The Wrong Side of Goodbye

6

Screen Cutter was the case name for the serial rapist Bosch had identified among the department’s open sexual assault reports. Combing through the files in the old city jail, Bosch had found four cases since 2012 that were seemingly related by MO but previously not seen as connected.

The cases shared five suspect behaviors that alone were not unusual but when taken as a whole indicated the strong possibility of one perpetrator at work. In each case the rapist had entered the victim’s home through a rear door or window after cutting the screen rather than removing it. All four assaults occurred during the day and within fifty minutes before or after noon. The rapist used the knife to cut the victim’s clothes off rather than ordering her to remove them. In each case the rapist wore a mask-a ski mask in two attacks, a Freddy Krueger Halloween mask in a third, and a Mexican Lucha Libre wrestling mask in the fourth. And finally, the rapist used no condom or other method to avoid leaving his DNA behind.

With these commonalities in hand, Bosch focused an investigation on the four cases and soon learned that while the suspect’s semen had been collected in rape kits in three of the four cases, only in one instance had the material actually been analyzed in the L.A. County Sheriff’s crime lab and submitted for comparison to stateand national DNA databases, where it found no match. Analysis in the two most recent cases was delayed because of a backlog of rape kits submitted to the county lab for examination. In the fourth case, which was actually the first reported rape, a rape kit was collected but no DNA from the rapist was found on the vaginal swab because the victim had showered and douched before calling police to report the assault.

The county lab and the LAPD lab shared the same building at Cal State L.A., and Bosch used his connections from his cold case days to speed up analysis of the two recent cases. While he awaited the results he thought would solidly connect the cases, he began requesting follow-up interviews of the victims. Each of the victims-three women in their twenties and a now-eighteen-year-old-agreed to meet with the detectives. On two of the cases he would have to turn over the questioning to Bella Lourdes because it was noted that the victims preferred to do the interviews in Spanish. It underlined the one drawback for Bosch in working cases in a city where nine out of every ten citizens were Latino and had varying capabilities when it came to English. He spoke Spanish passably, but for an interview with a crime victim, where subtle nuances of storytelling might be important, he needed Lourdes, who understood it as a first language.

To each meeting Bosch brought a copy of a victim questionnaire used by LAPD investigators who worked violent crimes. It was nine pages of questions designed to help identify habits of the victim that might have drawn the attention of the offender. The questionnaires were helpful in serial investigations, particularly in profiling the offender, and Bosch had cadged a copy from a Hollywood Division sex crimes investigator who was a friend.

The questionnaire became the stated purpose of the new round of interviews, and the stories that emerged were equal parts sad andterrifying. These were undoubtedly stranger rapes and the attacks had left each woman recovering both mentally and physically as long as four years after the crime. They all lived in fear of their attacker returning and none had recovered the confidence they once had. One of them had been married and at the time was trying to conceive a child. The attack changed things in the marriage and at the time of the follow-up interview, the couple were in the midst of divorce proceedings.

After each interview Bosch felt depressed and couldn’t help but think about his own daughter and what sort of impact such an assault would have on her. Each time, he called her within the hour to check that she was safe and okay, unable to tell her the true reason he was calling.

But the follow-up interviews did more than reopen wounds for the victims. They helped focus the investigation and underlined the urgent need to identify and arrest the Screen Cutter.

Bosch and Lourdes adopted a conversational approach to each victim that started with assurances that the case was still being investigated as a priority by the department.

They scheduled the interviews in chronological order of the assaults. The first woman was the victim from whom no DNA evidence had been collected. The initial report on the crime explained that the woman had taken a shower and douched immediately after the attack out of fear that she would become pregnant. She and her husband at the time were trying to conceive a child and she knew that the day of the attack was also the day that she was most fertile in her ovulation cycle.

The victim was still separated by almost four years from the attack, and while the psychological trauma persisted, she had found coping mechanisms that allowed her to talk more openly about what was the worst single hour of her life.

She described the attack in detail and revealed that she had attempted to dissuade the suspect from raping her by lying and saying she was having her period. The woman told Bosch and Lourdes that the man replied, “No, you’re not. Your husband’s coming home early to fuck you and make a baby.”

This was new information and it gave the investigators pause. The woman confirmed that her husband was scheduled to come home early that day from the bank where he worked so that they could have an evening of romance, with the hope that it would result in her pregnancy. The question was, how did the Screen Cutter know that?

