Fascinating in-depth portrait of Egyptian scientist/chemist turned serial rapist & killer,in the USA & Ciudad Juarez,Mexico,part #1
Joe1orbit
The local news media is usually quite reluctant to assign a reporter to
investigate a SINGLE story, in-depth, for months. And so we, the crime loving
public, are DENIED the type of DETAILED, probative, and insightful journalism
that we love and value most. And so, I would like to PERSONALLY thank the
owners and managers of the Fort Worth Star-Tribune, as well as reporter Tim
Madigan, for being WILLING to spend the time and effort necessary to produce
the REMARKABLE portrait of Sharif Abdul Latif Sharif, part #1 of which is
posted below.
Who is Sharif Abdul Latif Sharif, you might be wondering?? Well, think of
Ciudad Juarez, and the unsolved murders of 150+ young female factory workers, a
story I have posted about quite often, in the past, Sharif Sharif is a
BRILLIANT, high IQ EGYPTIAN immigrant, who worked as a chemist/scientist, lived
in the USA and Mexico, and based upon the FASCINATING portrait below, has ALL
the character traits of a genuine serial killer. He assaulted & raped NUMEROUS
gals in the USA, before moving to Mexico in 1994, where, Mexican cops say, he
IMMEDIATELY initiated a PROLIFIC serial killing spree, harvesting at LEAST a
dozen gals before being arrested.
I tell ya the truth folks, BEFORE reading this news article today, I had
SERIOUS doubts as to whether Shariff was guilty of ANY of the Ciuudad Juarez
killings. But having read part #1 of this in-depth expose, I think it is VERY
likely that Sharif did commit serial murder in Mexico. The portrait of profound
RAGE & hate that emerges from this article, is undeniable.
It is also of course fascinating, to get all these new details on Sharif's
remarkable rampage of violence while in amerikkka, apparently PRIOR to him
moving up in class from sexual battery & beatings & rapes, to murders. I would
bet that Sharif CAREFULLY DECIDED that he would be better off from a tactical
position, in terms of avoiding capture, ESPECIALLY given his criminal record of
violence in amerikkka, if he RESTRICTED his serial killings to Mexico. And that
was a WISE move on his part.
I'm SPLITTING this post up into two pieces, due to it's extreme length.
Please be advised that BOTH posts only comprise PART #1 of a LONG series of
articles, that the Star-Telegram will publish on a DAILY basis. So, to read
part #2. you must WAIT until MONDAY, launch your browser to:
And LOCATE the next part, part #2, of this article. I will DEFINATELY read it
tomorrow, because I am FASCINATED by Shari's actions and True Reality, but will
be VERY busy tomorrow and might NOT have time to POST the newly published part
#2.
Police believe that even AFTER his arrest, Sharif ORCHESTRATED additional
serial killings, literally PAYING men money, to continue to commit serial
murders on his "behalf". How TRUE that claim is, I still have doubts about. But
my appreciation for the fact that Sharif DESERVES to be credited & acknowledged
as being a serial killer, has become quite powerful, thanks to the brilliant
investigative journalism of Tim Madigan. I also believe it is VERY likely that
Sharif serially killed gals in the USA, before moving on to launch his prolific
explosion of serial rage in Ciudad Juarez.
Truly a FASCINATING person, this Sharif fellow is. I HOPE that true crime
book authors will consider trying to contact Sharif & working out a book deal,
even though he continues to wisely maintain his ABSOLUTE innocence with regard
to all murders.
Take care, Joe
The following appears courtesy of the 8/8/99 online edition of The Fort Worth
Star-Telegram newspaper:
Sunday, Aug. 8, 1999
Sharif Sharif: A Monster Exposed
By Tim Madigan
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Part one: A serial rapist's savage trek across America
During a four-month investigation for this article, reporter Tim Madigan
conducted more than 150 interviews across four U.S. states and Mexico. Other
information in this article was taken from police reports, affidavits,
transcripts from Sharif Sharif's El Paso deportation hearings and the 40-page
sentencing document written by the Mexican judge who convicted Sharif of murder
in Juarez.
Assisted by La Estrella editor Juan Antonio Ramos.
