PALMER — A man convicted 13 years go of raping three Palmer teenagers may be headed back to prison.

Earl Norman Ray, 37, said through his attorney in Palmer Superior Court that it wasn’t him who spoke to a sister of Ray’s victims just before Christmas in 2007. But the judge didn’t buy it.

Micale Culver, the sister, said she knew Ray had just gotten out of prison when she went to the Longbranch Saloon in Anchorage. When a “creepy” guy behind her started talking either to himself or to her — she wasn’t sure at first — she had a suspicion it might be him. Especially after he mentioned her mother.

She didn’t want to seem paranoid. She’d always felt that Ray wouldn’t dream of harming her family again.

“It’s too obvious. If anything was going to happen to anyone in our family the first person the authorities would look at would be him,” she testified.

Ray was sentenced to 20 years in prison in October of 1995. By law, a convict is eligible for a one-third reduction in his sentence if he obeys prison rules.

Back in 1995, police said he had met the girls’ mother in a bar about a week before the rapes and that she had rebuffed him. The night of the rapes he let himself into the apartment and went upstairs where he attacked two girls, ages 13 and 14, at gunpoint. When a third sister, 19, went upstairs to check on a noise she was also raped.

At the Longbranch, after her boyfriend scared Ray away, Culver said, she remained suspicious of the encounter but she didn’t start digging until she saw him again. First he was pulling out of her subdivision. Then she saw him at Carrs on Huffman Road.

Eventually she talked to his parole officer and found out the pickup she saw the man driving the second two times was his. It was then, months later, that she told Ray’s parole officer what had happened. Later, at a parole hearing where she saw him for the first time since he was sentenced, she was certain.

Ray’s attorney, Wallace Tetlow, attempted to poke holes in Culver’s story.

“Here’s this guy, Mr. Ray, who was convicted of doing horrible things to your sisters at gunpoint and you didn’t think to call his probation officer?” he asked.

“The possibility of Earl Ray being there is always there with anyone in my family,” Culver said. “My focus has never been on him. My focus has been on my family and how we live our lives.”

Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler eventually decided to believe Culver and rule that Ray did violate his probation by talking to a family member of one of his victims. Whether that means he’ll go back to prison will be decided at a hearing July 30.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.