Don’t Look Behind You

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 only 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