Housing Troubles Cancels Public Hearing on Serial Rapist Issue

A public hearing on a serial rapist's proposed release to Lake Los Angeles has been canceled because the owner of a house where he was set to live withdrew the property from consideration, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office announced today.

Public comments submitted over the proposed release of Christopher Hubbart, the so-called "Pillowcase Rapist," will still be delivered next Wednesday to Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Gilbert Brown, according to the District Attorney's Office.

No new release location has been proposed for Hubbart.

The District Attorney's Office announced last month that the owner of a home at 17132 Laredo Vista withdrew the property in an area east of Palmdale from consideration.

"Our Lake Los Angeles community has been successful in preventing Hubbart's release to their neighborhood," Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich said last month. "This is a significant victory -- however, the fight is not over. Another Los Angeles County community may still be identified by the state which will start this process all over again."

Hubbart admitted raping about 40 women between 1971 and 1982.

Upon his initial arrest in 1972 in Los Angeles, he was deemed a "mentally disordered sex offender" and sent to Atascadero State Hospital. He was released seven years later after doctors said he posed no further threat.

But over the next two years, he raped another 15 women in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to court documents. He was again imprisoned, then paroled in 1990. Hubbart subsequently was returned to prison after he accosted a woman in Santa Clara County.

Attorneys for Hubbart have argued that their client's current detention in Santa Clara violates his rights to due process.

In May, Judge Gilbert Brown ruled that Hubbart should be released and housed somewhere in Los Angeles County -- a decision that District Attorney Jackie Lacey contended was in error. An appeals court and the state Supreme Court, however, declined to overturn Brown's ruling.

Lacey and Antonovich have strongly opposed plans to allow the serial rapist to live in Los Angeles County.

Hubbart lived in Santa Clara County in the years leading to his last arrest and no longer has family living in Los Angeles County. California law requires that a sexually violent predator be conditionally released to the county of his or her domicile "prior to the person's incarceration," according to prosecutors.

Hubbart, if released, would be under strict supervision, including electronic monitoring.

Hubbart was born in Pasadena in 1951 and lived there for the first six years of his life, when he moved to Claremont, where he lived until 1971, according to the District Attorney's Office.

-- City News Service