The Ghost

by H. Berkeley Rourke

  "Was this ever publicized to your knowledge?"

  All the girls seated there together with Jeanne fairly yelled out hell no at the same time.

  "Did you, any of you, ever talk with the administration office about this?"

  Five girls, including Melanie put up their hands at that point. Melanie said, "We went to the administration when the campus cops wouldn't do anything about these situations. We got the same words from the administrative Vice President, James Preston. He told us to be patient and said it was being worked on."

  When we asked him to tell us what was being done he just said "I cannot talk about it since there are on-going criminal investigations involved."

  Melanie, who seemed to be the spokesperson for the group said, "Hell what he told us sounded plausible to us. And we really didn't want to be involved in an investigation. None of us were hurt badly though one or two spent a night in the infirmary here on campus. And then we heard about Marilyn."

  "So all of you were approached in the same manner, with a plastic bag over your head and a demand for your pants and panties to come off, then the rape and then the beating. Anything else from anyone else?" None of the rest of the girls spoke up.

  "Doesn't sound like much when you put it that way Ms. de Leon," said Melanie. "But it is much more in the actual occurrence. We have all been petrified the guy will come back and try to do one of us again. Of course now he would be likely to kill us according to what we are hearing on the streets of the campus." Jeanne didn’t say anything. There was no need. The campus rumor mill was at work and accurate, for a change.

  "What can you tell me, any of you, about him, about who he is? Anything at all may be of help, any remembrance you may have of him may help to bring him to justice."

  The group of girls/women, began to babble amongst themselves. Jeanne stayed quiet and waited. Then they started to talk, one by one. They settled down again and Melanie said, "I don't have much memory of him except that he was young. He had a young voice. I would say he is still in his teens or maybe early twenties. Oh and his tool was large and hurt me badly. I bled for several days afterward. The other reason I think he is still young is that he ejaculated very quickly. Thankfully the rape part of it did not last long." The rest of the girls laughed when she said that and then one by one agreed with Melanie about the youth of the attacker. They also agreed about his premature ejaculation and being thankful about his ineptitude.

  One of the girls had been quiet. She put up her hand to be recognized and said, "My name is Celia, Celia Ventura. I agree the guy is young, I agree that he has a large tool. I saw that much of him and it is long and thick. I watched him put on a condom. He is left handed I think, based on what I saw. He hit me with both hands afterward while I was still in restraints or I would have kicked his ass. He is rather thin I think, maybe six feet tall but probably a little less than that. His arms are not big but he is definitely strong.” She paused briefly, thinking, trying to define the man in her mind. “No, he is not strong. He is fearsome in that he catches us by surprise and then he beats us while we are in restraints. He is white. I am sure of that. I guess that is about as much as I can tell you." All who were present agreed that he was white.

  There was nothing else contributed by any of the group except Jeanne was able to develop a time line which went back around eight months to the earliest rape among those who were present. The earliest had been Melanie Campbell. Each of the girls also had developed a foreboding sense of increasing violence. The girl who seemed first among those present was not beaten badly according to her account. Rachel Mc Guire and Marilyn were his latest victims and of course Marilyn had been very nearly beaten to death and Rachel killed. At least Jeanne had something to start with, a little uncertain to be sure, but there was a time line and a rough description of the guy.

  BOOK II

  HOW DO YOU CAPTURE A RAPIST, A MURDERER?

  Chapter 5

  A New Door Opens

  Jeanne went back to her office and sat down at her desk to contemplate all which had happened to that point. She decided, like some of the other members of her division, she would make a couple of charts. She decided to put these in her computer with the intention of later making a large poster board of both. She started with what she would term the PERP CHART. Any information she obtained about the attacker would be information placed on the chart. Then after a lot of thought about the girls/women she had interviewed, she decided it would be a good idea to think about his victims, not by name but by type. She labeled the chart detailing the victims as VICTIM CHART.

  On the PERP CHART she put categories at the top of the page and information below those. The categories were Name, Height and Weight, Racial, Physical Characteristics. Using the information gleaned from the interview of the victims she organized it to start with and then proceeded to the Victim Chart. It was easier. Physical Characteristics was the only category. The physical characteristics were easy to describe. The women she interviewed, and Marilyn and Rachel, were brunettes or had dark red hair resembling a brunette. Many of them were around five feet two to five feet four inches tall.They were slightly built, some even thin, small girls. Every one of them were athletic looking but not necessarily athletes. None of them looked like gym rats even though several of them were students of one martial arts form or another. Celia was one of those.

  These characteristics would give Jeanne the ability, through what was left of the now cooperative Campus Police Department, to put out warnings to the students. They could also be used in conversations with the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI on the issue of what they called victimology if BAU became involved. She intended to get warnings out as soon as she rid the campus of the President and Vice President. Those two had gone conveniently unavailable for the moment.It might be best, she decided, if the warnings went out anyway.

