A Texas woman who was brutally tortured and sexually assaulted a woman after kidnapping her and holding her hostage for 12 days now says that she is going to try to forgive her captor.
Jeffrey Allen Maxwell, 59, was sentenced to three life sentences and will not be up for parole until he is 119-years-old.
His victim, who has not been named throughout the trial because she is a victim of sexual assault, decided to go public with her feelings because she feels the need to thank God for rescuing her last March.
Lois Peterson, 63, said that she felt that she was bound to die during the ordeal, but got God saved her.
‘He answered my prayers and spared my life,’ she told local television station WFAA.com.
‘That man was going to kill me; he had no choice but to kill me, because I could identify him and he didn’t want to go to prison,’ she said on Wednesday.
He is bound for prison now, after he was found guilty of aggravated kidnapping and two counts of aggravated sexual assault.
In the trial, the jury learned of how Maxwell abducted the woman from her rural home, drove her some 100 miles away to his house in Corsicana- about 50 miles south of Dallas- and held her captive for nearly two weeks.
She said Maxwell was mad when they arrived at his home, and he hit her with a whip and put her wrists in some type of device that hoisted her off the ground.
Authorities have said it was Maxwell’s homemade device for skinning deer, and photographs shown to the jury depict a long, thin wooden board with hooks attached. A cable was attached to the garage ceiling.
‘I don’t know what it is but he pulled me up in the air,’ the woman is heard saying on the audiotape that was played to the courtroom. ‘It scared me to death.’
She also said Maxwell told her his fingerprints were all over her house so he would have to torch it — which authorities say he did two days later.
She originally met Maxwell several years ago when she shunned his romantic advances and she told him to stay off her property.
After a neighbor’s tip led investigators to his house in Corsicana on March 12, Maxwell answered the door and said he was alone — but then the woman ran out and said, ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ Montgomery testified. She had a broken arm, head injury and multiple bruises, an emergency room doctor testified.
According to court documents, Maxwell later told an investigator that after he took the woman back to his house, he ‘strung her up’ in his garage on a homemade rack used for skinning deer.
After the trial ended and Ms Peterson learned on Wednesday that he would be forced to serve at least two of his three life sentences immediately after one another, she was thrilled.
‘I feel very relieved, because that was one of my worries — that he would come after me and try to kill me if he ever gets out,’ she said.
‘It’s a miracle that I’m alive.’
In spite of the torture she was put through, she maintains that it is in her own best interest to forgive him.
‘Because that is the way that our religious faith teaches that. If I don’t forgive him, I will go to hell. My religious faith teaches that, and I certainly don’t want to go to hell over not forgiving that man,’ Ms Peterson said.
This is not Maxwell’s first run in with the law, as he has also been investigated on suspicion of involvement in the disappearance of his ex-wife Martha Martinez Maxwell.
She has been missing since 1992. Maxwell divorced her in 1995, citing her disappearance.
Martha Martinez Maxwell first went missing in 1987 before being found beaten with her throat cut near Ardmore, Oklahoma. She survived those injuries.
Maxwell was charged with aggravated kidnapping in that case in 1987, but court records show a Tarrant County grand jury declined to indict him, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
Info : News
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