Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (41 page)

When she was calmer, she told Seattle police officers J. A. Nicholson and D. Hilliard that her attacker was a
man in his early twenties, Caucasian, tall and slender, with shoulder-length dark hair cut in a shag. He had a scraggly goatee and a pointed chin. She hadn’t seen his car, but she believed he had left in one.

After she had been treated for her injuries, the officers accompanied the young nurse to the yard where she had been attacked so they could help her recover anything she might have dropped there. They found her coat, one shoe, her purse, and its contents—which had been scattered over the ground.

In a city the size of Seattle there are, unfortunately, a number of rapes reported almost every day. Sex Crimes detectives Joyce Johnson and William Fenkner had learned to evaluate the MOs used in sex attacks. They know that rapists rarely stop with one attack and that they tend to follow an almost fetishist pattern.

A few days before Kitty Amela was attacked, another young woman had reported that she had been raped by a tall, thin man with shoulder-length hair.

“He followed me after I got off my bus in the north end,” she told the detectives. “I didn’t think there was anything dangerous about him, but then he walked past me, turned around suddenly and grabbed me around my neck and my head. He forced me into a garage off an alley.”

After she was raped, the young woman said that the stranger had stolen two dollars from her, chagrined at how little money she had in her purse.

“He told me to count to fifty before I left the garage.”

Fenkner and Johnson realized that the two rapes had followed an almost identical scenario.

“Except that the first victim wasn’t brutalized like the second,” Joyce Johnson mused. “They are so alike.”

There would be more that seemed similar.

On March 10, Cory Bixler* left her apartment in the near north end of Seattle a half hour after midnight, intending to walk a few short blocks to a friend’s house. At the corner of North 39th Street and Linden Avenue North, a dark figure stepped from the shadows and grabbed her from behind, putting his hand tightly over her mouth. Although Cory fought hard, her assailant was much stronger. He began to drag her into the bushes, and her screams didn’t deter him in the least. Cory’s purse fell on the sidewalk as the man threw her roughly beneath a thick stand of laurel bushes.

“He ripped off my clothes,” she recalled later. “And he wrapped my coat around my head. Then he raped me, and he kept hitting me in the face and stomach with his fists when I tried to crawl away.”

Cory recalled that the rapist’s voice was quiet and soft—an odd contrast to the violence of his fists and the fact that he said he would kill her if she didn’t cooperate.

Once he had ejaculated, he turned his thoughts to money and asked Cory where her purse was. She pointed to the sidewalk where it had fallen in the struggle, and he left her for a moment as he moved to retrieve it.

As soon as he let go of her, the plucky young woman got up and ran across the street, darting between dark houses, until she reached Aurora Avenue, which was always full of traffic—day and night. There, Cory found a motel office still open and begged the manager to call the police.

Patrol officers from the Wallingford Precinct, along with K-9 patrolmen and their dogs, responded at once.

But the rapist was gone, gone so completely that the highly trained German shepherds could not track his scent much beyond the spot of the attack. That meant that the assailant had probably gotten into a nearby vehicle.

When Cory Bixler talked to detectives Johnson and Fenkner, she revealed a decidedly weird facet of the rapist’s personality: “After he had raped me, he made me lie there and he kept telling me, ‘You’re dead. Just act like you’re dead’—and then he started throwing dirt on me. Almost like he was trying to bury me.”

Her attacker had taken Cory’s purse with him. On March 18, some of her papers turned up coincidentally. A friend of Seattle police robbery detective John Boatman called to tell him that his (the friend’s) Volkswagen had been stolen. It was recovered, but by then it was in very poor mechanical condition.

On March 18, a garage mechanic working on the “Beetle” found some identification documents belonging to a Cory Bixler under the seats. The car’s owner had never heard of anyone by that name and commented on it to Boatman.

John Boatman worked in the Crimes Against Persons Unit a few feet from Bill Fenkner’s and Joyce Johnson’s desks. Boatman had heard of Cory Bixler, and he knew she was the young woman who had been the victim of the vicious rape and assault—with robbery—the week before. Evidently, the rapist had stolen the Volkswagen for his getaway
and inadvertently left Cory’s ID on the floorboards after he rifled her purse.

