A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Leads poured in. One by one, Hendershot knocked them down. Police had arrested Sarah’s ex-husband for rape in 1978. But Sarah insisted that she would have recognized her ex, mask or no. Police were investigating another stranger rape in the apartment complex where Sarah had lived with her deceased husband. But the suspect was a Saudi Arabian man who fled the country. One cop called to say he remembered a case from years ago that involved a man who carried a “rape tool kit.” That guy turned out to be too old.

  Finally, there was the young man with the black backpack who had been spotted wandering along a wooded creek less than two miles from Sarah’s apartment complex. He turned out to be a college student with a green streak. Early one morning, he’d gone to the creek to arrange river rocks to improve circulation in stagnant pools of water. He confessed to showing “a little attitude” when cops questioned him. But he wasn’t a rapist.

  Hendershot knew that rapes—especially stranger attacks—are usually solved in the first week. Each hour, each day, that passed reduced the chance of catching the attacker. She was running out of leads to chase. Other criminal cases were piling up. The trail was growing cold.

  By December 2010, Hendershot was feeling déjà vu. She was in the same spot Burgess had been in a year earlier. Actually, it was a worse spot. Because now, the detectives had reason to believe that a serial rapist was on the loose. One who had raped two women for several hours but managed to leave behind no real clues. No eyewitnesses. No description. No fingerprints. And not enough DNA to enter into any database.

  What’s more, both Hendershot and Burgess believed that the rapist would probably strike again.

  All they could do was wait. Wait for a mistake. Or wait for another rape.

  The calculations had changed. The math was not so simple.

  Who was this guy?

  5

  A LOSING BATTLE

  Camp Casey, Dongducheon, South Korea

  * * *

  He could remember the moment the monster was born. It was embarrassing, really, to tell people. He was five years old. His parents took him to see Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi. Early in the film, there is a scene in the den of Jabba the Hutt, the interplanetary gangster who has the hero pilot Han Solo imprisoned in a frozen block. Jabba—an enormous, sybaritic grub—looms on a platform, surrounded by slaves, halflings, and aliens. Exotic music wails.

  The boy and his parents watched Luke Skywalker, mysterious and hooded, sneak into the lair while Jabba slept. There, lying at the base of the platform, is Princess Leia. She is bared, almost naked, in a metallic bikini, revealing her thighs, her stomach, her throat. She is attached to Jabba by a chain, a metal collar around her neck. She starts awake as Luke walks in and jerks uselessly at the chain. She is Jabba’s slave.

  He would recall that moment often in his later years. At the time, he did not have the words to even describe what he felt. It was alive, it was electric, it was dangerous. It filled him with pleasure. He knew only that he wanted to have that kind of control over a woman, to totally possess and to own her. He described himself as like a young animal, bonding to the first creature it sees. He had imprinted on fear, on humiliation, on enslavement. “From then on, I was basically ready to tie up every girl on the block” was how he remembered it.

  As he got older, the thrill of the forbidden deepened. When he was eight, he broke into a house with some of his friends and stole cash. It was exciting, being where he wasn’t supposed to be. He started breaking into homes just because he could. How many times? He lost track. It was just him having fun. “Something about it—even the act of cracking a window or opening a door, not even stepping in, was just an adrenaline rush,” he’d say.

  He didn’t talk about his obsessions with anyone. Who would understand? His family life was normal enough. “I’ve had a lot of love in my life,” he’d say. He grew up in Tennessee, the oldest of three siblings. His mother and father divorced, but Mom remarried and the new family moved to Longmont, Colorado, a rural town an hour outside of Denver. With a population of about eighty thousand, it was surrounded by farmland, flat fields of corn and alfalfa stretching in every direction. In the background rose the jagged height of Longs Peak, the town’s namesake and, at 14,259 feet, the most northern of the soaring heights in the Rockies known as fourteeners.

