| Issue #36, December 1, 2006 |
20-Year Sentence
Man Who Attacked Women on the Beach Pleads Guilty
By Dan Rattiner
It was this community’s dirty little secret, but for a period of three years, between 2002 and 2005, a very sick masked man terrorized dozens of women on the Hamptons beaches in Hampton Bays, Southampton Village, Quogue, Water Mill and East Hampton. He did not kill anybody but he did assault people. What he would do, if he came upon a woman walking the beach alone, was go behind a sand dune, quickly take off all his clothes, put on a ski mask and leap out to display himself and frighten her. On half a dozen of those occasions he’d grab the woman and throw her to the ground face down in the sand and then attempt to rape her.
He did not succeed in this, at least partially because the women he attacked tried or did fend him off, or because others would come to their aid and he’d run off, but sometimes it seemed that he broke off the attack because he was satisfied. He was clearly an obsessed individual.
In total, it is believed there were about three dozen attacks all together. They occurred, therefore, at the rate of about one every 10 days somewhere in the Hamptons during the warm weather, and on one level it seems astonishing that the police had so much trouble in apprehending this individual.
One problem was that every day, there were upwards of 50,000 people out on approximately thirty different beaches. When they stayed together in groups, there were no problems. But the isolated areas comprised a seventy mile strip, and to come upon an encounter that might take five minutes somewhere along this strip was very difficult to do. Finally, the women involved, who were both terrorized and traumatized, could not identify their attacker because he was masked. This would not be easy. There were, however, some descriptions of a car that might have been involved.
After this individual was finally caught, which was in late June of 2005, a press conference was held at which police officers from five different jurisdictions presided, along with the Mayor of East Hampton Village, Paul Rickenbach Jr., and the police chief of that village, Gerald Larsen, who finally led a team to catch this man. Chief Larsen said that this man had been a thorn in the side of the different departments for years. They thought he was the man they were looking for. He was often encountered sitting in his car at the side of a road near a beach. His car was a close but not an exact match to the descriptions of it they had. The man never did anything wrong, however. There was nothing they could do.
They tried. Both the Southampton and East Hampton Police Departments used female police officers in bathing suits walking alone to try to lure him out onto the beach. But nothing happened. After one particular assault, they set up roadblocks leading to and from the beach, and they searched the dunes with police dogs over a one-mile radius. They got nothing. They did, however, list their suspect on bulletin boards at police stations in the area as “a person of interest.”
On June 23, 2005, however, they decided that this had gone on far enough. On that day, at 8:45 a.m., a 61-year-old woman was assaulted by a masked man as she walked down the beach near the Maidstone Club in East Hampton. On the sand in front of Old Beach Lane, he came running up toward her wearing only this ski mask, and as she turned, he grabbed her from behind, threw her to the ground and began sexually assaulting her. Her screams came to the attention of cabin boys putting deck chairs out onto the beach for the morning at the club, and some of them ran over and chased the man into the dunes to the east while others went to the clubhouse to report what was going on and call the police.
Once again, they did not catch this man. The woman, hysterical, was taken to Southampton Hospital where she was found to be okay except for some cuts and scratches on her face from having it pushed into the sand. And at that point, it was decided to go have a talk about things with John J. Giraldo.
Giraldo, age 30, was a housepainter from Colombia who worked for a Hampton Bays construction company. He was also an illegal immigrant. The central office freely told the police where he was that day, and they went there that afternoon, to a house under construction in Southampton, and they talked to him and then arrested him.
Under interrogation, talking through an interpreter, he told one story and then another and they did not match up. He continued to do this, and then he confessed, and told police of one assault after another.
He’s been in jail now for a year and a half awaiting a major trial, unable to make a $100,000 bail. He was charged with crimes in six different attacks in East Hampton, at Wyandanch Beach in Southampton, Mecox Beach in Water Mill and Quogue Village Beach, and Old Town Road Beach in Southampton. A DNA sample was found to have matched.
And so, this past week, he has accepted a plea bargain.
Giraldo, who has been in this country for six years and has a wife and child back at home in Colombia, will plead guilty to sodomy, attempted rape, sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment and will serve a twenty-year term in the State Penitentiary instead of a total of more than fifty years that he might have served had he been convicted of all charges. Giraldo wept as he entered his plea.
At the official sentencing, which will be held on January 11, 2007, some of his victims will address the defendant about how they felt. And about how they continue to feel.
* * *
I have two thoughts about all of this.
One is that the authorities used very poor judgment, in my opinion in not soliciting the help of the general beach-going public to track this man down earlier. The fear might have been that it could have caused a panic, or negatively impacted the economic circumstances of the summer season here. But the frequency of the attacks, one every ten days, would seem to overrule that. And posting signs in which it is described who is at risk and what happens would have blunted the trauma of the surprise when it occurred, and could have resulted in group action to make an earlier arrest. It could even have resulted in the man stopping the behavior.
The second thing is to NOT attribute a particular behavior to a particular ethnic group. The facts are that crime is not being caused by any one group more than any other. There have been sick individuals such as this one perpetrating crimes from every race, creed and religion and if you think about recent specific examples, you know it is so.
I feel badly for those who have had to endure what they did from this individual. It’s over. And so, to paraphrase Southwest Airlines, it is now safe to move about the beaches.
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