
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 17, 1990                   TAG: 9007170210
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

9 YEARS GIVEN IN ATTEMPTED RAPE

Struggling with almost every sentence, a Roanoke man testified Monday that co-workers teased him so much about his stuttering that he "lost it" the day he broke into a woman's apartment and tried to rape her at knifepoint.

Stephen Frank Simpkins, 19, was sentenced to nine years in prison for attempted rape, malicious wounding and statutory burglary with intent to commit rape.

"I was feeling a lot of anger and hurt" shortly before the attack, Simpkins testified in Roanoke Circuit Court.

Simpkins, a house painter, said that on the day of the Jan. 31 attack, he had been having problems sleeping and could no longer deal with his anger after co-workers had teased him repeatedly about his speech impediment.

"I just couldn't control it," Simpkins said of his anger. "It was overwhelming me, and I couldn't stop it until the end and there was blood on [the woman's] hand."

Authorities have said that Simpkins went to his victim's home on Windsor Avenue Southwest as she was preparing to leave for work and asked to use the telephone.

After leaving the apartment door ajar as he left, Simpkins returned a short time later with a knife and ordered the woman into her bedroom.

Simpkins and the woman began to struggle as he forced her on the bed, and the woman's hand was cut as she fought off her attacker. Simpkins fled after he saw that the woman had been cut.

"But for her ability to protect herself, we would have had a much more serious situation," Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Ann Hill said.

Although Simpkins did not go into detail about the reasons for the attack, a probation officer and a psychiatrist both linked the incident to his anger about being teased for stuttering.

"He had a buildup of anger over that and it exploded at this particular time," a probation officer said.

Simpkins told Circuit Judge Roy Willett that while he deserved to be punished, he also needed treatment for his speech problems and anger control.

"I'm ashamed of the charges that I'm in here for," he told Willett. "I never thought of myself as capable of doing something like this, and I'm very scared."

by CNB