  There, he learned to live two lives. The side that faced the world was fun, gentle. He was a kid with spiky hair and a big toothy grin who loved cats, rollerbladed, and doted on a ferret named Elvis who lived in a habitat that he named Graceland. He picked up the guitar, began playing, and got good. He mastered “Little Wing,” the enigmatic tone poem by Jimi Hendrix. He would play it for his mother to song’s end, to where a woman “with a thousand smiles” promises relief from some inner turmoil.

  It’s all right, she says, it’s all right,

  Take anything you want from me, anything.

  The other side was that turmoil—internal, dark, confused. He knew that his fantasies about women were sick, pathological, wrong. He knew that voyeurism, that illicit intrusion into the lives of others that he so enjoyed, was abnormal. But, he told himself, these were just thoughts in his head. He could keep them under control. He could keep himself under control. “It’s just in my head—my business and no one else’s,” he’d tell himself.

  —

  He switched schools when he was a sophomore and began attending Olde Columbine High School. It was a low, flat building on the southern end of town, surrounded by an auto parts store, fast-food restaurants, and a mall. He hung out with a small group of friends. On weekends, they would drive out of town, down the long, flat highways that laced the long, flat landscape. They would drink beers by the side of the road. Once, when he was sixteen, he and four buddies were arrested by a Boulder County sheriff’s deputy during a sting on underage drinking called Kegger Interdiction. It was 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday. He had sixteen bottles of beer in the back of his car. He paid an eighty-dollar fine.

  He graduated from Olde Columbine on May 31, 1995. He moved to Denver and rented a room with a high school friend near Cherry Creek, a posh nightlife district. He worked for a year as a sales rep for one Internet company, then for another year as a tech support guy who would go to people’s homes and set up their Internet service. He shot pool with his buddies. He got busted for smoking marijuana, but the prosecutor dropped the charges. He enrolled in the University of Denver, but left after a semester. He moved back in with his parents in Longmont and tended bar at Oskar Blues in nearby Lyons, Colorado, a dark, earthy bar famous on the local brewpub scene. Six years had passed since he graduated from high school. He still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do.

  Then 9/11 happened. He considered himself a pacifist. He kept his hair long—hippie long, rock-star long. He liked hanging out in Boulder, a lefty outpost in mostly conservative Colorado. He thought people in the military were knuckle-draggers, rednecks, brainwashed. But when he saw the Twin Towers crumple, something stirred in him. He found a calling—a mission that could distract him from the monster.

  He walked into the United States Army recruiting station in downtown Denver on January 22, 2002, three months after the United States invaded Afghanistan. At twenty-three, he was a little older than the average Army recruit. He could do thirteen push-ups and seventeen sit-ups, and could run the mile in eight minutes and thirty seconds. He was six feet two but weighed just 155 pounds. It worried the recruiter. The guy would blow over in a strong wind. You can’t afford to lose a single pound before basic training, the sergeant warned.

  He had a hard time believing that he was entering the armed forces of the United States of America. “I was not exactly the military type,” he would write. He stunned his parents, too. “We laughed and thought he was kidding,” his mother says. “He really felt in his heart that, you know, he had to go fight and defend what had happened to our country and our people.

  “He wanted us to be safe.”

  He was not sure whether he wo
uld fit in. Some Army recruiters divide soldiers into alphas and bravos depending on their scores on the military’s entrance exam, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Bravos score lower, but they’re considered better soldiers. They tend to be pliable. Willing to follow orders. They rise easily through the ranks. Big Army values obedience over brains. Alphas score higher on the test. They tend to be independent thinkers. But that means they’re also more likely to question authority. They can be seen as outsiders, rebels.

  He was an alpha. His scores put him in the very top echelon of test takers. He only had a high school diploma, but he qualified for entry into the military’s most intellectually and mentally challenging jobs. He had potential to become a geospatial engineer, a criminal investigator, an expert in cryptology—the kind of jobs that usually went to officers and college graduates.

