A cold-case rapist, who appeared unfazed by the life sentence a judge imposed Tuesday, maintains his innocence and plans to appeal his conviction despite DNA evidence linking him to the 1990 attack on a woman at a Linthicum nightclub.
“Eight months and I’ll be home,” Wendell Keys shouted to his mother, who was sobbing deeply as her son was handcuffed and led out of the courtroom smiling.
“Just chill out. I’ll be home real soon.”
Defense attorney Warren Brown said his client was referring to the eight-month appeals process he plans to pursue on several grounds.
Brown said the Anne Arundel jury’s verdict in July was inconsistent, because Keys, 40, of Gwynn Oak, was convicted of raping a 26-year-old woman he met at the Safari nightclub in 1990, even though he was found not guilty of conspiracy.
Brown said the conspiracy charge was an essential element to proving first-degree rape, because a weapon wasn’t involved.
But Anne Arundel Circuit Judge William Mulford was not swayed, saying the sentence was strictly imposed to punish Keys, who was arrested in August 2007 after the county’s crime lab matched his DNA to semen left at the scene.
“Quite frankly, you’ve had 18 years of freedom that you didn’t deserve,” Mulford told Keys before handing down a life sentence for first-degree rape as well as five years to be served concurrently for false imprisonment.
“DNA is a powerful tool. It’s a tool of exclusion, but it’s also a tool of inclusion.”
Mulford said Keys was a danger to society, noting his two prior second-degree rape convictions.
“By the vile, vicious hands of Wendell Keys, a complete and total stranger to me, my body, mind and spirit was brutally violated,” the victim wrote in a statement read in court by prosecutor Pamela Alban.
“He imposed a life sentence of no longer living the freedom of my life.”
The victim, now 44, trembled throughout the sentencing and was comforted by family members.
She said she suffers from anxiety and panic attacks, causing her to be hospitalized after the case resurfaced this past summer.
Brown argued during the three-day trial that the sex was consensual and the victim made up to the rape to appease an abusive boyfriend who was angry when she came home at 4 a.m.
But Alban said the woman was kidnapped outside the nightclub by a group of men and raped by two of them in the back seat of a car while they threatened her life.
The second suspect has not been identified.
