Obsession (12 page)

Computer records said it was registered to a Ronnie Shelton, twenty-seven years of age, five feet eight and 138 pounds, matching the physical description of the rapist. Further checks revealed Shelton had a criminal record that included an arrest for voyeurism—behavior consistent with rape. Finally, Kovacic compared fingerprints taken from Shelton following an arrest in 1985 for theft with prints from several rapes. It was a clean match.

Their first stop was Shelton’s parents’ house, where his father told them he hadn’t seen Ronnie and didn’t know where they could find him. Following up at the apartment building where Kovacic spotted Shelton’s car, police learned a friend of Shelton’s was being evicted that day. Ronnie had stayed with him and, presumably, was helping him move. What police didn’t know was that the real reason he was returning was to get his own stuff out, having had a falling out with the guy as he’d had with many other former friends.

Around 7
P.M.
, Shelton returned to the apartment, driven in another friend’s car. Although the two detectives didn’t notice him at first in the strange car, Shelton spotted them, but mistook them for buddies of the guy being evicted, brought in to make sure Ronnie didn’t cause any trouble. Fearing for his safety since the guy had called the police on him before following their argument, Shelton had his friend drive to a pay phone where
he
called the police to ask for an escort into the apartment

Waiting for his escort, Shelton saw the guy come out of the apartment and stepped out of his friend’s car, at which point he was identified by the officers
who were actually there to arrest him. Just as they got him against the car to cuff him, the police escort called to the scene by Shelton did arrive, without being advised of the arrest. It was a tense moment for the arresting detectives as they identified themselves to the uniforms. A slight battle raged over who’d arrest Shelton: whether it was a sex-crimes collar or the Second District’s, based on jurisdiction. Eventually, the ones from sex crimes took him in and retrieved his car from his parents’ house. In the car they found such items as sunglasses, a switchblade, binoculars, and women’s jewelry.

Once he was left alone in jail, Shelton connected the zippers from several prison-issue jumpsuits and attempted to hang himself from the top bar in his cell. It wasn’t strong enough to support his weight, though, and he was placed on suicide watch.

Was it a genuine suicide attempt? Captured, Shelton could no longer manipulate, dominate, and control. It was his turn to have it all done to him. Every element of his life would be regulated by others. He wouldn’t even have control over the food he ate, when he ate, what he wore. Suicide would have been his ultimate act of control; he would have denied police the opportunity to try him and cheated his victims out of the chance to confront him and put him away for good. That’s why we see many of these types attempt suicide once caught, and why I often recommend automatic suicide watch.

Detective Zbydniewski was the first to interview him. In the first session, he didn’t admit to anything but drug use and hinted at credit card theft. Trying a different tack, the detective asked if he’d been abused as a child, and he answered not sexually, although he’d been beaten. She tried showing him the pictures from the bank surveillance camera. He appeared distressed to see himself on film but regained composure and
refused to talk further—although he didn’t yet ask for an attorney.

A few days later he had his lawyer. Christmas Eve, Jerry Milano, an attorney with a lengthy record of criminal defense, was asked by Maria Shelton to help her brother.

In the meantime, police worked to see how many of the unsolved rapes could be linked to Shelton. His fingerprints were matched with latents from four rape scenes. To get the others, Assistant County Prosecutor Tim McGinty turned to Bob Matuszny, figuring he was not only familiar with the case but already had a rapport with many of the victims. McGinty warned him there wasn’t budget for the overtime Matuszny would probably put in, but he was sufficiently obsessed with finally getting his man that he’d put in all the time on his own.

McGinty’s first step was to get the suspect to submit to a photograph of his genitals so they could resolve the issue of the bump. Some victims of the West Side Rapist reported the bump, others didn’t. The prosecutor needed to clear up this discrepancy. They also began the task of finding victims and getting them in to try to identify Shelton from a lineup. But many of the traumatized victims had left the area years ago. The prosecutor’s office asked local papers and TV stations not to publish a photo of Shelton, explaining the defense would be able to argue later that any positive IDs had been corrupted by the media coverage. The media showed tremendous restraint.

