Don’t Look Behind You

curiously over at Moira’s car.
    It was enough to spook “Neil O’Leary,” and he leapt from her car and took off running.
    Moira Drew was not a fragile little girl. She was perfectly proportioned, and she was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 135 pounds. She had fought her would-be strangler with such ferocity that she had literally forced the brake pedal of her car to the floor, making the brakes inoperable. She didn’t realize that until she pulled into a nearby 7-Eleven parking lot, and found she had to pull on the hand brake to keep from crashing into the store’s front window.
    There was a police car parked there with Officer G. J. Fiedler inside. The distraught teenager approached the policeunit and Fiedler could see the angry red marks on her neck—perfect imprints of someone’s fingers.
    At last, the handsome rapist had run out of luck. He had attacked a woman who knew people he knew. Moira called her host at the party and asked who the “tall, good-looking man with the mustache” was.
    “Oh, him—that’s Grant Wilson,” the man responded.
    Grant John Wilson was already a suspect, but unaware that Sex Crimes detectives were closing in on him, Wilson continued his penchant for brutal attacks on women.
    Seattle police burglary detective Bill Berg had been investigating Grant Wilson, too—on burglary cases. Berg had information that tied in with his fellow detectives’ case. Even better, he had a line on where Wilson could be found: He was living on Northwest 56th Street, not far from the cluster of violent sexual attacks.
    Bill Berg arrested Wilson on suspicion of rape in the case of Lynn Rutledge, and the other victims’ cases would follow. Grant Wilson would now have to face his accusers in a lineup arranged by Sex Crimes sergeant Romero Yumul.
    On June 11, the ex-con moved across the lineup stage with several other men who looked a great deal like him. He had always been very careful to cover the eyes of his victims, nearly smothering some of them, but they had seen him, and they had remembered his face well.
    Kitty Amela, the young nurse, recognized the man who had beaten her nearly unconscious. Carol Brasser, raped, beaten, and tormented, had his face emblazoned on her brain. Moira Drew, his last victim, picked him out of thelineup instantly. Lynn Rutledge, kidnapped from Northgate and raped twice, would never forget him. The children who were witnesses to the attack on Carol Brasser also identified Grant Wilson.
    Cory Bixler, whose attacker had thrown dirt on her after the rape and tried to bury her, was not positive; she had only seen him briefly in the blackness of night. The other young women who had been attacked where there was little light couldn’t be sure either—but they all recognized his voice.
    It didn’t matter. There were enough victims who were absolutely sure that Grant Wilson was the man who had raped and beaten them. In Lynn Rutledge’s case, King County deputy prosecutors Paul Bernstein and Lee Yates filed charges of rape, robbery, and kidnapping. In three other cases where victims had picked Grant Wilson from the lineup, rape and/or sexual assault charges were filed.
    With the arrest and confinement of Grant Wilson, who was held under $100,000 bail, there were no more attacks that fit the parameters of the rapist who had stalked women in the north end.
    Direct physical evidence was piling up on the man who raped Carol Brasser. He had cut his feet on the picket fence as he ran from the sound of approaching police sirens; Grant John Wilson’s feet showed healing nail punctures.
    Bill Berg knew where the bloody male clothing Wilson had discarded was. Semen samples taken from the rape victims matched Wilson’s blood type.
    Grant Wilson had no alibis for the dates and times the attacks had occurred. In addition, the burglary charge BillBerg had arrested Grant Wilson for in February had many aspects that made it look much more like a rape attempt than a burglary.
    Pry marks were visible around the windows of the home where Wilson was caught. Inside that house, a particularly beautiful woman lived alone. Wilson claimed that he had only been siphoning gas at that address. His trial on that charge had ended in a hung jury.
    Detective Bill Berg wanted Wilson, and he had long believed the handsome suspect was potentially very dangerous. Now, Berg worked countless off-duty hours to help prosecutors Bernstein and Yates build their case. The investigative trio revisited