Yeardley  Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. How are you guys? I hope you’re all doing wonderfully well. You’ll be happy to hear that fan favorite Detective Lindsey Wade is back with us today. As always, she brings us a case that highlights how shocking a day in the life of a sex crimes detective can be, including the harrowing challenge of being one step behind a serial rapist who is terrorizing multiple jurisdictions. I remember when we were recording this episode, thinking there are a lot of similarities between the way Lindsey’s offender evolved and the way Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer evolved. So, it was fascinating to hear Paul’s thoughts on how Lindsey’s suspect was operating during his spree and where he was very likely headed had he not been caught.

 If you’re a longtime listener to the podcast, you know we are always sparing in the details of what the victims endure during any sexual assault we cover. But in this case, it doesn’t mitigate much of the horror, because the way this offender chose his victims, the amount of reconnaissance he did, is every woman’s worst nightmare. And it made me think how sometimes it’s impossible to feel safe. Here is “You’re It.”

[music]

Yeardley  Hi, there. I’m Yeardley.

Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  I’m Dave.

Paul:  And I’m Paul.

Yeardley:  And this is Small Town Dicks.

Dan:  Dave and I are identical twins.

Dave:  And retired detectives from Small Town, USA.

Paul:  And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Dan:  Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

Dave:  Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare personal account of how they solved the crime.

Paul:  Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

Dan:  And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave:  -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

[Unison]:  Thank you.

Yeardley:  Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan.

Dan:  Me first [Yeardley laughs]. Hello.

Yeardley:  You’re first in my heart.

Dan:  Aw, thanks.

Yeardley:  Aww. We have Detective Dave.

Dave:  Hello, team.

Yeardley:  Hello, you. And we have, ta, ta da, da… the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul:  Hey, hey.

Yeardley: [laughs] I feel like the more grandiose I am with the intros, the more muted you all are in reply. That’s fair.

Paul:  It’s called balance.

Dave:  De-escalation.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  I take your point, and Small Town Fam, this is a very good day. We are so pleased to welcome back to the podcast, the one and only Detective Lindsey Wade.

Lindsey:  Hello.

Yeardley:  Ha…Lindsey. It’s so great to see you again. Thank you.

Lindsey:  Glad to be back.

Yeardley:  We always feel like it’s a good sign when a detective will actually come back and talk to us. [Lindsey laughs] But you now, I think this is your third go with us, and that means the world to us. Thank you so much.

Lindsey:  Absolutely.

Yeardley:  Lindsey, this case you’re bringing us today, tell us how it came to you.

Lindsey:  Yeah. So, gosh, this is a case that happened back in 2005, and this was definitely a memorable investigation for me. It was a serial rape investigation that spanned multiple jurisdictions. And one of those cases that’s kind of like, I don’t know, your nightmare. I know that, at least for myself, I always have these ideas, like, “Well, if I do this, I’m safe, or if I do that, I’m safe. I lock my door, I have an alarm, I have a gun. I pay attention to my surroundings, blah, blah, blah, blah.” This is one of those cases that shattered all of those ideas, because this offender was so brazen, and he was really just– He didn’t care. He had no boundaries and seemed to be becoming more and more violent with each attack.

Yeardley:  It sounds like the Golden State Killer, right? Were you going say that, Dave?

Dave:  I was just going to say Paul could probably sit this one out. He’s not going to have too much of background, historical information.

[laughter]

Lindsey:  No, no. So, the first case that I was involved with, happened back in October of 2005, and I actually got called out early morning, I think it was probably 5 in the morning for a home invasion rape. And so, I get a call from my supervisor to respond out to this house. It was a single-family residence in a normal residential area. Three female roommates were living together and the offender had broken into their home in the middle of the night, cut the phone lines, which right off the bat, that was extremely unusual. And we never knew 100% how we got into the house. It’s possible that there could have been an open window or an unlocked door, but there was no sign of, obvious, a door kicked in or a broken window or anything like that.

 But somehow, he got into the house, and he woke up the first roommate, got her out of bed, and then systematically went from room to room. Basically, collected all three of the women that lived in the home from their separate bedrooms. And these women wake up to see a guy wearing a ski mask, wearing gloves. He’s basically covered from head to toe. He’s got a gun. They described it as a revolver with wooden grips. And he basically takes all their cell phones and either breaks them or hides them, tells them he’s looking for money. He makes the girls walk around the house and he leads them around saying that he’s looking for money.

