Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (38 page)

Finally, a neighboring apartment dweller called for police and paramedics, and then bravely ran downstairs to rock Kitty in her arms. But Kitty was dead.

Arrested, Moseley admitted to detectives that he had killed another woman. He escaped custody for a short time and raped a pregnant woman. Kitty Genovese has become a tragic poster girl for the apathy of people who look the other way when they see someone in danger.

If Kitty had yelled, “Fire!” would she still be alive? Psychological studies have shown that when a number of people witness an accident or a crime in progress, it’s easy for them to believe someone else will help.

A few years ago, I spoke at a rape prevention seminar in Nashville, Tennessee. One of the other presenters was a detective who told of a case he’d worked on—a story I’ve never forgotten. A young woman was kidnapped in broad daylight, and her abductor told her to sit quietly in the passenger seat of his car. To make sure she did, he held a hunting knife against her ribs, and he promised her he wouldn’t hurt her if she just did what he said.

They stopped at a red light. The kidnapper’s car was in the left turn lane, and a marked patrol car pulled up beside it to the right. It was a hot day, and both vehicles’ windows were down. The kidnap victim was barely a foot from the uniformed officer in the patrol unit.

“If you say anything,” the abductor warned, “I’ll stab you right here.”

She said nothing. The police car went straight ahead when the light turned green, and the car she was in turned left. A few miles down the road, the man with the knife pulled off into an orchard. There, he raped her, and then cut her throat.

If she had screamed or cried out for help, she might have lived—but she trusted the promise of a psychopathic killer.

Legal definitions of rape state that it is
any
penetration of an unwilling victim’s body—from intercourse to sodomy. And yet rape is difficult to categorize; each sexual assault is different from others. Some rapists are cautious, seizing their victims in dark and deserted places where there is only a slight chance that any cries for help will be heard. Others, like the crimes of a man who prowled two counties in Washington State for almost a year, are blatant; he took such incredible risks that it seemed he was crying out to be caught. Perhaps it was the extreme danger of possibly being discovered that enhanced the sexual excitation he felt.

One factor is invariably true, however. Rapists—like almost all criminals—have clearly defined MOs. They repeat their crimes with little variation.

During the time I was a Seattle police officer, I worked for months in the Sex Crimes Unit—then called, oddly, the Morals Division. The rapists seemed to be considered to
have “bad morals.” Some people believed that that meant the victims were immoral, too. I took many statements from victims of sexual assault. Later, as a true crime author, I have written a few dozen articles about more recent cases. I don’t think laymen realize how terrifying sexual attacks can be—most of them involve far more than “missionary position” intercourse.

Some of these cases stand out in my memory. This story of a serial rapist is one I won’t forget. His series of sexual assaults shared a plotline so consistent that they must have been carefully planned and scripted. As always, I have changed the names of victims to spare them any more invasion of their privacy.

It was the fourth day of August, 1976, an uncommonly steamy day in Edmonds, Washington. Edmonds is a picturesque town a half hour’s drive north of Seattle, and it hugs the shore of Puget Sound.

Ashley Varner,* twenty-three, was typing some quarterly reports in the office of a church in Edmonds. It was shortly after two in the afternoon. Surely, there could be few safer places than a house of God on a sunny summer afternoon.

The pretty young woman heard the main church door open and then footsteps approaching the office where she worked. She looked up to see a tall man in workman’s clothes. There were some repairs under way at the church, so it wasn’t at all unusual to have workers come into the office. Ashley thought that he probably needed to use the phone.

That wasn’t it at all. She was startled when the man pulled a knife from his pocket and began to extract the blade. She was horrified by his rough command: “Take your clothes off!”

“What?” she asked, still unable to believe her own ears.

“I said to take your clothes off!”

There was nothing for her to do but comply, and pray that someone would enter the church to help her before it was too late. She removed all her clothing except her bra, and the man barked, “That, too.”

He remained fully clothed, but he unzipped his trousers and ordered the terrified girl to perform oral sex on him.