Names of the rape victims have been changed to protect their privacy.
In the sprawling Mexican border city, they speak her name with a reverence
generally reserved for religious icons. Which is fitting, in a way. For the
story of Nancy seems lifted from Scripture -- a dark-eyed teen-ager who
delivered Ciudad Juarez from its five-year nightmare.
On that night, March 18, Nancy was just one of thousands of naive, vulnerable
Mexican girls riding back and forth to work on rickety buses from their slums
to the foreign-owned factories, the `maquiladoras.' These were the girls, more
often than not, whose bodies had turned up in the deserts around Juarez for the
past five years, raped and strangled.
But that night in March, Nancy somehow survived. The frail-looking girl of 14
was raped, choked and beaten by her `maquiladora' bus driver and left for dead,
but stumbled across the nighttime desert to safety. She identified her
attacker, the bus driver, causing one ominous domino after another to fall.
The last domino led to a brilliant, Egyptian-born chemist. Sharif Abdul Latif
Sharif had moved to Juarez in 1994, and within a year, the serial slayings of
young women began. The scourge briefly ended in 1995, when Sharif was arrested
for several of the killings, eventually convicted in one case, and sentenced to
30 years in prison.
But in the twist that would distinguish his crime story from all others,
Sharif's villainy apparently grew when he was placed behind bars. The Juarez
murders started again. From jail, the 52-year-old scientist became an evil
martinet, directing assorted henchmen like Nancy's attacker to kill as he had
killed for the promise of a few hundred pesos. In the past five years, 57 young
women have died. Without the miracle of Nancy, the young women of Juarez might
be dying still.
But Juarez is only half of Sharif's grim story. The brief flurry of headlines
about Sharif and his crimes there led American readers to believe that his
scourge was contained south of the border. The truth is something else. The
truth is that the sorority of Sharif's victims that ended with the Mexican girl
Nancy actually began two decades before with a succession of victimized
American women.
They were women who had the misfortune of crossing Sharif's path during his
24-year odyssey across the United States -- victims beaten, choked, tortured
and raped, crimes that foreshadowed the deeds he is accused of in Juarez.
"If you try to escape I will murder you like the rest of them," Sharif told one
American victim, Lisa, during a vicious attack in Gainesville, Fla. That attack
occurred 11 years before Sharif crossed into Juarez. "I will bury you out back
in the woods. I've done it before, and I'll do it again."
In fact, twice in the 1980s, Sharif was convicted of sexual battery in Florida.
A third rape charge, in Midland, Texas, finally prompted Sharif to scurry into
Juarez. During the years, several other American women whispered to police that
they, too, had been brutalized by Sharif, but were too frightened of him to
prosecute.
Sharif's odyssey included four arrests on drunken-driving charges in New
Jersey, Florida and Texas, and a 1984 jailbreak in Florida. And a New Jersey
detective has now identified Sharif as a suspect in the unsolved 1977 slaying
of a flight attendant.
Yet Sharif soldiered on toward his terrible destiny, only gently rebuked by the
U.S. legal system. For two rapes, he spent only six years in prison. He escaped
prosecution for the 1984 jailbreak. He eluded deportation back to Egypt,
despite a United States law that called for banishing any legal alien who
committed two crimes of "moral turpitude."
For in America, the Egyptian immigrant was lucky beyond belief, taking full
advantage of considerable personal magnetism and the ancient stigma attached to
his rape victims.
He also thrived on the loyalty of his American employers. Sharif was a
scientist of inventive genius. U.S. companies stood to make millions from his
work and helped find for their problematic employee the finest legal defense
available. One Midland, Texas, company hired him from prison, helped him avoid
deportation to Egypt, and stood by him as evidence of his terrible nature
mounted.
He could have been stopped by the legal system but wasn't. So now, American
women grieve for their Mexican sisters.
"It didn't have to happen," Lisa, Sharif's Gainesville victim, said through
tears one day this spring. "Why couldn't they get rid of this guy?"
