A Platte County jury convicted 28-year-old Harley A. Marolt of statutory rape in the second degree on Thursday, finding that the Kansas City man and registered sex offender raped a 15-year-old girl at a New Year's Eve party in 2019. The case, which involved a four-day jury trial, hinged on testimony from a teenage victim who did not tell her mother what happened until several days after the assault.
According to KCTV, Marolt attended the New Year's Eve gathering in Platte County with the victim and a 16-year-old friend on January 1, 2019. The teenagers were drinking at the party, and the 15-year-old went to lie down in a bedroom, the station reports. Officials say Marolt raped the girl there; she told her friend as they left the party and told her mother about the assault several days later. She was later taken to St. Luke's for a sexual assault examination and underwent a child forensic interview, per the same account.
A Prior Conviction Became Key Evidence
Prosecutors used Marolt's prior felony conviction — which involved a sex crime against another 15-year-old girl — to argue he had a tendency to commit crimes against children, the station notes. That strategy was made possible by Article I, Section 18(c) of the Missouri Constitution, a provision approved by voters in 2014 that allows prosecutors in child sexual abuse cases to introduce a defendant's prior criminal sexual acts to establish propensity or corroborate a victim's testimony, according to the Missouri Law Review. Before that amendment, this kind of prior bad acts evidence was historically barred from criminal trials to avoid unfair prejudice.
The Missouri Supreme Court upheld that constitutional mechanism in its May 2018 ruling in State v. Williams, holding that admitting prior criminal acts to show propensity in child sex crime trials does not violate federal due process, per Justia Law. That precedent has become a standard tool for Missouri prosecutors pursuing repeat child sex offenders.
Why Jurors Never Heard the Forensic Interview
Missouri law allows recorded child forensic interviews to be played for a jury only when the victim was under 14 at the time of the interview, meaning jurors in Marolt's case did not hear the recording of the 15-year-old's forensic interview. Instead, she had to testify in person. Platte County Prosecuting Attorney Eric Zahnd, who has served as the county's chief prosecutor since 2003 according to the Platte County Citizen, has pushed for years to change that rule.
Zahnd drafted legislation in 2023 that would have allowed forensic interviews to be used at trial regardless of a victim's age, but the measure was vetoed by Governor Mike Parson over unrelated provisions in the broader bill, the Platte County Citizen reported. Zahnd has argued publicly that Missouri's under-14 cutoff puts the state out of step with federal rules and most other states. The outlet also noted that Platte County prosecutors used the same propensity-evidence approach in April 2024 to convict another repeat offender, Joseph E. Ginn, of second-degree statutory rape after introducing his 2002 sex offense conviction before a jury.
Sentencing Range and Prior Run-Ins With the Law
Second-degree statutory rape is ordinarily a Class D felony carrying up to seven years in prison under Missouri law, but the charge escalates to a Class C felony with a sentencing range of three to ten years when the defendant has a prior Chapter 566 sexual offense conviction, according to Rose Legal Services. Marolt's earlier conviction for a sex crime against a 15-year-old girl means he faces sentencing within that higher range.
Missouri's age of consent is 17, and mistake-of-age defenses are strictly barred when a victim is 13 or younger, though defendants accused of offenses against minors aged 14 to 16 may raise an affirmative defense if they reasonably believed the victim was 17 or older, per RAINN. Marolt also had a brush with law enforcement while his Missouri case was pending: in March 2025, Geary County Sheriff's deputies arrested him in Junction City, Kansas, on a fugitive from justice warrant tied to the Missouri proceedings, according to a Geary County Sheriff's Office release.
As a registered sex offender with a repeat Class C felony sexual offense conviction, Marolt would be subject to Tier III lifetime reporting requirements every 90 days under Missouri's sex offender registry statutes, a framework Hoodline detailed in its recent coverage of a Clay County manhunt involving a similar case. Failing to comply with those registration rules is itself a separate felony offense in Missouri. Marolt's sentencing date was not specified in available reporting.
