'Pillowcase Rapist' of Santa Clara County Ordered to Live In L.A. by Judge

A Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge today ordered that a serial sex offender --  the so- called "Pillowcase Rapist" -- be released from the Coalinga State Hospital to a home in rural Los Angles County despite strong resistance from nearby residents, a prosecutor said today.

Judge Gilbert Brown issued the ruling to send 63-year-old Christopher Evans Hubbart, who has admitted to raping dozens of women going back to the 1970s, to an area east of the city of Palmdale, Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Vonda Tracey said.

Brown gave notice of Hubbart's conditional outpatient release from the Coalinga mental heath facility to the California Department of State Hospitals and Liberty Healthcare Corp., which will closely supervise his movements at a rented home outside Palmdale, Tracey said.

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Hubbart's release will be similar to house arrest, Tracey said. He will have to wear an ankle bracelet monitored at all times by Liberty Healthcare by GPS and have a security guard posted in his house 24 hours a day for at least one month, Tracey said.

He will be restricted to his home for most of the day and if he were to try to leave his "inclusion zone," an alarm will sound alerting Liberty Healthcare's security personnel working in the area to capture him.

"He's not going to be running amok in the community," Tracey said.

If Hubbart, considered a sexually violent predator by the state, fails to comply with the rules of his conditional release he could be sent back to the Coalinga hospital, Tracey said.

Brown, who has jurisdiction over Hubbart because the latest crimes he committed in the 1980s were in the county, determined that Hubbart's last place of residence was in Los Angeles County and he should go live there, Tracey said.

Brown made his decision after listening in court in San Jose on Wednesday to the pleas of residents, law enforcement officers and a state assemblyman from Los Angeles County not to send Hubbart to the unincorporated north county area about 17 miles east of Palmdale.

Hubbart committed a series of rapes, sexual assaults and burglaries in the early 1970s in Los Angeles and was regarded as a mentally disordered sex offender, Tracey said.

He moved to Santa Clara County after his release from prison in 1980 and was arrested again in 1982 for another series of rapes for which he was sentenced to 16 years in state prison.

He was paroled in 1990, then committed to a state mental hospital in 1996 as a sexually violent offender and has been there ever since, Tracey said.

About a half-dozen neighbors from the Lake Los Angeles area drove hundreds of miles to San Jose to speak to Brown in court against allowing Hubbart to live in their midst.

They claimed that Hubbart, even with the strict monitoring, would pose a threat to women and girls in the community and may not be adequately monitored by law enforcement.

Los Angeles County Chief Deputy Sheriff William McSweeney told Brown that Sheriff John Scott was opposed to transferring Hubbart, who he said would cause "a huge distraction of sheriff's activities in the area."

McSweeney later told reporters that Hubbart had admitted to "100 or more rapes."

--Bay City News