Under questioning from Lourdes the victim revealed that she had an app on her cell phone that tracked her menstrual cycle and told her the day of the month when she was ovulating and most likely to conceive. It was then her practice to transfer this information to a calendar kept on the refrigerator door. Each month she marked the day with red hearts and phrases like “Baby Time!” so her husband would be reminded of its significance.

On the day of the attack the woman had gone out to walk her dog in the neighborhood and was away from her home no more than fifteen minutes. She had her phone with her. The Screen Cutter had gained entrance to the house, and when she returned, he was waiting for her. At knifepoint he made her lock the dog in a bathroom and then took her into a bedroom, where the assault took place.

Bosch wondered whether those fifteen minutes she was walking the dog were enough time for the Screen Cutter to break into the house, see the calendar on the refrigerator, and understand its meaning to the point that he could make the comment to her about knowing what she and her husband had planned for the day.

Bosch and Lourdes discussed this and both felt it was more likelythat the rapist had been in the house previously, either as part of stalking the victim, or because he was a family friend or relative or a repairman or someone who’d had some other business there.

This theory was supported when the other victims were interviewed and an eerie new component to the Screen Cutter’s MO was established. In each case, there were indicators inside the victim’s home that revealed details of her menstrual cycle. In each case as well, the assault had taken place during what would have normally been the ovulation phase of each woman’s cycle.

The second and third victims revealed during the interviews that they used birth control pills that were dispensed from push-through pill cards. One of the women kept her pill card in a medicine cabinet, and the other in her bedside table. While the pills suppressed the ovulation cycle, the cards and color-coding of the pills could be used to chart when that five-to-seven-day phase would normally occur.

The last victim had been attacked the February before. She was sixteen years old at the time and home alone on a school holiday. The girl reported that at fourteen she had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and her menstruation cycle affected her insulin needs. She tracked her cycle on a calendar on the door of her bedroom so she and her mother could prepare the proper insulin dosage.

The similarity in the timing of each of the attacks was clear. Each victim was assaulted during what would normally be the ovulation phase of their cycle-the time when a woman is most fertile. For this to have occurred in four out of four cases seemed beyond coincidence to Bosch and Lourdes. A profile began to emerge. The rapist had obviously carefully chosen the day of each attack. While information about each victim’s cycle could be found inside her home, the attacker had to know this information beforehand. This meanthe had stalked his victims and likely had previously been in their homes.

Additionally, it was clear from descriptions of the attacker’s body that he was not Hispanic. The two victims who spoke no English said he gave them orders in Spanish but it was clearly not his first language.

The connections between the cases seemed stunning and raised serious questions about why the cases had not been linked before Bosch arrived as a volunteer investigator. The answers were rooted in the department’s budget crisis. The assaults occurred while the detective bureau was shrinking in size and those left in the squad had more cases to work and less time to work them. Different investigators initially handled each of the four rapes. The first two investigators were gone when the second two cases occurred. There was no cohesive understanding of what was going on. There was no constant supervision in the squad either. The lieutenant’s position was frozen and those duties were assigned to Captain Trevino, who had responsibilities in other areas of the department as well.

The connections Bosch identified between the cases were confirmed when the DNA results came back linking the three cases in which semen had been collected. There was now no doubt that a serial rapist had struck at least four times in four years in tiny San Fernando.

Bosch also believed that there were more victims. In San Fernando alone, there was an estimated population of five thousand illegal immigrants, half of them women and many who would not call the police if victimized by crime. It also seemed unlikely that such a predator would operate only within the bounds of the tiny city. The four known victims were Latinas and had similar physical appearances: long brown hair, dark eyes, and a slight build- none of them weighed more than 110 pounds. The two contiguousLAPD geographic divisions had majority Latino populations, and Bosch had to assume that there were more victims to be found there.

Since discovering the connection between the cases, he had been spending almost all of his time on the SFPD job making contact with investigators from LAPD’s burglary and sexual assault squads throughout the Valley as well as in the nearby departments in Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena. He was interested in any open cases involving screen cutting and the use of masks. So far nothing had come back but he knew it was a matter of getting detectives interested and looking, maybe getting the message to the right detective who would remember something.

