A Queens couple who kept a disabled woman locked up in a dungeon for over a year while they helped themselves to her cash were sentenced to more than a decade in a cage, prosecutors said Friday.
Patrick Donovan, 45, and Mae Washington, 66, have pleaded guilty to the inhumane assault of 61-year-old Maureen Murray, who was badly bruised and weighed less than 100 pounds when she was found in their Rockaway Park house of horrors in March 2012.
Donovan received a 12-year sentence Thursday and Washington got 11 years in prison.
“The defendants pleaded guilty to the assault and have now been sentenced to prison time to punish them for their despicable actions,” Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.
Washington persuaded Murray, a former neighbor who was partially paralyzed after a stoke, to move to her house in early 2011. The couple then kept her captive in an 11-foot-by-8-foot room while stealing her Social Security checks, authorities said.
The emaciated victim was rescued after her niece called the cops. Neighbors have said they would hear screams coming from the hellish apartment and noticed cigarette burns on Murray’s arms.
Lawyers for the two defendants both tried to shift blame.
Steven Goldenberg, who represents Donovan, said the gal pal took Murray’s money and his client “felt remorse and he didn’t want the victim to suffer more” by taking the stand at a trial.
Washington’s attorney John Ciafone said it was the man who did the beatings and his client “felt fairly close to the victim and was upset the victim had accused her.”
The jailbirds’ romance now apparently over, each will do about six or seven years behind bars after credit for time served.
Some six months after their arrest, the scene of the crime was washed away during Superstorm Sandy.
