by Ann Rule
“Why didn’t you tell somebody before?”
“Like I said, I heard you arrested somebody, so there didn’t seem no point in it, but I got to wondering if it was that great big man, so I moseyed over here to take a look.”
With an eyewitness to the period just before Britt Rousseau died, an eyewitness who had actually seen the pretty girl running for her life, the charge against Kurtis Andersen was amended to first-degree murder.
Andersen’s first trial ended in a mistrial when he indignantly fired his attorney in the presence of the jury. In a second trial, Andersen was found guilty of first-degree murder.
Britt Rousseau came three thousand miles from the good life in Bethesda, Maryland, to end her life in a rundown hotel on a bleak January day. Her belief that she could trust everybody proved false.
TRACKS OF A SERIAL RAPIST
It was harrowing enough to be subjected to his frenzied rape assaults, the pretty victims said, but then he added insult to injury by forcing them to listen to nauseating boasts about his prowess in areas that gave them too much information.
Despite the proliferation of books, articles, and television discussions on rapists, there are still many people who believe that most sex offenders who attack women do so because they are losers in the dating game, men too unattractive to obtain sexual satisfaction through socially acceptable means. Only rarely is that true.
In the spring of 2014, there was a horrific killing spree in Santa Barbara, California, by a young man who thought he was unattractive and that women rejected him because of that. Full of rage, he shot and killed his two roommates, their friend, and two sorority girls who lived close by.
Elliot Rodger, twenty-two, the son of a successful movie director, was, in reality, quite handsome. But he saw the world darkly.
He left a manifesto behind called “My Twisted World”:
All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.
Elliot Rodger wasn’t a rapist, but his mind was fixated on sex, and he was crazed with it. Reportedly, no one realized how dangerous that made him until it was too late.
Many rapists are good-looking enough to pick and choose among the feminine population. But they don’t get their most all-encompassing thrills with a willing female. They are turned on by the terror they evoke when they grab a woman by force in the dark, making her submit, and the satisfying crunch of their fists against a soft cheek.
These are the men who alarm sex-crimes detectives. The psychic scars left by a “gentle” rapist are bad enough; the injuries helpless women suffer at the hands of a punitive rapist tend to increase with each attack and often result in the death of a victim.
A man who terrorized Seattle women for four months in the late winter and spring of 1975 was a good-looking ex-con who liked to brag that he looked like Peter Fonda. He expected compliments on his sexual prowess and technique and left his pretty victims bruised and battered. There was a definite pattern to his attacks, but unfortunately, several women had to suffer utter terror before that pattern began to emerge.
Ordinarily, Kitty Gianelli* would not have been out so late on a Sunday night, but on February 16, 1975, the young nurse had a visit to make after finishing her swing shift in the emergency room of a hospital in the North End. Her fiancé was in the hospital, about to undergo emergency surgery, and she stayed with him until after 1 A.M., when he was wheeled away to the operating room. Then she left to go home for a few hours before returning to sit with him.
Kitty lived with her family in a quiet residential neighborhood, but the others were away for the weekend. She had left the lights on at home so that it wouldn’t seem quite so much like returning to an empty house.
The porch light was on. She felt safe as she drove into her own driveway. But as she locked her car, she heard footsteps. She turned around and suddenly felt a fist crashing into her forehead. The blow made her knees sag.
She screamed. There were neighbors close by. Asleep, probably, but there was the slight hope that someone would hear. Before her scream had even died in the quiet night air, however, strong hands grabbed her coat and pulled it over her head, and a voice ordered her to be quiet or she would be killed.
Kitty screamed again—a muffled scream now, which no one heard. No one had heard the first scream, either. The neighborhood’s windows were all closed; the drumming heavy rainstorm had dulled sound even further.
The man who gripped her was tall and very strong. Pinning her arms to her sides, he walked her northbound away from her yard. The first house they passed was vacant; the second had lights on, but she didn’t dare scream again.
Evidently not satisfied with the location, the man walked back past Kitty’s own house and into the backyard of the next house.
Suddenly, the man threw her onto the ground, ripped off her slacks and panties, held her coat over her head, and raped her.
The coat blindfold did not work; Kitty Gianelli had seen the man’s face in the porch light that shone on that Sunday evening.
When he was finished, he asked her for money.
“It’s in my purse,” she said, sobbing.
Displeased with the mere two dollars he found there, he began to beat her with his fists. Over a dozen times, his blows thudded against her face.
“That’s too bad about the money,” he grunted. “I need more than that.” He ripped two rings off her finger, one a diamond worth five hundred dollars and the other a rare opal valued at almost two hundred dollars.
As if to justify his brutality, he told her, “Don’t think I’m sick or a junkie, but I have a hundred-and-eighty-dollar-a-day habit.” He laughed. “I’m sorry that you have to be a victim of this sick society.”
And so, indeed, was Kitty Gianelli. “Take what you want, but don’t hurt me,” she begged.
“I won’t hurt you, sweetheart. Don’t get up for a couple of minutes, and you’ll be okay.”
