WHATEVER HAPPENED TO. . .THE FRIENDLY RAPIST?

CRIME Until one cold night in February 1977, GUY WILLIAM MARBLE JR. was an aggressive, well-paid public relations executive with Dallas’s Bloom Agency. Today the man known as the Friendly Rapist is No. 274515, an inmate in the Walls Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections in Huntsville.

Marble, who confessed to some 40 rapes and was suspected of more, spent a year in Dallas County jail after his capture. He then copped a plea with the district attorney’s office and was sentenced to 60 years on seven charges of burglary with intent to commit rape, which was easier to prosecute than rape and carried a similar range of punishment. A former police reporter with the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Marble chose victims from ages 17 to 63, most of them single and living alone in the vicinity of North Central Expressway, Greenville Avenue, and Northwest Highway. He earned his nickname after victims described him as being polite and apologetic and speaking in a gentle, friendly voice.

Marble, who serves as editor of the prison paper, has been denied parole eight times since 1985. But he already has served more than ten years and has been credited with more than 26 years because of good behavior and performance at prison jobs, parole officials say. Three of the six parole board members have voted to grant him parole, which angers Marble’s victims and those who put him in prison.

Needless to say, District Attorney JOHN VANCE is against parole. “We just send in a form each time and oppose it,” Vance says. “The guy should not get out and that is where we stand. But he eventually will get out.”

When he is free. Marble plans to return to his hometown of Houston and make a career in writing. He told D he plans to go into “deep psychoanalysis” to find out why he committed the crimes. But at least one of Marble’s victims doesn’t want to see him given that luxury. “My God, how can that man even be considered for parole?” asks a Dallas woman who requested that her name not be used. “My life has been totally screwed up. I can’t even look a man in the eye now. I hope he rots in prison, and when he dies I hope he rots in hell.”