SHE WILL NEVER FORGET HIS POCK-MARKED face or his icy blue eyes. She was a student at Florida International University when, she contends, a man wearing a black cape broke into her suburban Miami apartment on Feb. 2, 1974, and raped her at gunpoint. Now a 40-year-old businesswoman, she still has nightmares about the alleged rape—particularly the final cruelty inflicted on her. "Right before he left he said, 'The gun isn't real.' It was like, 'Ha, ha, I got you,' " she says. "I've relived it millions of times, and I just keep thinking, 'Why didn't I fight back?' "
Police are convinced the caped intruder was a criminal dubbed the Gentle Rapist, who is suspected of sexually assaulting more than 60 young women in various Florida cities during the '70s. Though they had little physical evidence to work with, police point to a distinctive modus operandi as evidence that the crimes were all committed by one man. As nimble and elusive as a phantom, the Gentle Rapist slipped past locks and alarms at will. He carried a portable radio, detectives say, to monitor police transmissions. And to hide his identity, he wore gloves and rarely lifted his mask.
In the sexual assault on the Florida International student, as in the other cases police have linked to the Gentle Rapist, the culprit wore a trademark waist pouch in which he kept vaginal lubrication jelly. What made the case unique was that he not only gave the victim a good look at his face but left fingerprints as well.
It took police seven years to match the fingerprints with a suspect they identify as Jack MacLean, now 45, a cat burglar whose use of police radios to evade surveillance and whose ability to breech sophisticated alarm systems had earned him the nickname Superthief. Called in to look over a photo lineup, the former Florida International student immediately picked out a mug shot of MacLean. "The policeman jumped out of his chair," she recalls. "He said, That's the most positive ID I've ever seen.' "
There was just one problem: A two-year statute of limitations had run out on the case, as well as on five other rapes to which MacLean allegedly was linked by fingerprints or victim IDs of his face, and he could not be brought to trial. "Had we not been past the statute of limitations we would have gone forward with prosecution," says Assistant State Attorney Susan Dannelly. "And there is no doubt in my mind that I would have convicted him." Charges were brought for one rape where the statute had not expired, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Then serving a 15-year sentence in the Dade Correctional Institution for burglary charges stemming from the 1979 theft of more than $1 million in jewels from a mansion outside Fort Lauderdale, MacLean was released in April 1987 and moved to Arizona.
Four years later, when Phoenix police answered a burglary call in a wealthy neighborhood and found MacLean hiding in some bushes nearby, he said he was out for a jog. Police said he had a portable scanner radio. They also recovered a wig and burglary tools from an adjacent yard. In February, MacLean pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary charges and faces a possible sentence of 7½ to 15 years in state prison. He also faces an additional 37 months on federal charges for transporting stolen property.
This spring, for the first time, MacLean is scheduled to go to trial for alleged sexual crimes. In Phoenix, MacLean had allegedly billed himself as a photographer and distributed fliers soliciting nude models. He now stands accused of sexually exploiting two adolescent girls by taking pornographic pictures of them. He is also charged with having intercourse with one of the underage girls and sexual contact with the other against her will. MacLean denies these charges. But if convicted, he could face an additional 30 years in state prison.
In a recent letter to PEOPLE, MacLean dismissed as "nonsense" allegations that he has committed sex crimes. "Let's make a deal," he wrote. "You leave out the sex, and I promise to never short-sheet your beds. But more important, you can keep your dentures."
A few weeks after his arrest last September, however, MacLean was eager to meet with a reporter to talk about Why They Call Me Superthief, a boastful autobiographical account of his past burglary exploits, which he is currently selling by mail order. Speaking in soft and insinuating tones during an interview at Phoenix's Madison Street Jail, he portrayed himself as a mischievous rogue who abhors violence.
Growing up in Reading, Mass., MacLean was forever tinkering with CB radios and other electronic gadgets and fantasized about a career in law enforcement. Instead, when he graduated from high school in 1965, he went on the road for several years with a traveling carnival and ran a ropeclimbing game. After taking a correspondence course in locksmithing, MacLean settled in Fort Lauderdale in the '70s and began stealing cash and jewels from upscale homes in various Florida cities. "I stole from the wealthy so I could live their lifestyle," he says.
And it seems he did. Though his exact take will never be known, MacLean soon became so rich he was able to purchase a Cessna 172 and a Lake seaplane to travel between a middle-class home outside Fort Lauderdale and a summer residence in Vinalhaven, Maine. MacLean even bought his own Hughes 300-C helicopter, which he decorated with two gold-leaf stars to make it look like a police vehicle. The morning after one jewel heist, he brags, he buzzed the scene of the crime in his chopper. "As I got over the house, there were about 30 detectives milling around," MacLean says. "I grabbed my siren, and they all looked up to me and waved."
