Obsession (10 page)

Matuszny remembered another rape he’d worked and went back through the records of unsolved cases until he found what he was looking for: October 5, 1983, a twenty-three-year-old woman was raped in the first-floor apartment she’d just moved into—she hadn’t even had time to unpack or put up curtains—just a few blocks from the recent rapes. All the crime scenes were near the wooded area of Brookside Park—presenting a rapist with an easy route to a clean getaway. And in every case police had been able to lift finger-prints from the scene, although Matuszny hadn’t yet heard whether they all matched. Given the similarities and the likelihood there was just one rapist at work, Matuszny got permission from his supervisor, Lt Robert Howell, to devote all his time to finding the serial rapist.

The first step was to check the other police districts in the city to see if the subject they now referred to as the West Side Rapist had been active elsewhere. They described the rapist’s MO, as well as his distinguishing physical characteristic, and soon got reports back on two cases in the Fourth District. In the first case, which occurred just a few months earlier, on February 2, a fifty-one-year-old grandmother was assaulted by a white male who broke into her two-story home, raped her, and left her and her three-year-old granddaughter locked in the bathroom. The rapist had been able to break into the house cleanly, with no broken windows or marks left on the door or window screens. And just like the rapist in the Second District, this offender reportedly had a bump on his penis.

The next case matched the others in terms of the description of the rapist and MO, but the twenty-five-year-old victim was not willing to talk to police. Her
husband was anxious to put the incident behind them, which, unfortunately, is not an uncommon reaction among spouses or partners, family members, and close friends of rape victims, who are sometimes unable to deal with their own emotions and whose only coping mechanism is to deny it ever happened. Although the victim would not cooperate in putting together the composite sketch, much less agree to testify once a suspect was brought to trial, she did describe the rapist and the assault for police: a thin white man knocked at the door, then forced his way inside at knifepoint. He told her he would not hurt her if she did what he told her to—just as the other victims had been threatened—then raped her. The victim reported that he had a bump on his penis.

With five cases now to consider, it seemed likely the police might get a break. Once they put together a composite of the rapist (and a separate composite of his sex organ), they’d be ready to get their search under way. They brought copies of a diagram of a penis to two of the victims and asked them to note where the bump was. They each picked the same area. The same victims also met with Det. Andrew Charchenko, who put together a composite sketch of the rapist’s face, including his long, feathered hair. Once it was ready, the detectives brought copies to all kinds of hangout places on the West Side, posting them in bars, pizza parlors—even hair salons, since the victims described a style that was not your typical barbershop cut. All that was left, then, was to find a suspect and have him “drop trou,” as it were, to see if the other sketch matched as well as the facial. Within a week or so, the same detective who’d drawn the rendering saw a man at a local restaurant-bar who looked like the drawing, wearing the same type of tennis shoes (dirty, white, with blue stripes) Betty Ocilka described. He brought the guy in for Matuszny and Parrish,
whom the other detectives would soon dub the “pecker checkers.” They questioned him at length. This suspect had alibis, but the detectives weren’t willing to risk letting their man go. They asked to see his penis, which threw the guy until he was told it could eliminate him as a suspect. They went to the men’s room, had a look, then let him leave when they saw no bump. Soon they were working at a rate of about two suspects per week.

Around this time, the two detectives outlined the rape cases and described the rapist in a bulletin sent out to police departments in the neighboring suburbs, which also requested information on any cases with similar MOs in their jurisdictions, particularly in which there was anything unusual noted about the offender’s genitals. In less than a week cases came in from three of these areas—Middleburg Heights, Parma, and Parma Heights—with a total of four unsolved rape cases. Two of the rapes, both in Parma, took place at one apartment complex: one victim was pregnant, the other was a fifty-four-year-old grandmother whose granddaughter was asleep one room over as the assault occurred. Matuszny and Parrish, together with detectives from other areas with possibly linked cases, met in Parma to exchange information, which only served to fuel their suspicions that one man was responsible for this series of rapes in the Cleveland area.

