Carnival Worker Denies Rape

A Spokane carnival worker charged with repeatedly raping a 13-year-old girl testified Wednesday that she went home with him and consented to sex.

Terry L. Purcell, 31, was arrested after midnight on March 16, after security guards stopped him and the girl at the Spokane Interstate Fairgrounds.

The girl testified Tuesday that Purcell grabbed her outside a Spokane Valley convenience store earlier that night, forced her behind a building and raped her.

Purcell put a T-shirt over her head, she said, and made her walk to his fairgrounds trailer.

There, Purcell gagged the girl with a tennis ball, bound her, and forced her into more sex acts, she said. She told the jury she was also raped with a baseball bat.

On Wednesday, Purcell - stocky and square-jawed with long, dark curly hair- denied attacking the girl. He said he overheard her tell the store clerk that she needed to call her parents. It was dark and late.

“I felt a little concerned, too,” Purcell said.

He said he left the store and caught up with the girl. Holding a cigarette, she asked him for “a light,” he said.

“She seemed like she needed a place to stay,” Purcell told the Superior Court jury. “I offered, she accepted.”

He said she asked him for alcohol, and that he believed her to be 15 or 16. They went to his trailer, he said, watched TV, baked cookies and pizza, mixed rum and Kool-Aid drinks. Then they had sex, he said.

“The baseball bat - did you use that on her?” public defender Steve Reich asked the defendant.

Purcell said the girl used the bat on him instead.

“Are you admitting you had sexual intercourse?” Reich asked.

“Yes.”

Purcell said they had sex three or four times in the 20 hours she was with him inside the trailer. He is charged with four counts of first-degree rape.

Reich asked Purcell if he knew that consensual sex with a 13-year-old girl constitutes child rape.

“Yes, I do,” Purcell said.

During cross-examination, Deputy Prosecutor Mary Ann Brady pressed Purcell, asking him who initiated sex that night.

“It was a mutual thing,” he said. “A kiss is a kiss. It takes two lips.”

Brady asked Purcell how he got such a young girl to perform sex acts.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you do this?”’ he said. “She did it.”

Purcell told the court he didn’t know how the girl’s blood got on the bat, or how her DNA got on the tennis ball. He also claimed he didn’t know how her underclothes ended up behind a building near Sprague and Vista.

Closing arguments in the trial are expected today.

, DataTimes