Victims Testify About Belmont Shore Rapes

A Long Beach woman testifying in a serial rape trial on Monday described how an intruder crept into her house naked but for socks and a T-shirt over his head and raped her, pausing his attack only briefly when she repeated “deliver us from evil” from the Lord’s Prayer.

The testimony by the silver-haired woman came in the opening day of trial for Mark Wayne Rathbun, who faces 64 felony counts of burglary, rape and sexual assault for attacks that occurred in Long Beach, Los Alamitos and Huntington Beach.

Most of the attacks took place in or around Long Beach’s Belmont Shore neighborhood from 1997 to 2002. For years, a composite police sketch of the serial rapist could be found posted in stores along the shore’s commercial stretch, and pepper spray often sold out.

The attacker, who entered through open doors and windows, did not use a weapon but overpowered his victims.

Rathbun, a 34-year-old Long Beach resident, has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Rathbun lived on and off with his mother and friends and worked various odd jobs over the years. He had been a poll worker just days before his November 2002 arrest.

Since his arrest, extensive DNA testing has been conducted by three labs. Rathbun’s defense attorneys told a jury Monday that the evidence they will present will show such science is only as reliable as the humans involved.

Superior Court Judge Joan Comparet-Cassani instructed the jury to steel themselves for a trial with 108 witnesses expected to last about six weeks.

But prosecutor Rich Goul summed up the state’s case against Rathbun in a 10-minute opening statement Monday afternoon, telling jury members that they would hear a tape of Rathbun admitting his guilt to police and his mother.

“He always came in the dead of night,” Goul began, and seemed to appear “out of nowhere.... He wore gloves, never leaving fingerprints.... He was like a force moving in and out of these women’s lives.”

Goul said the man he called “the Belmont Shore rapist” always hid his face with a T-shirt or ski mask, and sometimes obstructed the view of victims with their own nightgowns.

As Rathbun sat at the defense table in a white dress shirt, his black dreadlocks bound in a ponytail, Goul told jurors that victim descriptions of their assailant varied dramatically, but he said evidence from bedsheets and from some victims and the assailant provided DNA linking Rathbun to 14 crime scenes.

The most disturbing attack Goul cited was on a 77-year-old woman recovering from a colostomy operation when she was raped on Aug. 21, 1999. He told the jury that she’d been raped by the same man two weeks earlier.

That woman is expected to testify in the trial today, along with a 51-year-old victim. The testimony of three victims over age 70 was videotaped -- as was the defense’s cross-examination of them -- under a law that provides for such testimony, and the tapes of two victims will be shown today by the prosecution.

On Monday, the first victim to testify, who was 61 at the time of the attack on June 26, 2002, told the court she had been re-grouting her kitchen tile at her then-home in Belmont Shore before she turned in for the night. About 2:35 a.m., she heard her wooden floor boards creaking and, she said, knew someone was inside.

“I tried to dial 911, but I didn’t get finished,” she testified. “I dialed the 9 and the first 1 ... a man, this creature-looking, thing jumped into the door.... He came flying at me, hit me in the jaw.”

The man was naked but for socks and a T-shirt he had pulled up over his face, the woman testified. As he was climbing on top of her, she testified, she noticed that he turned off the overhead light like he knew just where it was. In 1997, a man had entered her house while someone was home with her, and the man ran off.

Her attacker performed oral copulation on her and then raped her, but seemed to lose interest after she recited the Lord’s Prayer, she said.

A second Belmont Shore victim, now 47, testified that her attacker also performed oral copulation on her before raping her. The second victim said the intruder was in her home for about two hours and talked to her extensively.

He told her he had previously entered her home and remained there while she left to return a rented videotape. But then the man who had threatened her suddenly switched topics. She testified that he asked if she had a boyfriend. He told her she had a broken light she ought to fix and, that if she was getting up earlier, not to forget to set her alarm clock.

Both women were questioned by Rathbun defense attorney Edmund Barrett about their varying physical descriptions of their attacker to police or other officials. As with many of the victims linked by DNA evidence to the same attacker, the descriptions varied dramatically and didn’t necessarily match Rathbun.

He asked the first victim if she had told officers her attacker was Latino, and she said she felt she had not attached “nationality” so much as described his skin tone.

Barrett asked the second victim who testified if she had been accurate when she told police her attacker was Latino, 5 feet 6 and 140 pounds.

Rathbun is several inches taller and is of Hawaiian-Filipino descent.

As Monday’s court testimony concluded, Rathbun was asked by the prosecutor to read out loud a statement a victim attributed to him: “Cooperate and don’t ask any questions, or it will get ugly.”

Does that sound like the person who assaulted you? the victim was asked.

“Yes, it does,” she replied.