With the police chief’s approval, Bosch had also contacted an old friend who had been a senior profiler with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Bosch had worked with Megan Hill on several occasions when he was with the LAPD and she was with the Bureau. She was now retired from the FBI and working as a professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. She also kept her hand in profiling as a private consultant. She agreed to look at Bosch’s case for a discounted rate and he sent her a package on the Screen Cutter. He was keenly interested in knowing the motivation and psychology behind the attacks. Why did the Screen Cutter’s stalking pattern include determining his intended victim’s ovulation phase? If he was trying to impregnate his victims, why did he choose two women who were taking birth control pills? There was something missing in the theory, and Bosch hoped the profiler would see it.

Hill took two weeks to get back to Bosch, and her assessment of the cases concluded that the perpetrator was not choosing the attack dates because he wished to impregnate his victims. Quite the opposite. The details of the stalking and subsequent attacks revealed asubject with a deep-seated hatred of women and disgust toward the bodily ritual of bleeding. The day of the attack is chosen because the victim is considered by the offender to be at the cleanest part of her cycle. For him, psychologically, it is the safest moment for him to attack. Hill added to the profile of the rapist by describing him as a narcissistic predator with above-average intelligence. It was likely, however, that he had a job that did not involve intellectual stimulus and allowed him to fly below the radar when it came to the assessment of his employers and coworkers.

The offender also had a high degree of confidence in his skill at eluding identification and capture. The crimes involved careful planning and waiting and yet were marked by what seemed to be a critical mistake in leaving his semen in the victim. Discounting that this was part of an intention to impregnate, Hill concluded that it was intended to taunt. The offender was giving Bosch all the evidence he needed to convict him. Bosch just had to find him.

Hill also focused on the seeming incongruity of the offender leaving probative evidence of identity behind-his semen-and yet committing the crimes while masking his visual identity. She concluded that the offender might be someone the victims had previously met or seen, or he intended to make contact with them in some manner following the attacks, possibly deriving some of his satisfaction from getting close to the victims again.

Megan Hill’s profile ended with an ominous warning:

If you eliminate the idea that the perpetrator’s motive is to give life (impregnate) and realize that the attack is urged by hate, then it is clear that this subject has not concluded his evolution as predator. It is only a matter of time before these rapes become kills.

The warning resulted in Bosch and Lourdes upping the game. They started by sending out another set of e-mails to local and national law enforcement agencies with Hill’s assessment attached. On the local level, they followed up with phone calls in an effort to break through the typical law enforcement inertia that descends on investigators who have too many cases and too little time.

The response was close to nothing. One burglary detective from LAPD’s North Hollywood Division reported that he had an open burglary case involving a screen cutting but there was no rape involved. The detective said the victim was a male Hispanic twenty-six years old. Bosch urged the investigator to go back to the victim to see if he had a wife or girlfriend who might have been attacked but was afraid or embarrassed to report the assault. A week later the LAPD detective reported back and said there was no female living in the apartment. The case was unconnected.

Bosch was now playing a waiting game. The rapist’s DNA was not in the databases. He had never been swabbed. He had left no fingerprints or other evidence behind other than his semen. Bosch found no other connecting cases in San Fernando or elsewhere. The debate over whether to go public with the case and ask for the help of citizens was simmering on the back burner in the office of Chief Valdez. It was an age-old law enforcement question: Go public and possibly draw a lead that breaks the case open and leads to an arrest? Or go public and possibly alert the predator, who changes up his patterns or moves on and visits his terror on an unsuspecting community somewhere else?

In the Screen Cutter case Bosch and Lourdes had conflicting views. Lourdes wanted to go public, if only to chase the rapist out of San Fernando if the move produced no leads. Bosch wanted more time to quietly look for him. He felt that going public would indeed chase him out of town but that it would not stop the victim count.Predators didn’t stop-until they were caught. They just adapted and continued, moving like sharks to the next victim. Bosch didn’t want to move the threat to another community. He felt a moral obligation to chase the suspect down here where he was active.

But there was no right answer, of course, and the chief appeared to be waiting, hoping that Bosch would come through and break the case before another victim was attacked. Bosch was ultimately relieved not to have the decision on his shoulders. He figured this was why the chief made the big bucks and he made none.

Bosch checked his e-mail now and saw he had no new messages in his queue with Screen Cutter in the subject line. Disappointed, he shut down the computer. He put his notebook back in his pocket and wondered if Trevino had looked down on it while hovering in the cubicle. It had been opened to the page with James Franklin Aldridge’s name written on it.

He left the squad room without bothering to say good-bye to Trevino or write his time down on the board at the front door.