The lawyer defending an alleged choker-rapist told a jury on Thursday that Jacques Rouschop couldn’t physically have committed the vicious sex crimes he’s accused of because his hernia “makes it too painful to have sex from behind, his stomach is too large and his penis is way, way too small.” 
 
 The first defence witness, a registered nurse, testified that she volunteered to take Rouschop’s measurements. She testified that Rouschop is five feet six inches tall, with a 66-inch waist, 31-inch thighs, and a one-inch penis, measuring approximately two inches when erect. The nurse also measured his umbilical hernia, saying it was 3.5 inches by 3.25 inches. (There is no way of knowing his exact weight because the scales at the Innes Road jail only go up to 320 pounds.) The court was also shown photographs of a naked Rouschop, who sat in the prisoner’s dock statue-still as some jurors took notes about his most intimate measurements. 
 
 Rouschop, a 44-year-old career thief, is on trial for the 2013 rape and choking of two Vanier woman. Both were sex trade workers and testified as Crown witnesses, recalling horrifying accounts of being attacked and choked until they blacked out in the backseat of Rouschop’s pickup truck in an unknown industrial lot. 
 
 Rouschop has pleaded not guilty, and on Thursday, his lawyer, Natasha Calvinho, launched his defence. 
 
 In her opening statements to the jury, Calvinho was quick to acknowledge that Rouschop has a criminal record that stretches four decades. 
 
 “He is far from a perfect man. He has made mistakes. He has committed crimes. He has spent time in jail and has a significant criminal record. He is known to local police and is someone who has been in and out of jail most of his adult life,” Calvinho told the jury. 
 
 She said that Rouschop couldn’t have committed the crimes as described in court because of his physical limitations. 
 
 The lawyer then addressed the elephant in the room. 
 
 “Due to his weight (around 400 pounds at the time) and his appearance, he will be the first to tell you that he has had a lot of trouble attracting members of the opposite sex, and that getting a woman’s attention, let alone having sex, was not something that happened very often for him. 
 
 “Despite his lack of physical attractiveness, he still had needs — sexual needs. And he turned to the services of sex trade workers,” Calvinho said. 
 
 The defence lawyer tried to portray Rouschop as more than a john, telling the jury that he cared about the Vanier sex trade workers, drove them around, bought them groceries, and “helped them anyway he could.” 
 
 The lawyer said that in the case of one of the complainants, it went far beyond a money-for-sex relationship. “He cared for her. He brought her to his home for sleepovers and dinners with his mom,” Calvinho said. 
 
 The lawyer also told the jury that it is Rouschop’s firm belief that Ottawa detectives investigating the unsolved 2013 killing of sex trade worker Amy Paul targeted him because they suspected he killed her. 
 
 “He believes he is the subject of a witch hunt,” Calvinho told the jury. 
 
 The jury has heard that detectives working the Paul case went to great lengths to successfully secure formal statements from the sex trade workers against Rouschop. The charges — two counts of aggravated sexual assault and choking — that Rouschop is on trial for now were yielded from the investigation into Paul’s killing, which remains unsolved. Ottawa police publicly linked Rouschop to Paul’s homicide in December 2013 but have never charged him. They also searched his home for Paul’s shoes, pants and cell phone, according to records obtained by the Citizen. 
 
 Rouschop was charged with rape and choking less than 24 hours after Ottawa police announced a $50,000 reward in the unsolved Paul homicide investigation in December 2013. Both women in this case testified that they didn’t initially want to come forward but did so after police strongly urged them to, court has heard. They also testified that they didn’t come forward because of the reward, which remains unclaimed. 
 
 gdimmock@postmedia.com 
 
 www.twitter.com/crimegarden ||||| Three people - including a woman who served eight years in prison for starving to death a man held in the closet of her North Philadelphia apartment in 1981 - were charged Sunday with holding four mentally challenged adults chained in the cellar of a Tacony apartment house for weeks in an alleged scheme to steal their Social Security checks. 
 
 The alleged ringleader, Linda Ann Weston, 51, served eight years in the starvation death of Bernardo Ramos, 25, after he refused to support her sister's unborn child. 
 
 Also arrested was Weston's boyfriend, Thomas Gregory, 47, of North Philadelphia, and Eddie Wright, 49, a homeless man who neighbors said called himself a reverend. 
 
 All three were charged with criminal conspiracy, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and related charges. But investigators said Sunday they expected more charges to be filed in a criminal scheme that stretched back at least a year and reached to Florida and Texas. 
 
 All three were awaiting a bail hearing Sunday night. 
 
 The alleged victims - three men and a woman ranging in age from 29 to 41 - were treated for malnutrition and put in the care of mental-health officials. Police said they were being interviewed with the help of mental-health experts. 
 
 "What went on was pure evil," said Lt. Ray Evers, a Philadelphia police spokesman. 
 
 Police said they were alerted to the basement by Turgut Gozleveli, landlord of the apartment house at 4724 Longshore Ave. 
 
 On Sunday, Gozleveli said he had checked the basement three times last week after a neighbor complained of suspicious people coming and going. 
 
 He said that on Thursday, he noticed some furniture in the dank cellar had been moved. On Friday, he found a dog dish. On Saturday, the ceiling lights wouldn't turn on because the bulbs were missing. 
 
 He followed the sound of a barking dog down three steps to an old coal room, where he unwrapped a rusted chain from around the door handle and shined his flashlight into the tiny dirt-floor space. 
 
 "There were two little dogs and blankets," Gozleveli said. "And from the blankets, people's faces just started coming up." 
 
 The malnourished adults - lying in their own filth in the 10-by-15-foot room - could not answer him, Gozleveli said. One man's left ankle was chained to a boiler pipe, he said. There were bathroom buckets, but no food except a container of orange juice. 
 
 The four, all severely mentally challenged, Gozleveli said, looked like "they did not know what world they were living [in]." 
 
 "It was terrible," he said. "Something I never expected to see in my life." 
 
 Police said that since arriving in Philadelphia about Oct. 3, the four had been chained in the cellar and fed once a day by Wright. 
 
 One of the men, believed to be from Texas, may have been held against his will for more than a year, police said. 
 
 Weston, who investigators said also had a home in Palm Beach, Fla., and her two alleged accomplices drove north to Philadelphia, possibly fleeing authorities in Florida, police said. 
 
 "This may just be the top layer of what they were doing," Evers said. 
 
 Police are working with the FBI to track the path of the three suspects and their alleged victims. 
 
 Neighbors said the group arrived in an SUV in which the four alleged captives were held in the back. 
 
 Weston's daughter and son live in the apartment house. Police said they were cooperating with the investigation and had not been charged. 
 
 Gozleveli said Weston's daughter has lived in the building, a converted movie house, with her young children for two years. He said she told him she was an Army nurse from Texas. He said the woman's brother lived in the apartment next door. 
 
 One neighbor, Danyell "Nicky" Tisdale, said Weston occasionally took the four out to the SUV and would make them ride in the back. 
 
 She said that last week, Weston held a flea market, selling clothes on the sidewalk on Sunday with the help of the four, whom she bossed around.
– A 600-pound man escaped the possibility of a jail term because his weight and related illnesses would have made it too expensive to put him on trial. Instead, he struck a deal to plead guilty to scamming several fast-food restaurants for meals and to pay fines, reports AOL News. George Jolicoeur, 38, lives in a nursing home. "He's in his prison cell," a state attorney tells the Orlando Sentinel. "He's not getting out of that bed."