After the man left, she lay still, fearful he would return. But in a few minutes, she heard a car start. She estimated that the attack had lasted almost twenty minutes. Painfully, she made her way back to her car and drove to the emergency room where she had gone off shift earlier in the evening. Almost hysterical, she fell into the arms of a friend, whimpering, “Oh, Mary—I’ve been raped.”
Kitty’s clothes were almost all torn off; she was covered with dirt and had a contusion on her forehead and multiple abrasions on her face. A vaginal exam confirmed that the nineteen-year-old girl had been raped.
When she was calmer, she told Seattle police officers that her attacker had been a man in his early twenties, Caucasian, tall and slender, with shoulder-length dark hair cut in a shag, a scraggly goatee, and a pointed chin. She hadn’t seen his car but believed he had left in one.
After she had been treated for her injuries, the officers accompanied the young nurse to the yard where she had been attacked and helped her recover her property abandoned there. They found her coat, one shoe, her purse, and the contents of her purse, which had been scattered over the ground.
In a city the size of Seattle—half a million people—there are, unfortunately, a number of rapes reported almost every day. Sex-crimes detectives Joyce Johnson and William Fenkner had learned to evaluate the MOs used in sexual assaults. A rapist rarely stops with one rape, and he tends to follow an almost fetishistic pattern.
Shortly before Kitty Gianelli was attacked, another young woman was raped by a tall, thin man with shoulder-length hair who had followed her after she got off a bus in the North End of the city. He had walked past her and grabbed her around the neck and head and forced her into a garage off an alley. After the attack, he stole two dollars from her and told her to count to fifty before she left the garage.
On March 10, Joanne Bixler* left her apartment in the North End at 12:30 A.M. to walk a
few short blocks to a friend’s house. At the corner of 39th and Linden Avenue North, a man stepped from the shadows and grabbed her from behind with a hand over her mouth. Although she fought, he was much stronger, and he began to drag her into the bushes. Her screams did not seem to deter him in the least. Her purse fell onto the sidewalk as the man threw her down beneath a bush.
He ripped off her clothes and wrapped her coat around her head before he raped her, all the time hitting her in the face and stomach with his fists.
The man’s voice was quiet and soft, an odd contrast to the violence of his fists and the threats of death he was spewing. When he had ejaculated, he turned his thoughts to money and asked Joanne where her purse was. She pointed to the sidewalk where it had fallen in the struggle, and he left her to retrieve it.
As soon as he let go of her, the plucky young woman got up and ran across the street, between the dark houses, until she reached heavily traveled Aurora Avenue. There she found a motel office still open and begged the manager to call the police.
Patrol officers and K-9 units responded at once. But the rapist was gone, gone so completely that the highly trained German shepherds could not track his scent much beyond the spot of the attack. He had probably gotten into a vehicle.
When Joanne talked to detectives Johnson and Fenkner, she revealed a decidedly strange aspect of the rapist’s personality: “After he had raped me, he made me lie there, and he kept telling me, ‘You’re dead. Just act like you’re dead.’ And then he started throwing dirt on me. Just like he was trying to bury me.”
The rapist had taken Joanne’s purse with him. On March 18, some of her papers turned up in a coincidental fashion. A Seattle robbery detective received a call from a friend whose Volkswagen had been stolen and recovered in poor mechanical condition. A garage mechanic working on the Beetle discovered some identification belonging to Joanne Bixler under the seats. The car’s owner had never heard of anyone by that name and commented on it to the robbery detective, John Boatman.
Boatman had heard the name and knew it was that of the young woman who had been the victim of a vicious rape-assault-robbery the week before. Evidently, the rapist had stolen the VW for his getaway car and had inadvertently left Joanne Bixler’s ID on the floorboards after he’d rifled through her purse.
It was a good—though frustrating—lead. At this point, the VW was of no use for fingerprint evidence; most of its surfaces had been touched by half a dozen people in the garage, and any latent prints were destroyed. And the car thief, presumably the rapist, had removed any of his own property.
The sadistic attacker was out there, and so far, he had been clever at avoiding detection. His victims knew he was young, slender, tall, and strong and that he had a mustache and dark shaggy hair down to his shoulders. Detectives knew he would probably not stop his attacks until he was caught.
For almost two months, things were quiet; none of the rape reports coming in sounded like the man who’d tried to bury his last victim—either actually or symbolically. It was quite possible that he was still active and his victims had been afraid to report him, a not unusual circumstance that benefits nobody but the rapist.
It was near closing time at the huge Northgate Shopping Mall in Seattle on May 13 when the rapist surfaced again. Lynn Rutledge* walked toward her new car, which was parked near the Bon Marche. She had just put her purse in the backseat when someone walked up behind her and muttered something unintelligible. Then he demanded that she give him her purse.
“I’ve only got a few dollars left,” she answered, and tossed her keys out onto the parking lot. Then she kicked him as he pushed her into the car, and he called her “Bitch!” as he retrieved the keys.
“Get in the car!” the man ordered. He hit her in the face twice before she could react. He pushed her in and got beside her, forcing her head down toward the floor. “Keep it down,” he growled.
