The rapist committed his crimes robotically. Each attack was the same, repeated with ruthless efficiency. He wore the black mask that hid everything but his eyes. He tied the women up, but only loosely. He raped the women for hours, in multiple sessions. Afterward, he forced each one to shower.
Hendershot and Burgess described how the rapist had posed Sarah and Doris for photos, and how he had taken scores of pictures as he raped them. Both women remembered the large black camera with its clicking noise.
Well, there’s a difference, Galbraith noted. The attacker had taken pictures of Amber, too. But he had used a pink digital camera.
Immediately, Hendershot flashed back to the conversation she had with Sarah over the second missing camera. A pink Sony. Stolen by the rapist. Who matched the description in Amber’s case. Even for Hendershot, it was hard to resist the conclusion: It was the same guy at work.
Together, the detectives bore down. How were the women connected? Did they have something in common that might lead police to the rapist? All shopped at branches of King Soopers, the grocery chain scattered across eastern Colorado and Wyoming. All had links to local colleges. Doris, the victim from Aurora, worked as a housemother at a fraternity. Sarah, the victim from Westminster, had lived in an apartment complex near a community college before relocating to her new home. And Amber was a graduate student.
That was where the similarities ended. Doris was sixty-five and lived in a house in a residential neighborhood. Sarah was fifty-nine and had only recently moved into her new apartment complex. Both were older white women. Both lived alone. But Amber was in her twenties and a woman of color. She had a roommate. And a boyfriend.
The differences—in the women’s ages, their races, their physical appearances—ran against a well-established pattern in rape. The study of victim attributes, what the police call “victimology,” holds that serial rapists tend to strike similar targets. They could be young or old, teachers or doctors, blondes or brunettes. But they usually had some common unifying trait.
In this instance, the victims were dissimilar enough that the detectives decided they could not rule out the chance that more than one rapist was out prowling. It was possible that the similarity of the attacks was coincidental. But it was easy to imagine more unsettling scenarios. Maybe the rapes were being committed by a group of men coordinating their assaults to throw off the cops. Maybe it was some kind of pornography ring. Maybe Denver’s suburbs were under siege by a pair of highly experienced, highly traveled rapists.
The detectives noted another troubling trend. Ten months had passed between the first attack in Aurora in October 2009 and the second attack in Westminster in August 2010. Five months later, in January 2011, Golden happened. In the first two incidents, the rapist had threatened the women with a gun, but he had not displayed a weapon. In Golden, he flashed a handgun. He pointed it directly at Amber. And he threatened to shoot her.
The attacks were getting closer together and becoming more violent. To the detectives, it was a sign that the rapist was growing more confident. It was also an indication that he was getting better at what he did. The cops called it “MO creeping,” using the abbreviation for “modus operandi.” As a criminal got comfortable with the usual routine, he often pushed new boundaries and took more chances.
Burgess left the meeting burdened by a single question.
“How do we stop him before he rapes someone else?”
—
Galbraith had a strong lead. A business across from Amber’s apartment had a video surveillance camera that pointed toward one entrance into the complex. The owner turned the footage over to detectives to analyze. The task fell to Matt Cole, Galbraith’s partner, another Golden detective who had responded to the scene of the rape.
Cole watched the grainy footage for an entire day. He would play and rewind, play and rewind. He saw a guy on a bike with a dark backpack. Was he staring into Amber’s apartment? Why did the silver Chevy Celebrity switch parking spaces?
He counted 261 vehicles coming and going the night of January 4 and the early morning of January 5. One vehicle ghosted across the screen ten times in the predawn hours: a white pickup truck, driving slowly through the snowy parking lot.
Cole marked each appearance down to the second.
12:37:44 a.m.
01:16:25 a.m.
02:30:03 a.m.
05:03:00 a.m.
05:05:26 a.m.
05:14:02 a.m.
05:16:30 a.m.
05:17:14 a.m.
