The man accused of terrorizing DeKalb County in 2011 will spend the rest of his life in prison.
A jury on Friday convicted Gary Wendale Mincey of all 17 charges of rape or attempted rape in attacks on five women over a six-week period in the fall of that year.
Mincey, 36, kept the same smirk he wore through the entire four-day trial as the jury foreman read each guilty verdict.
“We are very, very pleased with the jury verdict,” DeKalb County Chief Assistant District Attorney Nicole Marchand Golden told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re just happy we could rid DeKalb County of this predator who stalked, robbed and raped his victims … for seemingly no rhyme or reason.”
Sentencing will be held at a later, undisclosed date, but Mincey faces eight consecutive life terms plus 135 years if he is given the maximum sentence.
Golden used harsh language to describe Mincey.
“Monster,” she said. “The Boogie Man.” “A woman’s worst nightmare.”
Mincey’s attorney, however, insisted the defendant was not the man who followed women home and attacked them.
“The state says that this man was a serial rapist,” public defender Letitia Delan told the jury. “There’s very little evidence in this case that links Mr. Mincey to this case.”
Prosecutors said that between Oct. 16, 2011, and Nov. 29, 2011, Mincey stalked five women, lying in wait at places where they shopped or socialized before trailing them and confronting them as they tried to enter their homes.
Mincey allegedly picked his victims from the Publix supermarket on Flakes Mill Road, from Echelon Bar and Bistro in Stone Mountain, and from Tanqueray Lounge in Decatur.
The armed suspect threatened to kill each woman, then robbed each victim before committing the sexual assault, prosecutors said.
Two women were able to fend off rape, according to testimony. Three others were raped. Rape kit samples collected from two of those women helped to match DNA to Mincey. One woman had been forced to wash herself after the attack and no DNA was available, prosecutors said.
Delan questioned the accuracy of the findings, pointing to testimony from a DNA specialist for the GBI.
“You heard the scientist tell you that 97 percent of all DNA is the same, and that only 3 percent can distinguish one person from another,” she said. “You’re dealing with a guess, not a certainty.”
Delan also told the jury that not everyone in the chain of collecting, packaging and cataloguing the DNA samples testified in the trial, and suggested that proper protocols to prevent contaminating the evidence might have been sidestepped.
“She can’t say that other people who touched the samples didn’t contaminate them,” Delan said of the GBI’s DNA expert.
But Golden countered that the expert wouldn’t have used the DNA if it appeared to be contaminated.
Another man was initially arrested amid the string of attacks, but was released within three days after an attack was reported while he was in police custody.
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