Sharif remains today in a Mexican prison. In a recent interview, he refused to
answer questions about his past. Meanwhile, Lisa's plaintive question
reverberates in two countries. In his American odyssey, Sharif was a tropical
storm, gathering strength over warm sea. With the man who would inspire
comparison to the evil genius of Hannibal Lecter, there would be no simple
answer.
The bombshell landed that day in January 1997. John Pascoe had a chemistry
degree of his own by then and was at work in his lab smock for a company in New
Jersey. He noticed a visitor waiting for a meeting and offered her a cup of
coffee, and when they got to chatting, the name of a mutual acquaintance soon
popped up. The visitor said that years before, she had worked with Sharif
Sharif at a place called Magnesium Electron Inc., a small chemical company set
in the countryside of southwest New Jersey.
"Do you know where Sharif is now?" the woman asked in Pascoe's office that day.
"In prison for murder," Pascoe replied, jokingly.
"So you know, then," the woman said.
The blood drained from Pascoe's face as he listened. His one-time drinking
buddy now sat in a Mexico jail cell, linked to the murders of more than a dozen
young girls and women. Pascoe almost ran to a telephone to call his mother.
They had met in New Hope, Pa., a small artist colony on the western side of the
Delaware River, only a 30-minute drive from the New Jersey chemical company
where Sharif Sharif worked. John Pascoe was 17 that summer of 1978, a
dark-haired high school diver who lived with his parents in a complex of
condominiums in the hills above the village square. One day, as he lounged by
the complex's pool with several local cheerleaders, a stranger in his early 30s
approached and immediately began flirting with the girls, almost drooling over
them, it seemed to Pascoe at the time.
"Man, you're pretty," said Sharif, as he introduced himself to the girls. The
tall, ruggedly built guy with short, dark hair and a mustache often followed up
with an invitation. "How about coming over to my place for a drink?"
Sharif offered the sophistication of an older man, with handsome Arabic
features that bore a passing resemblance to another Sharif, the dashing actor
from `Dr. Zhivago.' The teen-age girls in New Hope jumped at his advances. They
were gone just like that, drinking with Sharif in his new residence -- a
ground-floor apartment a few hundred yards from the pool. A few of them, Pascoe
eventually knew, would find their way into Sharif's bed.
That's the way Sharif was -- definitely a magnet for young girls. Several times
during the next two years, Pascoe would pop over to Sharif's apartment and find
another pretty waif, sometimes looking no more than 14 or 15 years old, asleep
on the sofa, or lounging around his place, or in his bed. Pascoe would look at
Sharif, as if to ask, "How do you do it?" and Sharif would just smile and
shrug. Then in a day or two, they would be gone.
Was it Pascoe's imagination, or did Sharif become even more sinister as the
months passed? He thought of the day the pair went deer hunting, when, after
Pascoe wounded a buck, Sharif tortured the quivering animal, poking it with the
barrel of his rifle, kicking it, waltzing around it with orgasmic glee. There
was the way he lovingly fingered his huge, red-handled hunting knife, the look
of madness that sometimes came into his eyes.
But the thing with the shovel and the girl was the last straw, the thing that
would haunt Pascoe for years afterward, despite the taunts of his skeptical
family.
It was 1980, sometime in the spring. Pascoe had popped over to Sharif's
apartment one afternoon and found another young girl waiting there, petite,
pretty, with long, light-blond hair, and wearing a tube top and bluejeans.
Sharif was gone, so the two of them got to talking inside. As much as he tried
in the years to come, Pascoe couldn't remember many details from their
conversation -- particularly the girl's name or where she said she was from. He
did remember that her few belongings -- a pair of sneakers, bluejeans and a
couple of shirts -- were sitting on the floor of Sharif's living room, piled
into a cardboard box the size of a milk crate.
Within a day or two, the girl was gone, which was typical. But with this girl,
there was something strange. Her stuff was still in Sharif's apartment.
"Where's the girl who was here?" Pascoe asked Sharif on his next visit.
"She's gone, and she's not coming back," Sharif replied, smirking.
"What do you mean she's gone?" Pascoe asked. "That's her stuff in that box
right there. She'll come back to get her stuff."
Sharif realized then that Pascoe had been in his place without him knowing. He
flew into a rage.
"If you ever do that again ... " Sharif screamed. "Get out!"
