Almost a year after his abduction victim was rescued from his Texas "house of horrors," Jeffrey Allan Maxwell, 59, is going to trial. Maxwell has been charged with aggravated kidnapping and two counts of aggravated sexual assault, and faces life imprisonment if convicted.
He is accused of kidnapping the 63-year-old woman at gunpoint, from her rural home in Parker County, Texas, on March 1, 2011. His victim says he drove her 100 miles away to his house in Corsicana, tortured her for 12 days chaining her to a bed, and hanging her up using a deer-skinning rack. It is alleged he then set fire to the house to destroy the evidence.
A tip-off on the whereabouts of the missing woman, had led police to Maxwell, who was her former neighbor. Maxwell's romantic advances toward her had been spurned years earlier, and she had expressed concern to friends that he was harassing her, police said.
"She even would call him the 'bad man,'" the victims friend Maryann Blakely said. "She wouldn't call him by his name, 'Jeff Maxwell.' She'd call Randy and say, 'The bad man was over here today,'"
Blakely said Maxwell, who was her former neighbor too, made her skin crawl. She said one day she came home to find her dog shot dead, and she was sure Maxwell was the culprit.
"The next day, he followed the blood trail and it led right to the front of his house," Blakely said.
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Maxwell is also a person of interest in the disappearance of his ex-wife Martha Martinez Maxwell, who in 1987, accused her then husband of duct-taping her, drugging, torturing and raping her before slicing her throat.
The grand jury declined to indict him on the charges. Five years later she went missing, "and now, she's never been heard from," said Parker County Sheriff Larry Fowler.
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