 And then he ends up tying up two of the women with various cords and things that he found in the house, ties them up. They end up getting loose. So, he re-ties them with some additional cords and hair dryer cords and straightening iron cords that he finds at the house. And his attention was really primarily on the third female, who I believe was his intended target. We’re just going to call her Amy. And he spent several hours in the house sexually assaulting her in various rooms within the house. When he was done, he made Amy bathe. He actually bathed her in some attempt to get rid of the evidence. And while she was actually in the shower, he fled, finally. And again, I think they estimated maybe two and a half to three hours that he was in the house.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Lindsey:  So, now they’ve got no phones. Their phone lines have been cut, and he’s taken their cell phones. So, they jump in the car and drive to her boyfriend’s house.

Yeardley:  To Amy’s boyfriend’s house.

Lindsey:  Yes. And then call the police from there, and she’s taken to the hospital. So, the patrol officers respond to the hospital, and they hear what had happened, and they end up asking for a detective call out, which was the appropriate move to do that. When I got to the hospital, it was clear to me that the officers weren’t really buying the story. They were kind of scratching their heads, like, “This doesn’t sound right. You know, how can this be? This is the craziest story we’ve ever heard kind of a thing.” And, I mean, it’s just not uncommon because it was so outside the box and so uncharacteristic of any kind of a sexual assault. But to hear all the things that this person did in the house, it was hard for these officers to believe that this actually happened.

Yeardley:  So, was that though, because was Amy the only one who was sexually assaulted?

Lindsey:  Yes.

Yeardley:  And they didn’t believe that this suspect would only rape one woman?

Lindsey:  I don’t think that’s it. I just think that the story of what happened seemed so outrageous that it was just hard for them to even wrap their minds around the fact that this could actually happen.

Dan:  I’ve worked with folks like that.

Lindsey: If they haven’t experienced it or they haven’t been exposed to this type of violence before. For some people, it’s just hard for them to wrap their brain around the fact that, “No, this stuff really does happen. This isn’t like a made-up story. This isn’t a movie. This happens in real life.”

Dave:  Right. I’ve had multiple patrol officers at hospitals where I get called out, pull me aside and say, “There’s no way it happened this way.” And I’m like, “Well, I’ll make up my mind,” and then you ask some questions. I wouldn’t say it’s a lot officers. I wouldn’t even say it’s a few. It’s a pretty small number. But one officer in particular that I used to talk to, he’d just say, “I just have a hard time believing that an adult could ever do this to a child.” And I’m like, “Well, you’re in the wrong fucking job, dude.”

Lindsey:  Yeah, yeah.

Dave:  So, I can understand where some of these officers are coming from because it sounds like a movie.

Lindsey:  Yes.

Dave:  And they’re saying there’s no way they would happen this way. And sadly, we know from experience that, yes, that does happen. You have to keep an open mind.

Lindsey:  Absolutely. And, I mean, regardless of whether they had questions about it, they did the right thing by notifying their supervisor and ultimately initiating a call out of detectives so that we could take over. But it was very surreal to be honest. And I remember sitting in the waiting room with Amy’s boyfriend and him asking me, like, “On a scale of one to ten, how bad is this? how serious is this?” I’m like, “Mm. It’s at the top.” This is very unusual, and we need to be geared up for next time, so we better do everything that we can during this crime scene investigation and during this investigation to try to identify this guy.

Paul:  And did the offender verbalize any threats to the women?

Lindsey:  He did not in this case. He demanded money. So, one of the common threads throughout all the attacks in this case was that he would tell them, this is just a robbery or I’m just here for the money. And I don’t know if that was just to try to kind of downplay it, so that they would calm down and think that it was just going to be a robbery and not something else. But he kept asking for money, but that was about it.

Paul:  You know, the demanding of the money, there is a duality for the reason. You do have offenders that are using the demand for money to de-escalate the victims. You know, “Okay, this isn’t a sexual assault. I’m just here to take stuff.” But also, the offenders will do that because in their mind, they don’t want to perceive themselves as a rapist. They want to see themselves as a thief.

