Palmdale Man Arrested in Rape of 10-Year-Old Girl at Movie Theater
A 31-year-old Palmdale man was arrested after he confessed to raping a 10-year-old girl at a movie complex in the Antelope Valley Mall last month, Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives said Tuesday.
Sheriff’s detectives initially sought to interview the suspect’s father, Henry Clark, who is listed on the state attorney general’s website as having committed lewd or lascivious acts on a child under the age of 14.
When detectives knocked on the Clarks’ door, the father was not home, but the son, Marque, was. He told detectives that he, not his father, regularly went to the Antelope Valley Mall and that he was at the movie theater at the time of the attack. He became the focus of the investigation, Sgt. Dan Scott said.
The girl was attacked at knifepoint at the Movies 10 complex at the Antelope Valley Mall on Aug. 29 by a man who pulled her into an empty movie theater and assaulted her.
The crime shocked and galvanized the community.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors offered a $10,000 reward; the city of Palmdale, the Antelope Valley Mall, the company that owns the theater complex and the U.S. Marshals Service together contributed $35,000.
At the same time, sheriff’s detectives in Palmdale began an intense manhunt, investigating close to 175 leads.
Detectives in the sheriff’s special victims unit started by targeting the 23 registered sex offenders who live in the mall’s ZIP Code -- 93551 -- seeking to interview each one as to his whereabouts at the time of the attack, Scott said.
After Clark told detectives that he was at the movies at the time of the attack, detectives asked him for a voluntary DNA swab, Scott said, which Clark allowed them to take.
About the same time, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children delivered enhanced surveillance footage taken by security cameras at the theaters.
“The detective was sitting down and going through all the footage and he noticed a very suspicious individual going in and out of doors, looking around ... who just happened to look similar to the suspect they’d recently talked to,” Scott said.
At that time, the crime lab still had not returned the results from the DNA swab, so detectives asked Marque Clark to take a polygraph exam, which he failed, Scott said.
That’s when Clark confessed. A search warrant on the home yielded further evidence, Scott said, but he declined to elaborate.
Clark is being held on $2-million bail, he said.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
