Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (40 page)

Then Linda ran to the phone and called 911. Almost immediately, the streets around her house were alive with patrol cars.

By this time, however, the audacious rapist’s luck had just about run out. While Marian McCann talked to the distraught victim, every detective and patrol car in the Edmonds Police Department was searching the area around Linda’s home. They were looking for a tall man with semi-long dark curly hair, a mustache, jeans, a white T-shirt with a flowered design, and ankle-high boots. They didn’t know if he was on foot or in a car, but if ever they were determined to catch someone, it was this man.

Captain L. L. Neuert was proceeding south on Olympic View Drive at 12:43 p.m. when he received radio information that a rape had just taken place eight blocks away. The description was a good one, and the man should be easy to spot if he was on the street.

Neuert turned around and headed northbound on Olympic View Drive. At that moment, he heard a Lynnwood car advise that he was in the area of Meadowdale High School and would block off that area. Neuert decided to go down the Meadowdale Beach Road in an attempt to intercept anybody coming eastbound. Just as he turned onto the Meadowdale Road, he spotted a white
Chevrolet at a stop sign. The driver was a dead ringer for the suspect being sought.

Captain Neuert made a U-turn and headed back in pursuit of the Chevrolet. He found he had to hit 70 miles per hour even to get close to the white car. He turned on his blue flashing lights and the car ahead finally pulled over to the side of the road.

Neuert hopped out of his car as a very tall man exited the Chevrolet and began to walk back toward him. Neuert ordered the man to return to his own vehicle, put his hands on the trunk, and spread his legs. Neuert’s pat-down search netted only an empty black knife case at the rear of the big man’s belt.

Captain Neuert handcuffed the suspect and radioed to ask if the suspect had been wearing a floral-patterned T-shirt. The answer was yes. Dennis Kelly, of the Lynnwood Police Department, arrived at that moment and the subject was placed in the back of Kelly’s patrol car. He was advised of his rights.

“Do you want to talk to us?” Neuert asked.

“Talk about what?” the suspect countered.

“About a young woman who was raped near here a few minutes ago,” Neuert answered.

“I don’t know anything about anything like that.”

“Well, you match the description—right down to your T-shirt.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The man said that he was living in Edmonds and had become lost on his way home from Everett; he was only coming up the hill in an effort to find the road home.

There was no further conversation. Captain Neuert then received information from the officers at Linda’s residence that the suspect had had a Polaroid camera, and Neuert located the case for a Polaroid in the back of the white Chevrolet behind the driver’s seat and the camera itself under the right front seat.

Neuert and Detective Wally Tribuzio transported the suspect to the Edmonds Police Department for further questioning.

The man was twenty-five-year-old Thomas G. Barrington—the same man Tribuzio had arrested the previous December in the Bali Hai Sauna robbery! Looking at the mug shot taken in that case—sans mustache—Detective Marian McCann could see why it might be difficult for a victim to identify it as a likeness of the man before her.

Barrington signed a rights waiver and talked to Detective McCann. He said that he was unmarried, had lived with his parents since the previous October. He explained that he was in an alcohol treatment program and was also addicted to heroin, and “would be hurting soon.”

Barrington told Detective McCann that he had started seeing a psychiatrist and had had one appointment. He readily admitted the charges against him in the Bali Hai Sauna case and said he had been convicted of robbery only—not the rape charge—a few weeks before. But he didn’t remember it—his mind had “blacked out,” he said. He was employed at a Seattle newspaper and worked nights. He repeated the phrase that so many of his suspected victims had heard: “I need help.”

At that point, Barrington requested permission to call
his attorney, and it was granted. There, the interview stopped.

Detective McCann called Detective Sedy of Snohomish County and told him of the arrest of Barrington. Since Sedy had been investigating so many similar assaults in his county, he was elated to hear the news.

Detectives Robin Hickok and Marian McCann transported Barrington, and he was booked into the Snohomish County Jail.