Pascoe wasn't about to argue, and hurried for the door. It was on his way out
that he saw a new shovel, caked with fresh mud, standing against a wall on
Sharif's front porch.
Then came the bombshell in 1997. Within a few weeks, he had shared his memories
of Sharif with a detective from Gainesville, Fla., where Sharif had been
convicted of rape. That detective in turn introduced Pascoe to Mexican
authorities. In late May 1997, Pascoe was on a flight to Orlando, Fla., to meet
with Juarez investigators at the Mexican Consulate.
Local cops tended to find Pascoe a little weird, overly obsessed with Sharif.
Some were disinclined to believe his stories. But the Mexicans were keenly
interested in what Pascoe had to say, particularly about the Egyptian's
predilection for underage girls. During their three-hour interview that day, a
young Mexican detective named Manuel Esparza told Pascoe that Sharif probably
killed several Mexican girls.
Esparza's words made Pascoe ill.
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Joe1orbit
Here's the second part of this fascinating expose on serial rapist/killer
Sharif Abdul Latif Sharif.
Take care, JOE
The following appears courtesy of the 8/8/99 online edition of The Fort Worth
Star-Telegram newspaper:
Sunday, Aug. 8, 1999
Sharif Sharif: A Monster Exposed
By Tim Madigan
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Part one: A serial rapist's savage trek across America
(Note: This is a continuation of the same article by Tim Madigan, That I just
posted previously)
With the news from Mexico, detectives along the path of Sharif's American
odyssey began to comb their files of unsolved homicides. Mexican detectives
believed that over and over in Juarez, Sharif had demonstrated his taste for
blood. What were the chances that he had acquired that terrible thirst in
America?
In the spring of 1999, Chris Andreychak, a detective with the New Jersey State
Police, would be one who wondered. Twenty-two years before, Andreychak's first
case was the 1977 slaying of a pretty flight attendant named Sandra Miller.
With each passing year, the mystery of Miller's death grew more impenetrable,
the chances of justice more remote.
Then, this spring, Andreychak heard of Sharif, a murderer and womanizing serial
rapist from Mexico. Before Mexico, Sharif had immigrated to America, coming to
New York in 1970. About the time Sandra Miller was killed, Sharif worked at a
New Jersey plant less than two miles away. Sharif and Miller, Andreychak would
learn, drank at the same bar. Every new detail seemed to point toward Sharif as
a suspect, not away. After 22 years, Chris Andreychak had a new suspect in his
first case, the case that had haunted him for so long.
Sandra Miller attended a Bible college and as a young woman, contemplated a
career as a missionary. Her life took a different turn when she applied for a
job at an Eastern Airlines ticket counter. She was pretty, brunette, bright and
personable, so the company encouraged her to become a flight attendant instead.
But Miller would always be tenderhearted and concerned about the poor. Before
flights to places such as the Dominican Republic, she collected clothes to
distribute to needy children who lingered around the airport.
Miller was also a social creature, visiting bars and nightclubs and talking to
the guys who inevitably approached her there. If they came on too strong, she'd
back away. But friends worried that her affability would be misinterpreted as
teasing.
"Sandy, one of these days you're going to do this to the wrong guy and you'll
get into trouble," a friend, an Eastern pilot named Terry Harrison, said to her
not long before she died.
"No," she replied. "I know what I'm doing."
Late Jan. 3, 1977, Harrison's concerns seemed prophetic. After a flight that
night, Miller drove home from Newark Airport, stopping at a Dunkin' Donuts
along the way. Her killer was apparently waiting when Miller pulled up to the
remote farmhouse outside Flemington, N.J., where she lived with her 5-year-old
daughter, Korin, and an elderly couple named the Fitzers.
Police later found evidence of a fierce struggle near the farmhouse, blood in
the snow and clumps of Miller's hair. Her attacker forced her into a car and
drove a few miles across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. In a heavily
wooded area near the river, Miller was either dumped on the side of the road,
or jumped from a moving car in an attempt to escape. She died from a single
stab wound just as a police officer managed to reach her.
