One night in August 2002, Refugio Tochihuitl looked at his sleeping 5-year-old daughter and decided to do the unthinkable.
He removed her clothes and inserted his erect penis into her butt.
For five years, Tochihuitl thought he'd gotten away with his disgusting crime.
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Then, in 2007, the 10-year-old girl told authorities about the incident after another man had sexually molested her.
During an interview, Tochihuitl admitted to police that he had indeed
sodomized his daughter, but he calmly reasoned that she
hadn't violently fought his advances.
An Orange County jury didn't buy the rationale and found him guilty of rape.
Judge Micheal Hayes sentenced Tochihuitl to 15 years to life in prison.
On appeal, Tochihuitl argued that the real bad guy in the case was his
prosecutor, but a California Court of Appeal recently rejected
the claim as absurd and upheld the conviction.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.