Obsession (8 page)

Two years later, in 1996, I was retired from the Bureau and traveling to New Zealand in connection with the release of
Mindhunter
. There, on the scene, I heard further about this case that had become the obsession of law enforcement and citizens alike. And as I learned more about the crimes of this rapist (which totaled at least fifty), I could easily see how he had captured so much attention and caused so much fear.

The rapist struck in the late-night and early-morning hours, generally breaking into homes through open windows or doors that were either unlocked or easy for him to pry open. His victims, often young girls like the one we’ve just described, were typically surprised in their beds, awakened by a man holding a knife to their throats. He usually covered the face of his victim or wore something to hide his own and set the scene to his liking before awakening his victims, if possible. He would unscrew lightbulbs, rip telephones out of the wall, find ways to barricade his victim or other family members who might try to help in their rooms, leave back doors open for his quick escape. On several occasions his attempted rape was thwarted when relatives in a house responded to the intended victim’s surprised screams.

There were other cases in which he abducted a victim on the street, or forced her to leave her home with him, taking her on a forced march in her night-gown and bare feet and raping her outdoors. Then, too, there were instances when girls and women awoke to find a stranger in their home who just said, “Hello,” if he spoke at all, and then left, never attempting to touch them. Even when the incidents did not involve rape, the intruder still terrified victims,
robbing them of their sense of safety in their own homes.

The rapist could be physically brutal and emotionally cruel, especially when he encountered resistance. He punched some women, even young girls, hard enough to knock them unconscious or break teeth, sending several bleeding victims to the hospital. One young victim was left partially deaf from his blows. It’s particularly upsetting to think about the injuries sustained by one victim who wore braces, which cut the inside of her mouth when the rapist hit her in the face. But the rapes were vicious even when he didn’t strike his victims. He taunted many he didn’t beat with threats of his return.

Yet to other victims he was apologetic, talking to them by using their names, saying goodbye or kissing them on the cheek when he left, as though they were old friends. He verbally abused most victims—even eleven-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-olds—calling them horny bitches or asking them in vulgar terms how they liked him sexually, but he also told them they were beautiful. If you can imagine it, think of how terrifying and confusing that juxtaposition would be to a victim—especially a very young one. How do you know what to do in that case? How do you try to respond so he won’t hurt or kill you? What does he want from you?

The rapist attacked young mothers while their husbands were at work, threatening to kill their children, who were often sleeping in the same room, if the mothers didn’t shut up and do what he said. In one case he broke into the home of a forty-year-old single mother with a twelve-year-old daughter and a baby. First he tied up and raped the mother on her living room couch, then raped her daughter at several locations throughout the house. Both victims heard the
other’s cries as the rapist assaulted them but were powerless to stop him.

He also did something almost unheard of for a serial rapist: he returned to at least one of his victims and raped her a second time. Although most rapists do threaten to come back to their victims—particularly if the victim reports the crime to the police—and virtually all rape victims fear it, it is rare for offenders to actually do so. This individual assaulted his victim on her living room couch, where she’d fallen asleep, then came back about four months later and raped her in her own bed. In another instance, he returned to the home of a fifteen-year-old girl six months after he’d been thwarted in his attempted rape when the victim’s mother came to her rescue. The same thing happened the second time, but in both cases the girl suffered a brutal physical attack. In one, the rapist ripped her earlobe, tearing out an earring as he beat her about her face.

Despite the unusual practice of returning to the same victim more than once, he exhibited other more predictable behaviors. We would expect this type of rapist to go back out on the hunt if he finds his efforts thwarted with his first intended victim. This type is motivated by insecurity and uses rape to confirm his masculinity in his own eyes, show himself he has power over women. If he cannot get this from one victim on a given night, he’ll likely move on to another unless the risk of capture is just too great. And in fact, this rapist was known to have visited several residences on nights when he had trouble gaining access to the first or second intended victim.

Again, although this man was raised in a completely different culture, across the world from the serial offenders I’d interviewed in prison, he shared with them many of the same predictable behaviors. This only goes to show that violent repeat criminals are not
merely products of a particular society or set of social values. Steve Mardigian, Tom Salp, all of us at Quantico who had studied the various rape typologies, knew what kind of man the New Zealand authorities were dealing with. His actions, his “art,” gave him away. We know the motivations of men who surprise young girls in their beds, spend just enough time with them to rape them, and then get the hell out. Outwardly, they may appear to have nothing in common, but their crimes reveal that they share the same obsession.

The New Zealand rapist was also probably facilitated by the environment in which he operated, much as American criminals are typically more successful in large urban areas than small towns or exclusive neighborhoods where everyone knows or recognizes everyone else. South Auckland is the informal name for Manukau City, a suburban area of lower-cost housing, factories, and industry that comprises several districts. It is the third largest city in New Zealand, with a population approaching a quarter of a million. These factors combined to form a setting in which it is easy to get lost, to blend in. Many of the crimes took place in homes adjacent to alleyways, making for the possibility of a quick getaway.

The lower economic standard meant, too, that there were a lot of families—and a lot of potential victims—living in circumstances that made them easy prey: children whose parents worked nights and/or were separated, leaving them alone or to babysit at a young age; families who could not afford to fix broken windows or locks and found alternative ways to secure doors, such as by jamming a kitchen knife in the frame to hold the door shut. Some didn’t even have phones, which delayed reporting the crime to police. And the rapist carefully chose the most vulnerable. One young victim had been left alone with her grandmother, who was passed out from drinking when the rape occurred.
Other victims had difficult or dysfunctional home lives, with stepfathers or ex-boyfriends of their mother, possibly with histories of abuse, who now might be suspects in the rape. Perhaps for financial reasons the victim lived with an extended family in a house where so many people came and went that nobody took notice of a stranger lurking.

