Man who abducted woman, 18, from Liberty Plaza in 1990 and raped her is eligible for parole

Staff report

WARREN

Marlon R. Chattman, 60, who abducted an 18-year-old high-school student from the Liberty Plaza parking lot in 1990 and raped her, is eligible for parole again this month – just six months from the time the parole board considered his release the last time.

Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins, as he did for the earlier parole hearing, has written to the Ohio Parole Board, asking that it again refuse to allow him to go free.

Watkins said Chattman has a maximum sentence that could keep him locked up until he’s 84 – in 2040.

“Without a doubt, this guy is very dangerous and probably homicidal, and should be locked up the maximum period of time,” Watkins said in his most-recent letter to the parole board.

Watkins said he disagrees with a prison summary that puts Chattman’s risk score in the moderate range. “I base my assessment on his known criminal history and violent-crime convictions outside prison walls over a lifetime and his repeated failures in rehabilitation and following the rules while in prison for more than 40 years,” Watkins said.

“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 of an incident on Benita Avenue in Youngstown.

Chattman spent 16 years in prison in Indiana for robbing and raping a 59-year-old woman in a dry-cleaning store in Fort Wayne in 1973, when he was 17.

“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.