Serial Rapist Who Posed as Maintenance Man Receives Six Life Sentences

A convicted serial rapist -- dubbed the “Maintenance Man” because he posed as a worker to enter apartment buildings and attack girls and women -- has been sentenced to six life prison terms plus 140 years.

Daniel Wade, 63, an inmate in a Kentucky federal prison, was convicted Friday on charges of rape, aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, aggravated assault, cruelty to children, burglary and robbery by intimidation in connection with a series of Fulton County rapes dating back 28 years, according to a news release.

The charges against Wade include rapes spanning one year between January 1986 and January 1987. During that period, five female victims ranging in age from 10 to 64 were raped in separate incidents. The victims were attacked by Wade, who posed at times as a maintenance man to enter apartment complexes along the I-85 corridor in Northeast Atlanta, according to the Fulton County district attorney’s office.

"He would pour water under the door, then knock and say, 'there's a water leak,' to get the victim to open up their door," Lou Arcangeli, a retired Atlanta police detective who worked the original case, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Or he would turn the lights out in the hallway and say there was a power outage."

The cases went unsolved with no fresh leads for nearly 20 years until the district attorney’s Cold Case Unit and the Atlanta Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit revived the case and began a new investigation in August 2007. The team linked DNA evidence from all five victims from the 1980’s Fulton County rapes and three other victims from DeKalb and Gwinnett counties to a single unknown suspect.

In March 2011, investigators found Wade – an inmate in a Kentucky federal prison -- was a DNA match for those eight cases. After more investigation, Wade was indicted for the Fulton County rapes in September 2013.

The sentence against Wade for the Georgia rapes will run consecutive to a 20-year federal prison term he is already serving.

Wade was in federal prison on drug charges when investigators charged him with the Fulton County rapes, the newspaper reported. He also had been convicted before on separate burglary and voluntary manslaughter charges.