The Killer Book of Cold Cases

by Tom Philbin

  Mills also remembered the rapist’s eyes. “When you’re staring into those eyes and that’s the only thing you can see and the only thing you can focus on, they stick with you.”

  He also was a talker. “He’s actually engaging in conversation rather than just the quick act of violence,” Wheeler’s partner, Detective Matthew Dick, said. “His rape victims would detail how loving he would be to them before turning violent and angry.”

  Help from the FBI

  At one point, unable to catch up with the serial rapist, the cops contacted the FBI. Profilers from the Bureau surprised the cops when they said the man they were after would not be a person with dripping fangs but someone who appeared to a good citizen. Investigators were instructed not to look for someone with a criminal record but, rather for someone who on the surface was a solid citizen.

  “The one thing [the FBI] did tell us that I’ll never forget was that this would be some guy that everybody works with. They’ll say, ‘No. He couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t do that,’ you know. And it’d be somebody that would be maybe a respected member of the community,” Wheeler said.

  Despite the best efforts of the police, investigators couldn’t catch the rapist. And from December 2002 to January 2005, he raped four women in lengthy, brutal sessions.

  Detectives Wheeler and Dick realized the criminal was a stalker. He was obsessed with his victims, gathering private details about them and repeating those details back during the rape. He knew the kinds of details about his victims that their friends would know so the press dubbed him “The Boyfriend Rapist.”

  The police had no suspect in mind, and the next victim was already being stalked.

  “I didn’t feel comfortable going outside by myself,” Jonelle Galuska said. She was constantly worried that she was being watched.

  One night, she called the police after waking up startled. “I had a strange feeling,” she said later. “I [could] hear knocking at the door, like an urgent knock.”

  When police officer Dave Zeamer arrived on the scene, he saw a man standing against the house. When the man noticed the police officer, he began to walk away.

  Zeamer yelled for him to stop, and he did. But when he turned around, Zeamer got a shock. The man was a fellow police officer, Jeff Pelo, who at one point had been Zeamer’s supervisor.

  Zeamer said he was relieved to see a fellow officer, but then he asked Pelo what he was doing out there. Pelo’s response was totally illogical. He said he was looking for a house for his mother-in-law. Zeamer couldn’t help but note that it was 1 a.m.

  After that, at least one—and perhaps both—of the investigating detectives made the connection in their minds that Pelo was the rapist, in part because that seemed logical. A cop would have known how to cover his tracks. But proving that Pelo was the perp was a whole different matter. When investigators started to probe, they found potent evidence. For example, Pelo had run the licenses of three of the rape victims, which would have enabled him to collect all kinds of personal information about them—including where they lived. Investigators grilled Pelo, but he denied any guilt.

  However, they obtained a search warrant for his home and found a ski mask made of fibers that matched the kind discovered on duct tape taken off Mills.

  There was another indication. Detective Clay Wheeler said, “Victims described how [the rapist] would pull some of the items around from his belt. You know, the gloves that they described were consistent with what police officers or security officers commonly wear.”

  At one point, victims got a chance to try to identify Pelo, even though he had worn a ski mask.

  One lineup was a voice lineup. Said Detective Dick: “The third victim, when she heard his voice, she literally curled up into the fetal position and pulled herself into the wall of the interview room.”

  “If you spend two hours listening to that person threaten [and] degrade you, it doesn’t take very much to recognize [his voice],” said Sarah Kalmes-Gliege.

  Three of the four victims also picked Pelo out of a visual lineup showing suspects’ eyes.

  Eyewitness Testimony Is Often Wrong

  Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, says the Innocence Project, playing a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing. While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge or jury, thirty years of strong social-science research have shown that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder or camera. We neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene: it must be preserved carefully and retrieved methodically, or it can be contaminated. The Innocence Project has worked on cases in which:

  A witness made an identification in a “show-up” procedure from the back of a police car hundreds of feet away from the suspect in a poorly lit parking lot in the middle of the night.

  A witness in a rape case was shown a photo array where only one photo was of the person police suspected was the perpetrator and the photo was marked with an “R.”

  Witnesses substantially changed their description of a perpetrator (including key information such as height, weight, and the presence of facial hair) after they learned more about a particular suspect.

  Witnesses only made an identification after multiple photo arrays or lineups and then made hesitant identifications (saying they “thought” the person “might be” the perpetrator, for example), but at trial the jury was told the witnesses did not waver in identifying the suspect.

  A variety of factors can affect accuracy, says the Innocence Project. Leading social-science researchers identify two main areas of influence. What are called estimator variables are those that cannot be controlled by the criminal justice system. They include things like the lighting when the crime took place or the distance from which the witness saw the perpetrator. Estimator variables also include more complex factors, such as race (identifications have proven to be less accurate when witnesses are identifying perpetrators of a different race than themselves), the presence of a weapon during a crime, and the degree of stress or trauma a witness experienced while seeing the perpetrator.

