Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (42 page)

Carol had just reached her front steps when the man called out, asking her for the time. As she turned to answer he grabbed her, covering her eyes with her coat. She screamed several times while he dragged her to the yard of the house next door. Her first thought was that he was trying to force her into a car, and she told him she would do anything he wanted.

The man was evidently confident that she had no choice in the matter anyway, and he continued to drag her behind a fence where they would be hidden from the street. Once there, he tore off her slacks and panties. He forced his fingers roughly into her vagina, bit her breasts cruelly, and then he raped her.

Not satiated, the man forced her to endure both oral and anal sodomy. During the attack, he tried to keep her eyes covered. The coat over her mouth and nose was smothering her and she told him she couldn’t breathe. Hearing that, he’d let up the pressure on her face a little.

Carol suddenly heard the sound of other voices—young
voices. They were asking her attacker what was going on. Her assailant answered, “We’re just making love.”

She was so afraid. The man hit her in the chest and she feared he would beat her to death if she called for help now. The children wouldn’t be capable of stopping him and might be hurt themselves. She managed to tell them she was all right, hoping that they would realize that she wasn’t and go for help.

Carol heard their feet running away. The rapist seemed nervous now, even ashamed. He asked if she was okay, and allowed her to put her clothes back on.

Then he fled.

The youngsters had run to their mother and cried, “Mommy, there was a man and he grabbed a girl and she screamed and he dragged her into the bushes and put his hand over her mouth!”

The woman called police and Wallingford Precinct patrolmen arrived almost at once. But, just as before, the rapist had disappeared into the night, leaving behind only drops of blood from his feet, which had been cut by nails on the fence.

Carol Brasser was taken to a hospital, where doctors confirmed she had been sexually assaulted, had received deep scratches on her neck, sternum, and back.

Carol gave Sex Crimes detectives a now-familiar description: tall, thin, ragged shag haircut, mustache, in his twenties.

Her attacker’s MO matched that of the earlier attacks almost exactly. The man stalked lone women late at night, kept their eyes covered, and not only subjected to sexual
indignities but also seemed to enjoy beating them. And when he was finished with his victims, he apologized, and seemed to be asking for forgiveness.

What was most alarming was the increasing frequency of these copycat assaults. It was quite possible that the rapist assumed his victims had not seen him, that he felt perfectly free to continue his pattern. He had gotten away clean every time. If he felt safe, even overconfident, he might slip, and thereby betray himself.

Or he might kill his next victim. The number of rape victims who have ended up dead through strangulation or beatings is overwhelming. Sometimes the rapist goes further and uses more force than he intended. In cases of serial murder, the “thrill” of a “simple” rape is no longer satisfying for the sex criminal and he progresses to murder.

It is a very thin line.

On June 10, eighteen-year-old Moira Drew* attended a party at a friend’s house in the north end. There were several people she knew there—and a few she didn’t. One stranger was a tall, good-looking man with a mustache. As she left the party between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m., the handsome man approached her and asked if he could have a ride to Aurora Avenue.

“Sure.” She nodded, and pointed out her car.

She felt no apprehension. After all, she had met the man at her friend’s house.

Once on their way, the man, who had told her his name was Neil O’Leary, changed his mind about his destination. He asked her if she would mind taking him to North 91st
Street and Linden Avenue North. It was only a few more blocks out of her way and she agreed.

“Hey, move over closer to me,” he said softly, as she pulled over at his corner.

It seemed like a simple pass. She shook her head and said, “No, I don’t know you.”

As quickly as a cobra strikes, the man’s hand reached out and seized her by the throat, powerful fingers cutting off her air entirely. A black curtain dropped over her eyes and she saw pinwheels of light as she fought to breathe. With her last strength, she leaned on the horn.

“If you don’t shut up,” Neil O’Leary hissed, “I’m going to kill you …”

But Moira Drew kept her hand on the horn, its bleating staccato shrieks blasting through the early morning air. A car pulled up, paused, and the driver looked curiously over at Moira’s car.

