For the first time, Jill turned to face him. He was very tall, inches over six feet, Caucasian, between twenty-two and thirty, and he had medium brown hair that grew almost to his shoulders. He wore blue jeans and a heavy, service-type jacket.
He closed the knife with his left hand and put it in his pocket, saying, “If you behave, I won’t have to use this.”
Jill was sobbing now and begging the stranger not to hurt her. She pulled off her knit top and unfastened her bra. The man bent over and began to kiss her breasts, asking her if she would touch him on his genitals.
“No! Please, I can’t,” Jill murmured. The man stepped back for a few moments and watched her as she removed her cutoff jeans and panties. Then he pushed her onto the bed. “Spread your legs!” he commanded.
While she closed her eyes and bit her lips, her attacker attempted penetration. It wasn’t working, and he commented that she was “sure tight for being married.”
As before, with Ashley Varner, the would-be rapist had lost his erection. After a matter of a few seconds, the man jumped up and said, “Forget this. Where’s your money?”
“I’ll check and see if I have any,” she said, stalling. She threw on her clothes and produced her wallet, showing him it was empty. He walked toward her again and she cried, “Please don’t hurt me—I’m pregnant. Please don’t hurt my baby.”
The big man studied her for a long moment and then walked toward the door. He turned to look at her and said, “I’m sick.”
“Just go,” Jill cried. “Just go and I won’t tell anybody.”
She didn’t mean that. She watched him walk past her neighbor’s home and then break into a run. When she was sure he was gone, she ran to the neighbor’s house, where she called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.
Jill’s report to Snohomish County detective Ken Sedy was quite similar to the statement Ashley Varner had given after she was attacked in the Edmonds church two months earlier. In this assault, too, the rapist had not removed his own clothing, had only unzipped his fly. Both women were assaulted on a weekday in the afternoon. Their descriptions of the stranger were close. And each of the terrified young women mentioned the size of the man’s penis, so large that he had been unable to have intercourse with either of them.
Similar attacks, yes, but there was really no sure pattern yet. The attacks were some distance apart, and the rapist’s MO matched several other unsolved cases just as closely as it did the Edmonds and the rural Snohomish County cases.
Jill Whaley’s shorts, panties, and bedspread were sent to the lab for analysis, but, since no ejaculation had taken place—no semen or pre-ejaculatory fluid was detected—nothing of evidentiary value was found.
Almost exactly two months later, on December 6—a Monday—a twenty-seven-year-old King County housewife, Dorian Bliss,* and her five-year-old daughter drove home after a trip to the grocery store. It was just before noon and the little girl was hungry, so Dorian hurried as she made several trips from her car into the house, carrying bags of groceries. She had left the front door open because her arms were full. Later, she couldn’t be sure if she had closed the front door on the last trip.
She heard someone coming in the front door, assumed it was her husband, and looked up expectantly. Instead, she saw a perfect stranger. Alarmed, she said, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
The man responded by clapping his hands together and ordered, “Get rid of the kid!”
That, of course, was her first thought: if there was danger—and there certainly appeared to be—she wanted her child safe. She led the little girl into the child’s bedroom and turned on her record player, warning the youngster to lock her door and not to come out—no matter what.
The intruder, a very tall, husky young man, pushed Dorian into the family room. “Take your clothes off,” he snapped. She tried to dissuade him, protesting that she couldn’t do that, that what he was suggesting was crazy. Finally, she slowly started to take off her sweater.
“No,” he said. “I want you to take all your clothes off.”
The man knelt before her and lifted her skirt, rubbing her pubic area through her underclothing with his hand. “Damn, that’s beautiful,” he breathed, and then he bit her.
She knew she couldn’t scream; her daughter might run out and be hurt. Instead Dorian pushed him away from her by kicking him. It didn’t seem to faze him. He stood up and methodically began to undress her.
He kissed her mouth and breasts and he was furious because she would not respond. “Damn it … kiss me!” he ordered the trembling woman.
She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
The huge man pulled her panties and panty hose over her shoes, and began to kiss her all over her now naked body. Finally, he mounted her. The rape itself lasted for a short time—only five or six thrusts—and she was quite sure he hadn’t climaxed when he suddenly withdrew and stood up.
The man walked toward the kitchen, saying, “I didn’t plan for this to happen—I’m sick, you know.”
She called him back, afraid he was going to her child’s room. “Why don’t you go for help?” she cajoled. “There are people who could help you.”
The big man now turned toward the front door. “No one can help me. Go ahead and shoot me, lady. I wouldn’t blame you at all.”
And then he was gone. She ran to bolt the door behind him, threw on her clothes, and calmed her little girl. Then she called the King County police and her neighbor.
King County detective sergeant Ben Colwell took Dorian’s statement. She was then taken to a hospital for treatment. She was asked to remove her clothing while standing on a sheet. This would prevent any minute evidence from being lost—hairs, pubic hairs, fibers—anything that might be matched to a suspect, if they ever found one.
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 o
nly 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.