Last May, a retired U.S. Border Patrol agent was arrested on suspicion of being the East Valley Rapist. Yet criminal cases involving four of eight sexual assaults he allegedly committed 20 years ago are still months from going to trial, and a judge has been asked to put the brakes on a lawsuit filed by one of the victims.
John Joseph Daly was taken into custody May 4, 2021 for allegedly committing three of those assaults in Maricopa County during 1999 and 2000, and one assault in Cochise County in late 2001. It is the victim of the Bisbee assault who filed a three-count lawsuit shortly after Daly was indicted last year.
Daly, 58, has asked a judge to stay, or put on hold, the lawsuit by arguing his Fifth Amendment right “to be free from self-incrimination…would be compromised” if the lawsuit moves ahead before the criminal case.
Judge Jason Lindstrom of the Cochise County Superior Court is expected to rule on Daly’s motion later this month. If a stay is ordered, then the Bisbee victim’s attorney, Lynne Cadigan, cannot move forward gathering information from various victims, emergency responders, or the U.S. Border Patrol.
Obtaining information from USBP is of particular importance, Cadigan argues, because the neighbor who purportedly “rescued” the Bisbee woman after the assault was Daly’s supervisor at USBP. In addition, Daly was frequently transferred by USBP, from which he retired in 2019 as a supervising agent.
In the meantime, Judge Timothy Dickerson of the Cochise County Superior Court will preside over an evidentiary hearing on Tuesday in the criminal case on whether the prosecutor must disclose additional information about alleged DNA evidence in the case.
Even if the defense receives the information, Daly will not stand trial anytime soon for the Bisbee assault. Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre previously announced Daly will go on trial first in Maricopa County as those assaults occurred before the one in Bisbee.
But no trial date has been set in the Maricopa County case. The judge assigned to that case was asked earlier this month to designate the case as complex, which would extend Daly’s speedy trial deadline by several months.
Court records show Daly was not a suspect in the East Valley Rapist reports or the Bisbee assault until early 2021 when a new review of old DNA evidence produced a match to Daly. Daly’s defense attorney later challenged the indictment handed down in the Bisbee case by a Cochise County grand jury, claiming Daly was “denied a substantial procedural right” during the grand jury presentation.
A defense motion for remand for a new grand jury presentation argued that testimony by Mesa Police Det. Derick Samuel about the October 2001 assault in Bisbee improperly connected Daly to several other assaults in Maricopa County. Those other assaults “were not relevant” to the Bisbee case, Daly’s attorney argued.
The motion for remand also revealed the DNA collected in 2001 from the Bisbee crime scene could not be compared to recently collected samples of Daly’s DNA because the evidence has been lost or misplaced along with the initial DNA profile report.
Instead, grand jurors were provided a 2002 lab report about a match found between the Bisbee DNA and DNA from two Maricopa County assaults. The DNA in the Maricopa County cases matched when compared to Daly’s DNA last year.
Dickerson rejected the defense motion, noting there is no requirement for the State to present original DNA results to the grand jury. The judge added it “was up to the grand jury” to decide if the evidence presented was sufficient to establish probable cause.
Daly is represented in the civil litigation by Jody Broaddus of Attorneys For Freedom. He is represented in the Cochise County and Maricopa County criminal cases by Mesa-based Nathan Hogle.
READ MORE ABOUT EAST VALLEY RAPIST: HERE