She bent to obey, still incredulous that this could be happening. She was afraid of the sharp knife he held, and realized that he was at least sixty pounds heavier than she was. She was trying to survive, hoping someone would see what was going on. After a few minutes, the intruder, still fully dressed except for his open fly, attempted to rape her. Although he had achieved a full erection, actual intercourse proved impossible; Ashley was a virgin and that, combined with her utter terror, made penetration impossible. Disgusted, the man ordered her to perform oral sex on him again. He ejaculated in her mouth as she choked and vomited with revulsion.

“That’s all there is to it,” the man said airily. “If you report this to the cops, though—I’ll come back and kill you.”

He walked from the church and she heard a car start, and tires squeal. Quickly, she threw on her clothes and locked the church. Once safely home, she didn’t know what to do. Like many sexual assault victims, she was
ashamed. And she also believed that the man would come back and kill her if she called the police.

Ashley took a bath, desperately scrubbing away the scent of the rapist, but also unintentionally washing away semen that might have been matched to any suspect’s bodily fluids. After spending a sleepless night, she felt she had to tell someone. Ashley confided in a friend who urged her to tell the minister of their church. “You can’t just let it go—he’ll hurt somebody else.”

The reverend counseled her to call the police.

Detective Marian McCann, a longtime veteran of the Edmonds Police Department, gently elicited the details of the attack and assured Ashley Varner that she had done the right thing in reporting it. Ashley described her attacker as a white male about twenty-five, quite tall, with dark curly hair and a two-day growth of beard. She said the man wasn’t bad-looking; in other circumstances, she would have said he was handsome.

Forensic artist Robin Hickok drew a composite picture based on Ashley’s description and copies of the composite were distributed to all of the area police departments.

There was little more McCann and Hickok could do at that point. The victim hadn’t seen her attacker’s vehicle—if he even had one. She was positive that she’d never seen him before. The detectives knew from long experience that the man was likely to attack again, but where or when was impossible to guess. They checked with nearby jurisdictions, but none of them reported similar sexual assaults. No one recognized the composite picture.

Two months later, on October 7, an eighteen-year-old bride who lived in rural Snohomish County, was mowing her lawn at two in the afternoon. As it was in the case of the first attack, it was a weekday afternoon, a Thursday. Dressed in jean cutoffs and a beige top, she concentrated only on the task before her, mowing both the front and side yard. Then she went into her house through the side door to check on clothes she had in the dryer. Finding them dry, she carried the load into the kitchen to fold. She turned the stereo on, not terribly loud, but loud enough to drown out quiet noises—stealthy noises.

The young housewife, Jill Whaley,* was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to the door, going over her grocery list, when suddenly, muscular arms encircled her neck. She felt the blade of a knife against her flesh. Rigid with shock, she stared straight ahead, and heard the deep voice saying, “This is a rape!”

“What?” she cried. Later she would tell Snohomish County detectives, “Then I just went crazy and kept begging him not to do that to me.”

She realized that the knife was not actually cutting into her neck. By dropping her eyes and using peripheral vision, she could see it was a small pocketknife with the blade open. The man’s hands were more frightening: he seemed very strong.

“Go into the bedroom,” he ordered, and she obeyed. Once in the room, he said, “Take your clothes off.”

For the first time, Jill turned to face him. He was very tall, inches over six feet, Caucasian, between twenty-two
and thirty, and he had medium brown hair that grew almost to his shoulders. He wore blue jeans and a heavy, service-type jacket.

He closed the knife with his left hand and put it in his pocket, saying, “If you behave, I won’t have to use this.”

Jill was sobbing now and begging the stranger not to hurt her. She pulled off her knit top and unfastened her bra. The man bent over and began to kiss her breasts, asking her if she would touch him on his genitals.

“No! Please, I can’t,” Jill murmured. The man stepped back for a few moments and watched her as she removed her cutoff jeans and panties. Then he pushed her onto the bed. “Spread your legs!” he commanded.

While she closed her eyes and bit her lips, her attacker attempted penetration. It wasn’t working, and he commented that she was “sure tight for being married.”

As before, with Ashley Varner, the would-be rapist had lost his erection. After a matter of a few seconds, the man jumped up and said, “Forget this. Where’s your money?”