  System variables are those that the criminal-justice system can and should control. They include all of the ways that law-enforcement agencies retrieve and record witness memory, such as lineups, photo arrays, and other identification procedures. System variables that substantially impact the accuracy of identifications include the type of lineup used, the selection of “fillers” (or members of a lineup or photo array who are not the actual suspect), blind administration, instructions to witnesses before identification procedures, administration of lineups or photo arrays, and communication with witnesses after they make an identification.

  After a while, Dick and Wheeler became convinced that Pelo was the rapist, and they were ashamed, tormented that a cop could commit these acts. “To go to the victims and have to tell them that ‘this was one of my own that did this to you…’” Dick said. “It was pretty devastating.”

  Sarah Kalmes-Gliege said Dick was choked up and teary when he told her. “And you could just see how much this breach of trust and the breach of the oath that they have taken to ‘serve and protect’ had affected them,” she said.

  Jeffrey Pelo was sentenced to 440 years in jail. Despite the evidence against him, Pelo’s family stood by him. His wife of twenty years, Rickie, said that there was no real physical evidence against him, and their three kids backed him as well. His wife said she had tried to shut out the recent past, remembering him when she first met him at eighteen. Ironically, she said that she fell in love with his eyes. “His eyes were just beautiful, and I could lose myself in them.”

  Jeff Pelo

  Notable Quotables

  “He was like the best family man you could ever ask for.”

  “I don’t think
he did it. There wasn’t DNA that said it was him. There wasn’t any hard proof to say it was him, so I just don’t understand how so many people have come to the conclusion that he’s a bad person.”

  —Quotes from Jeffrey Pelo’s wife, Rickie

  Q & A

  Information for the following Q & A came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice.

  Q. What is regarded as the most common type or rape?

  A. Blitz rape, which is an unexpected sexual assault committed by a stranger. It is one of the terms coined by Ann Burgess and Lynda Holmstrom in their studies of rape victims at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in the early 1970s. When women think of rape, unexpected assault comes to mind most often and is most feared because of the level of violence with which it is associated. “Blitz” is a German word that means “lightning strike.”

  Q. Which gender more commonly stalks the other?

  A. Men more commonly stalk women. All told, experts estimate that there are 1.4 million stalkers in America. These stalkers can take action in many ways, some of them quite upsetting:

  Kidnapping, injuring, or killing the victim’s pet.

  Slashing the victim’s tires or vandalism or destruction of the victim’s home and property is standard behavior for stalkers.

  Friends and family who support the victim are themselves in danger. The stalker views these people as enemies in the way.

  Stalkers have been known to hire private detectives to help track down victims.

  Victims are often subjected to being followed, harassed by continual drive-bys of their homes and workplaces, and inundated with phone calls, machine messages, and notes.

  While police do everything they can within the law, some victims complain that their cries for help are looked upon as exaggerations, overreactions, or even lies.

  The first stalking law was instituted in 1990 in California; now all fifty states have them.

  Memories of a stalker may haunt a victim after the stalker has been successfully arrested, prosecuted, and jailed, and the victim may fear the stalker’s release date from prison.—FBI

  Q. Do stalkers fall in different categories?

  A. Yes. Forensic psychologists divide them into two general categories. About 25 percent of stalkers fall into the “love obsession” group. People who stalk celebrities fall into this category. They are also the people who become fixated on a coworker, acquaintance, or teacher. They live in a delusional fantasy world complete with their own script of how this object of their fixation loves them and is already in a relationship with them. Those in this category suffer from some form of mental illness, like paranoia or schizophrenia. The other 75 percent or so of stalkers are in the “simple obsession” group. These people have previously been in some form of relationship with the victim, either romantic or personal. When the relationship ends, the stalker feels lost and powerless. He cannot bear the thought of the victim being out of his life, so the patterns of stalking behavior begin. Unfortunately, this category produces the majority of domestic violence incidents, the worst of which end in murder-suicide.

  Q. How many women and how many men will be stalked in their lifetime?

  A. Eight percent of American women and 2 percent of American men—1.4 million stalking victims every year. Most stalkers have been in relationships with the people they stalk, but many have never even met the victims or were just casual acquaintances.

  Q. How many stalkers are violent?

  1 percent

  10 percent

  30 percent

  50 percent

  A. 30 percent, almost one-third—a scary figure.

  Q. If someone is being stalked, is it wise for them to get a restraining order?

  Yes

  No

  Possibly

  A. 3. If you are being stalked, talk it over with an expert to see if a restraining order would work in your case. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.

