Lynn Rutledge’s mind raced as she tried to keep her kidnapper talking and, at the same time, agree with him.

It was a delicate balance.

She was afraid of what he might do next. But none of her talking was doing any good.

  She realized that the handsome rapist was heading her car right back to the same corner where he’d attacked her before.

She balked at walking into the berry patch again because she’d lost her shoes. That made him mad, and he started calling her “bitch” again as he pushed her into the bushes.

His emotions were mercurial and he was instantly violent again. He punched Lynn twice in the face, and then he picked her up and threw her bodily farther into the brush.

  Even through her fear, Lynn was reminded of a child who was having a tantrum. She had tried everything to placate him, but all of her amateur psychology had 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 might very 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 analsodomy 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 the man 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 force her into a car, and she told him she would do anything he wanted.

The man was evidently confident that she had no choice in the matter anyway, and he continued to drag her behind a fence where they would be hidden from the street. Once there, he tore off her slacks and panties.

He forced his fingers roughly into her vagina, bit her breasts cruelly, and then he raped her.

Not satiated, the man forced her to endure both oral and anal sodomy. During the attack, he tried to keep her eyes covered.

The coat over her mouth and nose was smothering her and she told him she couldn’t breathe.

Hearing that, he’d let up the pressure on her face a little.

Carol suddenly heard the sound of other voices young voices. They were asking her attacker what was going on. Her assailant answered,

“We’re just making love.”

She was so afraid.

The man hit her in the chest and she feared he would beat her to death if she called for help now.

The children wouldn’t be capable of stopping him and might be hurt themselves.

She managed to tell them she was all right, hoping that they would realize that she wasn’t and go for help.

Carol heard their feet running away.

The rapist seemed nervous now, even ashamed.

He asked if she was okay, and allowed her to put her clothes back on.

Then he fled.

The youngsters had run to their mother and cried,

“Mommy, there was a man and he grabbed a girl and she screamed and he dragged her into the bushes and put his hand over her mouth!”

The woman called police and Wallingford Precinct patrolmen arrived almost at once. But, just as before, the rapist had disappeared into the night, leaving behind only drops of blood from his feet, which had been cut by nails on the fence.

Carol Brasser was taken to a hospital, where doctors confirmed she had been sexually assaulted, had received deep scratches on her neck, sternum, and back.

Carol gave Sex Crimes detectives a now-familiar description: tall, thin, ragged shag haircut, mustache, in his twenties.

Her attacker’s MO matched that of the earlier attacks almost exactly. The man stalked lone women late at night, kept their eyes covered, and not only subjected to sexual indignities but also seemed to enjoy beating them.

And when he was finished with his victims, he apologized, and seemed to be asking for forgiveness.

What was most alarming was the increasing frequency of these copycat assaults. It was quite possible that the rapist assumed his victims had not seen him, that he felt perfectly free to continue his pattern.

He had gotten away clean every time.

If he felt safe, even overconfident, he might slip, and thereby betray himself.

Or he might kill his next victim.

The number of rape victims who have ended up dead through strangulation or beatings is overwhelming.

Sometimes the rapist goes further and uses more force than he intended.

In cases of serial murder, the “thrill” of a “simple” rape is no longer satisfying for the sex criminal and he progresses to murder.

It is a very thin line.

On June 10, eighteen year old Moira Drew* attended a party at a friend’s house in the north end. There were several people she knew there—and a few she didn’t.

One stranger was a tall, good-looking man with a mustache.

As she left the party between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m., the handsome man approached her and asked if he could have a ride to Aurora Avenue.

“Sure.” She nodded, and pointed out her car.

She felt no apprehension.

After all, she had met the man at her friend’s house.

Once on their way, the man, who had told her his name was Neil O’Leary, changed his mind about his destination.

He asked her if she would mind taking him to North 91st Street and Linden Avenue North.

It was only a few more blocks out of her way and she agreed.

“Hey, move over closer to me,” he said softly, as she pulled over at his corner.

It seemed like a simple pass. She shook her head and said, “No, I don’t know you.”

As quickly as a cobra strikes,

the man’s hand reached out and seized her by the throat,

powerful fingers cutting off her air entirely.

A black curtain dropped over her eyes and she saw pinwheels of light as she fought to breathe.

With her last strength, she leaned on the horn.

“If you don’t shut up,” Neil O’Leary hissed,

“I’m going to kill you …”

But Moira Drew kept her hand on the horn, its bleating staccato shrieks blasting through the early morning air.

A car pulled up, paused, and the driver looked curiously over at Moira’s car.

It was enough to spook “Neil O’Leary,” and he leapt from her car and took off running.

Moira Drew was not a fragile little girl.

She was perfectly proportioned, and she was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 135 pounds.

