Don’t Look Behind You

before she could say anything, she felt a fist crash into her forehead. The blow made her knees sag, but she stayed conscious.
    Kitty screamed as loud as she could, hoping the next-door neighbors would hear her. She knew they wereprobably all asleep, but she held on to the slight hope that someone might hear.
    Before her scream had faded in the quiet night air, however, strong hands grabbed her coat and pulled it over her head. She heard a male voice ordering her to be quiet or she would be killed.
    Kitty screamed again—but her cries for help were muffled now. No one heard. No one had heard her first scream either. The neighbors’ windows were all closed, and the drumming of a heavy rainstorm had dulled sound even further.
    She could tell that the man who gripped her tightly was tall and very strong. He pinned her arms to her sides and walked her northbound away from her yard. The first house they passed was vacant; the second had lights on, but she didn’t dare scream again.
    Evidently not satisfied with the location, the man walked her back past her own house and into the backyard of the next house.
    Suddenly, he threw Kitty on the ground, and ripped off her slacks and panties. Still holding her coat over her forehead, he kissed her. And then he raped her.
    After he climaxed, he asked her for money.
    “It’s in my purse,” she sobbed.
    Displeased with the mere two dollars he found there, the rapist began to beat Kitty with his closed fists. A dozen times or more, she felt pain as his blows thudded against her face.
    “That’s too bad about the money,” he grunted. “I need more than that.”
    He ripped two rings off her fingers. Her diamond engagement ring was worth at least a thousand dollars, and her other ring was a rare opal valued at almost four hundred dollars.
    As if to justify his brutality, he told Kitty, “Don’t think I’m sick or a junkie, but I have a four-hundred-dollar-a-day habit.” And then he laughed, adding, “I’m sorry you have to be a victim of this sick society.”
    And so, indeed, was Kitty Amela. “Take what you want, but don’t hurt me,” she begged.
    “I won’t hurt you, sweetheart,” he said, his voice soft now. “Don’t get up for a couple of minutes and you’ll be okay.”
    After the man left, Kitty lay still, afraid that he might come back. But a few minutes later, she heard a car start and drive away.
    She estimated that the attack had lasted almost twenty minutes. Painfully, she made her way back to her car and drove to the emergency room where she’d gone off shift earlier in the evening. Nearly hysterical, she fell into the arms of a nurse friend, whimpering. “Oh, Mary—I’ve been raped.”
    Kitty Amela’s clothes were almost torn off and she was covered with dirt. She had a contusion and abrasions all over her face. A vaginal exam confirmed that she had, indeed, been raped.
    But the coat blindfold hadn’t worked. Kitty had seen her attacker’s face in the porch light that shone that Sunday night.
    When she was calmer, she told Seattle police officers J. A. Nicholson and D. Hilliard that her attacker was aman in his early twenties, Caucasian, tall and slender, with shoulder-length dark hair cut in a shag. He had a scraggly goatee and a pointed chin. She hadn’t seen his car, but she believed he had left in one.
    After she had been treated for her injuries, the officers accompanied the young nurse to the yard where she had been attacked so they could help her recover anything she might have dropped there. They found her coat, one shoe, her purse, and its contents—which had been scattered over the ground.
    In a city the size of Seattle there are, unfortunately, a number of rapes reported almost every day. Sex Crimes detectives Joyce Johnson and William Fenkner had learned to evaluate the MOs used in sex attacks. They know that rapists rarely stop with one attack and that they tend to follow an almost fetishist pattern.
    A few days before Kitty Amela was attacked, another young woman had reported that she had been raped by a tall, thin man with shoulder-length hair.
    “He followed me after I got off my bus in the north end,” she told the detectives. “I didn’t think there was anything dangerous about him, but then he walked past me, turned around suddenly and grabbed me around my neck and my head. He forced me into a garage off an alley.”
    After she was raped, the young woman said that the stranger had stolen two dollars from her,