It was a good—though frustrating—lead. At this point the Volkswagen was of no use for fingerprint evidence. Most of its surfaces had been touched by half a dozen people in the garage and any latent prints were destroyed.

And the car thief—was it the rapist?—had been punctilious about removing his own possessions.

The sadistic sex attacker was out there, and, so far, he had been clever at avoiding detection. His victims all described him as young, slender, tall, and strong as an ox. He had a mustache and dark shag-cut hair to his shoulders.

Detectives knew he would probably not stop his attacks unless he was caught. They waited tensely for the next time he surfaced.

For almost two months things were quiet; none of the rape reports coming in sounded like the man who’d tried to bury his last victim—either actually or symbolically. It was quite possible that he was still active and his latest victims were afraid to report him. Many rape victims don’t report what happened to them because they are embarrassed and fearful. This benefits no one but the sex criminal.

It was near closing time—nine p.m.—at the huge Northgate Mall on May 13 when the rapist came out of hiding again.

Lynn Rutledge* walked toward her new car, which she had parked near the Bon Marché store. She had just put her purse on the backseat when she sensed that someone had walked up behind her. It was a man who was muttering
some words she didn’t understand. Then she realized that he was telling her to hand over her purse.

“I’ve only got two dollars left,” she answered, and tossed her keys out onto the parking lot to divert attention. She kicked the stranger as he pushed her toward her car. Angry, he called her, “Bitch!” as he retrieved the keys.

“Get in the car,” the man ordered. When Lynn didn’t react quickly enough, he struck her in the face twice. He pushed her into the passenger seat and got into the driver’s seat. Brutally, he forced her head toward the floor. “Keep it down,” he barked.

It was full dark as the man drove away from the lot, and he seemed satisfied that no one had noticed them. He drove to the corner of North 95th Street and Fremont Avenue North and ordered Lynn out of the car, pointing toward a thick cluster of bushes.

After he put his own shirt over her eyes, Lynn’s abductor ripped her blouse down the front, tearing the buttons off. Then he stripped off the rest of her clothes. He spread them on the ground and directed her to lie down on them.

And then he raped her.

When he had finished, he allowed Lynn to get dressed, and he made her walk in front of him back to her car. As he drove back to the Northgate Mall, her attacker said he had friends waiting for him there.

He apologized to her, and he told her he had a wife and child.

“I’m sorry I had to hit you,” he said, almost pleading for forgiveness. “I’ve been good to you, haven’t I? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“Not really,” she murmured, praying that he would see his friends and let her go. But when they got back to the mall, he couldn’t find his friends.

“I guess they left without him,” Lynn Rutledge told Joyce Johnson later. “That made him really upset.”

Now Lynn’s nightmare began a replay.

“Get your head down, bitch,” the tall man snarled, calling her “bitch” again and again. He drove around aimlessly, perhaps looking for his friends—if they ever really existed. Lynn could see him well now. He looked to be about twenty-five, was tall and slender, and had a medium-length, sloppy, grown-out shag haircut and a small mustache. She studied him covertly, memorizing every detail of his clothes. He wore a white pull-on shirt with short sleeves and a three-quarter zipper and light-colored brushed denim jeans. And well-worn cowboy boots.

The nervous rapist talked continually. “Would you believe I have a college education?” he asked, and Lynn nodded, figuring that flattery might save her. He told her he had majored in sociology and then served in Vietnam, where he’d become hooked on heroin.

“The army didn’t help me, so now I have a three-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. I was a parole officer before I was drafted.

“Don’t you think I look like Peter Fonda?” he asked. “You know, Henry Fonda’s son?”

“Yes, you do,” Lynn said, adding, “but you’re better looking. You shouldn’t have to kidnap a girl—you could easily find lots of them that wanted to go out with you.”

Trying to be sympathetic to his drug addiction, she suggested that he might try the methadone program.

“I tried it, but they couldn’t help me even though I want to quit.”