With the help of Snohomish County deputy prosecuting attorney Tom Wynne, a search warrant was obtained for Barrington’s parents’ home. The parents were extremely cooperative, although understandably stricken at the charges against their son. They had tried repeatedly to obtain psychiatric help for him, and he was presently being seen at a VA hospital. Everything had seemed to be better for the man who had come home from service in Vietnam a changed man. Beyond his psychiatric problems—drinking and drugs—Barrington had had surgery for a cancerous testicle; it had been removed. Whether this particular kind of surgery might have been enough to have any influence at all in turning a man into a compulsive sexual criminal is a question that only a top team of psychiatrists could determine—if, indeed, even they could.

Asked if Barrington owned a Polaroid camera, his parents said he didn’t—but they did. However, when they looked for it, they found it was missing.

The physical evidence against Thomas Barrington mounted steadily. When Detective Tribuzio searched him,
he found a pair of turquoise panties trimmed with lace in the suspect’s pants pocket—a “souvenir” from the attack on Linda Miller.

Officer Terry Minnihan, searching the probable escape route from Linda’s home to Barrington’s vehicle, found three Polaroid photos showing a woman with a pillowcase over her head, a woman wearing different panties in each shot.

When Barrington’s car was processed, a large buck knife was found under the cardboard flooring of the white Chevrolet. The Chevrolet was registered to Barrington’s father, but McCann learned that his brother-in-law owned an orange van.

A canvass of the neighborhood where Linda lived turned up two fourteen-year-old girls who had been frightened by a man answering Barrington’s description just before the attack on Linda Miller. He had parked and stared at them so intently that they had run for home as fast as they could.

The long hunt by detectives from three jurisdictions seemed to be over: Ben Colwell from King County, Ken Sedy from Snohomish County, and the Edmonds police detectives. Still ahead lay a lineup before the women who had been attacked. This was set for July 6, 1977. The handsome suspect shaved off his Fu Manchu mustache before his lineup; it did little good.

When Tom Barrington stepped forward from the group of men who were similar to him in height, weight, coloring, and age, he was asked to repeat phrases—phrases the
victims would never forget: “I am sorry, lady, I’m sick. I need help.” “I’ve come to rape you.” “This is a rape—”

Linda Miller, Tula French, Jill Whaley, and Dorian Bliss positively identified Thomas Barrington as the man who had attacked them. “There simply isn’t any doubt,” Jill said.

Later, although Ashley Varner, the young woman who had been attacked in the Edmonds church, was unable to pick Barrington in the lineup, Barrington himself admitted to Detective McCann that that, too, was his crime.

Thomas Barrington subsequently pleaded guilty to first-degree rape in the case of Linda Miller, first-degree burglary in the attack on Tula French, and armed robbery in the Bali Hai Sauna case. He received a twenty-year sentence in each case with a ten-year minimum—to run consecutively. That meant that he had at least thirty years to serve on Snohomish County charges.

On September 30, he pleaded guilty to first-degree rape in the Jill Whaley attack in King County and received a life maximum sentence, fifteen-year minimum sentence. If this sentence ran consecutively to the Snohomish County sentences, it would be at least forty-five long years before Thomas Barrington saw the world outside prison walls.

One thing will continue to puzzle Detective Marian McCann: She could never get Barrington to tell her how he picked his victims—how he knew they would be alone, why he almost always chose pretty young housewives with small children. Did he stalk them, or were they only spur-of-the-moment
choices? He took incredible chances at being discovered—or did he? Did he think his only adversaries were helpless women and children? Did he forget that some of the best detectives in three departments were after him and would surely catch up with him? It is now only conjecture; Barrington’s yearlong reign of terror is over.

Despite the current
proliferation of books, articles, and television shows about rapists, there are still many laymen who believe that most sex offenders attack women because they are losers in the dating game, men too unattractive to obtain sex through socially acceptable means. Not true. Many rapists are good-looking enough to pick and choose among the female population. But they don’t get sexual satisfaction through intercourse with a willing female. Rather, they are turned on by the terror they evoke by grabbing a woman by force in the dark, making her submit, and, for some, the thrill they get when they hear the satisfying crunch of their fists against a soft cheek.

