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Liberty Township rapist due for parole hearing in December
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins is again opposing the release from prison of Marlon R. Chattman, 59, who abducted an 18-year-old high school student from the Liberty Plaza parking lot in 1990 and raped her.
“This was not Chattman’s first time in committing acts of violence and rape,” Watkins said in a letter he sent in 2010 to the Ohio Parole Board.
“In the year before his Trumbull County arrest [November 1989] he was arrested in Mahoning County for felonious assault [stabbing a female victim repeatedly],” Watkins wrote.
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 he 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 17.
As a result, Judge William Houser of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court was unaware of Chattman’s conviction in Indiana and sentenced Chattman to two years’ probation for the Youngstown stabbing, not the multiyear prison term he most likely would have gotten, officials said.
Chattman was convicted of robbery and rape for a 1973 incident in Indiana and was sentenced to terms of 10 to 25 years and two to 21 years, Watkins said.
“In 1989, after serving 16 years in prison, he moved to Youngstown, Ohio, and found more innocent victims to attack and harm,” Watkins said.
In the Liberty case, the woman told police Chattman 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 for the Liberty rape, will have a parole hearing next month in Columbus.
“If there were insurance policies for re-offender risk and damages for sexual predators, Marlon Chattman would not find an underwriter – the risk is too high. There is a virtual guarantee that someone will be seriously harmed with this release into society,” Watkins said in a letter to the Ohio Parole Board last week.