A convicted Hazel Dell rapist who received five life sentences after terrorizing the Clark County community in the summer of 1982 will once again face a local judge.
David Jay Sterling, 74, appeared Wednesday morning in Clark County Superior Court on a warrant related to the decades-old case. Judge Scott Collier ordered him held without bail.
After Sterling was convicted he was sent to Western State Hospital for psychiatric treatment; he escaped in 1985. A warrant was issued for his arrest. At the same time, the county prosecutor filed a motion to impose Sterling’s suspended life sentences if he was ever caught, Senior Deputy Prosecutor James Smith wrote in an email Thursday.
Smith said the state now will be asking the court to grant the motion and impose the sentences. However, he does not expect the issue to be resolved at Sterling’s next hearing, which is June 5.
Sterling — who has a long history of sexual violence — has not been on the run since escaping the hospital; his path back to a Clark County Jail cell is much more tangled.
A few months after his escape from the mental hospital, Sterling made the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. He was arrested a year later when a Louisiana state trooper stopped him for a traffic violation. Sterling eventually admitted to robbing six banks in at least three different states while on the lam and using stolen airplanes to escape from some of the heists, according to Columbian archives.
Sterling appears to have been in federal custody ever since.
Smith filed an order May 6 in Superior Court requesting that Sterling be brought back to Clark County from the federal prison in Butner, N.C., upon completion of his sentence there. He was released from federal custody Tuesday.
In October 1982, Sterling pleaded guilty in seven rapes in Hazel Dell and two additional assaults. His victims included two boys, six girls and one woman. All but one were walking along roads at night, returning home from neighborhood stores, according to Columbian archives.
He was convicted of raping four teenage and pre-teen girls in Oregon in 1972 and spent seven years in prison for the crimes, according to Columbian archives.
