Man Charged With Rape After Admitting Kidnaping Was Hoax

A handyman, arrested in the rape and kidnaping of his fiancee’s 8-year-old daughter, has admitted that he took the girl to a motel and then concocted a phony story about a break-in and abduction from the family’s apartment, police said Saturday.

Robert Leroy Granger, 34, was being held in the Fullerton City Jail on $50,000 bail in connection with the kidnaping, sexual assault and rape.

The child was found safe late Friday night in the Silver Moon Motel in Anaheim after a frantic, daylong search.

“I just thank God she’s alive,” said the child’s mother, 29.

Fullerton police said Granger admitted that he staged the break-in at the two-bedroom apartment he shared with the child, her mother and her brother to make it appear that someone else had abducted her.

Detective Kevin Hamilton would not say if Granger had confessed to raping the child.

“He was trying to cover his tracks,” Hamilton said. “Even though his story about the break-in sounded really far-fetched, we approached it as real because you can’t rule out anything. His story really unraveled when we found the little girl.”

On Friday afternoon, about 20 police officers using bloodhounds searched the neighborhood surrounding the 88-unit apartment complex in the 2400 block of West Orangethorpe Avenue, where the girl lives. But they couldn’t find her.

The child later told police that she was raped at her apartment and then taken, taped and gagged, to the motel. She was told not to leave the room. But after seeing her picture on television during a late-night broadcast, she told police she ran to the room next door for help.

Hamilton said that Granger admitted tying the child’s arms, legs and mouth with duct tape, putting her inside a laundry basket, covering her with clothes and a blanket and smuggling her out of the apartment.

“I didn’t want to believe any of this until I heard it from my daughter,” the child’s exhausted mother said Saturday morning. “I’m shocked and devastated. I haven’t slept all night. I want to be there when he goes to court I want to see him sentenced. I’d like to see justice.”