Her attacker said he’d kill her if she went to police; 25 years later, she testified in court

She said it was the threat that she remembered the most, his promise to her of what awaited if she told anyone what happened.

“He said I should never tell the police, that he would find out if I told the police,” she said. “He said I wouldn’t know where, I wouldn’t know when, I wouldn’t know how, but he would come back and kill me. I remember that promise the most.”

In a Sacramento Superior Court courtroom she faced Mark Jeffrey Manteuffel, the accused serial rapist Sacramento County prosecutors say brutally raped her in her east Sacramento home 25 years ago.

Manteuffel: The retired federal corrections officer-now-Sacramento County jail inmate. The former Sacramento State criminal justice lecturer tied by Sacramento County District Attorney’s investigators’ DNA sleuthing to a violent string of torture and rape that terrorized Sacramento and Davis in 1992 and 1994.

A preliminary hearing is months away, trial is anticipated to be even further out. Manteuffel’s alleged victim took the stand last week as a conditional witness, her testimony in the official record in the event she is unable to testify at trial.

Manteuffel returns Wednesday, Nov. 13, to Sacramento Superior Court.

From her wheelchair beside Sacramento Superior Court Judge Laurel White, Manteuffel’s alleged victim haltingly recounted the savage attack and the chilling threat.

Her attacker had broken into her home and ambushed her as she walked through the door after work. He taped her mouth and eyes shut. He bound her hands and legs and repeatedly sexually assaulted her in the living room then the bedroom, she testified to prosecuting Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Amy Holliday.

She was still bound in the bedroom when he walked into the bathroom, turned on the bathtub faucet, she testified. When her attacker returned to the room and lifted her off of the bed, she thought he would make good on his promise to end her life.

“I thought he was going to drown me,” she said. “I went back to my hopes for a peaceful death.”

Manteuffel stared with little expression from the end of the defense counsel’s table, his face in profile avoiding his alleged victim’s eyes and prosecutor Holliday’s.

Her attacker finally left the house, leaving her in the bathtub, she testified. She waited, remembering the rest of his warning:

“He said he’d watch me,” she testified. He told her she didn’t know how she got into the house and that he would come back.

Still in the tub, she went to work. She said from the stand that those few minutes “may be my best shot for trying to get out of the house.”

“I seriously went to work on my bindings, trying to get them untied,” she told Holliday.

She scrambled out of the tub, grabbed a towel to cover her battered body and headed into the living room where her keys were knocked away in the initial attack.

In the garage, sat her car and the chance to escape.

She thought about driving to her neighbors’ for help. But what if he was outside, she wondered, watching as he’d vowed?

The police, she thought as she drove. She didn’t know how to get to the station, she testified.

She remembered the address of a work colleague – “Someone who would open the door for me,” she recalled – and drove a zigzag path across Sacramento streets to find her home.

“I pulled onto her lawn and jumped out,” she said.

For years after the attack, Manteuffel was a “John Doe,” anonymous but for the long skein of DNA numerical code that served as sole identification for nearly 20 years; hiding in plain sight until Sacramento investigators tracked him last July to his Decatur, Ga., home through relatives who had submitted their DNA to an online genealogy website.

Local officials used the DNA evidence from the rapes 19 years ago to obtain the first DNA-based “John Doe” arrest warrant in the state, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said at the July news conference announcing Manteuffel’s arrest.

The charge became a placeholder allowing investigators to continue their work to tie a name to the DNA.

Today, Manteuffel faces seven charges of rape and torture in Sacramento Superior Court connected to attacks in Rosemont in May 1992 and East Sacramento in 1994 and more charges out of Yolo County in the January 1994 kidnap and robbery of a Davis college student who was jogging to a market to get dinner when she was attacked.

The charge of kidnapping with the intent to commit robbery in the Yolo case carries a potential life sentence, said Yolo County prosecutors.

Manteuffel’s arrest last summer was the third since 2018 by local law enforcement using DNA from genealogy companies.

Joseph DeAngelo, who prosecutors allege was the notorious East Area Rapist and Golden State Killer, and alleged NorCal Rapist Roy Charles Waller, remain held in Sacramento County Main Jail awaiting upcoming court dates.