Thirty years ago, a stranger slipped into a University City apartment and raped a 6-year-old child as her family slept. On Monday, the man later linked by DNA to the crime was sentenced to 60 years to life in prison.
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Authorities say Michael Graham, now 67, lived less than three-quarters of a mile from the family’s first-floor apartment when he entered through a sliding-glass door before 5 a.m. in February 1996 and attacked the child who’d fallen asleep on her couch while watching a movie.
The case would go unsolved for 27 years, until Graham was arrested in a different state and on different charges. His DNA was entered into the national database, and up came a hit on the 1996 case.
In May, after a jury was selected for his felony trial in San Diego Superior Court, Graham changed his plea to guilty to all six felony charges — but did so without the benefit of a plea deal to secure a shorter sentence. “He was not going to get one minute off,” District Attorney Summer Stephan told reporters at a news conference Monday.
That left his sentence up to the judge. On Monday, Judge Robert Amador handed down the maximum he could for Graham’s admission to several charges, among them forcible rape and attached allegations including torture.
Graham’s defense attorney, Peter Blair, said in an email Monday his client did not want to continue with the trial, “did not want to put the victim and her family through any more pain.”
Blair said Graham has “no recollection of the crime due to heavy substance abuse, chemotherapy treatments, and several mental health issues stemming from prior abuse he sustained as a child. He was quite literally out of his mind at the time of the offense.” The attorney said Graham had had cancer just prior to the offense and had been given a 1 in 80 chance of survival, “so the chemo was aggressive and took a toll on his mental state.”
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On the morning of the attack, the girl’s mother heard her daughter crying. The sliding door was open. The assailant was gone. The child had second-degree chemical burns to her face. Authorities believe he used a chemical over her mouth and nose to render her unconscious.
Evidence included DNA from the suspect. For the next 25 years, San Diego police and crime lab scientists repeatedly sought a match. DNA was relatively nascent technology in 1996. But as the tech continued to improve, the lab kept submitting the evidence in hopes of a hit.
They ran it against the state database in 2000 and in the national database in 2003. They ran it against the DNA of California criminal defendants after the state in 2008 started allowing such searches for investigators hoping it might give a partial match to a family member. They ran it again in 2021, this time in genealogy databases in hopes of the same. But each time, nothing.
Then, in December 2023, came a call from authorities in Colorado. Police there had arrested Graham on suspicion of possessing thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. His DNA hit on the San Diego case.
More testing confirmed it. The odds it was Graham, according to Shawn Montpetit, supervising criminalist at the San Diego police crime lab, were one in 7.2 quadrillion.
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