Notorious ‘Superthief' gets life sentence after retrial in 1976 Boca Raton rape
It took nearly 50 years for a babysitter to see justice served for what happened to her when she was a teenaged girl on an October night in 1976.
She was 15, babysitting in a wealthy Boca Raton neighborhood that had seen a rash of burglaries about the same time, so many that a now-retired officer who worked the area told the South Florida Sun Sentinel he couldn't estimate a number of them. She heard a knock at the door, looked out a window and when she turned around, saw a masked man walking in the hallway of the home on Malaga Drive, who then sexually assaulted her, court records say.
The woman has now testified twice at trials of John MacLean, the man charged in her Oct. 16, 1976, rape — once in 2018 and once again earlier this month during a retrial where MacLean was again found guilty of armed sexual battery and sentenced to life on May 12.
MacLean, now 78, has already been serving one life sentence at a Florida prison since 2018. He was convicted that year of armed sexual battery in a separate attack in Boca Raton from February 1977, where a woman was attacked by a man wearing a wig. Both the assaults in 1976 and 1977 were tried separately but in the same year. In the 1976 rape of the babysitter, it took the jury at the first trial less than an hour to return a conviction. But he won on appeal in 2020 and was given a retrial, resulting in the second conviction and second life sentence.
MacLean's defense attorney Thomas Weiss declined to comment on the resolution of the case.
For decades, the identity of the man who assaulted the girl in October 1976 and a 26-year-old mother just months later while armed with a gun was unknown; the attacker in each covered his face or wore a disguise. But DNA evidence, including from jeans the babysitter wore the night she was assaulted, led to cold case detectives unmasking MacLean in 2012.
MacLean's criminal history is lengthy and spans multiple states. While serving a prison sentence in Florida in the 1980s for numerous burglaries, including a notorious one of the mansion of a Johnson & Johnson heiress where $1 million worth of jewelry was stolen, he published a braggadocious book, 'Secrets of a Superthief: An Inside guide to Keeping Burglars Outside Your Home.'
But MacLean's crimes went beyond burglaries and theft. Officers with multiple departments in South Florida in the early 1980s suspected him in possibly hundreds of sexual battery cases locally and elsewhere in the state.
The babysitter went to the home on Malaga Drive about 7 p.m. It was a Saturday night.
The area at the time was one of the wealthiest. Often people returned to the neighborhood on a Friday or Saturday night from going out to dinner or from having drinks to find their homes had been burglarized, said retired Boca Raton Deputy Chief of Police Philip Sweeting, who at the time was an officer and processed crime scenes. Such a call on a weekend was almost a 'guarantee,' he said.
'No one would be home,' he said. 'And in this case, there was a babysitter.'
It was late into the night, about 11:30 p.m., when the girl was watching TV and heard a knock at the door. She ignored it, thinking it was maybe just the kids who lived next door, according to a probable cause affidavit. But when the knocking continued, she got up to look out of a window near the door. She saw nothing.
A man was in the dark hallway near the kitchen when she turned around, wearing a dark-colored stocking over his head and holding a small handgun, the affidavit said. He got in through an opened screen door.
'Don't worry, I won't hurt you,' the man told her. 'Just don't scream and nobody will get hurt.'
The man took her outside onto the home's patio, where her jeans were left, before taking her into a bedroom and assaulting her, the affidavit said. The attacker was still inside the home as the parents returned at midnight, knocking on the door. The girl quickly grabbed her pants from the patio and was soon at the hospital after reporting what happened to her.
Assistant State Attorney Reid Scott pointed out in a court motion from 2013 how MacLean's lengthy history as a burglar made him 'experienced in entering and exiting residences without being detected and without leaving evidence that would identify him.'
Sweeting, who testified at the recent trial as a state witness, canvassed the crime scene that night for evidence. He and another crime scene investigator focused on the master bedroom, processing it for latent fingerprints, collecting the sheets and taking photos. Outside the home, they also found shoe prints, he said. They took photos and plaster casts of the impressions.
But it was DNA evidence on the girl's jeans she had quickly put back on that eventually led to MacLean.
'We didn't have a suspect for a long time,' Sweeting said.
Boca Raton Police began revisiting at least 15 unsolved sexual assault cases from the 1970s in 2010. The few of those cases that still had existing evidence had happened within five miles along a segment of highway in Boca Raton, Scott wrote in the 2013 court motion.
They reopened the babysitter's assault case in December 2011 and sent a stained piece from the girl's jeans no bigger than a quarter to be tested for DNA. It gave a match to MacLean.
His fingerprints had been entered into a federal law enforcement database in 2005 for committing a sex offense in Arizona and gave a second DNA sample two years later, court records say. In 2012, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Crime Lab got a match for MacLean from DNA evidence in both the 1976 and 1977 Boca Raton assaults.
In October 2012, MacLean was arrested and charged with two counts of armed sexual battery, charges which have no statute of limitations.
MacLean's former defense attorneys, and MacLean in his own handwritten letters to a judge, tried to poke holes in the DNA evidence. Other evidence — including the shoeprint casings, bedroom sheets and all latent fingerprints — were no longer available, either lost or destroyed, MacLean's former attorneys wrote in one court motion.
Still, a jury convicted him in 2018, the jury foreman telling the Sun Sentinel at the time that they were convinced by the DNA evidence. But the 4th District Court of Appeal overturned the conviction because of an issue with jury instructions, and the State Attorney's Office sought another conviction.
'We are pleased that the verdict and sentence have once again delivered justice for the victim of this brutal crime that happened nearly 49 years ago,' State Attorney's Office spokesperson Marc Freeman said in an emailed statement.
MacLean in jail letters to a judge after his arrest contended that he is innocent in the Boca Raton assaults and that the self-proclaimed 'Superthief' had found religion.
'My wife and I have committed our lives to Christ and serving others,' he wrote in one letter.
Information from the Sun Sentinel archives was used in this report.
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