43
Prosecutor opposes parole for Niles rapist
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins opposes parole for Randall L. Whitmore, 54, who has served 27 years in prison for raping his daughter while she was between age 5 and 7, raping one of his daughter’s friends and other sex crimes.
He was sentenced to life in prison. The state parole board will review his case for possible parole in January.
Whitmore had been raping his daughter for close to two years when she had a sleepover in February 1988 with two girls age 8 and 10 who also lived in the Royal Mall apartments in Niles, according to a Niles police report and Whitmore’s indictment.
Whitmore, then 26, went into the bedroom where the girls were sleeping and raped both of his daughter’s friends, a police report says. Authorities later spoke with his daughter, and she told them of the sex crimes her father had committed against her.
Whitmore was convicted of the lesser offense of gross sexual imposition involving one of the two of his daughter’s friends.
In a letter Watkins wrote to the parole board this month, he said Whitmore committed “violent physical acts” against his daughter, twice tying her arms and legs while raping her.
He also forced his daughter to watch pornographic movies and then “imitate with him the sexual acts portrayed in the movie.” He told her: “Don’t tell or Daddy will go to jail.”
When interviewed by the director of the Forensic Center of District XI, Whitmore said he “began having sexual contact with his daughter ... in the winter of 1986, when his daughter was 5 years old.
“When asked why he began a sexual relationship with his daughter, he stated that he was ‘depressed all the time and he was fighting with his wife over a messy house.’ He adds that he and his wife would get into an argument and she would leave the house, at which time he would sexually abuse” his daughter.
Watkins wrote: “Without any doubt the facts from multiple persons, including himself, establish that Randall Whitmore is a brutal child sexual predator whose lecherous attacks on different young children only underscores the absolute need to keep him in prison for the rest of this natural life.”