IL - Ex-Police Sergeant Doubled as Serial Rapist

By JIM AVILA, ALISON LYNN and LAUREN PEARLE

Wife Stands by Illinois Policeman Jeff Pelo, Sentenced to More Than 400 Years in Prison

On May 12, 2003, 25-year-old Kristie Mills awoke to the unimaginable: a masked intruder standing in her doorway.

"I was in shock," Mills said. "Absolute shock. I looked at the door and saw the light there, and something just didn't seem right. And that's when I saw him.

"The next thing I remember is he was on top of me in the bed," she said. Mills said the intruder told her he was there to burglarize her, and that he didn't want to hurt her, but if she made noise, he would shoot.

Wearing a ski mask and gloves, he seemed oddly calm and methodical as he bound her with zip ties and duct tape, she said.

"He actually taped all the way around my head so that I wouldn't be able to open my mouth at all. Put tape over my eyes."

Then he slipped a pillowcase over her head. "He seemed very assertive when he talked and not like somebody who's, you know, panicking. He seemed like he knew what he was doing," Mills said.

The man sexually assaulted Mills for 45 minutes.

Then, still blindfolded, he forced her into the bathroom where she heard water running. "I started to panic and I thought he was going to shoot me in the bathtub," she said. "Just over a month from my 26th birthday, and I was going to die."

Mills was forced to take a long bath and told to wash carefully, while her rapist calmly walked about her apartment cleaning up after himself.

As quickly as he had arrived, he was gone, taking with him all the evidence, including the bed sheets.

She was so upset and scared that when she got out of the bathtub, removed the pillowcase, and ripped the tape from off her eyes, she "actually ripped hunks of hair out." She then called 911.

Rapist's Next Victim

Two years later, the rapist found his fourth victim, 28-year-old restaurant manager Sarah, who also awoke to someone coming into her room in the middle of the night. She was just six weeks away from her wedding.

"It was gun to my head, knife to my throat," said Sarah, who asked that her last name be kept private.

He made it clear he had been stalking her, and he threatened her loved ones. "He knew everything about me," she said. "What my sister looks like to what car my husband drove, my work schedule. He knew where I worked out. Pretty much everything."

Sarah had brushed off an attempted break-in a couple of months earlier. "I didn't take that seriously," she said.

The intruder sexually assaulted and attacked Sarah for almost three hours. As with Mills, he was careful. He bound her hands and covered her head with a pillowcase.

"The majority of the assault was spent just humiliating and demeaning and terrorizing me. I mean, it wasn't at all about anything to do with sex. Just devastation is what, how I felt."

Rape Investigation: Searching for a Model Citizen

Before leaving, as he had with Mills and his other victims, the attacker forced Sarah into the bathroom for a long soak to wash away the evidence.

"All I could think about was, 'I can't have someone call my family, my fiancé, my parents, my siblings and tell them that I have been killed six weeks before I get married,'" she said.

He left Sarah alone, shaking in her tub and waiting hours until sunrise to flee.

Although she considered telling no one, she thought, "If I don't tell the police, this person is going to rape yet another person." So she called the cops.

Even through her trauma, Sarah had memorized details of her attacker, from his gait to the haunting eyes behind his mask.

"He had a very distinct way of walking," Sarah said. "Kind of cumbersome. He had very distinct bright blue eyes. I knew I would be able to pick them out as soon as I saw that person."

Mills also remembered his eyes. "When you're staring into those eyes and that's the only thing you can see and the only thing you can focus on, they stick with you."

Bloomington, Ill., Police Detective Clay Wheeler had spent two years, from December 2002 to January 2005, pursuing the first serial rapist in his town's memory.

"I've seen more brutal things, more violent things, but some of the things that happened and what he would say and tell these girls as he's assaulting them, and I mean, I get chills and just … it just disgusts me," he said.

He and his partner Matthew Dick realized this was a special kind of rapist; he was a stalker, a man seemingly obsessed with his victims who gathered intimate details about them.

"He's actually engaging in conversation rather than just the quick act of violence," Dick said. The victims described how he would talk almost lovingly to them, as if he was their boyfriend, before getting angry and violent.

And he knew how to cover his tracks. "It was very obvious to us that this was a sophisticated criminal and knew what he was doing," Dick said.

When the police turned to the FBI for help, they were told the rapist might be a seemingly model citizen.

"The one thing they did tell us that I'll never forget is that this would be some guy that everybody works with. They'll say, 'Naw. He couldn't do that. He wouldn't do that,' you know. And it'd be somebody that would be maybe a respected member of the community," Wheeler said.

The police had no prime suspect. Meanwhile, the rapist was stalking his next victim.




Source: sexoffenderissues.blogspot.com