  While she was thinking about the kind of warnings she might make to the women on Scalian campus, her boss Tom Leivas came into her office.He said, "Something new has come up in your campus rapist case. The guy has surfaced to a degree. He called the Arizona Republic and told them he was to be known in future articles as The Ghost Rapist. He talked with one of the reporters there for about two minutes. Unfortunately, it was not long enough to make a recording of his voice." Her heart jumped when Tom said the rapist had surfaced. As Tom told her about the telephone call she thought to herself his announcement was probably to be expected.

  Jeanne decided to show Tom her PERP CHART information. He looked at it for a moment and said "You are right on the money Jeanne. The reporter called me and told me the guy is a white kid in his late teens or early twenties from what the reporter could make out. The reporter said the kid is arrogant as hell. We need to begin to develop every piece of information about this bastard which we can find and do so quickly. He promised the reporter another death would occur soon. The kid is developing into a full blown serial killer. You might want to add to your perp chart the description the reporter gave me which was that the kid is an arrogant, narcissistic little shit. Keep working Detective. You have done very well with this thing so far. Keep it up. As always if you need help with anything just let me know."

  he made the call on a whim...

  he made sure it didn't last long...

  he didn't tell them anything real...

  but it was fun to do it...

  the stammers were evident...

  the disbelief was instant, then...

  he included names, places...

  but he didn't tell them how...

  and he didn't tell them why...

  he didn't understand the why...

  but here he was, it was real...

  the ghost rapist...

  now they knew...

  they would never catch him...

  he was too careful...

  he was too knowledgeable...

  he was, after all, a ghost...

  After the call came in and the reporter, Jim Wilson, called Tom Leivas, Je
anne went to the offices of the Republic. She waited what seemed an interminable time. Then she was taken to Wilson's cubicle. He stood and shook her hand, said to her, "What can I do for you, as if I didn't know," as he smiled.

  "You know exactly what I want Jim."

  Jeanne and Jim knew each other fairly well. After Josie Du Puy was killed they had drifted into the same downtown bar and sat down to do a short wake in Josie's honor, ending up together when one said to the other "What are you doing here?" They got together several times after their first encounter in a romantic way. It couldn't work for them though. They decided separately their respective chosen occupations precluded them from ever having a successful personal relationship. Jim married later and had a couple of kids.

  From the ending of their personal relationship they were sometimes friends. They were friendly enemies sometimes, pitted against each other. Sometimes, as in the present circumstance, though not often, they were collaborators. They knew each other well enough to know what circumstance was which. They respected each other enough so neither tried to take advantage of their having been intimate in the past. "Jim," she said, sometimes, "this is off the record." He knew enough to respect the information he got in those circumstances. He also knew if she told him something it would be truthful, and he would be able to use it eventually.

  "It was so fast, too fast to record unfortunately. I took notes but only afterward. I thought the guy was a crank, the usual, you know." She smiled. "But my disbelief was shattered when he told me the names of the women he had killed and where that occurred. And he also gave me the dates. Then he hung up before I could question him too much. He answered one question. I asked him who he was and he said he was to be called the Ghost Rapist."

  "Did you get a number on the caller ID of your phone?"

  "It was a cell phone Jeanne. It was probably a burner from Walmart or somewhere. That is all I got. It was a cell phone dammit. Don't I wish I could have gotten a callback telephone number. After I checked out the stuff he gave me with the coroner's office I was seriously pissed I didn't get more. But if he calls back I already have a plan set up. We cannot trace the call of course but we can try to get more information out of him. I promise we will do our best to get more information. After my editor you will be the first one to know what we get if anything. We will try to put a phone trap on but you and I both know that is not likely to help us any."

  "Okay Jim. I guess that I owe you a drink. Next time I see you after work I will buy."

  "You are on." The trip to the Republic had produced nothing. Jeanne knew, afterward, that Jim would give her what he could of anything the guy might say in the future. They both knew the guy would call again. His ego was served by doing it the first time. His ego would require he do it again, especially if he killed again. Both of them intuited he would kill again unless he was caught before he could find another target.

  he was further from the campus...

  it was not as familiar, that area...

  but it would be safer for a time...

  he would have to go out, away...

  that would insure anonymity...

  she was a brunette...

  she was petite, as usual...

  she was athletic looking as usual...

  he had watched her carefully...

  he knew where she lived...

  it was an apartment building...

  he could not do her there...

  he waited in the dark...

  he was close to her apartment...

  it was very dark...

  she was easy to take...

  she was scared, with reason...

  she tried to talk to him...

  he didn't listen, just raped her...

  then he slipped the knife in her...

  he thought a change was good...

  he knew where to cut...

  she bled out very quickly...

  she bled out without too much mess...

