In yesterday’s entry, I printed the first half of an article from the Washington Post regarding a serial rapist in the Washington, DC, area. Here’s the conclusion:
>>Three months later, the rapist attacked two Prince George’s teenagers at gunpoint as they walked home from the Marlow Heights shopping center near the Beltway. He forced the two into the woods in what would be the first time he raped two people in a single incident. The wooded ravine is similar to the scene of the recent Prince William attack.
Days after Christmas 2001, a 29-year-old mother of four from Fairfax was running late for her 7 p.m. work shift. She pulled on a turtleneck, a T-shirt, a sweat shirt and a coat and waited at a bus stop in the Alexandria section of the county.
She saw a man smoking a cigarette and thought he was being polite by standing back at the edge of the woods. He came closer and asked whether she knew when the next bus would arrive.
But the man didn’t want an answer. “I have a weapon — follow me,” he said. She caught a glimpse of a knife handle in his coat pocket.
As he led her down the street, the bus went by, too late to help. He demanded money. When she insisted that she had none, he didn’t believe her.
“You work all the time,” he said. He was right. She had two jobs, one at Ames and the other in a fast-food restaurant. She thought he could not have known that unless he had been watching her.
The tip of the knife dug into the left side of her neck. When they reached a nearby apartment complex, he forced her to the mulch, lifted her clothes over her face, and pulled off one of her shoes and one leg of her jeans.
She shivered in the winter cold, and he told her to stop shaking. Throughout the attack, she prayed aloud: “Thank you, Jesus.” The rapist got angry and ordered her to be quiet, but she refused. He then got up and, for a moment, she thought the assault was over. He wasn’t done.
“It was too good to stop,” he told her. After the rape, he said he would come back to get her if she had AIDS or got pregnant. Finally, he was gone.
She lay silently, counting backward from 100. At 30, she got up. With one pant leg trailing behind her and a shoe in her hand, she rushed home. She desperately wanted to take a shower and be done with it, but her husband persuaded her to report the crime. Police recovered DNA that linked her case to the others.
A few months later, the woman was at work when a customer’s voice stopped her cold. Ames security guards had spotted a man suspected of shoplifting baby clothes and later told her that when the man looked in her direction, he took off running.
“It was the voice,” she said. “I had the sense that he was coming back for me.”
* * *
After the last Fairfax rape, in 2001, at least four years passed without any signs of the rapist. There are no solid explanations. Police say any theory is just speculation, but they are focusing on the most likely reasons: a stint in jail, military service, a life change such as marriage or the birth of a child, relocation outside the country. Or he might have been thwarted and was scared off for a while.
“But these gaps might not be gaps at all,” said Prince William Detective Todd Troutner, flipping through a white binder labeled “The Rapist.” “We just might not know of all the attacks.”
In the evening darkness just after Thanksgiving in 2006, the attacker reappeared, leaving DNA more than 400 miles north of his previously known assaults. This time it was on the back deck of a house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Cranston, R.I.
An 11-year-old girl, doing homework on a living room couch, looked up to see a stranger’s face poking into her dining room. An unlocked sliding-glass door had been opened, and the man had stepped slightly through it. The girl screamed, the family’s large black Great Dane began barking, and the man ran away. No one was hurt.
“It was dark out, and I had just gotten home from work. He probably saw me come home and probably thought I was by myself,” the girl’s mother, now 42, said in an interview at their home. “We thought it was a local homeless guy or something.”
After the split-second encounter, police arrived and examined the scene.
Just outside the door, they found three drops of semen. The DNA matched that from the rapes in Maryland and Virginia.
“I guess we were lucky,” the girl’s mother said. “Why he was here doesn’t make any sense. I’ve tried so hard to figure it out.”
Janet I. Warren, associate director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia and an expert on serial rapists, said the peeping Tom incident says a lot about the man.
“I can assure you he’s been looking into many windows,” Warren said. “He probably has a methodical way of sizing up women, sizing up areas, sizing up apartment complexes. . . . He’s moving around the area and looking for victims and getting a sense of the people. He’s familiar with who locks their doors and windows.”
Police in New Haven, Conn., believe the rapist moved to New England for work or to be with family. The only attack in New Haven linked by DNA occurred just a month and a half after the Cranston incident, but police think he could have committed three similar assaults in New Haven around that same time.
In each of the New Haven attacks, the assailant entered homes through an unlocked door or window and confronted women in darkened bedrooms. In three of the cases, he attacked women who were home alone with children — like in Cranston — and instead of a weapon he used the children as leverage.
“He’s definitely watching them,” said Sgt. Martin Dadio of the New Haven Police Department’s special investigations unit. “He’s looking to get someone who will do whatever he wants because they want to protect their kid.”
Evidence of that is clear in a rape that took place on Jan. 10, 2007, in an isolated New Haven apartment complex.