There was also the touchy issue of possible discrimination: about 35 percent of the population of South Auckland, including many of the victims, was either Pacific Islander or native Maori. The rapist was also described as Maori, which led to another issue later in the investigation when police, desperate for leads, began targeting young Maori men.

Many in New Zealand questioned whether the marginalized lives of the victims and the socioeconomic conditions of their environment victimized them even further. After all, if something like this had happened in a wealthier neighborhood, the local watch groups would have jumped on the case, possibly catching the serial rapist much earlier. Perhaps more victims would have come forward to the police immediately, and maybe the crimes would have been more prominent in the news sooner, some argued. Also, for a mobile serial criminal, the individual districts offered ideal stomping grounds. At first, for example, investigators in Otara didn’t know about similar rapes in nearby Mount Eden or Papatoetoe. Just as in the United States, where neighboring jurisdictions don’t always have information about serious crimes committed just over their borders, incidents reported in different locations took longer to be linked.

I’ve consulted on many cases around the world, the Yorkshire Ripper in England being one of the better-known examples. Still, this case surprised as much as it shocked me. Not only were the individual incidents so horrible, we were talking about a rapist who operated
on an incredibly wide scale: the victims could be seemingly any age, any physical description. This subject’s need to dominate and control women over-rode any particular preferential-victim characteristics; she just had to be a woman, and he only needed an opportunity. Like any serial rapist in our own country, I wouldn’t expect this guy to stop raping until he was caught—or dead. There might be interruptions, if he happened to be incarcerated for other crimes or moved out of the area, but it wouldn’t end for good until he was put away for good.

As early as March of 1989, the newspaper
Sunday News
was reporting that South Auckland police believed a serial rapist was operating in the suburb of Otara. At that time, Detective Sergeant Brett Kane of the neighboring police department in Otahuhu warned citizens that they could expect the rapes to continue until the man was caught.

This serial rapist was good at getting in and out without leaving much in the way of evidence behind. Beginning in 1990, however, it became standard police procedure in New Zealand to collect body fluids found at the scene for DNA analysis. By 1993, Detective Sergeant Dave Henwood, second-in-command in the Papakura district, was putting together rapes going back as far as 1988, linking the more recent cases by DNA and the older cases by the rapist’s MO. In August of 1993, the Papakura police established Operation Park, the official special investigation into the serial rapes. The authorities’ attempts to find the rapist included door-to-door interviews in the area under siege and, as a proactive technique, running an ad in a local paper, the
Manukau Courier
, asking the serial criminal to turn himself in. While laudable, I’ve never actually known this particular proactive technique to bear fruit. They also organized a massive leaflet drop, with information on the rapist translated into Maori
and other Pacific Islander languages, which struck me as a more productive operation.

In early 1994, the Operation Park investigation was officially moved to the jurisdiction of the Manukau district, which was larger, with better resources to deal with a major case like this one. Detective Senior Sergeant Stu Mills, who’d handled some of the biggest cases in New Zealand dating back to 1970, was to lead the investigation. Henwood joined the team from Papakura and they started bringing in criminal psychology experts from around the world to consult. One expert, senior psychologist Hans Laven of the Auckland Justice Department, put together profile elements based on the rapes they’d connected to that point.

Laven observed that the rapist didn’t steal money from his victims, even when there was an opportunity, which made him think the rapist had a job. One of the victims described the offender as wearing work boots, which indicated that he might be employed in one of the local factories. Since he was able to come and go as he pleased at home (evidenced by the late-night/early-morning timing of most rapes), he was either single, worked shifts, or was the dominant partner in a relationship. Laven also noted that the majority of victims were very young, and that with the older victims, the rapist had to take extra steps such as binding before he could proceed. The psychologist took this as a sign that the man they were looking for wasn’t confident with adults emotionally, physically, or sexually, possibly having been abused.

I would agree with much of his assessment, especially his concern that police needed to get more detailed information from the victims about the subject’s behavior—what he said and did at each step of the assault—for us to be able to draw more specific conclusions. I would have added that this subject would
not only be dominant in his relationships with women, but that any relationship he had would be a strained one. In his fantasies, once he overpowers his victim, she finds she actually enjoys what he does to her. Of course, in reality, none of the young girls and women this man raped enjoyed it—in fact many spent the assault in tears—which only frustrated him more as the reality never lived up to his fantasies. So he’d keep trying again and again, trying to match up a real-life situation with his dreams.

As we see with other serial rapists, there would likely have been some triggering events—precipitating Stressors, we call them—in the UNSUB’s life preceding most of the rapes. I would have advised the police to look through the files for the earliest rape that matched this suspect’s MO and target that area as the place he likely lived in at the time. Again, criminals tend to start out in areas where their comfort level is the highest, which generally means close to home and/ or work.

It was in the early months of 1994 that police began the most controversial aspect of the proactive campaign to find the rapist: stopping men on the street who fit the physical description and asking for blood samples so that their DNA could be compared with DNA from the crime scenes. Officers set up camp at public places—libraries, parks, shopping malls—and approached slight Maori men between the ages of twenty and forty, asking for their blood. Participation, however, was said to be voluntary.

Around this time, too, the
Sunday News
offered a reward of $5,000 for information that led to the serial rapist’s arrest.

Police followed up on a lead from one of the crime scenes: a shoe print left on a seat cushion the rapist used as he climbed in a kitchen window. Tracing the print to a specific boot type, then to the manufacturer
and the only local supplier, police began the painstaking process of checking up on every man who’d bought that boot in the size the rapist wore in the past two years, since the tread left on the chair seemed to indicate the approximate age of the boots in question. Every time they found a guy who wore the right boots who met the physical description of the rapist, they drew his blood and added it to the samples being processed and compared with the rapist’s DNA.