Lindsey:  Yeah.

Dave:  And so, they’re trying to minimize internally why they are there, but the reality is they’re for the sexual assault.

Lindsey:  Absolutely. So, this case, early on, we didn’t have a ton of leads. We collected a ton of things from the house to include a partial shoe impression from a hardwood floor. And that would come into play later on in the investigation.

Yeardley:  Did it have mud on the shoe because it’s a hardwood floor?

Lindsey:  No.

Yeardley:  How do you get a shoe impression on a hardwood floor?

Lindsey:  So, the latent print examiner dusted the floor and was able to identify a shoe impression that was not visible to the naked eye.

Yeardley:  Wow.

Lindsey:  But we collected some clothing, and there was a toothbrush that the offender required Amy to use to brush her teeth after the assault, a towel. Amy actually had the presence of mind to wipe semen that was on her face onto the floor of the bathroom when he wasn’t looking, before he made her get into the shower.

Dan:  So, you’re talking to Amy, and you hear a detail like that, where does your mind go? You’re clapping in your mind.

Lindsey:  Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like, I can’t believe that while she’s enduring all of this that she’s thinking about how she’s going to help solve her own case.

Dan:  That’s amazing.

Dave:  And in speaking to Amy and her roommates, what did you gather from those conversations?

Lindsey:  Yeah. I don’t think that any of them truly, at the time that I was interviewing them, had even come close to coming to terms with what had happened. It just seemed so unreal, and it was so outside the realm of anything they’d experienced. And because these kinds of crimes are so uncommon, and then to have a crime like this happen by a total stranger, I think everyone was scratching their heads, going, “Okay, how does this guy know you? How did he target you? How did he come across you? What was the interaction or the connection?” And we just couldn’t find one.

Dave:  It also highlights, sometimes you’ll have a defense attorney, “You know, you were interviewed by Detective Wade on the night of this incident, but you never brought up anything that you brought up in the second interview.” And I always go, “Well, things come back to you.” It’s the same reason why a lot of police unions, after an officer involved shooting, you have a 48-hour to 72-hour delay in an officer giving their statement. It’s because things come to you in the moments of calm and clarity where you’re like, “I forgot that detail.” So, just to stress, it’s normal for people to have more detail later on in the interview process.

Lindsey:  Yeah. And for that reason, we didn’t even attempt to interview the victim who was sexually assaulted, Amy, that morning or that day even. I got some basic information from her just about the crime scene when we were at the hospital, and we didn’t even sit down with her and do a formal interview until the next day for that reason.

Dave:  Season detective.

Yeardley:  In 2005, is there a DNA database?

Lindsey:  Yes.

Yeardley:  So, the semen that’s collected at least can get uploaded into, is that CODIS?

Lindsey:  Yes. So, in this case, a sexual assault kit was completed at the hospital, but there was no DNA found in the sexual assault kit. If you recall, the offender made Amy bathe. He actually bathed her himself. So, there was no DNA collected from her body, however, and this is where I  have to chuckle when it comes to these guys that think they’re smart and think that they can somehow evade detection because they, I don’t know, they watched an episode of CSI or something, is that, you know, “Okay, so you made the victim bathe, but then you left the items that she used to bathe herself at the scene.” And so, in this case, it was the toothbrush that he required her to use that ended up having semen identified from the toothbrush.

 And so, his DNA profile was generated from that, but there was no match in CODIS. So, that was frustrating but the interesting thing that I learned from the crime lab when I called the DNA supervisor and said, “Hey, I’ve got this case, and this is a priority. I need this stuff turned around ASAP.” I tell him the details of the case, and he goes, “mm-hmm. He goes, “Well, that sounds real similar to a case we just got from your neighborhood, the sheriff’s department.” So, I’m like, “Really? [laughs] Okay, tell me about that case.” So, he gives me the case number, I look it up, and it’s almost identical in a neighboring jurisdiction.

[Break 1]

Yeardley:  When did this other attack in the neighboring jurisdiction take place?