The crime stunned residents of that pastoral part of New Jersey. The
investigation headed by the New Jersey State Police was predictably intense,
but ultimately fruitless. Detectives interviewed more than a hundred of
Miller's friends and relatives. Two weeks later, however, when asked by a local
reporter what was new with the case, one investigator grumbled, "not a damn
thing."
It had been nearly two decades since Sharif worked there, but during a visit to
Magnesium Electron's plant last May, Andreychak found a handful of employees
who remembered him. Sharif, they said, was not the sort you would ever forget.
Andreychak listened as they described Sharif's drinking, his wrecked cars and
his obsession with women. Sharif hungered for a different female every night of
the week. With the hours he spent in the bars, particularly a joint called the
Kingwood Inn less than a mile from the plant, Sharif could almost pull it off.
To Andreychak, that last tidbit was the most important of all. He knew from
reading old reports that Sandra Miller also frequented the Kingwood. Miller was
an attractive woman in her 30s, newly divorced. Put the two of them together in
a small joint and it was almost guaranteed they would have met.
Andreychak had developed another suspect after taking over the case, a local
man and longtime acquaintance of Miller who detectives later learned was
capable of great violence. After the man's death from cancer, officers
recovered a large knife like the one used to kill Miller, but were never able
to gather enough evidence to close the case.
Now, there was another suspect, one just as compelling. Andreychak knew he
needed at least one more piece of solid evidence before he could think about
bringing the case against Sharif to a grand jury. But even after all these
years, someone out there could know something that might move the case along.
Andreychak wondered whether this fall might be a good time for a flight to
Mexico.
"Me," Andreychak said one day in May at his Trenton office. "I have some
excitement about this guy."
For almost three years in Florida, from 1981 to 1984, Palm Beach defense lawyer
Greg Scott would be a fixture in the life of Sharif.
The guy was a brilliant chemist but always seemed in serious trouble -- rapes
in Palm Beach and Gainesville, an arrest for assault, another for drunken
driving.
But Scott also couldn't help being charmed by his client. Sharif was
personable, funny and intelligent. He always treated Scott with respect.
Criminal lawyers are used to dealing with the dregs of society. That in no way
seemed to describe Sharif.
In one of the rape cases he defended, Scott remembered later, there was a
question of consent, the familiar "he said, she said" tango so common in those
cases. Sharif maintained the same was true in the second.
After he was sent to prison in 1984, Sharif disappeared from Scott's
professional life. The lawyer scarcely thought about him for 15 years, until
the day this spring when the reporter called from Texas. Did Scott know about
what Sharif had done in Mexico? When Scott was told, a long silence followed.
"Good God," Scott said.
Tracy was 23 at the time, in May 1981, living four floors above Sharif in
Building B of Old Port Cove in Palm Beach. Sharif's employers had landed him a
spot in the exclusive place, which included a restaurant and yacht club,
because he was a hotshot chemist. But Tracy thought him creepy, always leaving
notes on her mailbox or the windshield of her car. On May 2, she accepted his
invitation to dinner only because he promised mutual friends would be there,
too.
But Sharif was alone when she arrived at his apartment. Sharif fixed her a
drink, something with vodka, told her the others would be along and left the
apartment to pick up some takeout food. Then the world began to spin. Tracy had
taken only a few sips of her drink, so he must have put something in it.
Frightened, she called her mother, who lived nearby, and was told to leave
Sharif's place immediately. Back in her own apartment, Tracy called her
boyfriend to tell him she had become violently ill. She assumed that the knock
on her door a short time later was the boyfriend, coming to check on her.
It was Sharif instead. The others were downstairs in his apartment, he said.
Why didn't she come back? When Tracy insisted that he leave, Sharif forced his
way in, grabbed her, threw her to the ground and started hitting her in the
face and head with his fists. Then he raped her and walked out the door.
The next day, after spending most the previous night with police, Tracy
returned to her apartment with her mother and father to feed her animals.
Sharif drove up about the same time and smiled at them, as if nothing had ever
happened.
"Good morning to you guys," he said, smiling cheerfully.
Sharif had another version of that night's events. Tracy had been drunk, Sharif
told his employers and police. She was very friendly toward him, and it was she
who had wanted to make love. Things had just gotten a little rough.
