Texas 'House of Horrors' Rapist Found Guilty
Texas "House of Horrors" rapist, Jeffrey Allan Maxwell, who held his former neighbor captive for nearly two weeks, was convicted Tuesday. It took jurors, who are set to hear more evidence in the trial's punishment phase Wednesday, less than one hour to convict Maxwell.
If found guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual assault, and aggravated kidnapping Maxwell 59, could face a life in prison.
"What this defendant, Jeff Maxwell, did is monstrous. It is frankly unimaginable and it's inhuman, and it's time to hold him accountable," Parker County prosecutor Jeff Swain told jurors during closing arguments.
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Maxwell is accused of kidnapping a 63-year-old woman at gunpoint, from her rural Texas home in Parker County on March 1, 2011. His victim testified that he held her captive for 12 days in his house, chaining her to a bed, hanging her up using a deer-skinning rack and sexually assaulting her.
She testified that the first days after he captured her, he kept her gagged and chained to a bed, and locked her in wooden box while he went out to run errands. After eight days after her kidnapping, she fell ill, and this is when she says he stopped the assaults and allowed her to be unrestrained while the two were together.
Maxwell told investigators he never planned to kill the woman and was intending to let her go as soon as her bruises healed. "I got myself into something I couldn't figure out how to get out of," he told the investigator.
Maxwell is also a person of interest in the disappearance of his ex-wife Martha Martinez Maxwell, who in 1987, accused her then husband of duct-taping her, drugging, torturing and raping her before slicing her throat.
The grand jury declined to indict him on the charges. Five years later she went missing, and authorities say she has not been heard from since.
