A convicted rapist accused of attacking a woman at an Anne Arundel County light-rail station last fall was convicted yesterday of a reduced charge because of convenience store security camera footage that showed the 50-year-old man and his young victim holding hands just before the assault.
Initially believed to be a random attack, the incident raised concerns about security at light-rail stations. But the video backed up defendant Eugene Waller's assertion that the girl had approached him to buy her beer and that together they had ventured into the woods near the Linthicum station to drink.
Waller, who has a nearly 30-year history of violent sexual assaults and other sex-related offenses, wailed and sobbed as Circuit Judge William C. Mulford explained the ramifications of entering an Alford plea, in which Waller denied guilt while conceding that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict him of second-degree rape.
Though charged with first-degree rape, which carries a maximum penalty of life, Waller now faces the possibility of 20 years.
"Given the evidence that we had, it was an appropriate plea," said Kristin Fleckenstein, a spokeswoman for the Anne Arundel County state's attorney's office.
His arrest - and the discovery that he had slipped through a number of cracks in the justice system - outraged domestic-violence activists. Days before the Oct. 9 attack, Waller was acquitted on a technicality of indecent exposure on another light-rail train in Anne Arundel and walked out of a courtroom, though a warrant should have been out for his arrest for failing to register a current address.
For more than a year before that, authorities in two jurisdictions had been unsuccessful in locating him, and he had been inadvertently left off the state's public database for sex offenders. Anne Arundel police told The Sun in December that they had become wrongly convinced that it was not their responsibility to locate him.
According to prosecutors, Waller and the 22-year-old victim met after she got off at the Nursery Road light-rail stop and asked him to purchase beer for her. They went into the Royal Farms store, wandering the aisles and at one point holding hands, according to defense attorney Elizabeth Palan.
They eventually purchased alcohol from a nearby liquor store and walked back into the woods along the tracks to drink. Prosecutors said Waller's demeanor changed and he struck her and threatened to kill her. He dragged her deeper into the woods, prosecutors said, and raped her repeatedly.
