Erin Justice’s account of being raped by her stepfather on March 3, 2004, was told twice Wednesday by two Naperville officers, one a detective who first talked to her that night, the second a policeman who took her handwritten statement the next day.
In each version of the story, the 16-year-old begged Laurence Lovejoy to stop, going as far as falsely claiming that she had a sexually transmitted disease, according to testimony.
On the second day of Lovejoy’s trial in DuPage County for rape and murder, the jury heard both versions of the alleged rape in lieu of Justice’s testimony, because she was murdered three weeks later. She had been beaten, poisoned, stabbed and suffocated, according to an autopsy.
DuPage prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Both accounts begin with Lovejoy running a bath at her family’s Naperville apartment and offering to massage her legs after Justice’s track practice at Waubonsie High School. She acquiesced, but the massage turned into more, Justice claimed in oral and written statements, and Lovejoy pulled down her pants, raised her shirt and placed his hand over her mouth before raping her.
Both accounts end with Lovejoy, 40, quickly releasing the girl when she told him that a sound outside may have been her mother coming home, and her lying to him about her having a sexually transmitted disease.
Naperville Detective James Griffith testified Wednesday that he interviewed the teenager at her neighbor’s home, where she ran crying after escaping her apartment.
She said she begged him, “Please don’t do this,” and offered to do anything else Lovejoy wanted in order to avoid being raped, Griffith said.
Afterward she heard him say he was sorry, that he loved her and that he didn’t mean to hurt her, according to both versions.
Lovejoy has denied the allegations, claiming that Justice was unhappy with her mother’s four-month marriage to Lovejoy. Lovejoy wasn’t immediately charged after the alleged rape because police and prosecutors were awaiting DNA test results from the DuPage County crime lab. Several weeks after the murder, the results showed DNA from Lovejoy’s saliva on the girl’s breast and cheek.
A bloody footprint at the Aurora townhouse where Justice moved after the rape allegation ties him to the March 27, 2004, murder scene.
The trial, which began this week and continues Thursday, is expected to last three weeks.
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abarnum@tribune.com
