ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 3, 1997 TAG: 9701030102
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
Ronnie L. Howard, a 22-year-old Roanoker suspected in a series of attacks on women in Old Southwest, was convicted Thursday of assaulting two of his victims and sentenced to five years in prison.
As part of a plea agreement reached in Roanoke Circuit Court, authorities agreed not to prosecute Howard on charges of breaking into another woman's home and trying to rape her, and of peeping into an occupied dwelling.
In exchange, Howard pleaded no contest to assaulting two women - holding them briefly at knifepoint outside their apartments, then letting them go when they screamed - and breaking into a third woman's apartment.
All three incidents occurred June 14 on Elm Avenue.
After finding Howard guilty of grand larceny, breaking and entering, and two counts of assault, Judge Robert P. Doherty sentenced him to five years in prison.
Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Gerald Teaster said authorities could have charged Howard with breaking into a Southwest Roanoke home and attempting to rape a woman. But because the evidence was not strong in that case - the woman could not positively identify the assailant - prosecutors were willing to drop it in exchange for convictions in the others.
At the time of the attacks, Howard had raised suspicions of some residents of an Elm Avenue apartment building where he lived with his girlfriend. He was known for hanging around the building and peeping into windows, they said.
"He always sneaked around," Rosa Lee Fitzgerald testified at a preliminary hearing in July. "He was never out in the open where people could see him. It was like he was hiding; that's the way he was."
Fitzgerald testified that on the morning of June 14, she was leaving her apartment in the 100 block of Elm Avenue when Howard grabbed her from behind and held what felt like a knife to her throat.
"I just kept screaming because he scared me so bad I couldn't do nothing but scream," she testified. "He wasn't after my pocketbook or nothing... He was after me." As she continued to scream, Fitzgerald said, Howard "finally turned me loose" and fled.
Howard also was convicted of attacking Betty Otey in the same manner at a nearby Elm Avenue apartment several hours later.
And later in the day, another woman returned to her Elm Avenue apartment and found that $2,000 worth of jewelry had been taken by a burglar who apparently got inside by cutting a window screen.
When police arrested Howard a short time later, they found some of the jewelry in his apartment.
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