Jury convicts Jasper man of raping teen

Feb. 22—Prosecutors overcame a lack of forensic evidence to convince a jury Thursday that a Jasper man raped a 13-year-old girl.

"It comes down to one question — the believability of (the girl)," Assistant Prosecutor Nate Dally told jurors at the close of John "Vincent" Estes' three-day trial in Jasper County Circuit Court on a charge of first-degree statutory rape.

The girl had testified Wednesday that Estes, 29, awakened her in the middle of the night during a sleepover with her girlfriend two years ago at his house, and carried her into his garage, where he pulled her shorts down and sexually assaulted her.

Dally told jurors that the girl, who is now 15, is "not a talented actress" and had no incentive to lie to them.

"This is just what happened," Dally said, pointing to the consistency of statements she made to police at the time, in pretrial depositions and on the witness stand Wednesday.

Defense attorney Jonathan Pierce argued that an absence of seminal fluid on the girl's clothes and the testimonies of the defendant's wife, his mother and the girlfriend at whose house the girl was sleeping all created reasonable doubt about the veracity of her allegation.

He reminded jurors that a specialist with the Missouri State Highway Patrol who conducted tests on the girl's clothes had testified that one might reasonably expect there to have been seminal fluid on her shorts because she was not wearing underwear.

"She was wearing those shorts all day," Pierce said. "There was no seminal fluid."

Ultimately, the jury of seven women and five men who deliberated the case deemed the girl more credible than the defendant's witnesses and returned a guilty verdict after four hours.

Dally reminded jurors during closing arguments of what a Children's Center interviewer told them about the grooming behaviors of child predators and how that fit Estes' case.

There was evidence in text messages that Estes sent her inviting her over to his house that he was targeting her. He used text messages to gain her trust and plied her with alcohol, also typical of a predator's ploy to address their target's needs, the prosecution maintained.

Dally said Estes pushed sexual boundaries — as predators do — by massaging the victim before she and her friend went to sleep on air mattresses in the living room of his home. He then isolated her by waiting until she fell asleep and then carrying her out to his garage and raping her where no one else in the house might see it.

The testimonies of the defendant's wife — that he had never left their bed that night — and the girl who lived there with them — that she could not get to sleep while the victim remained asleep next to her the whole night in the living room — were those of biased sources and just not as believable as the girl's account, Dally argued.

He also pointed out that a woman the state called as a propensity witness had testified Estes molested her 10 years ago when she was 14 in a similar way. There had been an air mattress laid out in the living room for her to sleep on and he had awakened her by rubbing her back in a manner that turned increasingly inappropriate.

Pierce stressed the significance of photos Amanda Estes later took of their garage and the passageway into it through a laundry room, purportedly showing how cluttered the garage was with belongings and rendering it unlikely that a rape could have been carried out there on its floor. The door into the garage from the laundry room was almost entirely blocked by a playpen.

"Do you think it's possible he could have carried her through that door?" Pierce asked jurors.

Dally pointed out that the photos were taken on an unknown date and not made available to law enforcement until early this year, more than two years after the rape, and suggested they could well have been staged "to explain the bad acts of the defendant."

The prosecution also successfully fended off the defense's insistence that there were inconsistencies in the girl's statements over time. Pierce emphasized that the girl variously alleged that Estes put his hand "on" her thigh and just "near" her leg when they were together the following day in the front seat of a vehicle.

A photo taken by the girl who lived with the Esteses and who was in the back seat of the vehicle showed his hand reaching across the center console onto the victim's seat. The prosecution maintained that whether he actually put his hand on her thigh or not, the photo speaks for itself and proved sufficiently "weird" to cause her boyfriend to alert her parents.

Judge Dean Dankelson dismissed jurors following the reading of the verdict and set sentencing of Estes for April 8. Statutory rape in the first degree is an unclassified felony in Missouri carrying a punishment range of five years to life in prison.