Career predator Ravon Romance has spent almost half of his 41 years in prison, yet still found time to rob or rape at least five women – in the latest case trying to place calls to his victim and two jurors during his trial.
Yesterday, a furious Manhattan judge called him a woman’s “worst nightmare” and sent him away for two life sentences.
“You’re unable to function in society,” Supreme Court Justice Lewis Bart Stone told Romance, as the fiend sat cuffed at the defense table, wild-haired in a brown jail jumpsuit.
The judge reserved his strongest condemnation for Romance’s attempt to contact jurors – one of whom had to be guarded overnight by cops after getting a call from another inmate asking why she was trying to send his friend away.
“This court is absolutely outraged,” the judge said. “For a defendant to contact a juror is absolutely unacceptable.”
Romance went on trial last month for disguising himself as a delivery man, robbing a young Chelsea woman in her building, then taking her to the roof where he tied her to a standpipe and sexually assaulted her.
“I’m not going to rape you,” Romance, a convicted rapist, told the terrified victim, adding, “It shows a learning curve.”
The brutal crime happened in 1998. But Romance was only caught after he was locked up on a parole violation in 2002, and his DNA was added to the state data bank – linking him to the six-year-old crime.
Romance has already spent an astounding 17½ years in prison for attacks starting in 1979, when he forced a woman to give him oral sex by holding a gun to her head, said prosecutor Martha Bashford.
On another occasion, he robbed a woman, then sent her a letter from prison saying “I should be out of jail soon” and adding he’d try to figure out where she lived.