Lynn Rutledge’s mind raced as she tried to keep her kidnapper talking and, at the same time, agree with him. It was a delicate balance. She was afraid of what he might do next. But none of her talking was doing any good.

She realized that the handsome rapist was heading her car right back to the same corner where he’d attacked her before. She balked at walking into the berry patch again because she’d lost her shoes. That made him mad, and he started calling her “bitch” again as he pushed her into the bushes. His emotions were mercurial and he was instantly violent again. He punched Lynn twice in the face, and then he picked her up and threw her bodily farther into the brush.

Even through her fear, Lynn was reminded of a child who was having a tantrum. She had tried everything to placate him, but all of her amateur psychology had only landed her back in the dark corner.

“Oh, no! You don’t want to do this again?” she asked him in horror.

In answer, he hit her in the left cheek and she staggered as he hit her again. She began to cry, and that made him madder. He thumped her hard on the back, virtually knocking the wind out of her. She stopped crying and submitted.

Oddly, until now, she hadn’t been afraid he would kill her. But as he raped her for the second time and threatened to inflict various perversions on her, she realized he might
very well murder her. She moaned in terror—and that seemed to please him. He asked if she was enjoying the sex and she finally lied and said, “Yes.”

She meant to stay alive if she could.

Nothing seemed to satisfy him. He threatened anal sodomy and she cringed. She knew she would scream and that he’d wring her neck if she did.

Finally, her attacker seemed to finish this second sexual attack. Was he going to force her back into the car again? No, he was gathering up her clothes and preparing to leave. She begged him to let her have her clothes and he finally relented, tossing them back at her.

“It’s my first rape,” he crowed. “Wow! I just raped somebody!”

She cowered in the bushes, wondering if he was so enthused about his conquest that he’d turn back to her, but it looked as though, this time, he was leaving.

“I’ll leave your car at Northgate,” he called back.

Lynn Rutledge had hidden her diamond ring under the seat. If he found that, he might be furious and come back to hit her again or kill her. As soon as she heard the car drive off, she put on her ruined clothes and ran to a nearby house, where she begged the owner to call 911.

Patrol Officer G. Meyers responded to the call and, on the way, received a “possible” sighting report of the stolen car. It turned out to be an identical car—not Lynn’s. Officer Meyers drove the injured kidnap victim to a hospital for treatment of her many cuts and bruises. Then the brave young woman volunteered to go with the officer in a search for her car—and the man who had abducted her.

They toured the parking lot at Northgate and did not find her car. Lynn, however, spotted it parked along the street near the Wallingford Police Precinct. It was impounded for processing and fingerprint expert Jeanne Bynum was able to lift one good partial latent print.

The shaggy-haired rapist was long gone once again. It was certainly possible that he lived in the neighborhood where the car was found; several of the other attacks had occurred in the same general vicinity. The latent would do no good alone: AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) was not yet in place at the time, but it would be vital if a suspect was found so they could compare his prints with the latent in evidence.

On June 2, Detective Fenkner got an anonymous call saying that the Northgate kidnapper was Grant Wilson,* twenty-three, who had been released from the Monroe Reformatory within the last year. Fenkner pulled Wilson’s file and found that the parolee had a rap sheet going back eight years, but none of the charges against him had involved sex offenses.

Wilson’s bookings had resulted from auto theft, grand larceny, burglary, and assault. He had served thirteen months at the penal facility at Shelton and fourteen months at the Monroe Reformatory for parole revocation. He had been released from Monroe two days before Christmas a year earlier, and in February, he’d been arrested as a burglary suspect. Since then, he hadn’t been arrested.

Wilson’s current location was unknown, but a look at his mug shots revealed he fit the general description of the
man who had been terrorizing women in the north end of Seattle. He was six feet tall, weighed 165 pounds, and had brown hair and blue eyes. He occasionally had worked as a carpenter.

While Bill Fenkner and Joyce Johnson attempted to track down the elusive ex-con, the rapist was still busy. It was two days later, at 11 p.m. on June 4, when twenty-six-year-old Carol Brasser* drove up in front of her home in the near north end. She parked and got out, idly noting that a man was walking eastbound along the sidewalk.