A California man, charged last week with kidnapping, torturing and raping a woman for months, pleaded not guilty to the charges on Tuesday.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said Peter McGuire, 59, was arrested after a 22-year-old woman escaped from his Chino Hills house on June 9 and ran to a nearby park.
Bystanders found the visibly injured woman and called for law enforcement.
The woman told deputies that she had moved in with McGuire at the beginning of the year, KTLA reported.
“Shortly after moving in, the victim was not allowed to leave and was forcibly held against her will by McGuire,” Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Mara Rodriguez said.
While being held there, she was “tortured, physically assaulted, and raped,” the sheriff’s department said, and her injuries were consistent with what she told the deputies.
Rodriguez said the department had received seven or eight calls about domestic disturbances at the home since the first of the year, but “no disturbance was ever substantiated.”
“The house was quiet and no one answered the door during each of the calls,” she said.
Chino Hills Police officers served a search warrant on McGuire’s home after speaking with the woman, but the suspect had already fled the home. They collected evidence from the scene and launched a search for him.
The San Bernardino County SWAT team located McGuire on Saturday in Orange County, where he barricaded himself inside a home a refused to come out. After a lengthy standoff, he surrendered and was taken into custody.
The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office charged McGuire with torture, kidnapping, kidnapping to commit another crime, mayhem, assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment by violence, forcible rape, sodomy by use of force, and forcible oral copulation. The district attorney added special allegations of personal infliction of great bodily injury, administering a controlled substance during commission of a sex crime, and infliction of great bodily injury during a sex offense.
McGuire is being held without bond and is due back in court on June 16.
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