The guy who raped a woman in 1984, was subsequently IDd by her, and then confessed to the crime a few months ago has put forth a clever defense strategy: he didn’t do it. (By “clever” I mean, of course, “stupid.”) As Liesel Nowak writes in today’s Daily Progress, William Beebe e-mailed Liz Seccuro recently and wrote, in part: “I’m not intentionally minimizing the fact of having raped you. I did.” His attorney says that he “did not contact Ms. Seccuro to apologize for a rape because that’s not what happened.”
Perhaps he’ll be moving on to the Chewbacca Defense next?
maybe he’ll use the Andrew Alston defense and claim that she raped herself. i hope they put this idiot away for a long, long time.
Amen. Hey, go to 29’s website. You can see the piece she did with Paul Merrill and they SHOW the email.
Thanks for the tip on the 29-link. It’s a well done piece. (Anyone know who produced it? It strikes me as being beyond 29’s normal skills. Kudos.)
But I’m puzzled when the victim says at the end of the piece that she the “system is failing her.” Perhaps when I read The Hook article, this will make sense.
All of the work on those three pieces was done by the folks at NBC 29.
Spang – I think she means the Vegas system is failing her, as in, they released him on bond for a felony. It’s a quote that looks like another piece.
If I was the judge then I would have released him on bond. Maybe even on his own recognizance. He did a very bad, illegal thing and should be punished for it. But the kind of guy who decides to contact her, apologize, offer reparations and confess all while using his real contact information is probably not the kind of person who you have to worry about fleeing from justice. He’s gone out of his way to flee towards it. I see no reason to think that this person is an immediate danger to the public.
People forget that the question of releasing an accused criminal on bond is not intended to be a matter of punishment. They’ll get to that soon enough.
I think that what Beebe and his lawyer are saying is that Beebe took advantage of her wrongly and harmfully but that she did not refuse sex in a manner clear enough to meet the legal definition of rape. I’m not saying that it’s true (the whole thing sure sounds like rape to me) but it’s not necessarily as nutty a contradiction as it looks at first glance.
I think that if I were the judge, I wouldn’t have granted him bond. Here’s why: Here’s this guy who might have thought that the statute of limitations was up and never thought he’d be facing this charge. Now, he spends a weekend in jail and might be thinking, “To hell with this. I’m running.” We’ll see if that actually happens. I think his next scheduled court appearance is in Nevada on February 9th.
Manny—
Are you perhaps with 29?
You seem very “close” to information with this case.