I know that it has been a while since this story appeared in the Washington Post, but I work with some ladies who remain concerned about this rapist. It is interesting that in this age of DNA evidence and CSi-like precision, someone can still get away with rape. I want to get the entire article in, so I’m running it in two parts. The concluding part will run tomorrow.

>>After 13 years, police still hunting for the East Coast Rapist

By Josh White and Maria Glod

He lurks at gas stations and pay phones and bus stops, blending in so well that people don’t notice him at first. He has a smooth, deep voice. He is black, he smokes and he is right-handed. He is in his early to mid-30s, is fit, stands about 6 feet tall, likes wearing camouflage clothes and black hats, and once had a badly chipped tooth.

The man studies women carefully. He watches them leave for work and walk home from the mall, and he notices whether they lock their windows and doors. He knows when they are most vulnerable and when they are home alone with their children. He stalks them in neighborhoods he knows well.

Then he rapes them and vanishes.

He is the East Coast Rapist. And police know so much about this man. They even have his DNA. But when it comes right down to it, he is a frustrating mystery. No one has been able to find him.

His attacks have spanned 13 years, beginning in Prince George’s County in the late 1990s, moving into Virginia and then up to New England.

Now he has been back to Northern Virginia. The most recent rapes were on Halloween in Dale City, when he forced three trick-or-treating teenage girls into a wooded ravine at gunpoint. That was the closest police have come to finding him. And the attacks showed them that he’s brasher than ever.

“He is a very bold, fearless predator,” said Sgt. Kim Chinn, a Prince William County police spokeswoman. “The concern is that he’s out there, he’s not going to stop until he’s caught and the violence could get worse.”

“He’s like a lion looking for prey,” said one of his victims, a woman who was raped in her Leesburg apartment in 2001.

Police detectives and five of the rapist’s victims cooperated with the reporting of this article with the same goal in mind: They want to identify and catch him before he attacks again. The Washington Post generally does not name victims of sex crimes and is not identifying any of the victims in this article. Some of them, parents themselves, said they were willing to discuss their attacks because the man raped teenagers.

“Somebody’s going to know who’s been in Prince George’s, who’s been in Fairfax, who went to Connecticut,” said Lt. Bruce Guth, who leads Fairfax County’s cold-case squad. “The bastard’s right there. We just need that one phone call. Somebody knows this guy.”

Police in Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut and Rhode Island have been hunting the rapist for more than a decade, but the Halloween attacks added urgency to their search. A trail of DNA links him to the rapes of at least 12 women, and police suspect him in a total of 17 attacks. Detectives think there might be more.

Experts say the rapist is probably in a continual search for his next victim. Police think he lives in, works in or is very familiar with the areas he prowls. He scopes out locations to intercept women, secluded sites in the midst of busy neighborhoods and ways to escape. He grabs women who are in their comfort zones, near or in their own homes.

“He’s taking advantage of people who are unguarded,” said Fairfax Detective John Kelly. “He’s doing it under the cover of darkness. He acts like a trapper would.”

His methods remain unpredictable. He has attacked using a gun, a knife, a screwdriver and a broken bottle. He has approached his victims using banal conversation or an abrupt demand. He compliments them and threatens to kill them. But beyond the violence of the rapes, he has not carried out any of those threats.

The rapist’s DNA has not turned up in any database of convicted criminals, and police think he knows it because he seldom uses a condom. He is skilled at hiding his face by operating in the dark, wearing a mask or covering his victims’ faces.

Besides his deep voice, which several of the women say they would recognize, descriptions of him remain fairly vague: black man with medium complexion, medium build.

Police have been looking at known sex offenders, people who have lived near the rape sites and people who have served prison time during gaps between the assaults. That has allowed them to rule out more than 100 possible suspects, but they haven’t been able to home in on anyone specific. They are using a high-tech data analysis program to scour leads and identify people with connections to the areas of the attacks.

But rapes by a stranger are among the most difficult to solve. This predator picks women and girls with whom he has no apparent association. Most are black, but some are white. The descriptions the women have provided are generic at best. Other than DNA, he leaves little evidence.

Although they are open to any possibility, detectives are exploring whether the man could be a long-haul trucker, a utility installer or a member of the military.

Whatever he is, he’s back. His rapes on Halloween carry several of his trademarks.

The three teenagers were laughing, chatting and sending text messages in the chilly night rain, their bags of candy swaying as they walked through a dimly lit Dale City shopping center. They were just a few blocks from home.

Slinking out of the darkness, a stranger wearing a black ski mask was suddenly behind them. One of the girls felt a gun in her back. The man led them into a steep wooded ravine as they held one another’s hands. A deep voice through clenched teeth told them to lie down side by side and to face away from him.

“I thought he was going to kill us,” one of the girls recalled.

As her two friends were raped in the leaves beside her, the 16-year-old dimmed her cellphone’s backlight. Operating blindly, she pleaded with her parents and friends for help, texting her rough location. She called her mother and then 911, breathlessly asking police to “please help me, please help me, please help me” before the call was dropped.

