Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (39 page)

Once again, there had been no ejaculation, so there was no semen to check for blood type or DNA. There was really nothing more than Dorian’s description of the man: tall, collar-length brown hair, mustache, fairly good-looking, wearing a jeans outfit and only one glove. She had never seen him before, and if he had followed her home from the supermarket, she wasn’t aware of it. She didn’t even know if he’d had a car; he’d just suddenly been there inside her house.

Ben Colwell contacted all police agencies in the north end of King County. He made sure that Detective Marian
McCann in Edmonds knew about this attack. Dorian Bliss’s house wasn’t far from the Edmonds church where Ashley Varner had been assaulted. McCann did have the unsolved church rape in August, but that rapist hadn’t made any comments about “being sick,” and he had been more interested in oral sex than rape.

At that point, the MOs appeared to be different.

On December 10, Jill Whaley was driving toward her home when she observed a car parked in her driveway—an unfamiliar car. As she approached, the car backed out and left at a high rate of speed. The spunky woman followed it until it pulled into another driveway. She pulled her car across the sidewalk there, virtually blocking the driver. She saw that he was a young male who looked a great deal like the man who’d raped her.

Irritated, he rolled down his window and said sarcastically, “Can I get out of here?”

She backed up just enough to allow the car to leave but she continued to pursue it. She lost the man’s car in traffic—but not before she wrote down his license number.

Colwell ran the number through the Department of Motor Vehicles on his computer. He found it registered to an Edmonds area man. When he confronted the possible rapist, Colwell saw that the man certainly matched the description given by Jill Whaley. He was irate and indignant and insisted he’d merely been looking for an address. On December 17, he agreed to take a polygraph test. Surprisingly, the results of the lie detector showed he was telling the truth.

The weekday, daylight rapist was still at large. However, if he struck again during the first months of the new year, his victims did not report it.

And then on March 14, a twenty-one-year-old Edmonds housewife, Leann Cross,* underwent a horrifying experience. She and her husband had advertised an antique car for sale. Shortly after noon, Leann answered the door to find a tall, handsome young man standing there. He smiled and asked, “How much do you want for the antique car?”

“We’d have to have something over a thousand dollars,” she replied.

Instantly, the man’s demeanor changed. “That’s too much—how much do you want for a fuck?”

Before the shocked woman could react to the obscene question, the stranger was inside her house. She started crying but her tears had only a stimulating effect on him. He pushed her toward her bedroom and he was so strong that there was no question of resisting. “I’m a hired killer,” he told her. “Don’t fight me.”

As the stranger took her clothes off, Leann heard her eight-month-old baby crying in the kitchen. She was afraid he would hurt the baby, and she vowed to do whatever she had to in order to protect her child.

And then, oddly, he placed a pillowcase from the bed over her head. Rape was clearly what he had in mind—but he was unsuccessful at that. “I can’t even do this right,” he moaned, moving off her. The man explained that he was an ex-marine as well as a “hired killer,” yet he was not proving to be a very efficient rapist.

“Get me a rope to tie you up with,” he ordered.

She found a thick sash cord and her husband’s bathrobe belt. The intruder tied her hands behind her and bound her ankles loosely with the bathrobe sash. Leann held her breath and prayed he would not harm her still-screaming infant. Then she heard the front door close. Hobbling over to the phone, she managed to get one hand free to dial her sister-in-law who lived next door. She rushed over to untie Leann.

The two frightened women called the Edmonds police and patrol officers responded, followed in minutes by Detective Marian McCann.

Leann’s description of her assailant had a most familiar ring: white, male, thirty, six feet two, 210 pounds, medium brown curly hair, brown eyes, mustache, jeans and jean jacket. Possible witnesses on the street where Leann lived reported that they had noticed an orange van parked in front of the victim’s house. It was possibly a ten-year-old Dodge.

Detective McCann immediately put out a teletype on the van and description of the rapist. Almost at once, she was deluged with reports of orange vans and/or unsolved rapes. She was appreciative of the response, but it meant checking out over a dozen orange vans and their drivers. Some were easy to eliminate; one spotted by a victim’s relative in a grocery store parking lot was driven by a skinny man with shoulder-length red hair who in no way matched the description of the rapist.