It was close to 9:00 at night and fully dark as the man drove away from the lot, and no one had seen them. He drove to the corner of 95th and Fremont North and ordered her out of the car, pointing toward a thick cluster of bushes.
The man ripped her blouse down the front, tearing the buttons off. Then he stripped the rest of her clothes off, spread them on the ground, and forced her to lie on them. He put his own shirt over her eyes and raped her.
When he had finished, he allowed her to get dressed and made her walk in front of him back to her car. Then he drove back to the shopping mall, telling her that he had friends waiting for him there.
He couldn’t find his friends and became upset.
The nightmare began a replay. “Get your head down, bitch,” he snarled, and he called her “bitch” again and again. He drove aimlessly around, perhaps looking for his friends—if they really existed. She could see him well now. He looked to be about twenty-five, was tall and slender, and had a medium-length, sloppy, grown-out shag haircut and a small mustache. She studied him covertly, memorizing every detail of his clothes: a white pull-on shirt with short sleeves and a three-quarter zipper, light-colored brushed denim pants, and old cowboy boots.
He talked continually. “Would you believe I have a college degree?” he asked, and she nodded, figuring that flattery might save her life. He told her that he had majored in sociology and then served in Vietnam, where he had become hooked on heroin. “The Army didn’t help me, so now I have a hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-day habit. I was a parole officer before I was drafted.”
He bragged that people told him he looked like the actor Peter Fonda, and Lynn quickly agreed with him, adding, “You wouldn’t have to kidnap a girl—you could easily find one who wanted to go with you.”
Trying to be sympathetic to his drug addiction, she suggested that he might try the methadone program, but he said they couldn’t help him even though he wanted to quit.
None of her talking was doing any good, however. The abductor was driving her car right back to the same corner where he had raped her a short while before. She balked at walking into the berry patch again, because she had lost her shoes, but he started calling her “bitch” and pushed her into the bushes. He punched her twice in the face and picked her up and threw her further into the brush.
Even through her fear, she was reminded of a child who was having a tantrum. He had apologized to her after the first rape, told her he had a wife and child, and said he was sorry he had hit her, had almost pleaded as he asked, “I’ve been good to you, haven’t I? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
She had tried everything to placate him, but all of her amateur psychology had only landed her back in the dark lot.
“Oh, no! You don’t want to do this again?” she asked in horror.
His answer was to punch her in the left jaw, and she staggered, and he hit her again. She began to cry, and that angered him, too, so he thumped her on the back. She stopped crying and submitted.
Oddly, she hadn’t been afraid he would kill her, but now, as he raped her for the second time and threatened to inflict various perversions on her, she realized he might very well murder her. She moaned in terror—and that seemed to please him. He asked if she was enjoying the sex act, and she finally lied and said yes.
She meant to stay alive if she could.
But nothing seemed to satisfy him. He threatened sodomy, and she cringed. She knew she would scream and that he would wring her neck if she did.
Finally, her attacker was finished with her. Was he going to force her back into the car again? No, he was gathering her clothes and preparing to leave. She begged him to let her have her clothes, and he finally relented, tossing them back at her.
“It’s my first rape,” he crowed. “Wow! I just raped somebody!”
She cowered in the bushes, wondering if he was so enthused about his conquest that he’d turn back to her, but no, he was leaving.
“I’ll leave your car at Northgate,” he called back.
Lynn had hidden her diamond ring under the seat. If he found that, he might be furious
and come back and hit her again or kill her. As soon as she heard the car drive off, she put on her ruined clothes and ran to a nearby house and begged the owner to call 911.
Patrol officer G. Weyers responded to the call, and on the way, the officer received a “possible” sighting report of the stolen car, but it turned out to be an identical car, not Lynn Rutledge’s. The officer drove the injured kidnap victim to a hospital for treatment of her many cuts and bruises. Then the brave young woman volunteered to go with Weyers in a search for her car—and the man who had abducted her.
They looked all around the parking lot at the Northgate Mall, but they couldn’t find her car. Lynn, however, spotted it parked along the street near the Wallingford police precinct. It was impounded for processing, and fingerprint expert Jeanne Bynum was able to lift one good partial latent print.
But the shaggy-haired rapist was long gone once again. It was likely that he lived in the neighborhood where the car was found; several of the other attacks had occurred in the same general vicinity. The latent would do no good alone; it would be vital if a suspect was found with prints to compare.
On June 2, Detective Fenkner got an anonymous call saying that the Northgate kidnapper was one Michael Smith, late of the Monroe Reformatory. Fenkner pulled Smith’s file and found that the twenty-three-year-old parolee had a rap sheet going back to 1968 but not involving sex offenses. Smith’s bookings had resulted from auto theft, grand larceny, burglary, and assault. He had served thirteen months at the penal facility at Shelton and fourteen months at the Monroe Reformatory for parole revocation. He had been released from Monroe two days before Christmas in 1974. In February 1975, he had been arrested as a burglary suspect.
Smith’s current location was unknown, but a look at his mug shots revealed that he fit the general description of the man who had been terrorizing women in the North End of Seattle: born April 27, 1952; six feet tall; 165 pounds; brown hair and blue eyes. He occasionally had worked as a carpenter.