These are the men who most alarm sex assault detectives. The psychic scars left by a “gentle” rapist are bad enough; the injuries helpless women suffer at the hands of a punitive rapist tend to increase with each attack and very often result in the death of a victim.

The man who terrorized Seattle women for four months through the winter and spring of 1980 was a good-looking
ex-con who liked to brag that he looked like actor Peter Fonda. He expected compliments on his sexual prowess and technique, although he left his pretty victims bruised and battered. There was a definite pattern to his attacks, but, unfortunately, several women had to suffer utter terror before that pattern began to emerge.

Ordinarily, Kitty Amela,* nineteen, would not have been out so late on a Sunday night, but on February 16, 1975, the young nurse had a visit to make after finishing her late shift in the emergency room of a north end hospital. Her fiancé was in the hospital, about to undergo emergency surgery, and she stayed with him until after one a.m., when he was wheeled away to the operating room. Then she left to go home for a few hours of sleep before she came back to sit beside him when he awakened from the anesthetics.

Kitty lived with her family in a quiet residential neighborhood, but her relatives were away for the weekend. She had carefully left the lights and radio on at home so that it wouldn’t seem quite so much like coming back alone to an empty house in the wee hours of the morning.

The porch light was on, and she felt safe as she drove into her own driveway. She set the emergency brake and jumped out of the car to lock the doors. It was very still, but only for a few moments. As she headed for the front door, she heard footsteps behind her. She turned around, but before she could say anything, she felt a fist crash into her forehead. The blow made her knees sag, but she stayed conscious.

Kitty screamed as loud as she could, hoping the next-door neighbors would hear her. She knew they were
probably all asleep, but she held on to the slight hope that someone might hear.

Before her scream had faded in the quiet night air, however, strong hands grabbed her coat and pulled it over her head. She heard a male voice ordering her to be quiet or she would be killed.

Kitty screamed again—but her cries for help were muffled now. No one heard. No one had heard her first scream either. The neighbors’ windows were all closed, and the drumming of a heavy rainstorm had dulled sound even further.

She could tell that the man who gripped her tightly was tall and very strong. He pinned her arms to her sides and walked her northbound away from her yard. The first house they passed was vacant; the second had lights on, but she didn’t dare scream again.

Evidently not satisfied with the location, the man walked her back past her own house and into the backyard of the next house.

Suddenly, he threw Kitty on the ground, and ripped off her slacks and panties. Still holding her coat over her forehead, he kissed her. And then he raped her.

After he climaxed, he asked her for money.

“It’s in my purse,” she sobbed.

Displeased with the mere two dollars he found there, the rapist began to beat Kitty with his closed fists. A dozen times or more, she felt pain as his blows thudded against her face.

“That’s too bad about the money,” he grunted. “I need more than that.”

He ripped two rings off her fingers. Her diamond engagement ring was worth at least a thousand dollars, and her other ring was a rare opal valued at almost four hundred dollars.

As if to justify his brutality, he told Kitty, “Don’t think I’m sick or a junkie, but I have a four-hundred-dollar-a-day habit.” And then he laughed, adding, “I’m sorry you have to be a victim of this sick society.”

And so, indeed, was Kitty Amela. “Take what you want, but don’t hurt me,” she begged.

“I won’t hurt you, sweetheart,” he said, his voice soft now. “Don’t get up for a couple of minutes and you’ll be okay.”

After the man left, Kitty lay still, afraid that he might come back. But a few minutes later, she heard a car start and drive away.

She estimated that the attack had lasted almost twenty minutes. Painfully, she made her way back to her car and drove to the emergency room where she’d gone off shift earlier in the evening. Nearly hysterical, she fell into the arms of a nurse friend, whimpering. “Oh, Mary—I’ve been raped.”

Kitty Amela’s clothes were almost torn off and she was covered with dirt. She had a contusion and abrasions all over her face. A vaginal exam confirmed that she had, indeed, been raped.

But the coat blindfold hadn’t worked. Kitty had seen her attacker’s face in the porch light that shone that Sunday night.