Lakeview rapist heads to prison — 30 years later

After 30 years on the run, convicted rapist Rudy Carter is heading to prison.

Nassau County Court Judge George Peck sentenced Carter to two to six years in prison on Monday, 30 years after he skipped bail on a 1981 rape conviction.

Carter, now 65, had been out on $1,000 bail when he skipped town on April 6, 1981, as a Nassau County jury deliberated on his case: he was charged with first-degree rape and sexual abuse on Aug. 9, 1979, after raping a woman in her Lakeview home. Carter was convicted “in absentia” the day after he fled, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

His free ride came to an end on March 4, 2010, when police found Carter living under a different name in a New Jersey hotel room. He was arrested in Elizabeth, N.J., by a slew of detectives from the Nassau County Police Department Fugitive Squad and the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force.

William Walsh, an investigator with the Nassau County district attor\ney’s office, cracked the cold case last year by obtaining records from the Department of Motor Vehicles and conducting surveillance of the fugitive while investigating a separate narcotics case. Nassau County Police Det. Joseph Maher, who is assigned to the New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force, took over the investigation with task force members and located Carter at the hotel by tapping cell phone towers.

Following his arrest, Carter was extradited from the neighboring state and brought before Peck on March 26 for sentencing. Peck had ordered a pre-sentence report — a document prepared by the Department of Probation explaining its opinion of how severe a punishment a convicted defendant deserves — in the case.

“It’s a cold case and whenever you get one like this, it’s sort of a big deal,” Det. Sgt. Salvatore Scalone, commanding officer of the NCPD’s fugitive squad, had told the Herald at the time of Carter’s arrest. And to think, he had added, “A random check of a cold case — that’s all it was.”

Detectives had revisited Carter’s case — one of 84,000 open warrants — earlier last year, plugging his name and social security information into one of several commercial databases police use regularly to track people. “The database didn’t tell us where he was living, just told us where he had lived, so we had to find him — old-fashioned police work,” Scalone had said.

“After 30 years on the run, this defendant will finally serve his punishment for this terrible crime,” District Attorney Kathleen Rice said. “It was the tenacity, skill and dedication of our Nassau County and federal law enforcement agencies that resulted in this cold case being brought to resolution.”

Carter’s attorney, Dennis O’Brien, declined comment.