  Instead, he signed up to become an infantryman—a grunt, the most atomic unit of the United States military. In 2002 in Afghanistan, the infantry were the guys marching through muddy mountain villages, knocking down doors, and shooting to kill. They were the ones driving across dusty highways in unarmored Humvees, squeezing their butt cheeks together in hopes that a roadside bomb wouldn’t send a shank of metal hurtling into their guts. They were the tip of the spear.

  But instead of hunting Taliban, he was assigned to Camp Casey, South Korea, a 3,500-acre base ten miles south of the demilitarized frontier with North Korea. His new home was also surrounded by mountains. Now, though, the tallest peak in sight was Mount Kumkang, 5,374 feet high. He was assigned to Company D, 2nd Battalion, of the Army’s 9th Infantry Regiment—the Manchus. Their name derived from the unit’s legendary courage under fire during the Boxer Rebellion. He had never been out of the country before.

  The pacifist distinguished himself as a military man. He quit smoking. He gained weight and added muscle. He excelled in training exercises and learned military tactics. Before a mission, he would do reconnaissance to scope out a target. Before attacking, he would conduct pre-combat inspections, or PCIs, to make sure that he had his gear at hand and his weapon ready.

  The Army recognized his work with the usual awards. He was accepted into a special honor guard. He earned medals for good conduct, Army achievement, and service to the national defense. He was recognized for his skill with weapons. He proved himself especially lethal with the M249, a light machine gun, once taking out an opposing infantry team sneaking toward his platoon’s outpost during a training exercise. “His maturity has been a contribution in the action of his peers and off duty,” one superior wrote. He advanced from private first class to sergeant. He had transformed into a knuckle-dragger. He described himself as “a pretty good soldier.”

  He wrote his mother frequently, telling her how much he enjoyed his job: He was in charge of training soldiers in South Korea’s 2nd Infantry Division who were headed out to Afghanistan and Iraq. His mother thought he was becoming a better person. “He wanted to train those guys as best he could to help them survive because he knew that some of them would not be returning back to their homes,” she said. “We really just saw a huge change in him then for the good.”

  In October 2003, he met a Russian cocktail waitress at a bar near base. Masha* spoke English with a hint of an accent. She had short hair and high bangs. Her face was broad and friendly, her lips full. She kept her nails manicured. She was three years younger. As a foreign national, Masha was not allowed to live on the military base. So each day, he would leave the camp at 4:00 p.m., stay with her until the midnight curfew, then race back to base. After six months of dating, they married on March 11, 2004. He transferred to a base in Seoul, and they moved in together.

  They had a typical Army marriage. They hung out with friends, mostly fellow soldiers with their own young wives and girlfriends. They drank at bars at night. They partied at apartments on base. Sometimes they hiked.

  He told his new wife nothing of his dark side. He continued to be haunted by images of sexual sadism—women in chains, women subjugated, women terrified as he raped them. He did not ask Masha to fulfill those fantasies. He once filmed them having sex. But she didn’t like it, and he never tried again. He didn’t even ask to tie her up. He considered their sex life normal, even vanilla. He had a hard time projecting his lust onto women he actually knew, women he liked. It was easier if the women were anonymous, distant.

  He had kept his imagination at heel all through his teens and early twenties. The images would rise and then, over time, fade. He would feel normal again. But now, they began to dominate his thoughts, a kind of incessant mental tinnitus. He was constantly fighting his obsessions. It exhausted him, mentally and physically. “I coped the only way I knew how, which was to not tell anybody and to try to control it in my head.”

  He sought relief away from Masha. He started looking at increasingly violent pornography. He tried going to prostitutes, asking them to play rape victims. Nothing worked to calm him. He was beginning to lose control. He would think about his dilemma, and blame it on his reaction to Star Wars. “Where do you go when you’re five and you’re already thinking about handcuffs?” he thought.

  He began to wonder: What if I acted on my desires? How would that change things? Perhaps if he indulged himself one time, he would be at peace. “I convinced myself that if I just did it once then it’d be like an itch that I had scratched and that I could basically get over it and move on with my life,” he’d say. What he needed, what the monster needed, was fear. Real fear.

