The first of a former courier's two trials on charges that he raped two women more than 20 years ago is scheduled to resume today in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court.
William Joseph Trice, 48, was charged two years ago, after police said DNA and a fingerprint linked him to the August 1988 sexual assault of a 29-year-old woman as she was getting ready for bed in the gated community in the Eastport section of Annapolis where she lived.
Trice's lawyer, Andrew Szekely, told jurors in the Annapolis case that his client was "factually innocent," that the police work was "not as thorough as we would like," and that there were other problems with the case.
Testifying last week, investigators said they had supplemental reports, but did not see initial 1988 police reports or have the victim's statement to an Annapolis detective.
Jurors in the trial that began last week were not told Trice was also charged in a December 1988 sexual assault in Arnold. In 2005, investigators matched genetic material from the two rapes. But they did not know whose DNA it was.
Three years later, they ran a fingerprint pulled from a bedroom candle in the Annapolis assault through an automated fingerprint database that did not exist in the 1980s, and they said the fingerprint matched one from Trice, who had a minor criminal record. In 2008, Trice, who was living in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., and working as a tow truck driver, was questioned and arrested.
Tracy Morgan, then an Anne Arundel County detective working on the reopened case, testified last week that when she questioned Trice in New York, he told her he did not recognize the photo of the victim in the Annapolis rape or know how his fingerprint would have gotten on a candle in her bedroom. Then Morgan said she told him his DNA, which New York State Police got from a cigarette butt he tossed on the ground, was found on the victim.
"Oh, my God, no way, I'm worse than I thought I was," she said he responded. Then, she said, "he put his head on the table and he began to cry."
The jury was not allowed to hear another remark investigators said he made after that: "My life is over." It was ruled inadmissible by Judge Paul A. Hackner.
Whether Trice will testify is not known. Szekely said he would not discuss the case because it was pending.
The case is expected to go to the jury today or Wednesday.
State's Attorney Kathleen Rogers and the victim, who is now an artist, depicted an eerie atmosphere at the Annapolis victim's home. The victim had returned home from work at a restaurant about 2:30 a.m. to the townhouse condo she shared with her mother and was reading a novel by Stephen King in her bedroom, which was on the lower level. She received several telephone calls, all anonymous, from a male caller who told her in one, "You have a beautiful body," and in another, told her the year she was born. The victim had seen the sliding glass door to the kitchen open a few inches, but presumed her mother, asleep upstairs, had left it open for fresh air.
She decided to go to sleep and went from her room to her bathroom. When she emerged, the bedroom light she thought she had left on was turned off. As she stepped into the dark room, she was grabbed from behind and choked, and her jaw was dislocated by someone who threatened to kill her if she yelled, she testified. She was sexually assaulted, she said through tears. When he told her he knew she was alone, she feared he had killed her mother. He had not.
"Do you want to know how I know you?" the victim recalled the attacker asking before he left. "I'm your DMV guy," she said he told her as he threw the driver's license renewal forms she had left in her car onto her bed. She called her sisters before calling police, she said. She testified that she did not see her attacker.
Szekely told the jury in his opening remarks that there were no signs of injury reported on the victim's neck or genital area. In addition, no fingerprints from Trice were reported on her driver's license forms or elsewhere in the home, he said.