Manteuffel gets 29 years for 1990s Sacramento rapes; faces more time in Yolo attack
He beat, tortured and raped his victims, leaving one with a fractured skull, then hid for decades in plain sight before unceasing detective work and DNA technology finally caught up with him.
Mark Jeffrey Manteuffel will hide no longer. The 60-year-old former federal corrections officer was sentenced Friday in Sacramento Superior Court to 29 years in state prison for the early 1990s rapes of two women in Rosemont and in East Sacramento.
Manteuffel pleaded guilty in July to the brutal crimes, his judge, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White, asking him to remove his face covering the better to proclaim his guilt. On Friday, Manteuffel returned to White’s courtroom to face judgment for the women he so savagely attacked, for, In White’s words, his “simply monstrous crimes.”
His first victim sat in the front row of the gallery, her daughter by her side, a clutch of flowers — red roses and baby’s breath— in her hands. Nearly three decades earlier, Manteuffel had bound those same hands until they swelled three times their size as he repeatedly raped her in her East Sacramento home.
Twenty-eight years after the attack, the woman, identified as Jane Doe No. 1, confronted Manteuffel with her pain and perseverance and his cowardice. She had just emerged from a painful divorce, had settled into a new home in a new neighborhood. She had found a church and was thinking about reviving an idea of a children’s clothing store.
That was before May 5, 1992.
“I would never be the same person I was before the assault,” she said from a podium in the center of the gallery, glancing now and then to her sheaf of typewritten notes. “Over the next 27 years, as I continued healing, I wondered who and why? The rope burns faded, the wounds healed, but what’s broken inside is still not right.”
But, she told the court and her attacker: “He did not break me.” His act, she said in a word, “cowardly.”
Manteuffel stared straight ahead, scarcely moving. His eyes were locked on a far wall of the courtroom beside White’s bench, his back to the gallery.
Manteuffel’s attacks in Rosemont in 1992 and in East Sacramento in March 1994 were carried out in the same pitiless fashion. He sneaked into their homes. He wore a pullover mask to hide his face. He pummeled each into submission, cut away their clothes, bound their limbs and covered their heads with pillowcases before raping them at knifepoint.
His second victim died earlier this year, but not before taking the witness stand last November to deliver the days of testimony that led to Friday’s sentencing.
Semen evidence taken from the homes of both victims led Sacramento investigators and prosecutors to a historic first: the first-ever DNA-based warrant issued in California. The years of detective and scientific work that followed built family trees that led detectives to Oklahoma and Florida, before Manteuffel’s July 2019 arrest in Decatur, Georgia.
His was the third in a string of high-profile DNA cases cracked by Sacramento County District Attorney’s crime lab, following the arrests of NorCal Rapist suspect, Roy Charles Waller, whose trial began this week, and the infamous Golden State Killer and East Area Rapist Joseph James DeAngelo.
DeAngelo pleaded guilty to multiple murders and rapes in the string of crimes that terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980’s.
But prosecutors are not yet done with Manteuffel. A Yolo Superior Court judge now waits to take Manteuffel’s guilty plea to the January 1994 rape and kidnapping of a Davis woman. The woman was jogging to a local market to get dinner when she was attacked by a masked man later discovered to be Manteuffel who subdued her with a stun gun.
A court date in Woodland has not yet been announced. Superior Court Judge White ordered Manteuffel remain held without bail in Sacramento County custody until he is transferred to Yolo County to face a judge in the Davis attack.
