A Douglas County jury convicted 74-year-old Lawrence landlord Mark Duane Strand on 10 counts Thursday, finding he sexually abused three girls who lived in a property he owned and then tried to stop them from testifying against him. Strand was found guilty of five counts of aggravated indecent liberties with a child, three counts of rape, one count of attempted interference with judicial process and one count of intimidation of a witness or victim.
The sex-crime convictions stem from incidents dating back as far as 2016, according to the Lawrence Journal-World. The three girls Strand abused were under the age of 14, and the most serious charges involved a girl under age 10, the paper reports. All three were living with a relative who worked as a handyman and also rented from Strand at the time of the abuse.
Scholarship Money Offered for Silence
The interference and witness-intimidation counts trace back to Strand's efforts to get the girls to recant their accounts, including an offer of scholarship money if they agreed not to testify, per the same report. KMBC reports that prosecutors said Strand tried to convince the children to take back their statements, dangling the scholarship offer in exchange. Despite those efforts, the allegations ultimately reached law enforcement in 2019, KMBC notes, years after the earliest incidents described in the case.
Court records show Strand was already behind bars at the time of this trial, serving a 12-year sentence tied to a separate 2019 federal conviction for knowingly attempting to coerce and entice a minor to engage in sexual activity, the Journal-World reports. Judge Stacey Donovan, who presided over the recent trial, will sentence Strand for the 10 new convictions at a later date, according to the same source.
A Related Case Ended in a Plea Deal
The handyman and tenant who the girls lived with was previously convicted of aggravated sexual battery and aggravated child endangerment and is currently serving a four-year prison sentence, per the Journal-World's reporting. That case echoes an earlier Lawrence prosecution: in 2023, Cormick Gabriel Ferrell, a Lawrence man originally charged with trafficking children for sex in exchange for rent, avoided a trial by entering a plea to lesser charges, the Journal-World reported at the time. Ferrell pleaded no contest to one count of aggravated sexual battery and two counts of aggravated endangerment of a child, and his plea agreement required him to register as a sex offender for 25 years.
Strand's case moved to trial rather than ending in a plea, culminating in Thursday's verdict after years of legal proceedings tied to the 2019 allegations. With sentencing still pending before Judge Donovan, the full consequences Strand will face for the 10 convictions remain unresolved for now.
