Don’t Look Behind You

each attack site and took photographs. They interviewed and reinterviewed the victims—all young women who were not only intelligent but had fantastic memories for detail as well. The case file grew as the prosecuting attorneys and the burglary detective gave their own free time to compile a loophole-free dossier against the brutal rape suspect.
    As they learned more about Wilson’s relationships with women, an interesting psychological profile emerged. There had been no dearth of women in the ex-con’s life, but Grant Wilson had fought with most of them, beaten one severely, and had never taken even a hint of rejection without seeking revenge.
    Strangely, he didn’t fight any rejection by the women in his life by hurting
them
. Instead, he had taken his rage out on the victims of his sexual attacks, on hapless women who were complete strangers.
    After each fight or breakup, Grant Wilson had goneprowling, looking for a pretty woman on whom he would vent his wrath.
    Interesting, too, was the fact that most of the attacks had taken place in the same neighborhood where Grant Wilson had grown up—one directly across the street from his boyhood home. Since his release from prison, he had been on the move, living with one friend or another in the north end of Seattle.
    Grant Wilson was slated to go on trial for attacking the four young women in August. But when Wilson was faced with the voluminous evidence that detectives Joyce Johnson, Bill Fenkner, and Bill Berg, along with prosecutors Bernstein and Yates, had gathered against him, he changed his mind about going to trial.
    He was allowed to plea bargain, to plead guilty to a charge of first-degree kidnapping and robbery in the case of Lynn Rutledge. The other charges were dropped. The kidnapping charge meant a mandatory life sentence.
    Grant Wilson is safely behind bars for a long, long time. But the scars on his victims will not soon fade. One young woman is afraid to walk on the street by herself—even in the daytime. She no longer feels safe to live alone. Another suffers from painful recurring migraine headaches. Rape is a crime that often leaves lifetime nightmares for its victims.
    And yet Grant Wilson’s victims were lucky. They escaped with their lives. If he hadn’t been captured when he was, forensic psychologists believe it was only a matter of time before his sexual attacks escalated to murder.
    As girls grow up, at least a quarter of us have had some kind of encounter with sexually deviant offenders. Mostoften, we are not in physical danger, but it is shocking to be approached by a flasher—who seems to get satisfaction by exposing his genitals. Police call them “Lily Wavers,” and they come from every level of society.
    There are also the voyeurs—the window peepers—who stare into windows, hoping to see a female in some state of undress. Those who do not know better say that exposers and voyeurs are not dangerous, but they are wrong. Almost every sex killer I have written about began with these seemingly “safe” intrusions into victims’ lives.
    I was accosted by a flasher in a movie theater when I was twelve, and it scared me half to death—scared me so much that I didn’t even tell my mother for three years!
    Perverts like Jerome Brudos (the Lust Killer) began as a voyeur and an exposer. Then he progressed to stealing hundreds of pieces of women’s undergarments from their bedrooms as they slept unaware.
    Rape was his next step, and finally, a series of gruesome homicides.
    I don’t want to frighten women—but I certainly want them to be aware and alert, especially when they are having a bad day. Ted Bundy, like many serial killers, had the ability to perceive vulnerability in his prospective targets. The hapless young women he killed all encountered him when they were temporarily distracted. They had the flu, they were suffering from premenstrual tension, they had just flunked tests or had been up all night studying for a final, their hearts were broken because they had just severed romantic ties with a boyfriend, or they were runningaway from home. Some weren’t wearing their glasses—and vanity cost them their lives.
    The list is endless. We all make mistakes in judgment—especially when our lives have gone off the tracks for a time. We must be extra cautious during those times in our lives.
    The sex killers I have written about for the last three decades are coyotes, watching for the crippled lambs that they can easily cut