“He ripped off my clothes,” she recalled later. “And he wrapped my coat around my head. Then he raped me, and he kept hitting me in the face and stomach with his fists when I tried to crawl away.”
Cory recalled that the rapist’s voice was quiet and soft—an odd contrast to the violence of his fists and the fact that he said he would kill her if she didn’t cooperate.
Once he had ejaculated, he turned his thoughts to money and asked Cory where her purse was. She pointed to the sidewalk where it had fallen in the struggle, and he left her for a moment as he moved to retrieve it.
As soon as he let go of her, the plucky young woman got up and ran across the street, darting between dark houses, until she reached Aurora Avenue, which was always full of traffic—day and night. There, Cory found a motel office still open and begged the manager to call the police.
Patrol officers from the Wallingford Precinct, along with K-9 patrolmen and their dogs, responded at once.
But the rapist was gone, gone so completely that the highly trained German shepherds could not track his scent much beyond the spot of the attack. That meant that the assailant had probably gotten into a nearby vehicle.
When Cory Bixler talked to detectives Johnson and Fenkner, she revealed a decidedly weird facet of the rapist’s personality: “After he had raped me, he made me lie there and he kept telling me, ‘You’re dead. Just act like you’re dead’—and then he started throwing dirt on me. Almost like he was trying to bury me.”
Her attacker had taken Cory’s purse with him. On March 18, some of her papers turned up coincidentally. A friend of Seattle police robbery detective John Boatman called to tell him that his (the friend’s) Volkswagen had been stolen. It was recovered, but by then it was in very poor mechanical condition.
On March 18, a garage mechanic working on the “Beetle” found some identification documents belonging to a Cory Bixler under the seats. The car’s owner had never heard of anyone by that name and commented on it to Boatman.
John Boatman worked in the Crimes Against Persons Unit a few feet from Bill Fenkner’s and Joyce Johnson’s desks. Boatman had heard of Cory Bixler, and he knew she was the young woman who had been the victim of the vicious rape and assault—with robbery—the week before. Evidently, the rapist had stolen the Volkswagen for his getaway and inadvertently left Cory’s ID on the floorboards after he rifled her purse.
It was a good—though frustrating—lead. At this point the Volkswagen was of no use for fingerprint evidence. Most of its surfaces had been touched by half a dozen people in the garage and any latent prints were destroyed.
And the car thief—was it the rapist?—had been punctilious about removing his own possessions.
The sadistic sex attacker was out there, and, so far, he had been clever at avoiding detection. His victims all described him as young, slender, tall, and strong as an ox. He had a mustache and dark shag-cut hair to his shoulders.
Detectives knew he would probably not stop his attacks unless he was caught. They waited tensely for the next time he surfaced.
For almost two months things were quiet; none of the rape reports coming in sounded like the man who’d tried to bury his last victim—either actually or symbolically. It was quite possible that he was still active and his latest victims were afraid to report him. Many rape victims don’t report what happened to them because they are embarrassed and fearful. This benefits no one but the sex criminal.
It was near closing time—nine p.m.—at the huge Northgate Mall on May 13 when the rapist came out of hiding again.
Lynn Rutledge* walked toward her new car, which she had parked near the Bon Marché store. She had just put her purse on the backseat when she sensed that someone had walked up behind her. It was a man who was muttering some words she didn’t understand. Then she realized that he was telling her to hand over her purse.
“I’ve only got two dollars left,” she answered, and tossed her keys out onto the parking lot to divert attention. She kicked the stranger as he pushed her toward her car. Angry, he called her, “Bitch!” as he retrieved the keys.
“Get in the car,” the man ordered. When Lynn didn’t react quickly enough, he struck her in the face twice. He pushed her into the passenger seat and got into the driver’s seat. Brutally, he forced her head toward the floor. “Keep it down,” he barked.
It was full dark as the man drove away from the lot, and he seemed satisfied that no one had noticed them. He drove to the corner of North 95th Street and Fremont Avenue North and ordered Lynn out of the car, pointing toward a thick cluster of bushes.
