Randolph Wightman nearly got away with years of abuse.
The Baltimore County man was convicted in 1994 of fondling his then-teenage relative. He pleaded guilty 10 years later to fondling the 16-year-old daughter of a friend.
But it wasn?t until a Baltimore County prosecutor tracked down allegations Wightman had been forcing oral sex on the same relative for years, going back to the 1980s when they lived in Florida, that he faced the extent of his alleged crimes, prosecutors said.
Wightman was convicted last week in a Tampa court of capital sexual battery, which in Florida carries an automatic life sentence, a prosecutor there said. The alleged victim, who was at the time of the abuse was related to Wightman by marriage, is now 26. The abuse started when she was 6 years old.
“He is a bad guy that they got [him] off the street, and I am so glad,” said Stephen Roscher, an assistant state?s attorney in Baltimore County who prosecuted Wightman?s 2004 case.
Neither Wightman?s defense attorney from the 2004 case nor the one for the case in Florida could be reached for comment.
Looking over the details of the 1994 conviction, in which Wightman was accused of abusing the relative after the family moved to Maryland, Roscher said he read in a police report that Wightman said he had engaged the girl in even more serious sex acts when they lived in the Tampa area.
Roscher wondered whether the allegations were at the time forwarded to Florida, where there?s no statute of limitations on those types of crimes. The prosecutor tracked down the Baltimore County detective who?d worked the case in the early 1990s and learned the allegations were never reported to authorities in Tampa.
So Roscher told them himself.
“I don?t think she felt like there was much justice for her in the Baltimore County case,” Roscher said of the former relative, who came in 2004 to Wightman?s sentencing in Baltimore County Circuit Court and met the 16-year-old victim there. “So much worse had been done to her.”
When Wightman finished his year in prison for fondling the 16-year-old in Baltimore County, he was taken to Hillsborough County.
It was an unusual trial last week, said Kimberly Hindman, an assistant state?s attorney who prosecuted the case in Hillsborough County.
There were almost no local witnesses, she said ? almost everyone flew down from Baltimore.
kcullinan@baltimoreexaminer
