Ordinarily, Kitty Amela,* nineteen, would not have been out so late on a Sunday night, but on February 16, 1975, the young nurse had a visit to make after finishing her late shift in the emergency room of a north end hospital. Her fiancé was in the hospital, about to undergo emergency surgery, and she stayed with him until after one a.m., when he was wheeled away to the operating room. Then she left to go home for a few hours of sleep before she came back to sit beside him when he awakened from the anesthetics.

Kitty lived with her family in a quiet residential neighborhood, but her relatives were away for the weekend. She had carefully left the lights and radio on at home so that it wouldn’t seem quite so much like coming back alone to an empty house in the wee hours of the morning.

The porch light was on, and she felt safe as she drove into her own driveway. She set the emergency brake and jumped out of the car to lock the doors. It was very still, but only for a few moments. As she headed for the front door, she heard footsteps behind her. She turned around, but 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 were probably 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 a man 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, 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 getaway and 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 and fearful. This benefits no one but the sex criminal.

It was near closing time—nine p.m.—at the huge Northgate Mall on May 13 when the rapist came out of hiding again.

Lynn Rutledge* walked toward her new car, which she had parked near the Bon Marché store. She had just put her purse on the backseat when she sensed that someone had walked up behind her. It was a man who was muttering some words she didn’t understand. Then she realized that he was telling her to hand over her purse.

“I’ve only got two dollars left,” she answered, and tossed her keys out onto the parking lot to divert attention. She kicked the stranger as he pushed her toward her car. Angry, he called her, “Bitch!” as he retrieved the keys.

“Get in the car,” the man ordered. When Lynn didn’t react quickly enough, he struck her in the face twice. He pushed her into the passenger seat and got into the driver’s seat. Brutally, he forced her head toward the floor. “Keep it down,” he barked.

It was full dark as the man drove away from the lot, and he seemed satisfied that no one had noticed them. He drove to the corner of North 95th Street and Fremont Avenue North and ordered Lynn out of the car, pointing toward a thick cluster of bushes.

After he put his own shirt over her eyes, Lynn’s abductor ripped her blouse down the front, tearing the buttons off. Then he stripped off the rest of her clothes. He spread them on the ground and directed her to lie down on them.

And then he raped her.

When he had finished, he allowed Lynn to get dressed, and he made her walk in front of him back to her car. As he drove back to the Northgate Mall, her attacker said he had friends waiting for him there.

He apologized to her, and he told her he had a wife and child.

“I’m sorry I had to hit you,” he said, almost pleading for forgiveness. “I’ve been good to you, haven’t I? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“Not really,” she murmured, praying that he would see his friends and let her go. But when they got back to the mall, he couldn’t find his friends.

“I guess they left without him,” Lynn Rutledge told Joyce Johnson later. “That made him really upset.”

Now Lynn’s nightmare began a replay.

“Get your head down, bitch,” the tall man snarled, calling her “bitch” again and again. He drove around aimlessly, perhaps looking for his friends—if they ever really existed. Lynn could see him well now. He looked to be about twenty-five, was tall and slender, and had a medium-length, sloppy, grown-out shag haircut and a small mustache. She studied him covertly, memorizing every detail of his clothes. He wore a white pull-on shirt with short sleeves and a three-quarter zipper and light-colored brushed denim jeans. And well worn cowboy boots.

The nervous rapist talked continually. “Would you believe I have a college education?” he asked, and Lynn nodded, figuring that flattery might save her. He told her he had majored in sociology and then served in Vietnam, where he’d become hooked on heroin.

“The army didn’t help me, so now I have a three-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. I was a parole officer before I was drafted.

“Don’t you think I look like Peter Fonda?” he asked. “You know, Henry Fonda’s son?”

“Yes, you do,” Lynn said, adding, “but you’re better looking. You shouldn’t have to kidnap a girl you could easily find lots of them that wanted to go out with you.”

Trying to be sympathetic to his drug addiction, she suggested that he might try the methadone program.

“I tried it, but they couldn’t help me even though I want to quit.”