Repeat Offender’s Plea Bargain Angers Families of Teenage Rape Victims

Misfits in a derelict town, seven teenage girls used to hang out at the home of a man who allowed them to smoke, drink and watch scary movies like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist.”

The freedom came at a high price: For three years, they say, they were raped and molested by the man, Walter Booher, who threatened them with black magic and Mafia reprisals if they told anyone.

Booher, 47, a seedy, big-bellied man who eked out a living mowing grass and umpiring Little League games, was charged with 334 sex-related offenses. Last month, he struck a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to five counts. The rest of the charges were dropped.

That angered the girls’ parents.

They were even more enraged to hear the prosecutors suggest that they were to blame for not being more attentive.

One mother confronted prosecutor George Kepple after he recommended that Booher get 15 years in prison at his sentencing this month. f

“He threw his hands up,” the mother said. “He said, ‘Where were you as a parent?’ He tried to put all the blame on the parents.”

The mother, whose name was withheld to protect her daughter’s identity, admitted that she might have done more.

“I was raised very strict, not allowed to go anywhere, do anything. I didn’t want that for my daughter. So I gave her a little more leniency,” she said.

Kepple did not return calls for comment but told the Leader-Times of Kittanning that the case would have been hard to prove because the girls weren’t threatened directly and that their fears of black magic or the Mafia would not seem credible to a jury.

His boss, Dist. Atty. Scott Andreassi, said it was inappropriate for Kepple to blame the parents. But he also said the case was weakened by the freedom the girls had.

“It just struck me as amazing, as a parent. Literally, some of these victims were living with Mr. Booher,” Andreassi said. “It doesn’t excuse him from what he did. But it does raise the question: Where were the parents to allow their children to live with a man who was not a family member?”

He said prosecutors had no physical evidence of the rapes, nor could the girls specify the dates and locations of the assaults. Booher moved three times during the years he assaulted the girls.

For much of that time, he lived in Ford City, a town of about 3,400 in a rural area 40 miles north of Pittsburgh. Ford City has been dying ever since the chief source of jobs, the PPG Industries glass plant, closed in 1993, and many stores are boarded up.

When Booher lived in Ford City, his house was three blocks from the Junior-Senior High School, so it was a convenient place to hang out or play hooky.

The girls, 12 to 15 at the time, were invited over by the daughter of Booher’s girlfriend. Booher let the girls smoke cigarettes, and at least one of them drank beer at his place, police said.

“She wanted some friendship. I tried to warn her about the people she was with,” said one girl’s mother, who is divorced. “But you know kids. She didn’t listen, and she got involved with something she couldn’t get out of. He preyed on children who didn’t have the father image at home.”

One girl’s father drinks and is absent often. The parents of three other girls are divorced.

Prosecutors said that although Booher assaulted the girls and forced his 19-year-old son, Jason, to rape one of them, Booher kept them coming back by telling them contacts in the Mafia would kill their family, and he said he could spin magic spells against them. A trial date for Jason Booher has not been set.

“Him threatening us with black magic, it’s sort of like witchcraft. If you believe in that stuff, it’s scary. Plus the Mafia, everybody knows they’re real,” said one girl, now 16.

Booher, who had no criminal record, was arrested after one of the girls told her high school principal about the rapes.

Former Mayor Greg Dinko, who runs an auto repair shop, is one of the few people in town who think the parents should stop pressing the case so aggressively.

“You look all over this country and this stuff happens--Ford City is not immune,” Dinko said. “Yeah, he did this. Yeah, he got caught. But why put it on the front page?”

Police Chief Jan Lysakowski said he never doubted the girls’ stories. The girls were at a “gullible age” when tales of black magic and the Mafia seemed real to them, Lysakowski said. He said the parents showed remarkable courage.

“On a lot of these cases, they just don’t want to pursue it because of the publicity alone,” he said. “But these parents, they stood behind their kids and wanted to follow it through.”