The sadistic sex fiend who raped “Top Gun” co-star Kelly McGillis when he was just 15 years old terrorized women on his Bronx block, neighbors recalled yesterday.
“I felt like I was living with the devil,” said one woman at the Carpenter Avenue building where Leroy Johnson – accused of raping at least five women in the past 26 years – lived in 2005.
“I went to sleep always scared at night. Sometimes I couldn’t even sleep.”
The woman, who was too scared of retribution to be identified, said she would hear Johnson’s petrified wife screaming, “Please stop!” at night, as she tried to shield herself and her four children from his violent rage.
Another neighbor, Frank Carino, said he had called cops after witnessing Johnson assault a girl on the street last year.
“I saw him grabbing her and the girl was screaming, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ ” Carino said, adding that no arrest was ever made. “We went through hell when he was living here.”
Johnson, 39, will stand trial again today in the brutal 1996 assault on two Greenwich Village women.
The knifepoint assault on the two at their Waverly Place apartment almost mirrored the 1982 attack on McGillis and her roommate.
While McGillis was unavailable to speak as she filmed a movie in Hawaii, the star described the sadistic behavior of Johnson and his accomplice in a personal account she wrote for People in 1988.
“I knew I’d rather die than get on that bed, but they were going to rape me whether I was alive or not . . . and it was foolish to keep resisting,” she wrote.
“While one watched, the taller one got on top of me and held the knife at my right eye.
“The whole time he was sexually assaulting me he was saying things that I just can’t repeat . . . I threw up all over, and he started hitting me.
“Then the other one got on top of me. They kept switching, telling me they were going to beat me until I was dead. At that point, I thought I would die, and I had resigned myself.”
Johnson was convicted two years later.
The lifelong predator has continued to deny he is a sexual fiend to authorities.
“I never hurt nobody,” Johnson told cops after his arrest May 13, 2005.
“I don’t go out thinking of raping, thinking of murdering nobody,” he said to police, according to statements offered to the court.
The sexual deviant, described as a jailhouse lawyer by police officers, also tried to bait cops by playing on the 10-year statute of limitations for rape.
“That’s not me. It ain’t me. It’s a crime I didn’t commit. You had years to pick me up. Why didn’t you get me nine years ago if you have evidence, OK?” he said.