After 30 years on the run, Lakeview rapist Rudy Carter faces Nassau County judge

    Rudy Carter was on the run for almost three decades. He skipped town as a Nassau County jury convicted him of first-degree rape and sexual abuse, managing for so many years to evade capture and punishment.
    But his free ride came to an end on March 4, when police found Carter, originally from Lakeview, living under a different name in a New Jersey hotel room. The 64-year-old, who has had an arrest warrant pending since April 1981, was arrested in Elizabeth, N.J., by a slew of detectives from the Nassau County Police Department Fugitive Squad and the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force.  
    Carter was extradited from the neighboring state and brought before Nassau County Court Judge George Peck on March 26 for sentencing. Peck ordered a pre-sentence report — a document prepared by the Department of Probation regarding its opinion of how severe a punishment a convicted defendant deserves — in the case and ordered Carter back in court on April 13.
    Carter faces 15 to 25 years in prison for committing first-degree rape, for which he was initially charged on Aug. 9, 1979, after police said he attacked a woman in her Lakeview home, possibly using a gun. As the jury deliberated on April 6, 1981, Carter was out on $1,000 bail and fled.
    "It's a cold case, and whenever you get one like this, it's sort of a big deal," said Det. Sgt. Salvatore Scalone, commanding officer of the NCPD's fugitive squad. And to think, he added, "A random check of a cold case – that's all it was."

    Detectives had revisited Carter's case — one of 84,000 open warrants — earlier this year, plugging his name and social security information into one of several commercial databases police use regularly to track people. "The database didn't tell us where he was living, just told us where he had lived, so we had to find him — old-fashioned police work," Scalone said.
    When they did find him, Carter admitted having a role in the crime. According to Scalone, "He remembered it, he knew why we were coming to get him and he said that he was drunk at the time [of the rape]."
    Closing the case was a victory for Nassau County police. "It's always very gratifying to find somebody that nobody else could for the last 30 years and bring that person ... to justice," Scalone said. "It's nice to know that it sort of gives the victim closure after 30 years."
    But, there's no time for revelry. "That's it. Every day we're looking for people," Scalone said. "Every day we get new warrants and every day some warrants get recalled, executed or removed from the system, so it's a constant. It never really goes away."