Despite such bravado, police didn't get wise to MacLean until he fell victim to another's carelessness. In January 1979, MacLean stole jewels worth more than $1 million retail from the Fort Lauderdale area home of Keith Wold, an ophthalmologist, and his wife, Elaine, a Johnson & Johnson heiress. "The alarm they beat at the Wold house was unbelievable," says Arthur McLellan, a former Fort Lauderdale detective who handled the case. "It had weight and motion sensors and heat detectors." As they hotfooted it out of the house, however, one of MacLean's three accomplices made a critical mistake: He left behind a hand-held radio containing a custom-made crystal.
Seven weeks later Detective McLellan traced the special crystal in the radio back to a local manufacturer and discovered that it had been ordered by MacLean. When police subsequently arrested MacLean at his home, they found a cache of jewelry. MacLean was taken into custody in March 1979 and remained in prison until he was sentenced for the Wold burglary a year later.
Police who had been stalking the notorious Gentle Rapist meanwhile were faced with a perplexing development. "The rapes stopped rather abruptly in late 1978," says Jesse Patmore, then a Metro-Dade sexual battery cop. "So we thought the rapist must be dead or in jail somewhere."
According to police, the Gentle Rapist had first surfaced in Gainesville and Miami in 1971 and had struck at will throughout the state for the next seven years. "From the beginning they were really strange cases," says Louise Vasquez, then a Miami detective. "He'd force girls to parade with no clothes on in front of open windows and then tell them they shouldn't be doing that." Vasquez's former partner Mike Gonzalez believes the rapist found it arousing to accuse his victims of acting in a lascivious manner. "Very often rapists would mention to their victims, 'This was your fault,' " says Gonzales. "But nobody delivered long lectures like this guy."
Over the years, as a state task force tracked the rapist's activities, his tactics remained remarkably consistent. "I've never encountered another rapist who used vaginal lubricant," says Mike Kellar, a Metro-Dade detective who joined the investigation in 1978. "Not only did this guy use it every time, he always produced it from a pouch around his waist. And then there's the cape. How many men do you see who look like Errol Flynn in Robin Hood?" Given to grand theatrics, the rapist often dressed up in the women's lingerie. "On occasion, he'd take a victim out into the backyard," says Kellar's former colleague J.J. Crocker. "And when he'd achieve orgasm, he'd howl like a dog."
After following thousands of leads, Kellar and Crocker were still at square one when Jesse Patmore, a colleague familiar with the investigation, left the Metro-Dade rape squad in early 1980 and bought a small country store in Hot Springs, N.C.A year later, while minding the store on a slow day, Patmore thumbed through his wife's copy of the February 1981 issue of Cosmopolitan and discovered an article about a convicted burglar in Florida who was bucking for early parole so he could launch a nationwide speaking tour on crime prevention. Patmore's heartbeat quickened as he read that this Superthief—Jack MacLean—had a familiar modus operandi. Like the Gentle Rapist, he wore a cape and a belt pouch for carrying tools. Moreover, he had a bad complexion and deep-set blue eyes.
On a hunch, Patmore called his old vice-squad buddies and suggested they check out whether this Superthief might have been moonlighting as a rapist. "It also gave me an excuse to say hello," he says. Sure enough, police say, MacLean's fingerprints matched those recovered from the 1974 rape of the Florida International University student.
Her case was typical of the more than 60 reported cases of sexual assault police believe were committed by the Gentle Rapist. According to the victim, when she opened the door to her apartment on the evening of the rape, she encountered a masked man wearing a cape, with nothing underneath, who marched her at gunpoint into a bedroom. "He had taken just about all the mirrors in the house and set them around the room," she says. "It was like a stage, so I could see him and he could see himself." The intruder, she says, donned a see-through pink nightie and kept saying, "You wear these things to tease men. You're just asking for it." Then he raped her. "He wanted me to lick my lips like in those porno movies, and I kept saying, 'I can't understand you. I can't understand you,' " she recalls. "So he finally pulled the mask up to show me how to lick my lips. It was in the heat of the thing. He was so wrought up I don't think he even realized that I saw his face."
The rapist's fingerprints were later recovered from a dresser where he left a note that read, "I think I love you. I'll see you again soon." When the victim identified MacLean's photo seven years later, police also found that the fingerprints taken from her apartment matched MacLean's. Miami cops had only one hope of getting around the statute of limitations: a confession. So Detective Kellar paid MacLean a visit in the Dade Correctional Institution, hoping to trick him into an admission of guilt. "I spent an hour or two with this guy, and I couldn't even get him to sign a rights waiver," Kellar says. "He has a lot of concentration. He knows when he is in jeopardy."
Kellar is delighted that Arizona authorities have his old nemesis behind bars once again. But he worries that MacLean is still a potential menace. "This guy will not change," Kellar says. ""He has some kind of compulsion which makes him do these crimes. If he gets out again, he won't stop." The former Florida International student agrees. "I put him in a class of criminals that is the lowest, unhelpable type," she says. "I'm not a violent person. But if I had him in front of me right now, I know I could shoot him without feeling one bit of remorse."
DAVID GROGAN
CINDY DAMPIER in Miami, DON SIDER in Fort Lauderdale and JOAN SHEFF in Phoenix
- Contributors:
- Cindy Dampier,
- Don Sider,
- Joan Sheff.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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