05:19:19 a.m.
05:19:59 a.m.
Could the pickup belong to the rapist? Cole and Galbraith ran the tape again and again, looking for a way to identify the vehicle. They could read “Mazda” on the back. The mirror on the passenger’s side looked broken. And it seemed like an older model truck. But the license plate was unreadable. They sent the surveillance tape to an analyst who specialized in video enhancement. The analyst broke down the tape into 1,200 images composed of overlapping, individual frames—a technique called averaging. Nothing. The video was too blurry.
The tape also presented a problem of chronology. The last time the truck was seen on the tape, the time stamp showed that it was 5:20 in the morning. But the attack started two hours later, at about 7:30. By then, the truck was no longer appearing in the video. Maybe it was just some all-nighter student, scrambling out for coffee or snacks. Galbraith gave up. She put the truck out of her mind. It was a dead end, as far as she was concerned.
The Golden Police Department issued a press release with a rudimentary description of the incident. The assailant was a white male, six feet two, with hazel eyes. There were no further identifying details: “The suspect was wearing a mask so no composite sketch is available,” it read. Galbraith made sure the release prominently mentioned the same detail that had drawn Amber’s attention. “The suspect does have a distinctive mark or tattoo on the outer area of his lower leg or calf that is about the size and shape of a large chicken egg,” it read. Galbraith was taking a leap of faith. Amber’s recollection needed to be right.
A few days later, a student at a college near Denver called the police hotline. He sounded shaky on the voicemail. He said he felt obligated to contact the cops. One of his friends had a mark that sounded like the one on the report. The guy’s name was Frank Tucker.* He was a fellow student.
With help from the tipster, Galbraith called up Tucker’s Facebook page. One photo showed his leg. The image was dark. But maybe there was a birthmark? Galbraith called Amber to come to the station. When she arrived, she peered at a cropped photo that showed Tucker’s leg. She couldn’t be sure. It seemed like the mark on the rapist had been farther down his leg, she told Galbraith. But it was about the same size and shape as the one on Tucker’s leg.
Galbraith ran Tucker’s criminal history. Four years earlier, cops at the college had taken a report from a female student. She had gotten drunk at a party. She attached herself to Tucker. After boozy conversation, he ordered her to have sex with him. If she didn’t, Tucker threatened to tell everyone that she was a slut. The woman agreed reluctantly. But after they started, she changed her mind. Tucker ignored her. She reported the rape to campus police but had ultimately declined to press charges.
Galbraith was fortunate the woman had come forward. Many women are reluctant to report sexual assault. Only about one-fifth of women contact police after they’ve been raped, according to national surveys. The stigma of the crime remains a serious barrier to speaking out. Women are afraid that friends or family might discover what happened. Or they are afraid of not being taken seriously. Or they don’t consider the attack serious enough to merit the involvement of the law. Or they don’t want to help the cops imprison a man who may be a boyfriend, a husband, a father to their children.
For Galbraith, the woman’s report of rape was enough to make Tucker a suspect. She subpoenaed the phone company for his cell phone records. She banged out a request to place a GPS tracker on Tucker’s car.
Her concern was clear. She needed to track Tucker’s car in order “to identify future victims,” she told the judge.
—
Hendershot figured she’d use Amber’s case to revisit an evidentiary trail that had so far disappointed.
Television dramas often treat DNA as the key that can unlock every mystery. Investigators find a speck of blood on a weapon or traces of spit on a cigarette butt. They send the sample to a lab. The lab compares the sample against the DNA of a suspect. Boom, there’s a hit, and the crime is solved in one hour, minus commercials.
The reality is different. The Federal Bureau of Investigation runs the most comprehensive cold-case database in the country, the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS. The database contains the genetic profiles of more than fifteen million people, mostly convicted criminals. The profiles are extracted from DNA samples collected under controlled conditions at some point in the judicial process—for instance, when a suspect is booked into jail and gets the inside of his cheek swabbed. From there, an analyst separates the DNA sample into fragments, which produce a person’s profile—a pattern of stripes that appears almost like a bar code on an X-ray filmstrip. The FBI accepts the profile only if it contains genetic material from thirteen separate locations, or loci, of a person’s DNA.