Others weren’t so easy. McCann visited a rural farm in Snohomish County where three brothers were supposed to
own an orange van. She spent hours staking out the place, even talking to some young women who were also waiting for their “suspects.” None of the brothers turned out to match the description of the man.

Detective McCann conferred with departments as far away as Spokane County at the eastern end of the state, and Mason County many miles south of Edmonds, but nothing matched up. In the meantime, she dreaded the repeat that must surely come if the rapist was not found—and soon.

McCann combed her files and surrounding departments’ files for mug shots of men with previous sex offenses. A fellow detective, Wally Tribuzio, recalled an incident in December 1976 when he had assisted the Lynn-wood Police Department in the arrest of a suspect in an alleged burglary-rape at the Bali Hai Sauna.

“This guy supposedly went in there and shot up the place, and then stole a desk because he couldn’t get the drawers open to get the money out,” Tribuzio recalled. “He was driving a panel truck, only it was white then. We traced the license number they got to a Tom Barrington.* I went out to his residence to help out the Lynnwood officers. Anyway, just as I turned down the street, I saw the panel truck parked—the license was right—and I parked out of sight and waited. There was somebody in the van, and he seemed to be fooling around with what looked like a huge box. I called Snohomish County Dispatch and they told me that the man they were looking for had stolen a desk. Apparently, he was stashing the drawers in the bushes while I watched.”

Tribuzio had moved in and arrested the man.

“He fits the description to a T,” Tribuzio recalled to Marian McCann. “Big guy, two-day growth of beard, brown hair. We found a bunch of Bali Hai business cards in his glove box. He claimed to have thrown his gun away and we never found it.”

Possible—although a rape in a massage parlor is a good deal harder to prove than a sexual attack on a housewife in her own home. McCann learned that Tom Barrington was awaiting trial on the Bali Hai case, and she obtained a mug shot of him from the Lynnwood police to include in the ten-mug laydown of pictures to show to Leann Cross.

Unfortunately, she could not identify any of the mugs in the laydown as the man who had assaulted her and tied her up that harrowing day.

Worse, the attacks continued. On April 26, a South Everett housewife was in her own home at two in the afternoon when a man suddenly appeared. A big man, white, around thirty, with stubble on his face, dark hair, a good-looking man. He wore jeans and a blue plaid shirt.

The intruder forced Mrs. Lillian Mercer* into her bedroom, placed a pillowcase over her head, and raped her. He also told her he was “scared,” which was mild compared to the way the attractive housewife felt. When he left, he took her wallet containing $119 in cash, eight credit cards, and three bank savings books.

Snohomish County detective Sedy listened to the description and felt it sounded much like the man who was now being sought by practically every department from North King County on.

All the attacks had taken place on weekdays, all had occurred around late morning or early afternoon. “We’re either dealing with a man who works nights or a guy who takes advantage of a long lunch hour,” one detective remarked. It was only a matter of time before someone was going to get hurt. The rapist was not only described as huge and husky, he was hostile and aggressive and often carried a knife. So far, his victims had been terrified into submission. What if one of them attempted to fight back? Would that send the big man into a rage that might end in a crime far more final than rape?

But how do you catch a phantom? He was here, there, then miles away in his attacks. McCann suspected he was staking out his future victims. He always seemed to know when they were home alone, possibly having checked their husbands’ working hours. Perhaps he followed many of them home from grocery stores, knew that they would leave their doors open while they carried in armloads of groceries.

On June 7, it happened again in Snohomish County, near Lynnwood. It was 1:30 on a weekday afternoon when Tula French* was in the bathroom washing her face while her small daughter brushed her teeth. She’d left the front door open because it was an exceptionally warm, sunny day. She wore only a bathing suit because she’d been sunbathing.

Suddenly, unbelievably, a man walked into her bathroom! He had a peculiar expression on his face and held his hands near the zipper of his jeans.

