Town of Madison Rape and Strangulation Brings 8-Year Prison Sentence

From the Wisconsin State Journal
By ED TRELEVEN etreleven@madison.com

Calling it “one of the worst I have seen,” a Dane County judge on Wednesday sentenced a town of Madison man to eight years in prison for the rape and strangulation of a woman he had lured to his parents’ home last year under the pretense of renting her a room.

Samuel K. Eneboe, 24, committed a “vicious and aggravated” crime on Sept. 26, 2013, that left the 21-year-old woman with bruises all over her body and obvious ligature marks on her neck, Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan said.

He also ordered Eneboe to spend 15 years on extended supervision after he serves the eight-year prison sentence.
Assistant District Attorney Rachel Sattler asked for 20 years behind bars. A state Department of Corrections pre-sentence report recommended nine to 10 years in prison, while the defense sought a three-year prison sentence.
The victim, a student who had met Eneboe a day earlier while searching for a place to live, told Flanagan that not only had Eneboe raped her, he tried to kill her by cinching a rope around her neck until she passed out. She said she was lucky to survive.
“Something as simple as looking for a place to stay turned into a fight for my life,” the woman said. She said thoughts of her future and her family “gave me the strength to keep fighting.”
But her struggle isn’t over, she said, because what happened to her will stay with her forever.
“I was just a happy girl before that,” she said. “I will never be that happy girl again.”
Sattler said Eneboe deliberately planned to lure the woman to his home, while his mother and stepfather were out of the house, to rape and kill her. Sattler said that after his arrest, Eneboe, a South Dakota native, told a fellow jail inmate in Rochester, Minnesota, that he had planned to strangle the woman, then take her body out in a boat and dispose of it.
Instead, Eneboe told the inmate, Sattler said, his mother came home and interrupted him, so he had to let the woman go. After leaving in her car the woman called her mother-in-law, then called police.
Eneboe’s lawyer, Jonas Bednarek, said Eneboe’s statements to the jail inmate were just “bravado,” and said it was a “gross exaggeration” to say that Eneboe had planned to attack the woman.
“It was more a crime of opportunity,” he said.
Flanagan disagreed, calling the attack “premeditated” and “not impulsive.”
Bednarek also argued that Eneboe is young and has “a lot of life and opportunity in front of him.” Family members, calling Eneboe a hard worker and good person who did something unimaginable, asked for less time in prison and more time under supervision.
Bednarek said Eneboe had done well on close supervision after prior, dissimilar crimes, which are now expunged, and behaved well while he was free on bail after the rape charge. Flanagan said that he struggled in comparing the positive things said about Eneboe to the viciousness of the attack, but was persuaded that he would do well under close supervision.