Within minutes, her mother, just a few blocks away, was racing to the woods from one side. Prince William police raced from the other side. As the lights and sirens closed in, the man stopped.

“He said, ‘Stay down. Don’t move,’ ” the girl said. “Then we heard him run away, the leaves crunching under his feet.”

And like that, he was gone, emerging from the woods into a busy neighborhood. Police were close. But not close enough.

* * *

It started almost exactly 13 years ago. The man wearing a ski mask rode his bicycle along Marlboro Pike in Forestville just after midnight, scanning the streets for a victim. He spotted a 25-year-old woman walking alone, approached her and started talking. He pulled out a gun and attacked.

The rape, on Feb. 19, 1997, marked the first time the man’s DNA would be entered into a database that holds genetic evidence from unsolved crimes. It occurred one month after and one month before similar assaults in the same neighborhood.

Those early rapes in Prince George’s provide some of the best clues to the man’s identity. The women never got a clear view of his face, but two of them noticed that one of his teeth was chipped or missing. Sometimes he wore a green camouflage coat.

The man, then in his late teens or early 20s, seemed to know the area well. Two women recalled seeing him near an Amoco station along Pennsylvania Avenue just before they were attacked.

“Reasonable people can assume he’s from there,” said Lt. Col. Kevin Davis, deputy chief of police in Prince George’s.

That spring, police sounded their first alarm that a serial rapist was at work. Prince George’s police publicly warned women to be on guard. Detectives think he might have seen media coverage, with headlines reporting a “bicycle-riding rapist.” In August, he raped again in Prince George’s, but he changed his method. He ditched the gun and bike and was on foot and armed with a knife.

The rapist then expanded his hunting ground. By summer 1999, he was roaming Fairfax’s Route 1 corridor, a busy section of strip malls, restaurants and apartment buildings. He lurked at gas stations and bus stops at night.

Carrying a knife, he spied one woman passing him with grocery bags, grabbed her from behind and led her to a desolate spot behind a real estate office. He plucked off one of her shoes and pulled one of her legs out of her pants, making it even more difficult for her to escape because it would have been nearly impossible to run. He would later repeat the tactic.

He began focusing on roads leading into townhouse communities and apartment complexes. There, police said, he could watch women come and go and attack when his best opportunity arose.

At one such location in the Alexandria section of Fairfax in November 2000, a 35-year-old woman fought him off. The rapist approached her as she entered a new townhouse community after getting off a bus. He implied that he was lost. He put her in a headlock and led her to a wooded area. The woman, who was in the military, wrestled a six-inch serrated knife from him. She told police that she tried to stab him and that he insisted he was “just playing” and ran off.

The knife, linked to him by DNA collected from skin cells, is the only known item the rapist has left behind.

In May 2001, he struck again, this time at an apartment complex in Leesburg.

When he grabbed the woman from behind and wrapped his arms around her, she laughed. She thought her husband had come into the second-floor garden apartment to help her move.

“What I noticed is that nobody was laughing with me,” she said. She looked down. The strong, black arms were not her husband’s.

“He said, ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you. I have a knife,’ ” she recalled.

The 41-year-old woman, who looks younger than her age, had spent the evening ferrying belongings from the apartment to her car. It was warm, and she wore a T-shirt and running shorts. The apartment was nearly empty. About 5 p.m., she sent her 14-year-old son to his taekwondo lesson.

While she was at the car, the rapist slipped through the open front door. He waited.

When she returned, he pushed her into the bedroom and onto the floor. Threatening her with an orange-handled Phillips head screwdriver, he bound her hands over her head with shoelaces he brought with him. He was chewing something, maybe gum or a toothpick that poked out the corner of his mouth. He covered her face with her shirt.

She thought: “So this is what it’s like to be raped.”

With him on top of her, the woman remembered a downstairs neighbor who complained about noise every time she ran on her treadmill. She banged the floor with her foot, hoping the neighbor would interrupt. This time, there was no complaint.

“Where’s your mother?” she blurted. “Anyone with a good mother wouldn’t do this.”

That made the rapist angry, and he told her to shut up or he’d kill her. When she told him she was having trouble breathing, he moved the shirt away from her mouth. But he threatened her again.

“Don’t say anything to the police,” he said. “I live right across the hall.”

As in several other cases, the rapist complimented the woman, saying that she was “fine” and suggesting that in his own mind there was some mutual pleasure.

When he finished, he bundled up her clothes, her shoes and her cellphone. He gathered the shoelaces and the screwdriver and fled. Naked and terrified, the woman ran to the window and yelled for neighbors to call 911.

Her clothes and bedding had all been packed, so she covered herself in the only thing she could find — Christmas wrapping paper — until police arrived.

Leesburg Detective Lisa Kara said police interviewed people in the apartment across from the woman’s at the time — a unit that often housed transients — but made little headway.<<

Tomorrow, the conclusion of this article. There is a video featuring the reporters, but you have to go to this link and click on “The Investigation” to see it. You can also check out a lot of other information about this case on that same page.

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