Beshaw again guilty of rape

PALMER — For a third time, Micah Beshaw has been found guilty of rape.

Beshaw, 37, was on trial for the last week and a half before superior Court Judge Eric Smith. It was a re-trial, ordered after a higher court tossed out his 2008 conviction. The guilty verdict came on Wednesday.

“The facts of the case remained the same. Therefore, the Palmer District Attorney’s Office felt it was important to continue to seek justice on behalf of the victim and the community,” Assistant District Attorney Melissa Howard, who successfully prosecuted Beshaw in the case, wrote in an email Wednesday.

The re-trial looked a lot different from a standard trial. For one thing, a lot of the evidence introduced came in the form of recordings of his previous trial.

The crimes alleged occurred in Glennallen in 2007. Prosecutors said Beshaw spotted a group of cyclists trekking along the Glenn Highway from Texas to Anchorage.

Beshaw tricked a woman into getting off her bicycle, then tried to drag her into the trees along the highway. Later, in an attempt to get away, he hit another cyclist with his pickup truck. When the court of appeals threw out his conviction, it retained the charge for hitting the cyclist with his pickup. It tossed the rape charges, though, saying that when prosecutors introduced evidence of previous rapes they should have called to the witness stand the officer who compiled that evidence.

The 2008 case was not the first time Beshaw faced rape charges. In September 2001, he was charged with raping multiple times a woman he picked up as she walked home along the Glenn Highway. He wiped her clean before dropping her off.

That same month, prosecutors said, he raped a different woman he picked up from the parking lot of McDonald’s by posing as a co-worker.

At the time of those Palmer charges, he was suspected in a couple of Anchorage rape cases. In February 2001, a woman said she was waiting for friends at Anchorage’s Fifth Avenue Mall when Beshaw, impersonating a security guard, led her into an empty room and raped her. He then held her captive for three days and raped her multiple times.

In October 2000, a woman said Beshaw, again posing as a security officer, accused her of selling drugs then raped her in an elevator room, wiping her down and leaving her handcuffed to a pole.

At the time, Frontiersman reports said that charges in the Anchorage cases “never materialized.”

Beshaw was on probation in Glennallen when he tried to pull that cyclist into the woods.

In recordings of his first trial for the Glennallen case played at his second trial, Beshaw denied dragging the woman into the woods and tried to explain his odd behavior — not giving a full account to troopers, trying to avoid talking to the woman he hit with his pickup — as being motivated by fear he would go back to prison.

“I didn’t want to be put in a position that would put me back in jail,” he told then-prosecutor Rachel Gernat.

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