In addition to the original cases Matuszny worked, the police rechecked cases handled by Gray and Zbydniewski and cases referred to them by Special Agent John Dunn of the FBI’s Cleveland Field Office, who sent unsolved cases from the suburbs that matched the West Side Rapist’s. At that point, the total of possibly linked cases was approaching forty.

One of the first victims called in to identify her assailant was Karen Holztrager, who easily zeroed in on two of the five men in the lineup. Detectives asked each man to speak language the offender had used during the rape, and Holztrager made her choice—the wrong guy. As she was leaving, she told the police that she knew she had the wrong man but was too afraid to identify the real offender.

Shelton had been arrested for the rape that led to his identification through the bank surveillance camera. Two weeks later McGinty got grand jury indictments on five more cases where fingerprints at the crime scene matched Shelton’s.

In the interest of leaving nothing to chance, the prosecutor continued looking into Shelton’s previous record, checking with former girlfriends, everything down to traffic violations. Good prosecutors believe in knowing the opposition, and McGinty was a firm believer in being prepared. One of his concerns was that Shelton’s lawyer would go for an insanity defense, which, if successful, could keep him out of prison.

Searching Shelton’s past, McGinty learned about a suicide attempt in 1986 at the apartment of a former girlfriend. This led to a psychologist who had treated him back then, Ross Santamaria, and to the former girlfriend. Santamaria reported he found Shelton not insane but manipulative—an assessment he would testify to. The former girlfriend then provided information that not only backed up what the psychologist had said but gave McGinty even more than he’d imagined.

She filled in the details of Shelton’s violent personality, describing how he’d beaten her and how his temper caused him to get into fights. She told of crimes he had committed against her, from stealing her credit cards to rape and attempted murder. Although she was willing to testify, she was embarrassed to admit her involvement with Shelton. Even her parents didn’t
know the depths to which he took her, and she wanted to keep it that way. She tried to explain that at times Shelton was completely charming, which made it difficult for her to leave him. Most important, though, she cleared up one of the big mysteries of the case: in the spring of 1986, she paid for a doctor to remove Ronnie’s genital warts.

James Neff describes McGinty’s surprise, almost perplexed amusement, when she reported how popular Ronnie could be with women. With his long, effeminate hairstyle and overdone appearance, McGinty couldn’t fathom what women saw in Shelton.

From what this woman said, Ronnie Shelton fit a classic profile for this type of rapist: inadequate personality, trouble holding down a job, ongoing conflict with parents and girlfriends, insecurity about his sexuality (he hated when people teased him about his hair, neat appearance, or small stature, especially if they called him “fag”). It’s as if these offenders are walking a tightrope, charming enough to win over any woman one minute, desperately needing to control and assert their masculinity the next. It doesn’t mean they have a split personality; it just means they are capable of controlling their insecurities and impulses when it serves them. When they want or need something, they can behave appropriately to get it, which is how so many rapists have active consensual sexual relationships at the same time that they assault other women.

McGinty and the police were still having trouble gaining ground on more than the original five rapes for which they had Shelton’s fingerprints. They were convinced he was responsible for at least twenty-three, but needed some way to tie him to the others. In several instances, physical evidence taken from the crime scene was contaminated, or nothing was collected at all. And in some cases Shelton fit the description
given by the victim in her statement, but she was unable to pick him out of a lineup.

The prosecution and the police talked to John Dunn again, and he recommended they get in touch with me, figuring I might be able to tie them together behaviorally. Though I think McGinty was skeptical at first, he must have thought it was worth a try. The catch was that it would be the first time this type of expert-witness testimony would be introduced in an Ohio courtroom.

McGinty’s team was preparing a 230-count indictment, the largest in county history. Jerry Milano announced publicly that his client would plead insanity and at most would serve only fifteen years before he’d be eligible for parole, regardless of any possible sentence. McGinty argued that Ohio law needed to be changed, that there should be no way for a serial rapist to get parole so quickly. He also convinced Shelton’s ex-girlfriend to testify about his behavior, including her rape, to help counter the insanity argument.

