ANOKA — A Minnesota man convicted of kidnapping his former teacher and her daughter 30 years ago and killing a boy who saw the abduction could spend the rest of his life in state custody under a ruling Wednesday by a local judge.
Anoka County District Judge Jenny Walker Jasper decided that Ming Sen Shiue, who was accused of repeatedly raping the teacher during seven weeks of confinement, meets the legal criteria for indefinite commitment to the state's sex offender program in Moose Lake.
The judge said Shiue, 59, should not go free if he's released from prison. He became eligible for parole this year.
In a case that horrified Minnesota, Shiue was convicted in federal court of kidnapping his former ninth grade math teacher, Mary Stauffer, and her 8-year-old daughter in 1980. Shiue had long been obsessed with Stauffer, who had been his teacher 15 years earlier.
Investigators said he videotaped some of the sexual assaults before the mother and daughter escaped from his Roseville home after seven weeks.
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When Mary Stauffer testified during his 1981 murder trial, Shiue jumped up and slashed her face with a knife he had smuggled into the courtroom. It took 62 stitches to close her wound.
He also was convicted in state court of killing 6-year-old Jason Wilkman, who witnessed the kidnapping, and received a concurrent sentence.
The Stauffers testified at Shiue's commitment hearing in April, saying they still feared him.
The Associated Press generally does not identify victims of sexual crimes, though Stauffer has spoken to the media and publicly about the case.
Now in poor health, Shiue testified that he felt rehabilitated by his three decades in federal prison, and that he would have undergone sex offender treatment if it had been available in the prisons where he'd been held. He also apologized for his crimes.
Stauffer and her husband are now retired. After the kidnapping they split most of their time between the U.S. and the Philippines, where they worked as Baptist missionaries.
