, the man raped the woman repeatedly for two hours, according to the probation officer’s report. When the woman begged him to let her leave, he said, “After we smoke a cigarette,” according to the report. Then he forced her to have sex again, the report says.

Eventually the man had the woman drop him off in a Moorpark neighborhood after warning her not to call police. She drove to her mother’s home and told her what happened, and the mother called 911.

The victim recalled two distinctive tattoos on her attacker’s chest, and she identified Gutierrez in a photo lineup. He was arrested two days later at his parents’ Moorpark home, where he was living. He pleaded guilty in October.

The victim’s father said the two boys are still traumatized by the incident. “The 5-year-old will never be the same,” he said, adding that the child is undergoing counseling. “He worries about the burglar coming back.”

As the victim, her husband and her parents watched, Gutierrez stood Friday to give the judge his own perspective on his behavior.

“I know I did wrong,” he said. “I’m sorry . . . but if I had been given the help I asked for, this wouldn’t have happened.” He said he had asked his parole officer for drug and alcohol treatment but had been denied help.

In an interview with the probation investigator, Gutierrez said he had been smoking cocaine and injecting the drug since his release from prison in July. The night of the kidnaping, he had been drinking heavily and had taken the drug PCP, he told the investigator.

“This guy was begging for help and couldn’t receive it,” said Gutierrez’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Gary Windom. “The PCP and alcohol made him violent. He would not have done this if he were sober.”

The victim’s father said he was disgusted by such explanations.

In his statement to the judge, the father said Gutierrez was not “another Charlie Manson.”

“He’s worse,” the father said. “Manson admits he’s evil, while the defendant has been manipulating and conning the justice system for 20 years.”