After he put his own shirt over her eyes, Lynn’s abductor ripped her blouse down the front, tearing the buttons off. Then he stripped off the rest of her clothes. He spread them on the ground and directed her to lie down on them.
And then he raped her.
When he had finished, he allowed Lynn to get dressed, and he made her walk in front of him back to her car. As he drove back to the Northgate Mall, her attacker said he had friends waiting for him there.
He apologized to her, and he told her he had a wife and child.
“I’m sorry I had to hit you,” he said, almost pleading for forgiveness. “I’ve been good to you, haven’t I? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“Not really,” she murmured, praying that he would see his friends and let her go. But when they got back to the mall, he couldn’t find his friends.
“I guess they left without him,” Lynn Rutledge told Joyce Johnson later. “That made him really upset.”
Now Lynn’s nightmare began a replay.
“Get your head down, bitch,” the tall man snarled, calling her “bitch” again and again. He drove around aimlessly, perhaps looking for his friends—if they ever really existed. Lynn could see him well now. He looked to be about twenty-five, was tall and slender, and had a medium-length, sloppy, grown-out shag haircut and a small mustache. She studied him covertly, memorizing every detail of his clothes. He wore a white pull-on shirt with short sleeves and a three-quarter zipper and light-colored brushed denim jeans. And well-worn cowboy boots.
The nervous rapist talked continually. “Would you believe I have a college education?” he asked, and Lynn nodded, figuring that flattery might save her. He told her he had majored in sociology and then served in Vietnam, where he’d become hooked on heroin.
“The army didn’t help me, so now I have a three-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. I was a parole officer before I was drafted.
“Don’t you think I look like Peter Fonda?” he asked. “You know, Henry Fonda’s son?”
“Yes, you do,” Lynn said, adding, “but you’re better looking. You shouldn’t have to kidnap a girl—you could easily find lots of them that wanted to go out with you.”
Trying to be sympathetic to his drug addiction, she suggested that he might try the methadone program.
“I tried it, but they couldn’t help me even though I want to quit.”
Lynn Rutledge’s mind raced as she tried to keep her kidnapper talking and, at the same time, agree with him. It was a delicate balance. She was afraid of what he might do next. But none of her talking was doing any good.
She realized that the handsome rapist was heading her car right back to the same corner where he’d attacked her before. She balked at walking into the berry patch again because she’d lost her shoes. That made him mad, and he started calling her “bitch” again as he pushed her into the bushes. His emotions were mercurial and he was instantly violent again. He punched Lynn twice in the face, and then he picked her up and threw her bodily farther into the brush.
Even through her fear, Lynn was reminded of a child who was having a tantrum. She had tried everything to placate him, but all of her amateur psychology had only landed her back in the dark corner.
“Oh, no! You don’t want to do this again?” she asked him in horror.
In answer, he hit her in the left cheek and she staggered as he hit her again. She began to cry, and that made him ma
dder. He thumped her hard on the back, virtually knocking the wind out of her. She stopped crying and submitted.
Oddly, until now, she hadn’t been afraid he would kill her. But as he raped her for the second time and threatened to inflict various perversions on her, she realized he might very well murder her. She moaned in terror—and that seemed to please him. He asked if she was enjoying the sex and she finally lied and said, “Yes.”
She meant to stay alive if she could.
Nothing seemed to satisfy him. He threatened anal sodomy and she cringed. She knew she would scream and that he’d wring her neck if she did.
Finally, her attacker seemed to finish this second sexual attack. Was he going to force her back into the car again? No, he was gathering up her clothes and preparing to leave. She begged him to let her have her clothes and he finally relented, tossing them back at her.
“It’s my first rape,” he crowed. “Wow! I just raped somebody!”
She cowered in the bushes, wondering if he was so enthused about his conquest that he’d turn back to her, but it looked as though, this time, he was leaving.