Jim Gambale, the owner of Cercoa Inc. and Sharif's boss, was inclined to
believe him. Sharif had been fired from his last job in New Jersey. Something
about a padded expense account. But no one questioned Sharif's genius in the
laboratory, a chemist who, in the words of one colleague, "could make a bomb
out of Bisquick." His talent was such that when Gambale hired Sharif at Cercoa,
he created a department especially for him. Sharif was a great guy. He was
being railroaded. It was Gambale who helped Sharif find and pay for the highly
regarded Palm Beach defense lawyer, Greg Scott.
Little matter that Tracy passed a polygraph test, or that Sharif's
protestations were disgusting lies. Tracy soon realized the world would be much
more inclined to believe the version of her attacker. Tracy overheard
conversations in the yacht club restaurant, listening as people speculated that
she must have asked for whatever she got. Old Port Cove management asked Tracy
to move from the complex. Only when she threatened to go to the media did they
relent and finally insist that Sharif relocate instead.
But Sharif would not be otherwise punished. Under Florida sentencing guidelines
at the time, the maximum punishment for the charge against Sharif was only 18
months in jail. At trial, Tracy knew her character would be the issue, not
Sharif's. Prosecutor Scott Richardson told Tracy that probation was probably
the best they could do.
Sharif's guilty plea was scheduled for the morning of Aug. 14, 1981. Under the
terms of the agreement, Sharif would receive five years' probation for Tracy's
sexual assault. But what was to be a routine court appearance that day was just
one episode in a dizzying 48 hours, two days that would illustrate Sharif's
charmed existence in the U.S. legal system.
The night before, on Aug. 13, a woman named Ruth left the Hi-Tide bar in West
Palm Beach and was approached by a man who identified himself as Mike. Mike's
car had broken down, he said, so Ruth agreed to drive him to his apartment. The
police report she filed later says she then accepted his invitation to come up
for a drink.
But when she entered his apartment, he immediately grabbed her and tried to
kiss her. When she refused his advances and asked to leave, the reports say, he
pulled her toward the bedroom, ordering her to remove her clothes. He punched
her in the face several times when she struggled. Blood spilled from her nose,
down her face, onto her clothes and the white carpeting.
"I was on the floor between the bed and the bathroom," Ruth later said in her
handwritten statement to police. "He began telling me to take my clothes off. I
asked him please for a towel, and he said no, kicked me once or twice and said
he was going to kill me, and hit me again several times."
She was punched some more before the assault ended. Then her attacker abruptly
calmed down, asking her to fix him a drink. He replaced her torn, bloodied
shirt with one of his own, and even asked her for a date the following night.
Later, after Ruth reported her attack, police determined that her assailant was
not named Mike.
"A suspect in this case is Sharif Sharif," an investigator wrote later that
same day. "He ... has current sexual battery charges pending, using the same
motive." But police apparently never reported the incident to Palm Beach
prosecutors handling Sharif's rape case.
On Aug. 14, only hours after Sharif pleaded guilty and received probation for
Tracy's sexual assault, he was arrested and charged with false imprisonment and
battery, charges resulting from his attack on Ruth.
In recent interviews, both prosecutor Scott Richardson, who is now in private
practice, and defense attorney Greg Scott said they were unaware of the Aug. 13
attack at the time of Sharif's guilty plea the next day. If they had known, it
was almost certain the deal for Sharif's probation would have been scuttled.
What's more, Richardson said, because the Aug. 13 assault occurred before
Sharif's guilty plea and sentencing, it could not be used against him as a
probation violation.
Sharif was released on bail shortly after his Aug. 14 arrest. On Jan. 11, 1982,
a Palm Beach jury found him guilty of simple battery in Ruth's assault and
sentenced him to 45 days in jail.
Sharif's good fortune continued in his professional life, as well. Eventually
fired by Cercoa because of his chronic legal woes, Sharif and two co-workers
headed north to Gainesville, Fla., to form a new chemical company. Sharif would
be the firm's president.