“I’ll check and see if I have any,” she said, stalling. She threw on her clothes and produced her wallet, showing him it was empty. He walked toward her again and she cried, “Please don’t hurt me—I’m pregnant. Please don’t hurt my baby.”

The big man studied her for a long moment and then walked toward the door. He turned to look at her and said, “I’m sick.”

“Just go,” Jill cried. “Just go and I won’t tell anybody.”

She didn’t mean that. She watched him walk past her neighbor’s home and then break into a run. When she was
sure he was gone, she ran to the neighbor’s house, where she called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.

Jill’s report to Snohomish County detective Ken Sedy was quite similar to the statement Ashley Varner had given after she was attacked in the Edmonds church two months earlier. In this assault, too, the rapist had not removed his own clothing, had only unzipped his fly. Both women were assaulted on a weekday in the afternoon. Their descriptions of the stranger were close. And each of the terrified young women mentioned the size of the man’s penis, so large that he had been unable to have intercourse with either of them.

Similar attacks, yes, but there was really no sure pattern yet. The attacks were some distance apart, and the rapist’s MO matched several other unsolved cases just as closely as it did the Edmonds and the rural Snohomish County cases.

Jill Whaley’s shorts, panties, and bedspread were sent to the lab for analysis, but, since no ejaculation had taken place—no semen or pre-ejaculatory fluid was detected—nothing of evidentiary value was found.

Almost exactly two months later, on December 6—a Monday—a twenty-seven-year-old King County housewife, Dorian Bliss,* and her five-year-old daughter drove home after a trip to the grocery store. It was just before noon and the little girl was hungry, so Dorian hurried as she made several trips from her car into the house, carrying bags of groceries. She had left the front door open because her arms were full. Later, she couldn’t be sure if she had closed the front door on the last trip.

She heard someone coming in the front door, assumed it was her husband, and looked up expectantly. Instead, she
saw a perfect stranger. Alarmed, she said, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

The man responded by clapping his hands together and ordered, “Get rid of the kid!”

That, of course, was her first thought: if there was danger—and there certainly appeared to be—she wanted her child safe. She led the little girl into the child’s bedroom and turned on her record player, warning the youngster to lock her door and not to come out—no matter what.

The intruder, a very tall, husky young man, pushed Dorian into the family room. “Take your clothes off,” he snapped. She tried to dissuade him, protesting that she couldn’t do that, that what he was suggesting was crazy. Finally, she slowly started to take off her sweater.

“No,” he said. “I want you to take
all
your clothes off.”

The man knelt before her and lifted her skirt, rubbing her pubic area through her underclothing with his hand. “Damn, that’s beautiful,” he breathed, and then he bit her.

She knew she couldn’t scream; her daughter might run out and be hurt. Instead Dorian pushed him away from her by kicking him. It didn’t seem to faze him. He stood up and methodically began to undress her.

He kissed her mouth and breasts and he was furious because she would not respond. “Damn it … kiss me!” he ordered the trembling woman.

She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

The huge man pulled her panties and panty hose over her shoes, and began to kiss her all over her now naked body. Finally, he mounted her. The rape itself lasted for a short time—only five or six thrusts—and she was quite
sure he hadn’t climaxed when he suddenly withdrew and stood up.

The man walked toward the kitchen, saying, “I didn’t plan for this to happen—I’m sick, you know.”

She called him back, afraid he was going to her child’s room. “Why don’t you go for help?” she cajoled. “There are people who could help you.”

The big man now turned toward the front door. “No one can help me. Go ahead and shoot me, lady. I wouldn’t blame you at all.”

And then he was gone. She ran to bolt the door behind him, threw on her clothes, and calmed her little girl. Then she called the King County police and her neighbor.

King County detective sergeant Ben Colwell took Dorian’s statement. She was then taken to a hospital for treatment. She was asked to remove her clothing while standing on a sheet. This would prevent any minute evidence from being lost—hairs, pubic hairs, fibers—anything that might be matched to a suspect, if they ever found one.