photo by: Kansas Bureau of Investigation

Michael Ken Aller

A 36-year-old registered sex offender was ordered on Thursday to stand trial after a woman testified that he raped her three years ago at a Lawrence mobile home park.

The man, Michael Ken Aller, of Lawrence, entered a plea of not guilty at the conclusion of Thursday’s preliminary hearing and is scheduled to stand trial in January 2026. He is currently out of custody on a $60,000 bond.

The woman, in her 40s, testified that on March 30, 2022, an acquaintance had arranged for her to get a free ride home from a convenience store with an Uber driver the acquaintance knew. The woman said she did not know the man — Aller — but accepted the ride, during which Aller asked her if she wanted to smoke marijuana.

The woman said she enthusiastically accepted the offer, and the man drove them to an “oddly empty” trailer — “a shell, kind of.”

In the bedroom of the trailer she was given marijuana. She didn’t recall if it was in the form of a cigarette or a bowl, but she said that Aller did not partake and she felt “a little weird.”

“I know I was stoned,” she told the court, but she said she still knew what she was doing.

Soon Aller came on to her “pretty strongly,” she said, and she put up her hands to indicate that she was not interested and needed to go. Aller ignored her, she said, and began groping her.

Sobbing, the woman told the court that she felt overpowered and said no “a million times over and over again,” but “it kept going on.”

Afterward, Aller “abruptly got off me like I was some kind of carnival ride,” she testified, and he refused to give her her purse and phone until she she made up a story about how she just wanted to call her friend about a party they could go to that night.

At the mention of a party, Aller softened, she said and returned her stuff; then they left the trailer and drove to her friend’s house near downtown Lawrence. Once there, she told the friend what had happened and was “extremely freaked out.” The friend then called police and the woman underwent a sexual assault exam at a hospital.

The report about the sexual assault exam was provided to Judge Amy Hanley Thursday, but its contents were not disclosed at the hearing.

A Lawrence police officer also briefly testified that she had collected Aller’s DNA with a buccal swab, but no evidence was publicly presented regarding matching DNA on the woman’s body, save for a brief mention by Senior Assistant District Attorney Ricardo Leal in his closing argument to the court.

Aller’s defense attorney, Carl Cornwell, attempted to cast doubt on the woman’s version of events, suggesting that she actually was very attracted to Aller and that her previous use of methamphetamine and anxiety medications, on top of the marijuana she smoked that night, had dramatically impaired her memory.

The woman acknowledged that she had used meth during that period in her life, but she said she wasn’t using it that night and was not so impaired by the marijuana that she would be mistaken about a rape.

“I remember what I remember,” she told the court.

Aller is a registered sex offender in Kansas after being convicted in January 2022 of one count of electronic solicitation of a person between the ages of 14 and 16 and one count of attempted aggravated indecent liberties with a child. He was sentenced to 59 months in prison, which a former judge, Kay Huff, suspended to three years of probation, as the Journal-World has reported.