Alleged serial rapist charged again after release from Florida prison

Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of sexual abuse that readers may find disturbing.

WEST PALM BEACH – Three months after an accused serial rapist was released on bail from an Orlando jail, Palm Beach County investigators say he lured a woman – his sixth alleged victim – to a vacant Wellington home and sexually assaulted her at knifepoint have.

“Why are you doing this?” the woman asked. He replied, “Because I can.”

The woman said he attacked her for an hour with a white-handled knife in one hand and a cellphone in the other and recorded the attack. She said he told her to moan as if the sex was consensual and only stopped the assault when the woman’s cell phone started ringing. He gave her $20 and left.

Officers charged 32-year-old Vincent Laing Jr. with sexual assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the May 7 incident. Laing is linked to five other rapes committed in a similar manner in Orlando last year, according to his arrest report. He was arrested for two of those five cases. Only one of those cases resulted in charges from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.

None of them were enough to keep him in prison until trial. An Orlando judge agreed to reduce Laing’s bail last year at the behest of a defense attorney who said to her knowledge Laing had no violent criminal history.

The same judge revoked his bail after the arrest this month. If convicted of the attack at the Wellington Green Apartments property – where Laing moved after being released from the Orange County Jail in February – he could face life in prison.

Laing is represented by the district attorney’s office, which typically does not comment on open cases.

Detectives: Vincent Laing Jr. forced women into abandoned apartments at knifepoint and raped them

Six months before he was released from prison, investigators in Orlando said Laing’s fifth alleged victim ran naked and screaming from an apartment complex: This man raped me!

A neighbor gave the woman clothes and called the police. Officers detained Laing as he attempted to leave the apartment complex, paving the way for his first arrest.

The woman, a Texas resident who was house hunting in Orlando, told investigators that a man approached her while she was walking through the complex. She said he pressed a knife to her side and led her to an empty apartment, pinning her to the floor and telling her to be quiet.

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The man filmed the attack with his cell phone and tried to cover his face with his jacket, she said. The jacket slipped out of his hand for a moment – long enough for her to recognize him when confronted by the police later that day.

Another woman said she was raped with a knife in the same complex two months earlier, but police were unable to identify the perpetrator. After the Texas woman identified Laing, officers invited the victim of the earlier assault back to police, where she also identified Laing as her attacker.

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Orange County prosecutors accused Laing of raping the Texas woman and said they will present evidence linking him to four other assaults for which he was never charged if the case goes to trial.

Jason Gunn, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, said Tuesday that Laing is “a danger to the community and needs to be off the streets.” He would not say why prosecutors only charged him with one of the reported rapes, but said Laing had a “clear pattern of violence” and was being pursued “vigorously.”

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The pattern, Laing’s suspected modus operandi, includes the knife, the cell phone recording and the venue. Three of the four cases occurred in empty and abandoned apartments. The Wellington house where Laing is accused of inviting his latest target, whom he met hours earlier on an adult meeting website, was being renovated and was also unoccupied.

After the attack, the woman told investigators she entered the man’s phone number into an online database and found the name “Vincent Laing Jr.” She searched the name on Google and came across articles about the two previous attacks, as well as a post from Orlando police urging anyone with information to come forward.

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