A Thai immigrant who police say directed them to the body of a 12-year-old Tacoma girl pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges that he violently raped two other young girls.
Authorities say one of the girls — who is now 19 — was abducted on her way to school in 2000. The other had lived with him for three years as a teenager.
It was 42-year-old Terapon Adhahn’s first court appearance since his arrest July 8, when detectives working the case of Zina Linnik, who was abducted during a neighborhood fireworks display July 4, tracked him down at a home in Parkland, south of Tacoma. Detectives said that he provided information that led them to the girl’s body in rural Pierce County, and that during the course of the investigation they discovered the other victims.
Adhahn, who was convicted of incest in 1990 for raping a female relative, entered the pleas to 12 charges in Pierce County Superior Court: one count of first-degree kidnapping; four counts of first-degree rape; three counts of second-degree rape; three counts of third-degree child rape; and one count of failing to register as a sex offender.
Deputy Prosecutor Ed Murphy said Thursday he expects to charge Adhahn next week in Zina’s abduction and death.
Bail was set at slightly more than $2 million on Thursday, and Adhahn was scheduled for trial Sept. 13. He was being held at Pierce County jail in isolation, police said.
Authorities say the girl abducted on her way to school was brutally attacked and then dropped off in a remote area. The other girl told investigators she lived with Adhahn for three years as a teenager. The girl said that her mother was having some difficulties at the time, and that she went to live with Adhahn because he was an acquaintance of her mother’s boyfriend.
She initially estimated that she lived with him from ages 12-15, but billing records uncovered by investigators suggest the girl actually would have lived with him approximately from ages 14-17.
She said he molested her as many as 200 times — during at least 15 of which she was “physically restrained and held down when the defendant raped her,” according to an affidavit for probable cause. One of those times was at gunpoint, it said.
Taylor Cornyn, a dispatcher at the Tacoma towing company where Adhahn worked, said Adhahn told co-workers that the girl was his daughter.
Police in suburban Lakewood, meanwhile, have named Adhahn a person of interest in the killing of Adre’Anna Jackson, a 10-year-old girl whose remains were found in a Pierce County field last year. Witnesses said they saw Adhahn in Jackson’s neighborhood around the time she disappeared, police said.
Adhahn is an immigrant who came to the U.S. in the 1970s after his mother married a U.S. soldier. Adhahn enlisted in the Army in 1983 after graduating from an American high school in Germany, but his service ended following his incest conviction, for which he was sentenced to two months in jail and five years of counseling. He told his counselors during his treatment that he had been raped countless times by an older brother while growing up in Thailand.