BURBANK : Rapist Sentenced to 210 Years in Prison

A Pasadena Superior Court judge sentenced a Burbank man to 210 years in prison Wednesday for luring a 19-year-old female co-worker to his home under false pretenses, then assaulting her with a knife and raping her.

It was the third sexual assault conviction and prison term for Stephen Douglas Capps, 41, a former salesman at the Burbank Circuit City store.

In 1978, Capps was convicted of kidnaping two girls, ages 13 and 15, from a 7-Eleven store in New Jersey and abducting them into the woods, stabbing one of the girls 13 times, authorities said. In 1985, he was sentenced to prison for the rape of a 20-year-old woman in Burbank, police said.

“In both [previous] incidents, Capps was out of custody for less than nine months before he attacked another female,” said Burbank Police Detective Matthew Miranda.

But because this was Capps’ third felony “strike,” he must serve 80% of his 210-year sentence before becoming eligible for parole, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Rash.

Rash said two of Capps’ previous victims--one of the two girls assaulted in New Jersey and the 1985 rape victim--testified at his trial last month.

“In each case, he used a fake story to lure his victims into a trap,” Rash said. In the most recent assault, in 1994, “he asked a woman that he worked with to come over and talk to a teen-age runaway girl he was helping. But of course, when she got there, there was no girl.”

According to police reports, the woman tried to resist Capps but he held a knife to her throat to make her cooperate.

Capps was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment, forcible penetration with a foreign object, two counts of forcible oral copulation and three counts of rape, Rash said.