U.S. District Court Stephen R. Clark on Thursday sentenced a man from St. Louis, Missouri who repeatedly harassed and threatened to rape five women to 71 months in prison.
After his release from prison, Robert D. Merkle, 54, will be on supervised release for three years, during which he will be barred from using or possessing electronic devices and accessing the internet without permission.
“Robert Merkle has terrorized innocent women for years,” said U.S. Attorney Sayler A. Fleming. “This lengthy prison sentence and the term of supervised release will prevent him from harassing women for nearly nine years, and hopefully deter him from engaging in similar behavior ever again.”
At his guilty plea in March, Merkle admitted harassing women in the St. Louis area and across the country for months, while he was on parole for similar crimes with different victims. Merkle met several of the women on dating sites and worked with another woman. He used email, multiple cell phones, and a service that can send texts anonymously to threaten the women.
Merkle contacted a St. Louis County woman who he’d met on a dating site more than seven years earlier, sending a series of text messages in which he said he’d made a copy of her house key and was planning on breaking into her home two days later and raping her. She then contacted the Town and Country police.
In a letter to Judge Clark, one of Merkle’s earlier victims wrote, “He has a deeply rooted problem, where he seemingly gets a thrill out of tormenting women online and via text.” She said dealing with Merkle has been “crippling” at times.
Another wrote that Merkle’s “actions have shown to be more aggressive and inherently dangerous over time.”
Yet another said Merkle called for two years at random times day and night, threatening her and her daughter when the girl was as young as five years old.
Judge Clark called Merkle “a danger to society” and his conduct “tremendously troubling.”
Merkle pleaded guilty in March in U.S. District Court to the five felony counts he was facing: two counts of interstate communication of threats and three counts of cyberstalking.
He still faces a pending felony charge of harassment in St. Louis County Circuit Court.
Merkle was charged with harassment in 2017 and 2018 in Jefferson County Circuit Court and St. Louis Circuit Court, resulting in a three-year prison sentence. He was living in a halfway house in St. Louis at the time he committed his new, federal crimes.
The FBI, the Town and Country Police Department, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, the Glen Ellyn (Illinois) Police Department and the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department and the Gulfport Police Department in Mississippi investigated this case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Colleen Lang is prosecuting the case.