If they included three more unsolved cases that fit the MO, the total now stood at twelve. Even without an official tally, there were enough to get the attention of a city councilman, Joe Cannon. Although news of a possible serial rapist hadn’t yet hit the papers or TV, people were comparing notes at neighborhood-watch-type gatherings and knew women were being raped. The pressure was on the police to catch this one, and Matuszny’s commander authorized a plan for surveillance put together by Matuszny and Parrish.
Extra unmarked cars would work the streets in the late-night and early-morning hours to respond quickly to reports of rape, trespassing, and the like.

Many of the cases I’ve worked involved extra efforts on the part of police to catch the offender in question, such as establishment of special task forces with personnel from various jurisdictions and areas of specialty, extra details set up in the affected area, coordinated efforts between police, citizens groups, the media. Every time you have a case like this, whether it’s high profile in the news or not, there’s tremendous pressure on the cops to come through and justify the extra expense. By June, after weeks with nothing to report, the extra surveillance was canceled. At the same time, Phil Parrish was made sergeant and assigned to a new position downtown, leaving Matuszny on his own to lead the hunt for the Cleveland rapist.

On June 23, police had reason to second-guess the call to end surveillance. Thirty-seven-year-old Marian Butler was awakened around four in the morning by a strange man moving through her apartment in Parma Heights. Just hours earlier, she and a friend had been watching the news, talking about the possible serial rapist in their midst. Although she lived on the first floor, Butler reportedly joked with her friend about what an unlikely target she would be and went to bed with the windows open to compensate for the poor airconditioning in her building.

I’ve heard people wonder how women can leave their windows open at night. Interestingly, these are most often folks who have sufficient airconditioning of their own. On a hot summer night, you weigh odds of something bad happening to you against how uncomfortable you are and how many hours of sleep you’re missing. Particularly if you live in a middle-class neighborhood like Parma Heights, it’s easy to
understand how someone could trade a slight security risk for a cool breeze.

When Butler awoke and saw the strange man in her bedroom, she screamed. Before she could react, he was covering her mouth and threatening her in a warning that sounded a lot like the one given to the earlier victims: he had a knife that he’d use if she didn’t do what he said and keep quiet. He also told her not to look at him and demanded money. Butler had recently had an operation to remove a cyst from her pelvis, and she told her attacker she was unable to have sex. As he forced her to perform oral sex, she mentally noted everything she could about him, from a description of his shoes and jacket to a bandage on his right hand, to the lingering smell of a breath mint. He accidentally turned on her bedroom light afterward, and she got a good look at his face.

He made her give him all her money, then shut her up in the bathroom, demanding she wait there until he told her she could leave. She listened as he went through her bedroom, possibly looking for valuables, and left the bathroom when she heard him leave. She called the police and gave them an impressive description of her rapist—right to the breath mints. As Neff reports, she vowed to her friend that someday she would “testify against that bastard.”

Just a couple of weeks later the rapist struck again, this time assaulting a twenty-three-year-old mother as her three-week-old baby slept next to her on the couch. Her description of the rapist matched what other victims had said about their thin, dark-haired, slight assailant. He even wore the same clothing: jeans and a black jacket that stopped at his waist. His behavior was also consistent: he cut her telephone cord, woke her up by fondling her, and threatened her with a knife, telling her to do as he said and he wouldn’t harm her baby. As with Butler, when this victim complained
she was physically unable to have sex with him (she’d just given birth to her son weeks earlier), he forced oral sex, which gave her the opportunity to observe the distinguishing bump on his penis.

It had to be incredibly frustrating for Detective Matuszny that this rapist who’d stayed out of sight during the extensive surveillance campaign went back to work as soon as the detail was called off. At least this time, however, they got some evidence: he’d left a Marlboro cigarette behind, which might yield saliva, which in turn could provide his blood type. And one neighbor had seen a man matching the physical description of the rapist cut through the neighborhood.

