Man Guilty of Drugging, Raping Dates

A Superior Court jury Friday convicted an Air Force veteran of sexually assaulting two Orange County women he lured out on dates and then drugged and raped them.

Dick Tilman Hunt, 69, of Long Beach, sat with his head down as the verdict was read.

The jury of six men and six women took two days to find Hunt guilty of six counts of rape, sodomy and unlawful penetration with a foreign object. The same jury deadlocked 9 to 3 in favor of conviction on a seventh charge of burglary, which was later dropped by the prosecution.

Juror John Chaffetz, the jury foreman, said one of the toughest decisions to make was whether the women, ages 49 and 55 at the time, consented to the sex. The question was complicated by the affection the women had shown Hunt prior to the crimes, Chaffetz said.

One of the victims, a Laguna Niguel woman, had asked Hunt what he wanted for breakfast, implying that she wanted him to stay overnight, the juror said.

But in the end, the jurors decided that even though they might have implied consent for sex, they never consented to Hunt’s use of sedatives. One of the women told Hunt to stop because she was in pain, and the other had tried to break off her relationship with him 15 minutes before he drugged her, Chaffetz said.

“The discussion bounced back and forth between whether there was or was not consent,” he said. “In the end, we carefully read over the instructions. Under the use of force, there was substance.”

Hunt’s attorney, John Barnett, had argued during trial that the widower had reasonably believed that the women had consented to sex. There is no proof that drugs were involved, and even if Hunt did use sedatives, the sex did not amount to rape, Barnett said.

“This case is not about whether it’s OK to drug your date,” Barnett told a Superior Court jury. “However wrong that is, he’s not charged with that. . . . The issue before you is, did Mr. Hunt have sex with [the women] without their consent? And there’s no proof beyond a reasonable doubt of that.”

Prosecutor Dennis Bauer argued that Hunt himself admitted to putting drugs in women’s drinks, including one woman’s fruit juice. Bauer also presented evidence showing that Hunt might have injected sedatives into the women “to gain control of them,” the prosecutor said.

Hunt is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Richard F. Toohey next month.