How to catch a serial rapist

Brown, 38, was set for release from prison in May after serving a four-year sentence for a similar attack on a year-old girl in He wasn't prosecuted in that case until Lesson: Rapists don't always stick to the same types of victims. Some prey on strangers and people they know. Dwayne Wilson:. A jury convicted Dwayne Wilson last month of raping four women between and He was set to get out of prison when rape kit testing connected the year-old to the cold cases.

The rape cases linked to Wilson were geographically diverse but had commonalities, like the use of a knife or a box cutter. He was even arrested in one of the cases a decade earlier. Police made efforts to track down Wilson in after a nurse, waiting alone to catch a bus to work, reported a man with a "carpet cutter" forced her behind a gas station and raped her.

The nurse got her attacker's license plate and when an officer found him, a cutting tool similar to what the year-old woman described was in his trunk, prosecutors said. Though the reason is unknown, a Grand Jury declined to indict Wilson on those charges. But his name kept popping up in rape investigations. Meanwhile, Wilson, who worked as a day laborer, was accused of sex crimes at least three other times, including convictions in and In those cases his victims were girls, aged 11 and 14 that he knew.

In , he was linked to a rape case during a rape kit testing pilot project. But the case was dismissed when the victim did not show up to testify. Lesson: DNA testing of rape kits can help link harder-to-solve cases together, giving investigators more information to go on.

Example: Robert Green. Robert Green was on oxygen when police went to arrest him in for the rapes of five women reported over a decade starting in Many of the attacks were reported in the same East Side neighborhood, near St.

Clair Avenue and East nd Street. Victims gave somewhat similar descriptions of their attacker. Other than that, there wasn't much evidence to tie the attacks together. And Green's only conviction locally was for carrying a gun into an airport.

There was only one clue, an address. One of Green's earliest victims had called detectives with an address where she'd seen him. Armed with that, Cleveland Det. Karl Lessmann searched for names and then driver's license photos and men who had lived there. By the time Green's case was ready for trial, DNA had connected him to two more rapes, bringing his total to seven known attacks. Last year, Judge Pamela Barker sentenced the year-old to years in prison. The only details she could describe her attacker, glimpsed through the tape, was that he wore white sneakers and camo pants.

So far, DNA linked three of the crimes to each other, but it is believed at least eight were connected based on similarities in how the crimes occurred, location, and choice of victims.

Because DNA has become a powerful tool for solving old and cold cases, rape kits are being re-examined through a new lens. When an individual becomes the victim of sexual assault, bodily fluids are collected during treatment, often yielding offender DNA. The method for collected semen or blood from a victim involves using a Rape Kit, and the materials collected are stored. In some cases, without a lead on a perpetrator, these rape kits can be stored for years or decades.

But as the database of DNA profiles expands, more rape kits can be brought out of storage for analysis. The technical term is SAFE: Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence kit, and it takes a minimum of eight hours and up to 16 hours to fully analyze the contents. After a forensic analyst gets a SAFE kit, they cut out samples of whatever material is inside, including hairs, fibers, semen and blood.

The kits may have as few as four samples, or as many as 20, so it takes significant time to run tests on each sample, according to the Statesman Journal. Technicians and analysts have to take their time and make detailed notes because their work may be used in a courtroom, and they may need to testify as to the results. Technicians at state labs usually face backlogs, which is where the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative comes in.

Starting in , the SAKI grant-funded initiative has provided funds for 70 American agencies to open old kits that never got analyzed. The Department of Justice reports that hundreds of criminals have been arrested and convicted as a result of the program.

Men who commit rape and other sex crimes sometimes commit other violent crimes, so getting them off the streets is benefits law enforcement and society. Once an individual is convicted of a sex crime, they are registered as sex offenders for life, and require a higher level of supervision than other felons. The existence of SAKI enhances not only the integrity of rape kit processing but helps ensure the physical evidence will undergo full processing and DNA profiling, giving sexual assault victims more confidence in reporting a rape.

Since serial sexual offenders usually do not stop offending unless they are jailed or die, using rape kits to identify them is one of the best ways to prevent crime. Daly was identified as a person of interest through a tip. Once his name came up, police began looking into his background and discovered he owned property in Mesa and Bisbee close to several of the crime scenes, according to AZCentral. In fact, law-enforcement experts know that there is a strong link between burglars — many of whom started their criminal activities as Peeping Toms — and serial rapists who assault women in their own home.

These rapists don't strike just any home. They tend to look for a house that is more isolated than the others around it — for example, separated by thick bushes or a patch of woods, thereby offering an easier break-in and subsequent getaway. This was the suspected MO of year-old Robert Jason Burdick, a serial rapist who focused his alleged year rape spree in the counties around his home of Nashville. Burdick, who, chillingly, owned his own security company, tended to rape women who resided near woods — earning him the nickname the Wooded Rapist — until his arrest in He also struck on stormy nights, perhaps because rain could muffle the noise he made climbing through unlocked windows.

How did Burdick manage to allegedly attack more than a dozen women without being caught? Among his victims was a year-old, who was confronted by a masked Burdick, armed with a gun. He tied her up and raped her in her bedroom.

Another victim was 17 when Burdick, again wearing a mask, woke her, a gun pointed at her temple. He forced the teen into her garage to carry out his crime. At the series of trials in and early that led to Burdick's multiple convictions, several women testified to being awakened or confronted by him in a similar way: a mask over his face, sometimes a gun in his hand.

So far, he has been sentenced to more than years in prison and is awaiting trial for at least six more cases. Scarily, he probably would still be out there if an alert resident hadn't called to report a masked man dressed in black carrying a flashlight in his neighborhood.

Police put Burdick under hour surveillance and got hold of his DNA. When a positive match was made between that and the DNA collected from the Wooded Rapist's victims, he was quickly arrested while driving down an interstate headed east of Nashville.

Rape is a crime that occurs because of the offender's predatory behavior, and you can never protect yourself one hundred percent from becoming a target.

But every woman should make sure her day-to-day behavior isn't putting her at a higher risk. Since it's often the consistency of a target's habits that gives a determined predator his cues, try occasionally to vary the path you take to and from work stick to a few routes you know well.

This way, a predator can't assume that you always get home at a specific time. To protect against home-invasion rapists, something as simple as locking your doors and windows, including your garage door, even when you are in your home can make a big difference.

It sounds obvious, but predators scout in advance for women who leave doors unlocked while running errands and watch to see if you enter your home without a key. Speaking of windows, make sure all of yours are securely covered by curtains or shades at night. Exposed windows broadcast whether you are alone and when you go to sleep.

These serial assailants search for that brief moment of vulnerability when you are by yourself and distracted or off in your own world. In the s, a serial rapist stalked Manhattan's usually safe Upper East Side, attacking more than 18 women in their 20s and 30s, usually between 1 and 4 a. My team in the prosecutor's office at the time theorized that he counted on his victims being tired at that hour and he knew some were off guard because they had been drinking.