The woman, then 27, arrived home after picking up her 11-month-old son at day care. She opened a window to cool off her ground-level apartment, put the baby to bed and watched television before going to sleep about 10.
She awoke sometime after midnight, not wearing her glasses and groggy from sleep. She saw a man silhouetted against her bedroom doorway and heard him say: “Don’t yell.”
The man ordered her to cover her head with her pillowcase.
“I froze and did what I was told to do,” she said. Her son, one week shy of his first birthday, was sleeping in a crib in the room. She prayed he wouldn’t wake up. “He specifically said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you — I know you have your son here.’ It was almost like he started feeling bad, like he couldn’t control himself.”
At one point, the rapist asked her if she “liked it,” and she didn’t answer for fear of angering him. When he was done, he warned her not to report the crime.
“He told me not to call the police, and if I did, he’d know and he’d come back and kill me,” she said. “And he said, ‘Make sure to lock your windows.’ “
The apartment complex is not a place one would just stumble upon. It is tucked into the back of a residential neighborhood and is far from pedestrian traffic.
“You wouldn’t go there unless you had business there or family there,” said Lt. Julie Johnson, head of the New Haven police’s special investigations unit. “He plans these. He’s watching. He knows the areas.”
In three other cases in New Haven, the attacker did not leave DNA behind, either because he used a condom, a makeshift condom or the woman fended him off. But they carry some of the rapist’s signatures. Just as in one of the Fairfax rapes, the attacker in New Haven told a woman to “stop shaking.” He spoke with a Caribbean accent in some of the attacks, but one woman reported that he turned it on and off, indicating that it might be fake. He complimented them on their bodies and the act, something experts said probably shows some level of fantasy or a confused sense that what he is doing is consensual.
* * *
Nearly three years passed between the last known attack in Connecticut, in January 2007, and the Halloween rapes in Dale City. Police are examining unsolved rapes in several states to determine whether this attacker could have committed them, because they think there must be some they don’t know about.
But last Halloween, it was him again: He was dressed in all black, wore a black mask, used a gun, grabbed the three teenage girls as they walked home and spoke in a deep voice through gritted teeth.
The rapes were in a wooded area he must have scouted.
Located just yards from a shopping center and a large residential community off Dale Boulevard, the walk down into the small clearing is precarious. It’s a shortcut where people have tossed Natural Light beer cans, empty bottles, a stray car tire and other trash.
“It’s a pretty good location for what he wanted to do,” said Troutner, the Prince William detective, standing next to the ravine floor where the teenagers were ordered to lie in the cold, wet darkness.
The girls held hands and scrambled into the ravine as the masked attacker followed with a gun, all of them afraid to cry out or run for fear that he might shoot them. He raped one girl, then moved on to the next. That’s when the third crouched over her phone and decided to text. At 9:05 p.m., she created a message, addressed it to seven people, and typed furiously: “911 cvs pls noww man with gun.”
“I can text really fast,” she said. “I turned my backlight down and texted my mom, my dad and friends, asking them for help, telling them that I was in the woods, that a man was raping my friends, and to please call 911.”
There was no anger in the rapist’s voice, no tension, no compassion. Almost no tone at all.
“He just came, got what he wanted and left,” she said. “That’s it.”<<
If you have any information that might help resolve this investigation, contact them through the links below:
Cranston (R.I.) Police
Visit their Web site
Phone: (401) 942-2211
Fairfax County (Va.) Police
Visit their Web site
(866) 411-TIPS (8477) — Crime Solvers anonymous tip line
E-mail tips to Detective John Kelly at john.kelly@fairfaxcounty.gov
Text “TIP187” plus your message to CRIMES (274673)
Leesburg (Va.) Police
Visit their Web site
(703) 443-TIPS (8477) — Anonymous crime tip line
Call Detective Lisa Kara at: (703) 771-4587
E-mail tips to Detective Lisa Kara at lkara@leesburgva.gov
New Haven (Conn.) Police
Visit their Web site
(866) 888-TIPS (8477) — Crime Solvers anonymous tip line
Call the Special Investigations Unit at (203) 946-6290
Prince George’s County (Md.) Police
Visit their Web site
Call the Criminal Investigation Unit at: (301) 772-4908
(866) 411-TIPS (8477) — Crime Solvers anonymous tip line
Text “PGPD” plus your message to CRIMES (274637) on your cell phone
Prince William County (Va.) Police
Visit their Web site
(866) 411-TIPS (8477) — Crime Solvers anonymous tip line
E-mail tips to the department at policedept@pwcgov.org
Reward information
The Prince George’s County Police Department is offering a cash reward of up to $25,000 for information that leads to the arrest and indictment of a suspect or suspects in this case. Washington-area Crime Solvers is also offering up to a $1,000 reward.
Here’s the video regarding the most recent attack:
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