Victim’s Wife Testifies

The Daily Local

August 24, 2007

By R. Johnathan Tuleya

The wife of one of Mark Ethan McFall’s alleged victims described how her husband stumbled into the couple’s home hours before dawn after reportedly being sexually assaulted by the defendant three years ago.

Unaware of what allegedly had happened earlier in the night – and her husband still too groggy from the drugs reportedly given to him on the sly by the defendant – the woman told the jury listening to McFall’s trial on Friday she remembered being angry.

She was partly upset because she had assumed her husband had spent the night drinking without the courtesy of a phone call to say he would be home late. Second, it was 4 a.m. and the woman had to wake up in a few hours to go work.

The wife left her husband to pass out on the couch and she returned to bed, but not before thinking it was odd he didn’t smell of alcohol.

“That night he kept telling me he didn’t feel good, and he didn’t know what was wrong. He didn’t know why he felt that way,” the wife testified. The names of both the accuser and his wife have been withheld to protect the victim’s identity.

He was still asleep a few hours later when she left the house. She said she called home later to check in.

“That’s when he told me something had happened last night that made him very uncomfortable,” she said, “and he could only remember part of it.”

The man’s wife left work early, and returned home where the alleged victim described passing out in a chair downstairs inside McFall’s Towing, on the 1100 block of West Lincoln Highway in Valley, and then reportedly waking up on the building’s second floor with his pants pulled down.

As he swerved his way home in his vehicle, fighting the effects from what authorities believe was medication administered by McFall, he further remembered seeing flashes, like those from a camera.

“He told me not to tell anybody. He told me not to call the police,” the woman said. “You don’t know who Mark (McFall) is, and I don’t want you getting involved.”

McFall is charged with rape and multiple counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault, unauthorized administration of an intoxicant and other related offenses for allegedly drugging three victims and then sexually assaulting them. The attacks span three years.

McFall, 43, was arrested in November 2005 following a complaint from a 19-year-old employee to state police.

It wasn’t until the wife of the earlier alleged victim saw a story about his arrest printed in the newspaper that she convinced her husband to contact police.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Robert L. Miller rested the prosecution’s case shortly after the woman’s testimony Friday afternoon.

McFall’s defense attorney, Justin J. McShane, has said the defendant is bisexual and is arguing the encounters with the men were consensual.

Among his first witnesses was Michael King who described the relationship between McFall and a third alleged victim as “close.”

“Maybe some of the touching they did, I wouldn’t do to my best friend,” he said.

And Dave Discullo, who worked for McFall in the winters in 2005 and 2006, testified “gay sexual suggestions were made (to him by McFall and the third alleged victim), but I thought it was a joke.”

The trial is taking place before Common Pleas Judge Phyllis R. Streitel. Testimony is scheduled to resume Monday.

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