The power of the database kicks in when a detective finds some kind of body fluid at a crime scene: blood, semen, saliva. Once the crime scene sample is processed, it can be compared to the millions of stored samples. The FBI will not do the comparison, however, unless the crime scene sample contains genetic material from the same thirteen locations, with some limited exceptions. If the DNA sample is degraded or limited in quantity so that the analysis results in complete information from only five or ten genetic locations, the FBI rejects the sample. By insisting on such “high stringency” matching criteria, the FBI estimates the chances of a false match at one in one billion.
Hendershot figured that the rapist must know something about the process. The police term was “DNA conscious.” He was trying to erase his presence down to the molecular level. And so far, he had succeeded.
Burgess had been the first to be disappointed. A few days after the rape in Aurora, Doris had walked through her house with a crime scene investigator named Randy Neri. In each room, Neri asked: “What did you see? Where’d you see him go? What did you see him touch?” When they reached her bedroom, Doris saw the television that sat on a wooden dresser, next to her bed. On top were three teddy bears, two white and one yellow. When Doris saw them, she stopped. The yellow bear, she told Neri. The rapist had knocked the yellow bear onto the floor, and then stooped to pick it up.
Neri swabbed the bear, packed the sample into an evidence bag, and shipped it to the state’s crime lab at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
The CBI was headquartered in a low brick building, surrounded by pine trees, across a busy intersection from a Hooters restaurant. Much like its federal counterpart, it specialized in using science and technology to solve the toughest crimes. With 250 employees, and offices across the state, the bureau served as a crime lab for local police and sheriffs. It analyzed fingerprints and DNA, conducted toxicology tests, and tracked gun sales. The bureau’s crime lab was best known for its Herculean labor in the case of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen found murdered in her parents’ house in Boulder in 1996. In that case, the bureau’s analysts received 2,509 laboratory specimens and conducted 25,520 lab examinations over the course of 3,116 hours. The murder went unsolved. But Colorado cops still held the CBI as the last, best hope for answers in a complicated case.
On December 7, 2009, two months after Doris’s rape, CBI analyst Sarah Lewis called Burgess with mixed news. The rapist had been punctilious. But not perfect. Doris’s teddy bear had yielded the tiniest trace of him—perhaps no more than seven or eight skin cells, sloughed from his fingertips as he grabbed the bear with gloveless hands. The analysis of touch DNA, as such micro-genetic samples were known, was a revolutionary investigative development. It allowed police to examine minute amounts of genetic material that would have been impossible to analyze with traditional DNA tests. But the new tests had a drawback: The paucity of cells did not render enough information to meet the FBI’s standard of thirteen genetic markers.
Lewis had been forced to use a more limited type of DNA exam called a Y-STR analysis. The exam looked for patterns, called short tandem repeats, on the Y chromosome found in male DNA. The results would show nothing in the case of a female suspect. And even for men, they would only reveal a limited amount of information. They could identify a male suspect as coming from a particular family tree. But the results were not unique enough to be a genetic fingerprint. Lewis delivered the news to Burgess: The DNA found on the bear was “either inconclusive or provided no results,” she wrote. “This profile does not qualify for entry into the CODIS DNA database.”
In Westminster, Hendershot had been excited to learn that Sarah saw the rapist pick up her white kitchen timer. It was one of the few items police were certain he had touched. Sarah’s memory proved correct. CBI analyst Gentry Roth found a trace of genetic material on the timer. But as with the teddy bear in Doris’s home, he was able to salvage only enough cells for a Y-STR analysis. “The amount of DNA was not sufficient for a complete DNA profile,” Hendershot wrote.