Lindsey:  That happened back in August. So, this was October when this crime occurs. So, just a couple months prior, there had been a similar attack in a very small town, maybe, I’m going to say five miles from this incident.

Yeardley:  That you were investigating?

Lindsey:  Correct. Yeah. So, this previous incident occurred back in August. I was unaware of it, and thankfully, the crime lab knew about it and was able to point me in the right direction. And when I read through that case, immediately got ahold of the detective who was assigned to that one. He had also submitted evidence from that case to the lab, and we learned pretty quickly that we had the same offender based on the DNA. And similarly, in that case, there was no DNA from the sexual assault kit. However, there was a swab of the victim’s neck taken and a swab of her breast taken by the sexual assault nurse examiner and that had the offender’s DNA.

Yeardley:  That’s amazing. And that information from the August attack just hadn’t been uploaded into CODIS yet, which would be why you didn’t get a match.

Lindsey:  Right. But there was also no match to an offender. This guy was not in CODIS as a convicted offender. So, we would have gotten a case-to-case match if it had already been in there, but we wouldn’t have known who the offender was.

Yeardley:  Understood.

Lindsey:  And so, this attack that occurred in August in the town of Fircrest, this young lady was, I want to say she was 19 or 20. She lived at home with her mother and her brother. And she wakes up in the middle of the night in her bedroom to a strange man wearing a ski mask, armed with a gun, standing next to her bed. And he sexually assaulted her, again for several hours. At one point, she actually screamed, and her mother came into her bedroom, and he must have heard the mother coming, because he told her, if you say anything, I’ll kill her. And so, when mom came in, it was dark. Mom couldn’t see what was going on in there. And so, the victim just said, “Oh, I saw a spider, mom, go back to bed.” So, her mom left.

 And during the course of the attack, the offender forced her to take drugs. He had some pills, which I think was Ecstasy, that he made her take. He told her that he had been watching her and that he had seen her in her room earlier taking pictures. So, he clearly was doing some surveillance ahead of time. And then the really peculiar thing that he did, at the conclusion, he made her get up and walk him to the front door and then made her give him a kiss before he left.

Yeardley:  Eww.

Lindsey:  Like they were on a date or something.

Paul:  Hmm.

Yeardley:  Paul.

Paul:  Okay. So, we are not going to dive into the sexual assault details and the sex acts that the offender did, but during the sexual assault, was he somebody that was cuddling with his victims or is he punching them? Is he making derogatory statements?

Lindsey:  None of the above. The sexual assault was pretty violent. He actually put the barrel of the gun into her mouth and into other orifices. So, he was extremely violent, but he wasn’t verbally making threats or anything like that.

Paul:  Yeah, because this idea of having the victim walk him to the door and give him a kiss, that sounds like he’s fantasizing about a consensual relationship. And I come out of this philosophy, gross rapist typologies where you have your power assurance, your power assertive, anger retaliatory and sexual sadists and this is a broad classification of offenders. And these categories offenders are very different from each other or can be. And this idea of an offender coming in and living out a fantasy of a consensual relationship with the victim, where I mentioned before, cuddling with the victim in the bed and stroking her hair and whispering sweet nothings into her ear. There are offenders that do this. This is out of my jurisdiction NorCal rapist.

 This is a category of your power reassurance offender. They will use violence to control the victim, but they are trying to live out this fantasy of this relationship with the victim versus somebody like a Joseph DeAngelo as a serial rapist. He was an anger retaliatory type of rapist. He is overwhelming the victims. He is not being nice to the victims. So, your offender sounds like it might be a mixed offender with the foreign object insertion, obviously trying to denigrate the victims with that. He possibly has fantasy of using the gun against the victims. But then to have this kind of almost this strange consensual kiss at the end of the rape, it’s like he wants that reassurance that she liked her experience with him.

Lindsey:  Yeah.

Dan:  I also think that there’s a degree there where the offender, that’s just one more way of humiliating her is to have her give him a kiss. It’s adding insult to injury.

Yeardley:  Totally.

Dan:  It’s brutal.

