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Trumbull prosecutor opposes rapist’s parole
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins is opposing the release from prison of a man originally from Flint, Mich., who abducted an 18-year-old high school student from the Liberty Plaza parking lot in 1990 and raped her.
The woman told police that Marlon R. Chattman, 54, grabbed her from behind as she was getting into her car, told her to get in and pushed her into the passenger seat.
He pulled a knife out of his jacket and threatened to kill her if she screamed.
Chattman drove around Liberty Township and Youngstown’s North Side until he found a vacant house, then raped the woman in the car while the car was parked in the driveway.
Chattman let the woman go after she promised she wouldn’t tell anyone what he did.
Chattman, serving an indefinite sentence of 15 to 50 years, will have a parole hearing next month in Columbus.
“Today I still stand by my position given in 2000 that Chattman ‘serve the maximum amount of time law allows’ to wit: imprisonment to the year 2040,” Watkins wrote to the parole board.
Six months before he abducted and raped the 18-year-old, Chattman stabbed a woman with whom he was living on Benita Avenue in Youngstown six times, according to Vindicator files.
Chattman would not have been free in May 1990 to commit the rape if not for a communication mistake that occurred after Chattman was arrested in Mahoning County for the stabbing, The Vindicator reported.
The reason the mistake was made was not clear, but Mahoning County officials never became aware that Chattman had spent 16 years in prison in Indiana for robbing and raping a 59-year-old woman in a dry-cleaning store in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1973, when Chattman was age 17, The Vindicator reported.
Because Judge William Houser of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court was unaware of Chattman’s conviction in Indiana, he sentenced Chattman to two years’ probation for the Youngstown stabbing, not the multiyear prison term he most likely would have gotten, officials said.
Chattman moved to Youngstown in summer 1989 after leaving prison in Indiana because a pen-pal suggested the city to him while Chattman was in prison, court documents say.
Watkins used DNA for the first time in Trumbull County history in the Chattman case, and the results indicated that the chances that anyone but Chattman committed the rape of the 18-year-old were 145 million-to-one, the prosecutor said.
“This office firmly believes it would be nearly the same odds now that Marlon Chattman would re-offend if released from prison,” Watkins wrote.