Man sentenced to decades in prison for the rape of 4 Penn State students in State College
A Port Matilda man whose rapes upended the lives of four former Penn State students and their families was sentenced Friday to 29 1/2 to 61 years in state prison.
Jeffrey P. Fields, 38, is set to spend more than three decades incarcerated for crimes the father of one of the women described as “exceedingly shocking and horrifying.”
Fields pleaded guilty in March to all but two of the charges filed against him, including felony counts of rape and sexual assault. He received credit for nearly two years served.
The sentence is believed to be among the lengthiest handed down since Centre County District Attorney Bernie Cantorna took office in 2018, absent five people who were sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murder.
“The idea is that I am to stand here and tell you how this man and his actions impacted my life. There is not enough time for me to do that here today,” a woman who grew up in State College wrote in a statement to Centre County President Judge Pamela Ruest. “To share the scope of his impact on my life, that would take a lot longer than a few typed up pages. He changed my life completely. He changed who I am at my core.”
‘Courage and resiliency’ as victims speak out
Fields chose each of the women at random. He attacked them in the wee hours outdoors in the densely populated Highlands neighborhood of the borough. All were either 19 or 20 years old. There were no witnesses.
Centre County First Assistant District Attorney Sean McGraw said Fields was a “very sophisticated rapist.” Fields’ rapes, Ruest said, were “calculated, planned attacks on vulnerable women.”
Fields, who was classified as a sexually violent predator, carried out the rapes between 2010 and 2017. DNA samples collected during rape examinations at Mount Nittany Medical Center helped identify him.
“Whenever I talk about what happened that night, I can see the horror in people’s faces and the sympathy — how awful that must have been. But what I would find out is that the pain that comes in the weeks, months and even years to follow is worse,” a second woman wrote. “During the rape itself, I only had one thought — live. I wasn’t worried about what came after that. I just didn’t want to end up dead. The hard part would come later in trying to get my life back and find normalcy again.”
The statements penned by the women and their families, Centre Safe Executive Director Anne Ard said Wednesday, were “some of the most powerful things I’ve ever read.”
The women were raped during one of the most formative times in their lives, and three of the four have carried the trauma from the attacks with them for more than a decade.
They’ve shown a “tremendous amount of courage and resiliency,” Ard said.
“Their bravery and their courage is just really unbelievable to me,” she said. “To have them be able to sit down and write these statements after what they’ve been through is really pretty extraordinary.”
Those closest to Fields described him as a perfectionist with obsessive-compulsive disorder tendencies, unhappy with his longtime job as a manager of a local furniture store and feelings of being an inadequate husband and father.
He was never medically diagnosed with OCD, an anxiety disorder characterized by uncontrollable, recurring thoughts and fears that lead to repetitive and often ritualized behaviors or compulsions.
McGraw said Fields was raised in a stable home. Fields’ wife, Heather, described him as a distant husband prior to his arrest.
Each of the four rapes had “overtones of power and control; two aspects in Jeff’s life that were absent outside these crimes,” defense lawyer Steve Trialonas wrote in a memo to Ruest.
Fields spoke for nearly 20 minutes, offering an apology for his “unspeakable” crimes. He said he’s “embarrassed, ashamed and disgusted” of his crimes.
“My words cannot express how truly sorry I am,” Fields said. “... I regret everything I’ve done. You did not deserve to go through this. I am so sorry.”
He later added: “If I could go back in time and change everything, I would.”
Fields’ mother, Susan, expressed to the four women her “deepest sorrow for all you have endured.”
“To think our son caused the pain is heartbreaking and we are deeply sorry. We have prayed for you and your loved ones and will continue to do so. My hope is that you are completely healed from trauma and that you are able to live in peace and not fear nor torment,” she wrote. “I know so little about you, but this I do know: you are strong and each of you is an overcomer. I hope that today is the last day you will ever be referred to as Victim #1, Victim #2, Victim #3 and Victim #4, for truly you are Strong Woman, Strong Woman, Strong Woman and Strong Woman.”
‘Exemplary’ police investigation
Fields did not once challenge the evidence against him in the nearly two years since his July 2020 arrest. He also did not ask for a change in his bail, which was denied and gave him no opportunity to be released.
Those choices were deliberate, Trialonas wrote. Fields “recognized the four young women involved had experienced enough trauma” and did not want to force them to testify.
“I truly wish he sees the harm that he has done. I hope he has the wisdom to pray for forgiveness because I am not ready, and am not sure if I will ever be ready to offer him mine. The only peace I will ever be able to hold is if there is no chance of him harming another person. I can only find peace knowing that the four of us live in a world without him in it,” a third woman wrote. “And without peace, I will be living in constant fear for my life, the lives of my family and of my future children, and for the lives of any other female who must walk the Earth inhabited by this evil monster.”
The nearly decadelong investigation carried out by State College police detectives Stephen Bosak and Nicole Eckley was “nothing short of exemplary,” Ard said.
The investigation began in August 2010. The detectives identified Fields using genetic genealogy, a technique that matches DNA samples with profiles from genetic testing companies for consumers.
The search narrowed to Fields’ parents, who only have one biological son. They offered up DNA samples in July 2020 and the results, police wrote in an affidavit of probable cause, showed they were the mother and father with near 100% certainty.
Bosak, a 36-year veteran of the borough police department, pledged to the father of one of the women who was raped that he would not retire until the case was solved.
“It’s a big case. We had four women that were victimized — four women that we know were victimized. If he wasn’t stopped, there were going to be more,” Bosak said after the hearing. “Yeah, it’s an important case and we weren’t going to stop until it was done.”
Bosak smiled when asked about a potential retirement on the horizon, offering no definitive answer.
“He has more work to do,” McGraw said. Added Eckley, his partner: “I know the answer to that: No. I think I’ll retire before Steve will.”
Pain that never goes away
The attacks left the women and their families to grapple with permanent, far-reaching repercussions.
Several were sickened by prophylactic medications designed to prevent pregnancy or the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.
One woman described herself as feeling “damaged, unworthy ... broken.”
The mother of another woman wrote her daughter’s self-worth plummeted, leaving her to often feel lonely and isolated. She described feeling like a “failure,” while her husband wrote that his heart “broke into a million pieces.”
Another woman who never returned to Penn State described bouts with nightmares, depression, panic attacks, substance abuse and challenges with intimacy. She and her husband “want so much” to have a child, but she described a struggle to feel safe and positive with sex.
One woman was raped less than three weeks before she was set to be a bridesmaid in her sister’s wedding, leaving her a “shell of a human that day.”
The years since have been filled with self-doubt, isolation, guilt, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and a difficulty to form meaningful, lasting relationships. She also wrote that she “completely lost my relationship with God” and has “lost a considerable amount of weight.”
“More than half my days are filled with little or no pleasure in the activities that once brought me joy,” she wrote.
Her three sisters are more cautious. Her mother said she tries to cover up her “deep, dark inner sadness,” leading a life that’s “a bit like living a lie.”
Her father wrote that he lives in a “constant state of anger.” The pain that has come with the rapes carried out by Fields, he wrote, will never go away.
“No sentence is tough enough in my mind. More than ever, I am convinced that evil exists in the world. This man is the embodiment of evil,” he wrote. “May God forgive me, but I have no room in my heart for forgiveness or mercy. May he burn in hell.”
This story was originally published July 8, 2022 at 12:55 PM.