A convicted Orlando serial rapist who is already serving two life sentences pled guilty to another sexual assault in a 36-year-old cold case Wednesday after the victim urged police to reexamine DNA evidence.
George William Girtman, 70, known as the “Malibu Rapist” for multiple sexual assaults in the area around west Orlando’s Malibu neighborhood in the 1980s and ’90s, agreed to a deal with prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to one count of sexual battery with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to just over three years in prison.
The plea was for Girtman’s attack on Gail Gardner, a single mother assaulted inside her home in 1988. With advances in forensic science, she had the Orlando Police Department test her old rape kit for DNA evidence, leading to Girtman not only being identified as the suspect in her case after 33 years, but also in the cases of six other women from 1985 to 1990.
Girtman was subsequently re-arrested in 2021 and charged in relation to 15 cold cases. 16 charges — eight counts of sexual battery, seven counts of burglary and one count of kidnapping — besides Gardner’s case were dropped as part of the plea agreement.