“I’ll leave your car at Northgate,” he called back.
Lynn Rutledge had hidden her diamond ring under the seat. If he found that, he might be furious and come back to hit her again or kill her. As soon as she heard the car drive off, she put on her ruined clothes and ran to a nearby house, where she begged the owner to call 911.
Patrol Officer G. Meyers responded to the call and, on the way, received a “possible” sighting report of the stolen car. It turned out to be an identical car—not Lynn’s. Officer Meyers drove the injured kidnap victim to a hospital for treatment of her many cuts and bruises. Then the brave young woman volunteered to go with the officer in a search for her car—and the man who had abducted her.
They toured the parking lot at Northgate and did not find her car. Lynn, however, spotted it parked along the street near the Wallingford Police Precinct. It was impounded for processing and fingerprint expert Jeanne Bynum was able to lift one good partial latent print.
The shaggy-haired rapist was long gone once again. It was certainly possible that he lived in the neighborhood where the car was found; several of the other attacks had occurred in the same general vicinity. The latent would do no good alone: AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) was not yet in place at the time, but it would be vital if a suspect was found so they could compare his prints with the latent in evidence.
On June 2, Detective Fenkner got an anonymous call saying that the Northgate kidnapper was Grant Wilson,* twenty-three, who had been released from the Monroe Reformatory within the last year. Fenkner pulled Wilson’s file and found that the parolee had a rap sheet going back eight years, but none of the charges against him had involved sex offenses.
Wilson’s bookings had resulted from auto theft, grand larceny, burglary, and assault. He had served thirteen months at the penal facility at Shelton and fourteen months at the Monroe Reformatory for parole revocation. He had been released from Monroe two days before Christmas a year earlier, and in February, he’d been arrested as a burglary suspect. Since then, he hadn’t been arrested.
Wilson’s current location was unknown, but a look at his mug shots revealed he fit the general description of the man who had been terrorizing women in the north end of Seattle. He was six feet tall, weighed 165 pounds, and had brown hair and blue eyes. He occasionally had worked as a carpenter.
While Bill Fenkner and Joyce Johnson attempted to track down the elusive ex-con, the rapist was still busy. It was two days later, at 11 p.m. on June 4, when twenty-six-year-old Carol Brasser* drove up in front of her home in the near north end. She parked and got out, idly noting that a man was walking eastbound along the sidewalk.
Carol had just reached her front steps when the man called out, asking her for the time. As she turned to answer he grabbed her, covering her eyes with her coat. She screamed several times while he dragged her to the yard of the house next door. Her first thought was that he was trying to force her into a car, and she told him she would do anything he wanted.
The man was evidently confident that she had no choice in the matter anyway, and he continued to drag her behind a fence where they would be hidden from the street. Once there, he tore off her slacks and panties. He forced his fingers roughly into her vagina, bit her breasts cruelly, and then he raped her.
Not satiated, the man forced her to endure both oral and anal sodomy. During the attack, he tried to keep her eyes covered. The coat over her mouth and nose was smothering her and she told him she couldn’t breathe. Hearing that, he’d let up the pressure on her face a little.
Carol suddenly heard the sound of other voices—young voices. They were asking her attacker what was going on. Her assailant answered, “We’re just making love.”
She was so afraid. The man hit her in the chest and she feared he would beat her to death if she called for help now. The children wouldn’t be capable of stopping him and might be hurt themselves. She managed to tell them she was all right, hoping that they would realize that she wasn’t and go for help.
Carol heard their feet running away. The rapist seemed nervous now, even ashamed. He asked if she was okay, and allowed her to put her clothes back on.
Then he fled.
The youngsters had run to their mother and cried, “Mommy, there was a man and he grabbed a girl and she screamed and he dragged her into the bushes and put his hand over her mouth!”
The woman called police and Wallingford Precinct patrolmen arrived almost at once. But, just as before, the rapist had disappeared into the night, leaving behind only drops of blood from his feet, which had been cut by nails on the fence.