In Golden, Galbraith had managed to capture a few of the rapist’s cells when she brushed Amber’s face with a swab in the front of her patrol car. But as with Doris’s teddy bear and Sarah’s kitchen timer, Amber’s face did not yield enough of the rapist’s genetic material to develop a complete profile. The CBI technicians could only conduct a Y-STR analysis. The magic of DNA had failed Hendershot, Galbraith, and Burgess. The FBI’s database could not be tapped for a possible hit.
But a CBI technician pitched an idea to Hendershot. The three samples might not be able to identify a single suspect, but they could still be useful. The CBI could compare the Y-STR profiles with one another. If they were different, detectives would know they were dealing with different suspects. If they matched, detectives would know that a single man—or at least a paternally related set of men—was stalking the suburbs.
They would know they were hunting relatives, instead of strangers.
Hendershot gave the go-ahead to start the work.
—
Though they did not know each other well, Hendershot’s and Galbraith’s lives were intertwined. They were members of a sorority within a fraternity. They were female cops.
As a young patrol officer, Galbraith had been inspired by a female detective. One morning, Golden’s chief called his officers together to let them know about a drug bust that was going to happen later that day at a local fast-food restaurant. An elite narcotics squad drawn from police departments across the Denver area, the West Metro Drug Task Force, was sweeping in to break up a ring. One of the task force officers in the room for the briefing caught Galbraith’s eye. She radiated a quiet intensity. Galbraith had been thinking about applying for a spot on the narcotics squad. At that moment, she knew she would. “She’s a chick,” Galbraith thought. “If she can do it, I can do it.” The detective was Edna Hendershot.
In the United States, female cops have been building on the success of other female cops for more than a hundred years. Once, women were confined to work in police departments as civilian helpers, usually in matters involving children and women. Alice Stebbins Wells helped change that. She became a police officer—or “officeress” as she was then known—when she joined the Los Angeles Police Department on September 12, 1910. Her shield read “Policewoman.” The bottom of her gold badge featured her number: 1. She joined the so-called “purity squad,” tasked with patrolling penny arcades, dance halls, skating rinks, and other dens of iniquity. Wells “fought for the idea that women, as regular members of municipal police departments, are particularly well-qualified to perform protective and preventative work among juveniles and female criminals,” reads her o
fficial bio on the International Association of Women Police, a group she founded. Two years after Wells was hired, two other women joined the LAPD.
Wells’s argument that women brought special qualities to police work wasn’t always enough to win over her male colleagues. But over time, studies have shown that female officers benefit police departments and the communities they serve. Women are less likely to use excessive force than their male counterparts, and are less likely to be involved in lawsuits alleging police abuse. Citizens tend to rank female officers as more empathetic and communicative than their male counterparts. And female officers are more likely to embrace the goals of community policing—a law enforcement philosophy that emphasizes cooperation and interaction with citizens.
Female officers have also been shown to respond more effectively to violence against women. For instance, a 1985 study found that female officers displayed more patience and understanding with domestic-violence victims. A 1998 study of a nationally representative sample of 147 police departments found that female officers were more likely to make arrests in domestic-violence cases than male officers. And a 2006 study of the sixty largest US metropolitan police departments showed that every 1 percent increase in female officers correlated with a 1 percent increase in the number of rapes reported in a jurisdiction.
None of these studies downplays the extraordinary work of the male cops who investigate and arrest thousands of rapists every year. Nor do they suggest that a female officer is automatically better than a male counterpart at responding to gender-based violence. While some female victims prefer to speak with a woman because of a shared gender connection, other victims have said they felt safer and calmer in the presence of a male officer. End Violence Against Women International, the police training organization, has suggested that the most important factor in talking with victims is the engagement of the investigators. “What is absolutely clear is that an officer’s competence and compassion are far more important than gender in determining their effectiveness at interviewing sexual assault victims,” the organization emphasizes.
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