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OAP Arrested After 40-Year Hunt For Rapist
1:34pm Friday September 10, 2010
A fugitive pensioner accused of rape in the US has been arrested – nearly 40 years after the alleged crime took place.
Russell Benjamin Pearce, aged 73, was apprehended at his home in eastern Pennsylvania after a mobile telephone call he made to prosecutors in May was traced by police. He had been living under the name Russell Stengle for 16 years, having been charged with two separate attacks on women in New York in 1970.
We had a phone number and it was a cell phone. The rest is good, old-fashioned police work <cite>
New York state police investigator Joe Barrett
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Although Pearce jumped his £10,000 bail while awaiting trial in 1971, he periodically called police over the following years to check whether he was still wanted. But while all his previous calls had been made from payphones, he was tracked down after police traced a mobile phone he used to contact them in May.
New York state police investigator Joe Barrett was among those actively hunting Pearce for the last five years. He said: "He still refused to turn himself in. “We had a phone number and it was a cell phone. The rest is good, old-fashioned police work."
Pearce was charged with raping a 19-year-old woman in June 1970, about 90 miles from Manhattan. The victim claimed a man offered her a ride on his motorcycle, but drove her in the wrong direction to a wooded area and raped her repeatedly over three hours.
He was then accused of a second assault involving a 20-year-old hitchhiker the following December. She identified Pearce after being shown a photo of him and said he had raped her after driving her to New Jersey.
He is now being held at a prison in Pennsylvania, while awaiting extradition to New York Police said all charges in the New Jersey case had been dropped after the victim declined to prosecute, but the New York charges stood because Pearce had been indicted.
