Don’t Look Behind You

chagrined at how little money she had in her purse.
    “He told me to count to fifty before I left the garage.”
    Fenkner and Johnson realized that the two rapes had followed an almost identical scenario.
    “Except that the first victim wasn’t brutalized like the second,” Joyce Johnson mused. “They are so alike.”
    There would be more that seemed similar.
    On March 10, Cory Bixler* left her apartment in the near north end of Seattle a half hour after midnight, intending to walk a few short blocks to a friend’s house. At the corner of North 39th Street and Linden Avenue North, a dark figure stepped from the shadows and grabbed her from behind, putting his hand tightly over her mouth. Although Cory fought hard, her assailant was much stronger. He began to drag her into the bushes, and her screams didn’t deter him in the least. Cory’s purse fell on the sidewalk as the man threw her roughly beneath a thick stand of laurel bushes.
    “He ripped off my clothes,” she recalled later. “And he wrapped my coat around my head. Then he raped me, and he kept hitting me in the face and stomach with his fists when I tried to crawl away.”
    Cory recalled that the rapist’s voice was quiet and soft—an odd contrast to the violence of his fists and the fact that he said he would kill her if she didn’t cooperate.
    Once he had ejaculated, he turned his thoughts to money and asked Cory where her purse was. She pointed to the sidewalk where it had fallen in the struggle, and he left her for a moment as he moved to retrieve it.
    As soon as he let go of her, the plucky young woman got up and ran across the street, darting between dark houses, until she reached Aurora Avenue, which was always full of traffic—day and night. There, Cory found a motel office still open and begged the manager to call the police.
    Patrol officers from the Wallingford Precinct, along with K-9 patrolmen and their dogs, responded at once.
    But the rapist was gone, gone so completely that the highly trained German shepherds could not track his scent much beyond the spot of the attack. That meant that the assailant had probably gotten into a nearby vehicle.
    When Cory Bixler talked to detectives Johnson and Fenkner, she revealed a decidedly weird facet of the rapist’s personality: “After he had raped me, he made me lie there and he kept telling me, ‘You’re dead. Just act like you’re dead’—and then he started throwing dirt on me. Almost like he was trying to bury me.”
    Her attacker had taken Cory’s purse with him. On March 18, some of her papers turned up coincidentally. A friend of Seattle police robbery detective John Boatman called to tell him that his (the friend’s) Volkswagen had been stolen. It was recovered, but by then it was in very poor mechanical condition.
    On March 18, a garage mechanic working on the “Beetle” found some identification documents belonging to a Cory Bixler under the seats. The car’s owner had never heard of anyone by that name and commented on it to Boatman.
    John Boatman worked in the Crimes Against Persons Unit a few feet from Bill Fenkner’s and Joyce Johnson’s desks. Boatman had heard of Cory Bixler, and he knew she was the young woman who had been the victim of the vicious rape and assault—with robbery—the week before. Evidently, the rapist had stolen the Volkswagen for his getawayand inadvertently left Cory’s ID on the floorboards after he rifled her purse.
    It was a good—though frustrating—lead. At this point the Volkswagen was of no use for fingerprint evidence. Most of its surfaces had been touched by half a dozen people in the garage and any latent prints were destroyed.
    And the car thief—was it the rapist?—had been punctilious about removing his own possessions.
    The sadistic sex attacker was out there, and, so far, he had been clever at avoiding detection. His victims all described him as young, slender, tall, and strong as an ox. He had a mustache and dark shag-cut hair to his shoulders.
    Detectives knew he would probably not stop his attacks unless he was caught. They waited tensely for the next time he surfaced.
    For almost two months things were quiet; none of the rape reports coming in sounded like the man who’d tried to bury his last victim—either actually or symbolically. It was quite possible that he was still active and his latest victims were afraid to report him. Many rape victims don’t report what happened to them because they are embarrassed