Don’t Look Behind You

still fully dressed except for his open fly, attempted to rape her. Although he had achieved a full erection, actual intercourse proved impossible; Ashley was a virgin and that, combined with her utter terror, made penetration impossible. Disgusted, the man ordered her to perform oral sex on him again. He ejaculated in her mouth as she choked and vomited with revulsion.
    “That’s all there is to it,” the man said airily. “If you report this to the cops, though—I’ll come back and kill you.”
    He walked from the church and she heard a car start, and tires squeal. Quickly, she threw on her clothes and locked the church. Once safely home, she didn’t know what to do. Like many sexual assault victims, she wasashamed. And she also believed that the man would come back and kill her if she called the police.
    Ashley took a bath, desperately scrubbing away the scent of the rapist, but also unintentionally washing away semen that might have been matched to any suspect’s bodily fluids. After spending a sleepless night, she felt she had to tell someone. Ashley confided in a friend who urged her to tell the minister of their church. “You can’t just let it go—he’ll hurt somebody else.”
    The reverend counseled her to call the police.
    Detective Marian McCann, a longtime veteran of the Edmonds Police Department, gently elicited the details of the attack and assured Ashley Varner that she had done the right thing in reporting it. Ashley described her attacker as a white male about twenty-five, quite tall, with dark curly hair and a two-day growth of beard. She said the man wasn’t bad-looking; in other circumstances, she would have said he was handsome.
    Forensic artist Robin Hickok drew a composite picture based on Ashley’s description and copies of the composite were distributed to all of the area police departments.
    There was little more McCann and Hickok could do at that point. The victim hadn’t seen her attacker’s vehicle—if he even had one. She was positive that she’d never seen him before. The detectives knew from long experience that the man was likely to attack again, but where or when was impossible to guess. They checked with nearby jurisdictions, but none of them reported similar sexual assaults. No one recognized the composite picture.
    Two months later, on October 7, an eighteen-year-old bride who lived in rural Snohomish County, was mowing her lawn at two in the afternoon. As it was in the case of the first attack, it was a weekday afternoon, a Thursday. Dressed in jean cutoffs and a beige top, she concentrated only on the task before her, mowing both the front and side yard. Then she went into her house through the side door to check on clothes she had in the dryer. Finding them dry, she carried the load into the kitchen to fold. She turned the stereo on, not terribly loud, but loud enough to drown out quiet noises—stealthy noises.
    The young housewife, Jill Whaley,* was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to the door, going over her grocery list, when suddenly, muscular arms encircled her neck. She felt the blade of a knife against her flesh. Rigid with shock, she stared straight ahead, and heard the deep voice saying, “This is a rape!”
    “What?” she cried. Later she would tell Snohomish County detectives, “Then I just went crazy and kept begging him not to do that to me.”
    She realized that the knife was not actually cutting into her neck. By dropping her eyes and using peripheral vision, she could see it was a small pocketknife with the blade open. The man’s hands were more frightening: he seemed very strong.
    “Go into the bedroom,” he ordered, and she obeyed. Once in the room, he said, “Take your clothes off.”
    For the first time, Jill turned to face him. He was very tall, inches over six feet, Caucasian, between twenty-twoand 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