As Neff quotes McGinty:

“I want to show a jury that he’s a son of a bitch twenty-four hours a day, not just at six in the morning. … I want to show that he raped her, abused her, gave her VD, took her credit cards. … I want to show little Ronnie’s manipulative behavior. We can argue that that’s how he was able to get whatever doctor he hired to say that he was nuts. Plus we need her to show that he could get laid. She shows that he had normal sexual outlets. That means he raped for thrills. It’ll show the rapes were crimes of violence.”

In the meantime, as I went through the materials myself, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between the different cases. Elements of his modus operandi were consistent: the targeting of first-floor apartments with easy escape routes, timing the events typically in the early-morning hours when the victim would be
alone or with dependent children nearby, surprising the victim, threatening her with a knife or other sharp object at the scene. But more than that, the rapist’s signature—the things he does that are not necessary to the perpetration of the crime but that he needs for his emotional satisfaction—was also consistent. For example, in many instances he either masturbated before the victim or pulled out while raping her to ejaculate on her. This indicated to me that his motivation was power, he wanted to symbolize his total domination of these victims. This ritualistic behavior was consistent throughout the series and indicated to me that all the rapes had been committed by one man, to which I would gladly testify.

Along with my testimony, McGinty had Dr. Michael Knowlan, the court-assigned psychiatrist who interviewed Shelton for nearly eight hours over the course of eight days. The defense based its case on the argument that Shelton had suffered brain damage when he fractured his skull in 1983 in a fall from a ladder while working in construction. And in an interview with Cuyahoga County court-clinic social worker Rita Haynes, Shelton had mentioned that during the series of rapes, he felt as though he was “protected” from police by a shield. After his meetings with Shelton, however, Knowlan decided that the defendant was, in fact, sane. He was a substance abuser with an anti-social personality, but this did not “constitute a mental disease or defect,” and Shelton could certainly distinguish between right and wrong.

Knowlan also noted that Shelton told him he thought about raping women “fifty times per month, yet he only committed approximately fifteen rapes. The fact that the defendant had thoughts about raping, but did not act on some occasions, suggests that he had some ability to refrain from committing rapes.”

To address these arguments, the defense lined up
forensic psychiatrist Dr. Emanuel Tanay. He’d worked with Milano before in the case of defendant Michael Levine, accused of the aggravated murder of successful Cleveland businessman Julius Kravitz. In his sixties with gray hair and an elegant European accent, Tanay had the experience that comes from testifying in hundreds of cases, including those of Ted Bundy and Jack Ruby. After meeting with Shelton, Tanay concluded that even though Shelton had told Knowlan he hadn’t raped as many times as he’d felt like raping someone, he was still compelled to rape, and that “efforts to resist compulsive behavior are the very characteristic of a compulsion.”

As the trial date drew closer. Judge Richard Mc Monagle expected a plea agreement to be worked out between the two sides, since, as Milano had pointed out, Ohio law had a cap on sentences for rape. McGinty, however, kept adding charges and was determined to go to trial. It was a gamble, but McGinty felt all the victims should be represented with charges—which wouldn’t happen if he agreed to a plea—so they would all have an opportunity to give input before the parole board and try to keep Shelton locked up as long as possible. And in the larger frame, McGinty hoped the sentencing rules would be recognized as ludicrous once people understood the atrocity and magnitude of the rapist’s crimes and that they would provide ammunition for changing the sentencing laws. After all, those of us who’d studied the subject knew that fifteen years on ice is not likely to cool the obsession whose life’s work, as it were, had been rape.

McGinty used a new tactic in preparation. Since the victims held the key to the case, he felt he needed to make sure they were all ready to testify, that as terrified as many of them still were, they’d be able to reach a jury with their story and not be destroyed by the
other side. He met with Carla Kole, a social worker with the court’s Witness and Victim Service, a group that acted as part of the court system to provide counseling and support for witnesses and victims of crime. Together, they invited all the victims of the cases going to trial—thirty in all—with their husbands or boyfriends if they wanted, to come together to get ready emotionally for what they were about to face in court. They discussed everything from how to preserve their privacy, to what a sentence might be if Shelton was found guilty, to a discussion of plea bargaining, even how to deal with the family of the accused, since Shelton’s ex-girlfriend complained that his sister had been following her around. McGinty even asked what they felt a good sentence would be.