  Q. How many women have been raped or have been the victims of attempted rape?

  A. According to the Department of Justice, around 17 percent, almost one in five. This high of a percentage may seem shocking, but a close look at how rape occurs makes it understandable. For one thing, Department of Justice statistics reveal that 50 percent of all rape victims are known by their attackers, that they are victims of acquaintance, date, or convenience rape. These are essentially rapes of opportunity. Other types of rape fatten the percentage, including statutory rape, which is sex with someone under the age of consent; marital rape, or unwanted sex in marriage; blitz rape, an unexpected assault by a stranger; incest; so-called “group” rape (also known as “pack” or “gang” rape or “pulling train”); and “gray” rape, which gets its name from rape charges being difficult to prove. Given all the ways that women can be assaulted, it’s a wonder that the rape percentage isn’t higher.

  Q. How many rapists know their victims?

  A. Astonishingly, 50 percent. Rapists who know their victims casually or intimately are far more common than is generally believed. The act is known as acquaintance, date, or convenience rape. One myth is that such rapes are less traumatic than when the victim does not know the assaulter. In fact, the sense of betrayal and shock is likely to be greater.—Department of Justice

  Q. Has rape always been seen as a crime?

  A. For ages, 100 percent of rapes were seen in most cultures as less a crime against a particular girl or woman than against the male figure she “belonged” to. Thus, the penalty for rape was often a fine payable to the father or the husband whose “goods” had been damaged.—FBI

  Q. How many rapists use weapons?

  A. In 2004, 8 percent of all rapes or sexual assaults involved the use of a weapon.—Department of Justice

  Q. Is incest considered rape?

  A. Incest is a sexual assault on a child by an elder relative, and it is definitely considered rape. Psychologists estimate that 40 million adults—20 percent or more—in the United States, 15 million of those being male, were sexually abused by family members or other elders who they depended on. Psychologists often call these victims “secret survivors,” but survive is about all they do. They carry the trauma deep inside themselves, unable to tell anyone what happened, and a parent who knows also says nothing because, like the child, they may be dependent on the assaulter. Of course, many times these long-repressed memories emerge in adulthood, but by then it’s too late to reconstruct the shattered psyche of the child, now an adult, and there is no legal recourse. The statute of limitations has run out on the perpetrator.

  Q. Can a woman rape a man?

  A. While the universal perception of rape involves the sexually aggressive male violating the female, there have been numerous cases of women raping men. Criminologists believe that most of these incidents are never reported because victims fear not being believed or don’t wish to endure the embarrassment of filing a police report or having to testify in an often unsympathetic courtroom. Some criminologists say this type of rape happens 5 percent of the time when a woman wants to be intimate with a man. Most people think it would be impossible for a woman to rape a man due to the anatomical prerequisite of sexual arousal (an erection) to complete the act, but, in fact, males who are psychologically unwilling participants can find themselves becoming erect due to autonomic response (which is the part of the nervous system that governs involuntary actions). An aggressive female can achieve the desired result in her victim through manual stimulation and other sexually provocative contact. Heightened emotional states (such as fear) can also produce an erection. At this point, forced penetration can occur (which is the legal definition of rape). Drugs or alcohol, or both, are often found to be contributing factors.

  Q. What percentage of rape accusations are false?

  A. The FBI has estimated that around 8 percent of rape accusations are false. The number is small because not many people would want to go through the trauma of accusing someone and then possibly going throug
h a trial. Men should know the law to protect themselves from false accusations. There are a number of situations in which a man can be considered to have committed rape under the law:

  Not stopping having sex when your partner wants to.

  Getting a girl drunk or high and then “petting” with her is considered committing a sexual assault. If sex follows, it’s rape.

  If you know a woman is drunk or high and you still have sex with her, even if you did not get her drunk, then you have committed rape.

  Even if you are unaware that a girl you are having sex with is drunk or high, you could be charged with rape.

  Even if you are also drunk or high when you have sex with a girl who is drunk or high, you could be charged with rape. It is not enough to say, “I was wasted, too!”

  Q. How does rape on campus differ than other kinds of rape?

  A. First, up to 85 percent of all women raped on campus know their attacker. Second, either the offender or the victim has been drinking 75 percent of the time. And, while 40 percent of all rapes are reported in the United States, only 5 percent of all rapes on campus are reported. Embarrassment is the main reason why women don’t report the rapes.—Department of Justice

  Q. How many women in America are prostitutes?

  A. According to the National Task Force on Prostitution, an astonishing 1 percent, or one million women, prostitute themselves. In a study of women who get into prostitution, the proximate cause for 80 percent is drug use. The woman needs a way to obtain the funds to buy drugs. But even more basic than this is that these women have been sexually abused as children, and the drug or alcohol they take acts as an anesthetic to deal with the lifelong anxiety and depression that the abuse has inculcated.