  He decided to attack.

  —

  Outside the high walls of many American bases in South Korea lie districts of narrow, garishly lit streets lined with shoebox nightclubs. The most notorious of these clubs are called “juicy bars,” where soldiers buy a ten-dollar glass of juice and quality time with a young Filipina “drinkie girl.” At night, the girls flood the streets and side alleys in tight dresses and high heels, unabashed and unafraid.

  Perfect targets, he thought.

  He began following women at night through the packed streets and labyrinthine byways. He had a mask and gloves, but not much of a plan. He figured he would kidnap a girl, take her someplace—a hotel room, a car parked in the woods, who knew? He’d rape her. And at last, he’d be cured. He wasn’t worried about the risk. “What happens in Korea stays in Korea,” he told himself.

  But it was not as easy as he thought. For months, he tailed girls deep into the night. Each time, after hours in the streets, he’d call it off. At home, his emotions surged, an angry, poisonous sea. He was simultaneously afraid of carrying out his plans and disgusted at his inability to act. But he didn’t tell anyone. He always had a story for Masha: he was hanging out with friends; he had to work late. She never suspected anything.

  And then, one night, it happened. It was near midnight. He saw a young Korean woman, about his age, wobbling down an alley. She was alone. She looked very, very drunk.

  “Fuck it,” he told himself. “I just can’t sit out here on the fucking street my whole life.”

  He was in peak shape, 180 pounds, conditioned and muscled. He jumped on the woman and threw her to the ground. She struggled, fighting him back. Screaming in English with a strong accent, she focused on the dark clothes he wore: “Get off me black guy! Go away black guy!”

  He burst out laughing. Here was this tiny, drunk girl. And she was trying to fight him off. It was comical. Where was the fear? The terror? Okay, this is not what I expected, he thought.

  He pushed himself away. She got to her feet, stood unsteadily, and began to stagger away. She did not run. She walked. He followed behind her for a few steps, laughing. She faced him again. She picked up a rock from the street and threw it at him. “Go away black guy,” she screamed again.

  It was loud enough that he started to worry that she was attracting attention. He decided to call it off. Again. He was disappointed, confused. The whole thing had been ridiculous. It was theater of the absurd.

  He had learned his lesson. “G
rabbing someone in an alley isn’t for me. It’s not going to work,” he said to himself.

  The next time, he combined his plan to rape with his childhood thrill: breaking into a house. He went on the hunt again, this time through residential neighborhoods. One night, he saw his opportunity. It was a small, ground-floor apartment. The windows were uncovered. He could see everything inside: the kitchen, a small bathroom, and the bedroom. It thrilled him. It was like looking into a dollhouse, each room displayed for his pleasure. In the bed, a woman was sleeping. It was 3:00 a.m. No one else was around.

  He glanced at the door, where Koreans leave their shoes upon entering their homes. He saw only women’s footwear. If any men lived in the home, they were out, he thought. He tried the door handle. It was unlocked. This was his chance. He put on a ski mask and gloves and slipped inside.

  He stopped and looked around. The apartment was tiny. In the kitchen, he saw packages of MREs, the ready-to-eat meals that the Army issues to soldiers in the field. He suddenly worried that the woman was married to an American. He looked around, but saw no other signs of a Westerner’s presence. He calmed down. The path to fulfilling his fantasy was clear at last.

  As he stood in the kitchen, the angry sea surged again. He was paralyzed, trying to talk himself into the attack, and trying to talk himself out of it. A half hour passed in the strange apartment with the strange woman just lying in bed, feet from him. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked himself. “You know, just walk out of here and forget this whole thing.”

  All of a sudden, he heard a noise outside. He exited the kitchen just as an older Korean man flung open the front door. The Korean, unsteady on his feet after a late night at the bar, looked up. A beefy intruder, six feet easy, with hazel eyes framed by a black mask, loomed above him, standing in the middle of his home in the middle of the night. The startled homeowner bolted back outside, slamming the front door shut.