It was enough to spook “Neil O’Leary,” and he leapt from her car and took off running.

Moira Drew was not a fragile little girl. She was perfectly proportioned, and she was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 135 pounds. She had fought her would-be strangler with such ferocity that she had literally forced the brake pedal of her car to the floor, making the brakes inoperable. She didn’t realize that until she pulled into a nearby 7-Eleven parking lot, and found she had to pull on the hand brake to keep from crashing into the store’s front window.

There was a police car parked there with Officer G. J. Fiedler inside. The distraught teenager approached the police
unit and Fiedler could see the angry red marks on her neck—perfect imprints of someone’s fingers.

At last, the handsome rapist had run out of luck. He had attacked a woman who knew people he knew. Moira called her host at the party and asked who the “tall, good-looking man with the mustache” was.

“Oh, him—that’s Grant Wilson,” the man responded.

Grant John Wilson was already a suspect, but unaware that Sex Crimes detectives were closing in on him, Wilson continued his penchant for brutal attacks on women.

Seattle police burglary detective Bill Berg had been investigating Grant Wilson, too—on burglary cases. Berg had information that tied in with his fellow detectives’ case. Even better, he had a line on where Wilson could be found: He was living on Northwest 56th Street, not far from the cluster of violent sexual attacks.

Bill Berg arrested Wilson on suspicion of rape in the case of Lynn Rutledge, and the other victims’ cases would follow. Grant Wilson would now have to face his accusers in a lineup arranged by Sex Crimes sergeant Romero Yumul.

On June 11, the ex-con moved across the lineup stage with several other men who looked a great deal like him. He had always been very careful to cover the eyes of his victims, nearly smothering some of them, but they had seen him, and they had remembered his face well.

Kitty Amela, the young nurse, recognized the man who had beaten her nearly unconscious. Carol Brasser, raped, beaten, and tormented, had his face emblazoned on her brain. Moira Drew, his last victim, picked him out of the
lineup instantly. Lynn Rutledge, kidnapped from Northgate and raped twice, would never forget him. The children who were witnesses to the attack on Carol Brasser also identified Grant Wilson.

Cory Bixler, whose attacker had thrown dirt on her after the rape and tried to bury her, was not positive; she had only seen him briefly in the blackness of night. The other young women who had been attacked where there was little light couldn’t be sure either—but they all recognized his voice.

It didn’t matter. There were enough victims who were absolutely sure that Grant Wilson was the man who had raped and beaten them. In Lynn Rutledge’s case, King County deputy prosecutors Paul Bernstein and Lee Yates filed charges of rape, robbery, and kidnapping. In three other cases where victims had picked Grant Wilson from the lineup, rape and/or sexual assault charges were filed.

With the arrest and confinement of Grant Wilson, who was held under $100,000 bail, there were no more attacks that fit the parameters of the rapist who had stalked women in the north end.

Direct physical evidence was piling up on the man who raped Carol Brasser. He had cut his feet on the picket fence as he ran from the sound of approaching police sirens; Grant John Wilson’s feet showed healing nail punctures.

Bill Berg knew where the bloody male clothing Wilson had discarded was. Semen samples taken from the rape victims matched Wilson’s blood type.

Grant Wilson had no alibis for the dates and times the attacks had occurred. In addition, the burglary charge Bill
Berg had arrested Grant Wilson for in February had many aspects that made it look much more like a rape attempt than a burglary.

Pry marks were visible around the windows of the home where Wilson was caught. Inside that house, a particularly beautiful woman lived alone. Wilson claimed that he had only been siphoning gas at that address. His trial on that charge had ended in a hung jury.

Detective Bill Berg wanted Wilson, and he had long believed the handsome suspect was potentially very dangerous. Now, Berg worked countless off-duty hours to help prosecutors Bernstein and Yates build their case. The investigative trio revisited each attack site and took photographs. They interviewed and reinterviewed the victims—all young women who were not only intelligent but had fantastic memories for detail as well. The case file grew as the prosecuting attorneys and the burglary detective gave their own free time to compile a loophole-free dossier against the brutal rape suspect.

