Case Explained: Jury convicts rapist guilty 36 years after brutal Framingham assault – Legal Perspective

More than 36 years after the crime, Stephen Paul Gale was found guilty of raping and robing two women at a Hit or Miss store in Framingham in 1989.

The jury found him guilty on all charges which included four counts of aggravated rape, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of armed robbery.

Gale evaded the law for decades, using false names and moving around the county, before DNA evidence linked him to the crime in 2024.

“This investigation spanned more than three decades. It involved many false starts, up and downs, and long periods without answers,” Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said at a press conference after the verdict Tuesday. “Despite the passage of time, the victims in this case showed tremendous perseverance, they never gave up hope and they never waiver in the pursuit of finding answers.”

It was one of the victims who saved some of Gale’s DNA in a tissue following the crime that would help crack the case so many years later.

Gale entered the Hit or Miss in December 1989, a few days after Christmas, with a handgun and made two female employees hand over the cash they had on hand and in the register and locked the store, according to the DA. He then made the women undress and get into separate rooms.

He sexually assaulted both women while holding the gun to their heads. When he returned to the front of the store, the women fled.

Barely clothed and in the bitter cold, they made their way over a chained linked fence and to a nearby home to report the crime.

“That took incredible courage,” Ryan said.

Even with the DNA and a sketch, it took years to find a real lead on the case, the DA said.

In 2022, the office began working with a lab to try to match DNA for older cases, but it wasn’t until 2023 that the profile they had was matched to some of Gale’s family. Then, it took until the next year to identify Gale himself.

“There’s no substitute in these cases, even using this technology, for real police work and dogged investigation,” Ryan said.

Even when an arrest warrant was issued and law enforcement began looking for Gale, something Ryan described as a “national effort,” the fugitive still tried to flee from police.

Ryan thanked local and national investigators for their work on the case, including the Los Angeles Police Department who helped apprehend Gale two years ago.

She also talked about the “substantial challenges” that older cases like this one pose.

“For everybody who is in that position who wonders, too much time passed for me to get an answer,” Ryan said this should be a case that gives them hope.