She had fought her would-be strangler with such ferocity that she had literally forced the brake pedal of her car to the floor, making the brakes inoperable. She didn’t realize that until she pulled into a nearby 7-Eleven parking lot, and found she had to pull on the hand brake to keep from crashing into the store’s front window.

There was a police car parked there with Officer G. J. Fiedler inside. The distraught teenager approached the police unit and Fiedler could see the angry red marks on her neck perfect imprints of someone’s fingers.

At last, the handsome rapist had run out of luck. He had attacked a woman who knew people he knew. Moira called her host at the party and asked who the “tall, good-looking man with the mustache” was.

“Oh, him that’s Grant Wilson,” the man responded.

Grant John Wilson was already a suspect, but unaware that Sex Crimes detectives were closing in on him, Wilson continued his penchant for brutal attacks on women.

Seattle police burglary detective Bill Berg had been investigating Grant Wilson, too on burglary cases.

Berg had information that tied in with his fellow detectives’ case.

Even better, he had a line on where Wilson could be found:

He was living on Northwest 56th Street, not far from the cluster of violent sexual attacks.

Bill Berg arrested Wilson on suspicion of rape in the case of Lynn Rutledge, and the other victims’ cases would follow.

Grant Wilson would now have to face his accusers in a lineup arranged by Sex Crimes sergeant Romero Yumul.

On June 11, the ex-con moved across the lineup stage with several other men who looked a great deal like him.

He had always been very careful to cover the eyes of his victims, nearly smothering some of them, but they had seen him, and they had remembered his face well.

Kitty Amela, the young nurse, recognized the man who had beaten her nearly unconscious.

Carol Brasser, raped, beaten, and tormented, had his face emblazoned on her brain. Moira Drew, his last victim, picked him out of the lineup instantly.

Lynn Rutledge, kidnapped from Northgate and raped twice, would never forget him. The children who were witnesses to the attack on Carol Brasser also identified Grant Wilson.

Cory Bixler, whose attacker had thrown dirt on her after the rape and tried to bury her, was not positive; she had only seen him briefly in the blackness of night. The other young women who had been attacked where there was little light couldn’t be sure either but they all recognized his voice

It didn’t matter.

There were enough victims who were absolutely sure that Grant Wilson was the man who had raped and beaten them.

In Lynn Rutledge’s case, King County deputy prosecutors Paul Bernstein and Lee Yates filed charges of rape, robbery, and kidnapping.

In three other cases where victims had picked Grant Wilson from the lineup, rape and/or sexual assault charges were filed.

With the arrest and confinement of Grant Wilson, who was held under $100,000 bail, there were no more attacks that fit the parameters of the rapist who had stalked women in the north end.

Direct physical evidence was piling up on the man who raped Carol Brasser. He had cut his feet on the picket fence as he ran from the sound of approaching police sirens; Grant John Wilson’s feet showed healing nail punctures.

Bill Berg knew where the bloody male clothing Wilson had discarded was. Semen samples taken from the rape victims matched Wilson’s blood type.

It didn’t matter.

There were enough victims who were absolutely sure that Grant Wilson was the man who had raped and beaten them.

In Lynn Rutledge’s case, King County deputy prosecutors Paul Bernstein and Lee Yates filed charges of rape, robbery, and kidnapping.

In three other cases where victims had picked Grant Wilson from the lineup, rape and/or sexual assault charges were filed.

With the arrest and confinement of Grant Wilson,

who was held under $100,000 bail,

there were no more attacks that fit the parameters of the rapist who had stalked women in the north end.

Direct physical evidence was piling up on the man who raped Carol Brasser.

He had cut his feet on the picket fence as he ran from the sound of approaching police sirens;

Grant John Wilson’s feet showed healing nail punctures.

Bill Berg knew where the bloody male clothing Wilson had discarded was.

Semen samples taken from the rape victims matched Wilson’s blood type.

Grant Wilson had no alibis for the dates and times the attacks had occurred.

In addition, the burglary charge Bill Berg had arrested Grant Wilson for in February had many aspects that made it look much more like a rape attempt than a burglary.

Pry marks were visible around the windows of the home where Wilson was caught.

Inside that house, a particularly beautiful woman lived alone.

Wilson claimed that he had only been siphoning gas at that address.

His trial on that charge had ended in a hung jury.

Detective Bill Berg wanted Wilson, and he had long believed the handsome suspect was potentially very dangerous.

Now, Berg worked countless off-duty hours to help prosecutors Bernstein and Yates build their case.

The investigative trio revisited each attack site and took photographs.

They interviewed and reinterviewed the victims all young women who were not only intelligent but had fantastic memories for detail as well.

The case file grew as the prosecuting attorneys and the burglary detective gave their own free time to compile a loophole - free dossier against the brutal rape suspect.