A View to a Killer
The first thing she said was that I looked just like a serial rapist. The second: “I have a gun,” followed by a laugh. Whether a reassuring “I know you’re not the dregs of society” or an intimidating “I’ll shoot you dead if you so much as blink,” I wasn’t sure. So, the stroller-pushing mother I’d stopped for an impromptu interview along Kelly Drive and I took our debate to the nearest tree.
Like dozens of others within whistling earshot of Fountain Green Drive, a “Wanted for Murder/Rape” flyer was stapled to its bark. Three police sketches showed a 5-foot 8-inch Hispanic man with a widows-peak hairline, earring in his left ear and heavy accent. “See?” she said.
I didn’t, since I’m nearly 6-feet-tall, speak broken high-school-level Spanish, wouldn’t pierce my ear for $50,000 and (despite my shaved head atop this column) have non-receding hair. The encounter was good (if just a bit uncomfortable) since I’d wondered whether it’s effective to send leafleting special-investigations-unit personnel out to scenes of three rapes and one murder allegedly committed by the same still-at-large suspect.
“It’s human nature that if people don’t hear about crimes for a while, they assume they’ve been solved,” SIU Lt. Thomas McDevitt explained of why police papered last weekend the area near Fountain Green where the attacks started on April 30, 2003.
From there, I drove three miles to Conshohocken Avenue on the other side of the river (where med-student Rebecca Park was murdered less than three months later), Falls Bridge (a thwarted attack three months after that) and 11 miles to a park at Frankford and Solly avenues where the rapist last struck in Aug. 2007. The similarities were striking; vantage points to stake out prey, obscured wooded areas nearby for cover and multiple escape routes. Each stop, I became more convinced this guy is a precision-fueled sadist.
If the 2.5-year lag means he’s dead or out of commission, perfect, but the police should be lauded anyway for continually busting their humps to keep the pressure on. All of which brings me back to the third thing the woman said: Nothing is too excessive to get justice in the victims’ eyes, especially when the DNA evidence hasn’t done the trick. Now I see what she meant: Efforts like this not only unite citizens and police to fight crime, but they strengthen our community.
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