In Gainesville, Sharif's brief marriage ended when he beat his wife senseless,
both the wife and her relatives said in interviews. A few weeks later, a
20-year-old college student answered Sharif's ad in the `Gainesville Sun'
seeking a live-in housekeeper. He attacked on Lisa's first night in the house.
In the years afterward, Lisa carried the memories of her assault on March 17,
1983, like a terrible photo album of the mind. Most of that night in Sharif's
Gainesville home had blurred. But at the moments when he hurt her the most, or
the times when she was the most afraid, it was like `click' -- a mental
photograph of that moment. Her head smashed against the wall. `Click.' More
mental photos when he kicked and punched and raped her. Another `click' at the
sliding-glass window.
It was there that Sharif threatened to kill her if she screamed. It was there
that Sharif said he had done it before, and promised to kill again.
Lisa had no doubt, then or later, that he spoke the literal truth. She saw the
evil in his eyes. Several times during her ordeal, she wished Sharif would go
ahead and kill her, too, would get it over with. But then, after hours when his
rage rose and fell like some evil tide, he stopped. It was as if someone had
finally found the handle to shut off a faucet of venom.
"Oh, I've hurt you," he said. "Do you think you need to go to the hospital?"
He called her a cab because he didn't have a car, and rode with her in the back
seat on the way to the emergency room. He later told police that, yes, they had
sex, but Lisa had come on to him, kissing him and wanting to make love.
But this time, his victim had an unassailable personal history and serious
injuries. This time, police knew that Sharif had raped before. This time, after
news accounts of Lisa's attack appeared, several other women called Gainesville
police to report they also had been terrorized by Sharif.
"All were so frightened that they were afraid to come forward," Gainesville
police Capt. Sadie Darnell wrote 10 years later to an El Paso federal judge
during deportation proceedings against Sharif. "Some indicated they thought he
would kill them if he found out."
No living woman understood those fears better than Lisa. He was a monster, a
person whose menace would not be confined, even by jail. One day at lunchtime,
several months after the attack, the telephone rang at the home of Lisa's
parents. She had moved there to heal, but now the voice was unmistakable. How
had he found her?
"I'll get you," she says Sharif told her that day from jail. "It's only a
matter of time."
Then the phone went dead.
For Lisa, Sharif's 12-year prison sentence seemed token punishment, yet another
setback in what she says today was a struggle to convince a skeptical
prosecutor of Sharif's true menace.
She says that former Assistant State Attorney Gordon Groland kept insisting
that her case didn't fit that of a monster at all, but of a form of date rape.
"This is going to be really hard to prove," she remembers him saying, as if he
were trying to discourage her from pursuing the case. "Are you sure you want to
prosecute? Are you sure you want to go through with it?"
"Yeah," Lisa kept saying. "You've got to stop this guy. You can't let him do
this again."
So at a probation revocation hearing in Tracy's case, Lisa withstood Sharif's
hateful stares, and the withering assault by his defense lawyer. But her own
case, as in Palm Beach, would end in a plea bargain.
She was left with Groland's promise -- that on the day of his release, Sharif
would be deported to Egypt, "met at the prison gates and escorted to the
plane." (Groland, now in private practice in Gainesville, declined to comment
for this article. "I've got nothing to talk to you about," he said, before
hanging up the telephone.)
A current Gainesville prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Greg McMahon, said
recently that he did not know why Sharif was not prosecuted for his brief
escape from the Alachua County Jail. In late January 1984, Sharif bolted with a
group of other prisoners.
He was recaptured just in time to enter his plea for the rape of Lisa. His
12-year sentence was handed down on Jan. 31, 1984. For the first time in
America, Sharif would do time in a state prison.
But not for long. In October 1989, Sharif was released after serving less than
half of his sentence. No state or federal officer was waiting at the prison
gates.
Instead, Sharif was at work for another company in Midland, Texas, two weeks
later. It was there that he found the love and adoration of co-workers and
friends. The legal system would wink at him. And in Midland, Sharif would
eventually be indicted for rape again. The tragic sorority that eventually
ended with Nancy in Juarez would claim another member.
Tomorrow: Sharif sets up a sweet life in Midland, Texas, where he is indicted
for another sexual assault and cuts a deal to cross the border.