- November 7, 2024
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A Flagler County jury of five women and one man deliberated for an hour and a half Feb. 22 before finding John Schenone, a 33-year-old Palm Coast resident, guilty of raping and molesting his girlfriend's daughter.
Circuit Court Judge Dennis Craig sentenced Schenone to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The crime was reported June 28, 2015, by the victim's mother, who told Flagler County Sheriff's Office detectives that her 11-year-old daughter said Schenone had repeatedly molested her — until that very day, when the girl's mother's knock on the girl's locked bedroom door at 4 a.m. interrupted Schenone as he raped her.
There were also two other children in the house: a 13-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, siblings of the victim.
The mother first realized something might be wrong that morning when she found her daughter's bedroom door locked, she said. The mother had been getting ready for bed — the family often stayed up late at night — when she noticed that her daughter's bedroom door was closed. She went to check the door, and found it locked, a violation of a family rule. She heard a muffled voice inside.
She called inside to see if Schenone, her live-in boyfriend, was in there. From inside the room, Schenone answered yes.
The mother asked why the door was locked. "I had this feeling come over me that something was not right, so I’m just listening real intently," she told the jury during the Feb. 22 trial.
She heard a creaking sound, like someone getting up off the bed. Schenone replied that he was just getting the family's hamster, and asked her if she needed him to unlock the door. She said yes. It took him a moment to get to the door.
As he came outside, she told the jury during the Feb. 22 trial, she leaned in to kiss him, and smelled a strong "feminine odor."
After he walked out, the mother went in check on her daughter. Whispering so that Schenone couldn't hear, the mother asked he daughter what Schenone had been doing in her room.
The girl told her that Schenone had been raping her. "I couldn't even process the words coming out of her mouth," the mother said during the trial. "It literally felt like my mind was exploding."
The mother asked her daughter how many times it had happened, and the daughter said once or twice. The mother didn't report the crime right there and then: She said she was afraid of what Schenone would do if he knew that she knew.
When the mother asked her daughter later that morning if it had really just been once or twice — after noticing that Schenone's behavior in the morning didn't seem any different from any other day — the daughter shook her head.
The mother took the girl to the Sheriff's Office that same day to report the crime, and also placed in a plastic bag and took with her the underwear her daughter had been wearing at the time of the rape. A Florida Department of Law Enforcement laboratory found DNA matching Schenone's DNA type on the underwear. The daughter said that Schenone had molested her more than 50 times within a year.
Schenone's attorney, Randall Richardson, questioned the mother during the trial about Schenone's manner of disciplining the children, saying the victim and the other children had resented Schenone because he was "a disciplinarian" who yelled at the children and disciplined them by making them stand in a corner. Richardson called the 11-year-old's statement a "false allegation."
The victim, who had turned 12 by the date of the Feb. 22 trial, took the stand and described the sexual acts Schenone had committed on her.
Schenone then took the stand in his own defense. Rambling — and repeatedly corrected by the Assistant State Attorney Joe LeDonne, Richardson and Judge Craig — Schenone made allegations that he wasn't able to provide any evidence for: He said he'd once seen the victim's brother commit a sexual act on her. He said she had a hygiene problem in which she didn't wipe properly after bathroom use, causing what he referred to as "staph infections," and that he'd therefore taken it upon himself to "wipe" her with sanitary wipes for about a year, and that that explained why he'd been in the room with her with the door locked at 4 a.m.
He denied ever touching her sexually in the manner she'd described to law enforcement. When the prosecutor questioned him, Schenone said he'd never reported the alleged infections to the girl's mother or taken the girl to a doctor for it, and that he hadn't ever reported the sexual act he'd allegedly witnessed.
A juror questioned if there were any medical records supporting Schenone's statements about the girl getting infections. Schenone said there weren't.
The girl's mother took the stand again, and said she was not ware of any such infections or hygiene issues with her daughter, or any alleged sexual act on the daughter by the brother.
And one part of the investigation wasn't revealed to the jury: After telling the Sheriff's Office about the molestation, the mother placed law enforcement-recorded phone calls to Schenone, saying her daughter had told her everything, but that both she and her daughter would forgive him if he was honest about what had happened.
He initially denied molesting the girl, saying he'd "wiped" her with sanitary wipes, according to a Sheriff's Office charging affidavit — the same story he gave in court.
But after the mother pressed him during the phone calls and mentioned the specific acts her daughter had said Schenone had committed, Schenone said, "Alright, fine then. I did." Later, when the mother mentioned a third sexual act that her daughter had said Schenone had committed, Schenone said he'd done the first two sexual acts she had mentioned — one of which constitutes sexual battery, and the other lewd and lascivious molestation — but said, "but I didn't do that other thing."
Schenone was found guilty of one count of sexual battery — rape — of a child under 12 years of age, and one count of lewd and lascivious molestation. He was found not guilty of a second charge of lewd and lascivious molestation.
Schenone had one prior arrest, for a domestic violence assault in November of 2007, according to county jail records.