Lindsey:  So, we knew after those first two cases that we had one offender that were looking for but didn’t know who it was. And there was a pretty intense media interest at that point. We tried to do what we could as far as canvassing and putting out information, but we had a guy wearing a ski mask [chuckles]. We had no vehicle description. As far as the two victims, they looked similar. So, they both had long dark hair, they both had olive skin tone. And so, we thought, okay, maybe there’s some connection there as far as preference of victims, but how is he targeting these victims?

 We really couldn’t come up with any commonality between the victims. They didn’t know each other. They didn’t operate in the same circles. There was nothing that we could really identify other than the first victim worked at a local shopping mall. And so, we thought, okay, well, maybe he saw her at the mall.

Yeardley:  And the second victim, did she work in a public place like that?

Lindsey:  No. So, we were really struggling, but we didn’t have very long to wait before the next crime occurred. So, about 19 days after the incident that I investigated with Amy in Tacoma, I get a phone call from a detective in another neighboring jurisdiction. So, now we’re on to our third jurisdiction, and this is about maybe 25-30 minutes north of Tacoma. So, between Tacoma and Seattle, where this incident occurs. And I get a call from a detective late at night saying, “Hey, I saw the bulletin you put out about your home invasion rape. We just had a home invasion rape up here, and it seems very similar.” So, I think it was by the next day, we were having our first task force meeting with that agency. They had several detectives that came down to our headquarters, and we met to discuss the cases.

 And their case was very similar to the other two down in the Tacoma area. In this particular incident, it was an apartment, not a single-family residence, and there were five adults in the home when the offender broke in, three adult males and two adult females.

Yeardley:  Wow.

Lindsey:  He broke in through an unlocked window and surprised the first couple in their room, took control of them, and then forced them to corral the rest of the victims into one room. He made the women look for money. So, he basically forced them to move around the house with him holding them at gunpoint, telling them, where’s the money? This is a robbery. He brought his own binding. So, he’s learned that maybe he needs to be a little bit more prepared. So, he actually brought his own duct tape this time.

 He ended up tying up the three males. This is so bizarre. So, the offender, during a tirade that he went off on, while he’s there, he tells a male and female couple, “I know you guys took a shower together earlier. You know, I heard you guys in the shower.” So, he was clearly outside listening to what was happening inside the bathroom. But then he went on to berate the males, telling them that you can’t protect your women and saying all kinds of things to indicate that he was disgusted with them because he could come in and take control of their women and they really couldn’t do anything about it. And there was one particular male that he really didn’t like of the three.

 And I believe this was the male that he overheard showering with the female, which she was his intended target. The offender got pretty violent with him, ended up ripping an earring out of his ear, stabbed him in both thighs with a fork, threatened to anally rape him with a floor lamp, threw some kind of powder in his face, just over the top, extremely violent towards this one male.

Yeardley:  So, I wonder if the offender’s brutality toward this particular male who was in the shower with one of his victims is the thing that sets the rapist off as he’s just like, “How dare you take my prize?” referring to the woman.

Paul:  Yeah, I believe that’s entirely possible. Assuming that there had been no prior interaction between the offender and this male, as well as that this male didn’t do anything that upset the offender during the commission of the crime, then the acts that the offender is taking against this particular male could be a result of this interaction that he overhears between the male and the victim in the shower. And in many ways, there may be almost a level of jealousy that is occurring in that offender’s mind. And so, when he gets the opportunity, he’s upset that this victim has already given herself to this other male. And so now what he’s trying to do is strip power and control from that male, showing I’m the one that owns this victim. That’s how he’s thinking in his mind.

Yeardley:  Right. That’s terrifying.

Lindsey:  Yeah. So, the two females, he sexually assaulted them in front of the males. He also forced the two females to perform a sex act on each other, and then he forced the victims to bathe after it was over with. He fled the scene, left his roll of duct tape. I think they collected over 100 items of evidence from the apartment on this scene. And just like the other two, there was no DNA of his found in the sexual assault kits because he had forced them to bathe. But because he wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist, he left things at the crime scene that had his DNA on them, like a coke can and cigarette butts.

Yeardley:  So, the sexual assault kits that they take from these female victims don’t have the offender’s DNA. Am I to assume that there’s no actual penetration or he doesn’t ejaculate into– It’s curious to me that if that’s why he’s there to commit this sexual assault, that there isn’t semen inside these women.

