HILLSBORO -- The petite 24-year-old Beaverton woman got out of the shower wrapped in a towel, stopped to watch a couple minutes of TV and then sat down on her bed.

While putting lotion on her legs, she realized a man was standing in her closet, staring at her with bright blue eyes. He was wearing a lacy negligee with fishnet stockings open at the crotch, a woman's miniskirt, sheer white blouse and long, brown wig.

For a second, time stood still. The woman stared back. The man hid his face in the crook of his arm.

Then she screamed twice, ran to another room and called police. The man fled without saying a word, hurrying from the ground-floor apartment in the 15200 block of Southwest Teal Boulevard to his nearby van.

"She had no idea what was going on, what was going to happen, how much risk she was at," prosecutor Gina Williamson Skinner said. "But what she thought at that moment was that she was going to be raped.

"It is every woman's greatest nightmare."

Nine months later, Beaverton police arrested Eric Triton Kincaid, 29, of Aloha after tracing DNA on a meth pipe the man left in the woman's closet. He was charged with two counts of first-degree burglary and one count each of attempted first-degree sexual abuse and invasion of personal privacy.

Last week, Kincaid sat in the witness chair, facing a jury of five women and seven men, ready to tell his side of the story, one laced with drug-induced demons.

He was high on methamphetamine, he said, and went to the Beaverton apartment complex on March 3, 2007 because he was invited to have sex by a woman he barely knew. But when he saw the woman sitting on the bed half naked, he realized she was the wrong woman and that he was in the wrong apartment. Basically, he was as surprised as she was, he said.

Kincaid told jurors he isn't proud of his drug-induced behavior, but at the time he was having sex with a lot a people he didn't know. That's why he was dressed like he was, Kincaid said, and had a tube of sexual lubricant that he inadvertently left on a shelf in the woman's bedroom closet.

Kincaid said the woman he was going to meet was staying with friends and gave him directions that neither of them were too sure about. He arrived at what he thought was the right apartment, and when he turned the doorknob, it opened.

Kincaid said he heard the shower running and thought it was the woman who invited him. He sat down on the bed, then decided to hide in the closet because he felt like somebody was watching him, that demons were after him.

When the apartment occupant came out of the shower, both she and Kincaid froze, public defender Ethan Levi described to jurors in his closing argument. "They looked at each other like a couple of scared rabbits. He was confused; she testified he looked confused."

Police tracked Kincaid down because his DNA was on file from a robbery conviction as a juvenile. When officers arrested him in December, Kincaid immediately told them, "This was a complete accident," Levi said.

The prosecutor told jurors it was more likely that Kincaid tried every basement apartment door until he found one that was unlocked. Investigators couldn't find the mysterious friend Kincaid knew only as "Kate," Skinner noted.

Kincaid says he was only in the apartment a couple minutes at the most; the woman said she was out of the shower for about 61/2 minutes before she realized a man was in her closet.

"It is the worst nightmare of a person," Levi agreed.

"It's an odd case, it's not a case you see every day, it's a weird case," Levi told jurors. "It's a scary case to a lot of people. But I don't want you to be scared by the facts. You have to make a decision about the specific intent in his mind."

After nearly six hours of deliberations on Friday, the jury decided to believe Kincaid and found him not guilty of all charges.

- Holly Danks;

hollydanks@news.oregonian.com