He had a term for what he was about to do: “rape theater.” Deviant fantasies had gripped him since he was a kid, way back to when he had seen Jabba the Hutt enslave and chain Princess Leia. Where do you go when you’re 5 and already thinking about handcuffs? he would ask himself. He was only 8 the first time he broke into a home. It was such a rush. He had broken into more than a dozen homes since.
Now he was 30, an Army veteran — infantry, two tours in South Korea — who had enlisted in the Reserves, only he hadn’t appeared for duty in months.
In the kitchen, he went to the knife block and removed a black-handled blade from the top row, far left.
In the living room, he removed the laces from her black tennis shoes and put the shoes back. One detective later wrote in a report, “The shoes were lying next to each other near the end of the couch and the bedroom door, on the soles as if placed there (not disturbed).”
He was just being neat and orderly, the way he was with everything.
He threaded one of the shoelaces through a pair of underwear.
Then he walked to the bedroom.
-A description of a horrific attack by a serial rapist—whose victim the police refused to believe—from an in-depth investigative report by T. Christian Miller and Ken Marshall at ProPublica and The Marshall Project.
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