Don’t Look Behind You

only landed her back in the dark corner.
    “Oh, no! You don’t want to do this again?” she asked him in horror.
    In answer, he hit her in the left cheek and she staggered as he hit her again. She began to cry, and that made him madder. He thumped her hard on the back, virtually knocking the wind out of her. She stopped crying and submitted.
    Oddly, until now, she hadn’t been afraid he would kill her. But as he raped her for the second time and threatened to inflict various perversions on her, she realized he mightvery well murder her. She moaned in terror—and that seemed to please him. He asked if she was enjoying the sex and she finally lied and said, “Yes.”
    She meant to stay alive if she could.
    Nothing seemed to satisfy him. He threatened anal sodomy and she cringed. She knew she would scream and that he’d wring her neck if she did.
    Finally, her attacker seemed to finish this second sexual attack. Was he going to force her back into the car again? No, he was gathering up her clothes and preparing to leave. She begged him to let her have her clothes and he finally relented, tossing them back at her.
    “It’s my first rape,” he crowed. “Wow! I just raped somebody!”
    She cowered in the bushes, wondering if he was so enthused about his conquest that he’d turn back to her, but it looked as though, this time, he was leaving.
    “I’ll leave your car at Northgate,” he called back.
    Lynn Rutledge had hidden her diamond ring under the seat. If he found that, he might be furious and come back to hit her again or kill her. As soon as she heard the car drive off, she put on her ruined clothes and ran to a nearby house, where she begged the owner to call 911.
    Patrol Officer G. Meyers responded to the call and, on the way, received a “possible” sighting report of the stolen car. It turned out to be an identical car—not Lynn’s. Officer Meyers drove the injured kidnap victim to a hospital for treatment of her many cuts and bruises. Then the brave young woman volunteered to go with the officer in a search for her car—and the man who had abducted her.
    They toured the parking lot at Northgate and did not find her car. Lynn, however, spotted it parked along the street near the Wallingford Police Precinct. It was impounded for processing and fingerprint expert Jeanne Bynum was able to lift one good partial latent print.
    The shaggy-haired rapist was long gone once again. It was certainly possible that he lived in the neighborhood where the car was found; several of the other attacks had occurred in the same general vicinity. The latent would do no good alone: AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) was not yet in place at the time, but it would be vital if a suspect was found so they could compare his prints with the latent in evidence.
    On June 2, Detective Fenkner got an anonymous call saying that the Northgate kidnapper was Grant Wilson,* twenty-three, who had been released from the Monroe Reformatory within the last year. Fenkner pulled Wilson’s file and found that the parolee had a rap sheet going back eight years, but none of the charges against him had involved sex offenses.
    Wilson’s bookings had resulted from auto theft, grand larceny, burglary, and assault. He had served thirteen months at the penal facility at Shelton and fourteen months at the Monroe Reformatory for parole revocation. He had been released from Monroe two days before Christmas a year earlier, and in February, he’d been arrested as a burglary suspect. Since then, he hadn’t been arrested.
    Wilson’s current location was unknown, but a look at his mug shots revealed he fit the general description of theman who had been terrorizing women in the north end of Seattle. He was six feet tall, weighed 165 pounds, and had brown hair and blue eyes. He occasionally had worked as a carpenter.
    While Bill Fenkner and Joyce Johnson attempted to track down the elusive ex-con, the rapist was still busy. It was two days later, at 11 p.m. on June 4, when twenty-six-year-old Carol Brasser* drove up in front of her home in the near north end. She parked and got out, idly noting that a man was walking eastbound along the sidewalk.
    Carol had just reached her front steps when the man called out, asking her for the time. As she turned to answer he grabbed her, covering her eyes with her coat. She screamed several times while he dragged her to the yard of the house next door. Her first thought was that he was trying to