Matuszny turned to Quantico for help, having heard about our services from one of his bosses who had taken courses at the FBI Academy. The detective sent us information on seventeen rapes. Blaine McIlwain, one of the two guys who’d broken down my hotel-room door and rescued me in Seattle, became the point of contact at the Investigative Support Unit. He was still fairly new at this, but very talented. I trusted his instincts and had found him to be a quick study. We met and discussed the cases as he worked up each part of the profile.

Since the first rapes took place in the area near the zoo, we felt the police should be looking for a guy who probably lived within walking distance. He would have gone through his own surveillance to choose victims who would be easiest to control, such as those with young children they needed to protect, or women he knew would be alone when he struck. The early-morning timing of the rapes indicated the rapist probably didn’t hold a day job. If he had a steady job at all, which was doubtful, it would be some kind of menial position that did not involve much contact with the public. As with many of these offenders, he would alternate between deep feelings of inadequacy and insecurity
(using the rapes to boost his perception of his own sexuality), and grandiosity, plus pride in his new, infamous identity as the West Side Rapist. For this reason, he would probably collect newspaper articles about the rapes.

Because of his feelings of inadequacy, any social relationships would be with much younger or less sophisticated women. In general, though, our profile maintained, he’d be a loner. There was probably a dominant female in his life with whom he might still live, such as a mother or aunt or other female relative. Conflict with this woman puts him under stress and causes him to question his masculinity, which is part of why he feels the need to rape and dominate his female victims. It is also likely that he collects pornography, and he might keep a diary of his offenses, a record of all the women he’s spied on, as well as his actual rape victims, almost like a collection, as if he now owned them. He would have a record for related crimes as a juvenile, such as voyeurism, breaking and entering, theft of fetish-type souvenirs such as jewelry or lingerie. He’d be the type to own a motorcycle or a dark, older vehicle in poor running condition.

A number of the victims had noted how clean he was, so we thought there was a good chance he worked in a capacity that required cleanliness, such as food preparation, hospital work, or something of the sort.

In addition to collecting media accounts of his work, his postoffense behavior would include exaggerated elements of his normal behavior. For example, if he used drugs or alcohol before, he would be drinking more, or abusing drugs. Blaine noted, too, that if he was a religiously observant person, to cope with the stress he would probably have become even more religious.

On July 26, the rapist struck again, cutting his way
through a window screen in the living room of another Parma Heights apartment to awaken its twenty-seven-year-old resident and rape her at knifepoint. Then on August 17, a sixty-year-old woman from the same area was sexually molested by a man who also gained access to her apartment as she slept.

The rapist continued his pace. In the early-morning hours of September 14, 1984, twenty-three-year-old Karen Holztrager became his latest victim. The pretty mother of three small boys had heard of the previous crimes and tried to take steps to secure her family’s first-story apartment, calling their landlord and getting him to promise to fix several of the windows that would not lock. With her husband working nights, she kept the windows closed; in just a few weeks they were to move farther outside the city, into a home of their own.

Holztrager was awakened by a strange man sitting on her bed. He produced a knife and told her he’d seen that her kids were fast asleep and closed her bedroom door; they wouldn’t awaken or be hurt as long as she cooperated. Before he raped her, he asked if she knew him, saying, “Well, I know you. I’ve been watching you.”

After the assault, he demanded all her money and left her in the bathroom, with the warning that if she called the police, he’d come back for her and her children. Despite his threats, she did call police and provided a description that corresponded with the others, except for what he was wearing.

Over the next year, Det. Bob Matuszny continued to work the case, updating bulletins and passing them around the different districts, following up on leads. But there was no break. At the same time, a new centralized Sex Crimes Unit was established at police headquarters downtown. Instead of having detectives from the individual districts work sex crimes in their
area, all were to be investigated by this special unit, led by Lt. Lucie J. Duvall, one of the highest-ranking women in the Cleveland Police Department and the first female officer to command a vice squad there.