To gain time, Tula faked a smile and said, “Hi, how are you?”

“I’ve come to rape you,” he answered.

“You’re kidding! What do you really want—can I help you with something?”

“I’m not kidding,” he snarled. “I’m going to rape you.” He pushed Tula’s four-year-old daughter into the bathroom and locked the door, dragging the mother out into the hallway.

“What is the matter with you?” she asked incredulously.

“Don’t you know I’m crazy?” he said as he began to tear her bathing suit top off.

Inside the bathroom, Tula French’s daughter cried, “You leave my mommy alone!”

“You shut her up, lady, and cooperate with me or I’ll rape her, too. Now you get in that bedroom or I’ll hurt you bad …”

Tula was a fighter and clung to the door frame in the hallway while she screamed to her neighbor for help.

It only served to further enrage the huge man who was struggling with her. “Shut up, bitch, or I’ll really hurt you!” he threatened.

The man threw her to the floor, and she came up fighting, grabbing his leg and butting him in the stomach as hard as she could with her head. It knocked a bit of the wind out of him, and he loosened his grasp for a moment. Tula ran for the front door, then realized she couldn’t leave the house—her little girl was hiding in the bathroom and the man was still inside. She saw her German shepherd in the yard and ordered, “Get him … get him!” But the dog had been raised as a pet, not as an attack animal; he merely stared quizzically at his mistress.

However, with the front door open, Tula opened her mouth and screamed as loudly as she could again and again. This was too much for the would-be rapist. He ran by her, and she slammed the door behind him. She called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office at once, and four deputies arrived within three minutes. They checked the heavily wooded area around the Frenches’ home where the man had fled on foot—but he was gone, swallowed up in the thickets of fir and alder.

Tula had been very lucky. She had saved both herself and her little girl, and suffered only bruises and a bad scrape on her leg.

But the siege was not over yet. The rapist’s desires had not been slaked, and this time he struck again in a much shorter time.

Three weeks later, another pretty young housewife, Linda Miller,* had just returned from the grocery store shortly after noon and was busy carrying armloads of groceries into her kitchen in Edmonds. Her three-year-old daughter was sitting at the kitchen table eating a hamburger while Mrs. Miller went to the bathroom. As she stepped out, a huge man approached her down the hallway with a knife in one hand and a black case of some kind in the other.

Before she could even scream, the man grabbed her around the neck with one powerful forearm and pushed her into the bedroom. He snatched a pillowcase from the bed, and she started to run. He caught up with her within a few feet and led her back to the bedroom. “Try that again and you’ll both get hurt,” he growled.

She watched in amazement as he removed a Polaroid camera from the black case. Then he placed the pillowcase over her head; she could see only vague outlines. The man removed her slacks, blouse, and bra and ordered her to stand, wearing only her panties, next to the dresser. She could hear the click and whirr of the camera. He was taking pictures of her!

Then he rustled through the drawers of the dresser until he found some panties he liked better. “Change into these,” he ordered, handing them to her.

If she had any hope that he was merely a picture freak, a man with some kind of weird fetish, that hope was dashed. He closed the drapes tightly, and she could see through the thin weave of the pillow case that he was unzipping his jeans.

“Spread your legs more,” he demanded. Then he raped her.

When he was finished with her, Linda pleaded, “Leave—just leave!”

“No, I have to tie you up.”

That frightened her. Her little girl was still in the kitchen. If the man tied her up, she wouldn’t be able to protect her child. She pleaded with him not to tie her.

“Okay, I won’t—but you have to give me all the time I need—an hour.”

She promised. With rapists, a good rule is to promise them anything; ethics don’t enter into it—survival does.

The big man walked down the hall, then suddenly returned to check on her. He found her still sitting on the edge of the bed as he’d left her and appeared satisfied. This time, he left and she heard the front door slam.

Linda threw on some clothes and ran to check on her daughter, relieved to find the child still munching on her hamburger, unaware of the struggle in the bedroom. The child couldn’t understand why her mother was sobbing and holding her so close.