As they learned more about Wilson’s relationships with women, an interesting psychological profile emerged. There had been no dearth of women in the ex-con’s life, but Grant Wilson had fought with most of them, beaten one severely, and had never taken even a hint of rejection without seeking revenge.

Strangely, he didn’t fight any rejection by the women in his life by hurting
them
. Instead, he had taken his rage out on the victims of his sexual attacks, on hapless women who were complete strangers.

After each fight or breakup, Grant Wilson had gone
prowling, looking for a pretty woman on whom he would vent his wrath.

Interesting, too, was the fact that most of the attacks had taken place in the same neighborhood where Grant Wilson had grown up—one directly across the street from his boyhood home. Since his release from prison, he had been on the move, living with one friend or another in the north end of Seattle.

Grant Wilson was slated to go on trial for attacking the four young women in August. But when Wilson was faced with the voluminous evidence that detectives Joyce Johnson, Bill Fenkner, and Bill Berg, along with prosecutors Bernstein and Yates, had gathered against him, he changed his mind about going to trial.

He was allowed to plea bargain, to plead guilty to a charge of first-degree kidnapping and robbery in the case of Lynn Rutledge. The other charges were dropped. The kidnapping charge meant a mandatory life sentence.

Grant Wilson is safely behind bars for a long, long time. But the scars on his victims will not soon fade. One young woman is afraid to walk on the street by herself—even in the daytime. She no longer feels safe to live alone. Another suffers from painful recurring migraine headaches. Rape is a crime that often leaves lifetime nightmares for its victims.

And yet Grant Wilson’s victims were lucky. They escaped with their lives. If he hadn’t been captured when he was, forensic psychologists believe it was only a matter of time before his sexual attacks escalated to murder.

As girls grow up, at least a quarter of us have had some kind of encounter with sexually deviant offenders. Most
often, we are not in physical danger, but it is shocking to be approached by a flasher—who seems to get satisfaction by exposing his genitals. Police call them “Lily Wavers,” and they come from every level of society.

There are also the voyeurs—the window peepers—who stare into windows, hoping to see a female in some state of undress. Those who do not know better say that exposers and voyeurs are not dangerous, but they are wrong. Almost every sex killer I have written about began with these seemingly “safe” intrusions into victims’ lives.

I was accosted by a flasher in a movie theater when I was twelve, and it scared me half to death—scared me so much that I didn’t even tell my mother for three years!

Perverts like Jerome Brudos (the Lust Killer) began as a voyeur and an exposer. Then he progressed to stealing hundreds of pieces of women’s undergarments from their bedrooms as they slept unaware.

Rape was his next step, and finally, a series of gruesome homicides.

I don’t want to frighten women—but I certainly want them to be aware and alert, especially when they are having a bad day. Ted Bundy, like many serial killers, had the ability to perceive vulnerability in his prospective targets. The hapless young women he killed all encountered him when they were temporarily distracted. They had the flu, they were suffering from premenstrual tension, they had just flunked tests or had been up all night studying for a final, their hearts were broken because they had just severed romantic ties with a boyfriend, or they were running
away from home. Some weren’t wearing their glasses—and vanity cost them their lives.

The list is endless. We all make mistakes in judgment—especially when our lives have gone off the tracks for a time. We must be extra cautious during those times in our lives.

The sex killers I have written about for the last three decades are coyotes, watching for the crippled lambs that they can easily cut out of the flock even though they wear charming masks.

The title of this book is
Don’t Look Behind You
. My message to you is
do
be aware of what is happening around you. Look back, to the side, and straight ahead with your head held high and walk with purpose.
Do
look behind you, and have your subconscious programmed so that you will react automatically should danger suddenly confront you.

You are the very first line of your own defense, and you can save your own life.

So many people opened their hearts and searched their memories to help me reconstruct mysteries of long ago in this book. For many, this meant opening old wounds and bringing up heartbreaks of the past, recollections that were, perhaps, best left alone. And yet the victims and the families they left behind need to be remembered.