Don’t Look Behind You

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 MarianMcCann 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