  Her name was Caroline Manners. She was twenty years old. He had done her in a large copse of bushes and trees near her apartment building. There was no patrol of the apartment building grounds. It was not thought necessary by the owners. There was virtually no crime there. Her body began to decompose in the night. By morning it was swelling with gasses to some degree and some were escaping through her body orifices.

  She smelled bad already. A passerby, a jogger, smelled her, located the direction of the odor and went to it, found her, puked and then called the cops on his cell phone. The cops were there in a matter of five minutes or so. Two patrol officers isolated him, and the area of her body, and called for detectives and forensics.

  The two patrol officers questioned the passerby and determined he was not involved. They got his personal information and let him go before detectives arrived. The Surprise Police Department was involved in this case. Its detective bureaus, including its homicide division were well developed, and well informed. The department also had a good group of forensic specialists. They arrived at the scene of the murder at the same time as the detectives.They swarmed the area like bees, each seeking anything of interest, taking pictures, looking for anything of evidentiary value and very quickly determining there was little available which would help their investigation.

  Caroline's body was examined by the forensic specialists and found to have been raped. She was also found to have had the femoral artery of her right leg cut. They bagged her hands, bagged her feet, bagged her hair, put a note on the body bag into which she was placed to the forensic pathologists that a careful examination concerning rape needed to be done and sent her off to the Maricopa County Coroner's Office.

  The autopsy doc and assistants at the County Coroner's Office took scrapings from under her fingernails and toe nails, carefully examined her for any sign of a foreign substance in her body orifices, including her vagina, did the examination of her organs and brain and sewed her back up. They also vacuumed her hair and clothing for anything which might assist the police in their investigation. Nothing was found.

  The cause of Caroline's death was listed as homicide. Manner of death was listed as a stabbing which caused arterial exsanguination. The autopsy results showed no organ damage or condition which could have or would have contributed to her death. The examination of her brain was equally unproductive in terms of any evidentiary information except the brain was slightly swollen.She had been raped, cut and bled out. It was all they saw. They didn’t equate it to the Scalian situation or the murder and rape just off the campus proper.

  One of the post doc's assistants noticed an oddity. He noticed she had an odd bruise on the side of her neck. He pointed it out to the doc and she included the information about the bruise in her report. She made no conclusion as to what caused the bruise. She also noted a few spots of petechia in Caroline's eyes but did not conclude asphyxiation was part of the criminal conduct involved because there only a few spots in the eyes.

  The reporter with the Republic who had spoken with the Ghost Rapist, Jim Wilson, caught a squeal of another rape/murder near the campus of Scalian and contacted his friend Jeanne right away. Jeanne did not have much information so she called the detectives at Surprise P.D. After talking with them she told Jim what little there was to know. His question to her was "Is this the same guy? Is this the guy who did the other two recently? Is this the Ghost Rapist?"

  "I cannot tell you the answer to your question Jim," she replied. "At this point it could have been the ghost who did this killing. There is no apparent evidence. But you know the Surprise and Glendale departments as well as our department will keep at it until we make some kind of breakthrough." They chatted briefly, agreed to get together for a drink at the end of the week and went their own ways.

  Jeanne called the Maricopa County Coroner's Office and asked for a copy of the autopsy report and pictures on Caroline Manners. Surprise detectives had already given word to the Coroner's Office Jeanne would be calling and they approved of her receiving those records. She ask
ed if she could speak with the post doc who did the examination and autopsy. As it happened the doc was filling out another report and was available. After greetings Jeanne asked the doc if she had been involved in the autopsies of either Rachel McGuire or Marilyn Cummings. The doc said no but she did have access to the pictures from the autopsy if there was a specific question.

  Jeanne asked, "Was the tearing and bruising of the vagina on Caroline Manners significant enough to capture your attention?" When the doc answered that it had been Jeanne asked, "Would you please compare it with the results of the rape of the other two."

  When the doc had looked at the pictures of the other two and compared them to her own she said to Jeanne, "There is significant tearing and bruising of each of these girls. There is no way to determine if it was the same guy. But I could say I think in each case the rapist probably was endowed with a large tool." The doc also said "I think in each case the rapist came at her from behind. And it was evident on Caroline's wrists she was restrained by the use of some kind of thin material." Jeanne thanked the doc and called her boss to see if he was available for a consultation. He was.

  When Jeanne walked into Tom Leivas' office he asked her what was up and she answered, "The rapist in Scalian area has now become a serial killer. There is a new victim and though the mode of killing has changed from asphyxiation to exsanguination I am sure it is the same guy. I am also sure he will contact Jim Wilson again to brag about this killing. This is his third victim Tom. Do you think we should try to pull in the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at this point?"