Don’t Look Behind You

prevention seminar in Nashville, Tennessee. One of the other presenters was a detective who told of a case he’d worked on—a story I’ve never forgotten. A young woman was kidnapped in broad daylight, and her abductor told her to sit quietly in the passenger seat of his car. To make sure she did, he held a hunting knife against her ribs, and he promised her he wouldn’t hurt her if she just did what he said.
    They stopped at a red light. The kidnapper’s car was in the left turn lane, and a marked patrol car pulled up beside it to the right. It was a hot day, and both vehicles’ windows were down. The kidnap victim was barely a foot from the uniformed officer in the patrol unit.
    “If you say anything,” the abductor warned, “I’ll stab you right here.”
    She said nothing. The police car went straight ahead when the light turned green, and the car she was in turned left. A few miles down the road, the man with the knife pulled off into an orchard. There, he raped her, and then cut her throat.
    If she had screamed or cried out for help, she might have lived—but she trusted the promise of a psychopathic killer.
    Legal definitions of rape state that it is
any
penetration of an unwilling victim’s body—from intercourse to sodomy. And yet rape is difficult to categorize; each sexual assault is different from others. Some rapists are cautious, seizing their victims in dark and deserted places where there is only a slight chance that any cries for help will be heard. Others, like the crimes of a man who prowled two counties in Washington State for almost a year, are blatant; he took such incredible risks that it seemed he was crying out to be caught. Perhaps it was the extreme danger of possibly being discovered that enhanced the sexual excitation he felt.
    One factor is invariably true, however. Rapists—like almost all criminals—have clearly defined MOs. They repeat their crimes with little variation.
    During the time I was a Seattle police officer, I worked for months in the Sex Crimes Unit—then called, oddly, the Morals Division. The rapists seemed to be considered tohave “bad morals.” Some people believed that that meant the victims were immoral, too. I took many statements from victims of sexual assault. Later, as a true crime author, I have written a few dozen articles about more recent cases. I don’t think laymen realize how terrifying sexual attacks can be—most of them involve far more than “missionary position” intercourse.
    Some of these cases stand out in my memory. This story of a serial rapist is one I won’t forget. His series of sexual assaults shared a plotline so consistent that they must have been carefully planned and scripted. As always, I have changed the names of victims to spare them any more invasion of their privacy.
    It was the fourth day of August, 1976, an uncommonly steamy day in Edmonds, Washington. Edmonds is a picturesque town a half hour’s drive north of Seattle, and it hugs the shore of Puget Sound.
    Ashley Varner,* twenty-three, was typing some quarterly reports in the office of a church in Edmonds. It was shortly after two in the afternoon. Surely, there could be few safer places than a house of God on a sunny summer afternoon.
    The pretty young woman heard the main church door open and then footsteps approaching the office where she worked. She looked up to see a tall man in workman’s clothes. There were some repairs under way at the church, so it wasn’t at all unusual to have workers come into the office. Ashley thought that he probably needed to use the phone.
    That wasn’t it at all. She was startled when the man pulled a knife from his pocket and began to extract the blade. She was horrified by his rough command: “Take your clothes off!”
    “What?” she asked, still unable to believe her own ears.
    “I said to take your clothes off!”
    There was nothing for her to do but comply, and pray that someone would enter the church to help her before it was too late. She removed all her clothing except her bra, and the man barked, “That, too.”
    He remained fully clothed, but he unzipped his trousers and ordered the terrified girl to perform oral sex on him.
    She bent to obey, still incredulous that this could be happening. She was afraid of the sharp knife he held, and realized that he was at least sixty pounds heavier than she was. She was trying to survive, hoping someone would see what was going on. After a few minutes, the intruder,