A 71-year-old man, arrested after a lengthy police pursuit in Los Angeles Thursday, has been identified as a fugitive rape suspect out of Massachusetts who has been on the run for more than three decades.
Stephen Paul Gale was identified and charged with four counts of rape, two counts of kidnapping and a count of armed robbery of two women in a Framingham, MA. store in 1989.
Authorities with United States Marshals Service publicly named Gale as the suspect in May of this year.
According to reporting by WFXT Boston 25 News, the then 37-year-old Gale walked into a store called Hit or Miss on Dec. 27, 1989, armed with a handgun. He reportedly forced two women into the back of the store, had them empty money from a safe, made them undress and put them in separate rooms.
“He sexually assaulted both women while holding the gun to their heads,” Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan told the Boston outlet at the time. “When [Gale] returned to the front of the store, the victims fled out the rear fire door to a nearby home.”
Evidence left behind at the scene led to the creation of a DNA profile in 2001, though there were no positive matches to the profile in law enforcement databases. It wasn’t until later, when investigators used forensic genetic genealogy, that Gale was identified as the suspected rapist, WFXT reported.
The 71-year-old is also wanted for questioning in a series of similar violent sexual assaults in the greater Boston area between 1989 and 1990, the U.S. Marshals Service said.
He is believed to have lived in several different states, including Las Vegas, while using different aliases that included Stephen Pisarcik, John Rossi and Paul Costa.
He may have also previously had ties with organized crime, Boston 25 News reported.
It is unknown if Gale had been residing in Southern California when he allegedly failed to yield to LAPD officers Thursday in San Pedro, prompting a more than hour-long pursuit that ran through the Port of Los Angeles, up the 110 and 405 freeways to surface streets around LAX and the Westside.
The pursuit ended on Medical Plaza Drive in Westwood when Gale, with nowhere to go, surrendered to police who had surrounded his vehicle with guns drawn.
The 71-year-old appeared to have difficulty physically exiting the vehicle and standing on his own.
He was cuffed and briefly placed in the back of a patrol unit before police pulled him out, put him in a wheelchair. He was taken to the hospital for treatment of an unknown condition, but upon his release will be booked into jail upon his release.