Carol Brasser was taken to a hospital, where doctors confirmed she had been sexually assaulted, had received deep scratches on her neck, sternum, and back.
Carol gave Sex Crimes detectives a now-familiar description: tall, thin, ragged shag haircut, mustache, in his twenties.
Her attacker’s MO matched that of the earlier attacks almost exactly. The man stalked lone women late at night, kept their eyes covered, and not only subjected to sexual indignities but also seemed to enjoy beating them. And when he was finished with his victims, he apologized, and seemed to be asking for forgiveness.
What was most alarming was the increasing frequency of these copycat assaults. It was quite possible that the rapist assumed his victims had not seen him, that he felt perfectly free to continue his pattern. He had gotten away clean every time. If he felt safe, even overconfident, he might slip, and thereby betray himself.
Or he might kill his next victim. The number of rape victims who have ended up dead through strangulation or beatings is overwhelming. Sometimes the rapist goes further and uses more force than he intended. In cases of serial murder, the “thrill” of a “simple” rape is no longer satisfying for the sex criminal and he progresses to murder.
It is a very thin line.
On June 10, eighteen-year-old Moira Drew* attended a party at a friend’s house in the north end. There were several people she knew there—and a few she didn’t. One stranger was a tall, good-looking man with a mustache. As she left the party between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m., the handsome man approached her and asked if he could have a ride to Aurora Avenue.
“Sure.” She nodded, and pointed out her car.
She felt no apprehension. After all, she had met the man at her friend’s house.
Once on their way, the man, who had told her his name was Neil O’Leary, changed his mind about his destination. He asked her if she would mind taking him to North 91st Street and Linden Avenue North. It was only a few more blocks out of her way and she agreed.
“Hey, move over closer to me,” he said softly, as she pulled over at his corner.
It seemed like a simple pass. She shook her head and said, “No, I don’t know you.”
As quickly as a cobra strikes, the man’s hand reached out and seized her by the throat, powerfu
l fingers cutting off her air entirely. A black curtain dropped over her eyes and she saw pinwheels of light as she fought to breathe. With her last strength, she leaned on the horn.
“If you don’t shut up,” Neil O’Leary hissed, “I’m going to kill you …”
But Moira Drew kept her hand on the horn, its bleating staccato shrieks blasting through the early morning air. A car pulled up, paused, and the driver looked curiously over at Moira’s car.
It was enough to spook “Neil O’Leary,” and he leapt from her car and took off running.
Moira Drew was not a fragile little girl. She was perfectly proportioned, and she was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 135 pounds. She had fought her would-be strangler with such ferocity that she had literally forced the brake pedal of her car to the floor, making the brakes inoperable. She didn’t realize that until she pulled into a nearby 7-Eleven parking lot, and found she had to pull on the hand brake to keep from crashing into the store’s front window.
There was a police car parked there with Officer G. J. Fiedler inside. The distraught teenager approached the police unit and Fiedler could see the angry red marks on her neck—perfect imprints of someone’s fingers.
At last, the handsome rapist had run out of luck. He had attacked a woman who knew people he knew. Moira called her host at the party and asked who the “tall, good-looking man with the mustache” was.
“Oh, him—that’s Grant Wilson,” the man responded.
Grant John Wilson was already a suspect, but unaware that Sex Crimes detectives were closing in on him, Wilson continued his penchant for brutal attacks on women.
Seattle police burglary detective Bill Berg had been investigating Grant Wilson, too—on burglary cases. Berg had information that tied in with his fellow detectives’ case. Even better, he had a line on where Wilson could be found: He was living on Northwest 56th Street, not far from the cluster of violent sexual attacks.
Bill Berg arrested Wilson on suspicion of rape in the case of Lynn Rutledge, and the other victims’ cases would follow. Grant Wilson would now have to face his accusers in a lineup arranged by Sex Crimes sergeant Romero Yumul.