a placeless world

Floyd Maestas' fingerprints were found in her home. His DNA was found in her body.

But while Maestas may have been responsible for the stabbing, beating, raping and strangling of 75-year-old Donna Lou Bott, it took more than one man to kill her.

It took an entire system.

Over the past 30 years — through at least a half-dozen similar attacks against elderly women — charging decisions, plea negotiations and parole board determinations have ensured Maestas has never been convicted of a single violent crime. As a result, he never spent much time behind bars.

The maddening story begins no later than 1974, as Bruce Hansen walked passed the darkened home of the aunt who raised him.

"I usually visited her on my way home, but on that night I didn't," he says. "I still can't forgive myself for that."

Inside, Maestas was beating and raping 64-year-old Donna Jensen.

"The doctors had to sew one of her nipples back on — that's how bad it was," Hansen recalls.

Maestas, then 17 years old, was convicted of burglary. He was paroled after serving 18 months.

Three months after his release, he was arrested again.

Jerrilynn Comollo still sobs when she thinks about cleaning Maestas' blood from underneath her grandmother's fingernails. "She had fought so hard that all that blood was way down into the quick," Comollo recalls.

Alinda Ross Robbins McLean's nails were the least of the 79-year-old woman's concerns: Over the course of several hours on the evening of Oct. 13, 1976, she was repeatedly raped and savagely beaten. And before Maestas left her home, he lifted a broken lamp from the floor and told the twice-widowed woman that he was going to use it to gouge out one of her eyes.

And then he did just that.

While she cleaned her grandmother's hands — the only thing Comollo could think to do at the moment — the old woman wondered aloud why she had been chosen for such punishment.

"She just kept saying, over and over, 'I can't understand why anyone would do this to me.'"

There was, of course, no answer for that poor, beautiful, old woman. But there was a promise that should have been made. A promise that should have been kept.

A promise that wasn't: Maestas served six years for the attack on McLean. And he spent the following decade in and out of prison on a slew of parole violations — most of which, his family members recall, had something to do with elderly women.

In the fall of 1989, prosecutors were eyeing Maestas in at least three new burglaries. In two, the elderly victims were physically beaten and sexually assaulted.

But officials chose to prosecute Maestas on a third case: A burglary in which Maestas was confronted by three elderly Greek sisters — who had come home from church together to make some Baklava — and chased out of their home before he could attack.

Convicted of theft, burglary and being a habitual criminal, Maestas was sentenced to one to 15 years in prison.

The other cases were set aside. One was dismissed, the other never filed.

Loene Nelson, now 69 years old, is still not sure why her case was ignored.

"At the time, a detective showed me his rap sheet and said, 'Listen, this is all this guy needs to be put away forever," Nelson says. "I believed him."

Nine years later, Maestas was back on the street. Once again, he repeatedly violated his parole. In April, 2000, he was convicted of burglary — one of few convictions on Maestas' lengthy criminal record that does not involve an elderly female victim — and sentenced to a one-to-5-year prison term.

He was released from prison on Sept. 7 — nine months before the full five years and without supervision, said parole board chairman Mike Sibbett.

Three weeks later, Bott was dead.

Her badly beaten body lay in the bedroom of her home for three days before police — acting on the concerns of neighbors — entered her home. Next to her body, they found a pair of her underwear.

An autopsy determined Bott's face had been slashed while she was still alive. She was strangled and her teeth were fractured. And she had been raped.

Maestas left a mountain of physical evidence in his wake. And that is all well and good for prosecutors, who appear poised to seek the death penalty in Bott's murder.

They're now making the promise they should have made long ago: If Maestas doesn't die of lethal injection, he'll die in prison.

But it's too late for Jensen. Too late for McLean. Too late for Nelson.

The failure to make the promise became the lifeblood of a serial rapist. And the failure to keep it resulted in the death of Donna Lou Bott.