Lindsey:  Yeah, it’s a good question, because you think even just making someone take a shower or take a bath isn’t necessarily going to eliminate all of the DNA. But in this case, they didn’t find any DNA, and I don’t recall any of the victims indicating that he wore a condom or anything like that.

Yeardley:  Hmm. Interesting.

Lindsey:  But the DNA that was recovered came from a pop can and I believe a cigarette butt at the scene. So, we were able to confirm that it was the same offender as the other two cases. The interesting thing about the King County Sheriff’s Department is they had a man tracker, and she came down, and I was like, “What’s a man tracker? I’ve never heard of this before.” [Yeardley laughs] So, of course, immediately I’m interested to find out what is a man tracker? So, she is like a human tracker. So, similar to what they use at Border Patrol and other agencies is they look at footwear impressions and they look at changes in whatever the substrate is to identify what happened, who was there, and where they went, what direction they went.

Yeardley:  What’s a substrate?

Lindsey:  Like a floor? concrete, grass, carpet, whatever the-

Yeardley:  The surface is.

Lindsey:  -the surface is. Yeah. So, the man tracker was able to take another set of prints, shoe impressions that were found at that scene, and then she sent that shoe impression along with the shoe impression that was collected from the crime scene in Tacoma to the FBI, and they were able to identify the type of shoe that the offender was wearing in both cases. And it was actually two different shoes, but they were both Nikes, both Nike tennis shoes. So, that was just helpful for us to know. Obviously, we’re not going to be able to identify [laughs] someone walking down the street based on their Nikes. But we knew that if at some point we get a suspect, that would be something that we could look at.

 So, it was interesting. More interesting was her ability to go through and basically track his route around the apartment complex, where he had been, where he likely parked his vehicle, just based on her tracking ability. So, it was pretty fascinating and that was the first time I used her on a case and going forward, she was involved in many cases of mine over the years because it was just such an interesting and fascinating ability.

Dan:  Any video surveillance at the apartment complex?

Lindsey:  No, we had no video. I don’t think we had video in any of the cases, which, 2005 doesn’t seem like it’s that long ago, but really, I guess it is.

Dan:  Yeah.

Lindsey:  Before the ring camera and everything else.

Dave:  And clearly the offender does surveillance. So, you know, the prevalence of CCTV and ring cameras back then, nonexistent. It wouldn’t be difficult to find an apartment complex without the bubble cameras on each corner.

Lindsey:  Right. Yeah. So, in this particular incident, this was the third one. The two female victims were very similar in appearance to the victims from the Tacoma cases. Again, olive skin, long dark hair, but we still couldn’t come up with any common place or any place where any of these victims would have crossed paths. So, again we were back to the drawing board. We have the DNA. We were doing a ton of your usual things that you would do on these cases, looking at sex offenders, looking at previous crimes that occurred in the area, trying to come up with potential leads. And then we were getting pretty swamped with leads coming in from the public as well. So, we were collecting DNA samples from people that were called in as tips and registered sex offenders and really coming up with nothing.

Yeardley:  And how was the cooperation between jurisdictions?

Lindsey:  It was pretty amazing. I had never actually worked with the King County Sheriff’s Office, and that kind of cemented my relationship with them. This case did because I worked many, many cases with them after this, and it was great.

Yeardley:  That’s cool.

Lindsey:  So, now here we are kind of mid-October, getting towards the end of October, and then the next wave of incidents actually happened on Halloween.

[Break 2]

Yeardley:  Lindsey, did you say there’s a wave of incidents on Halloween night?

Lindsey:  Yes, we actually had three. So, this guy had two attempts and a completed attack on Halloween, which was pretty unbelievable. The first one happened about 02:00 AM. And it was in Tacoma again. So, now he’s back to maybe 10-12 blocks from the first incident that I investigated in Tacoma.

Yeardley:  From Amy’s?

Lindsey:  From Amy’s attack. So, very, very close to Amy’s attack. And this was a case that didn’t really even get flagged as being potentially related to the series. I found out about it because I got a phone call from one of my old patrol partners, and he had been working graveyard the night before and called me and said, “Hey, did you hear about this home invasion?” And I said, “No, I haven’t heard anything about it.” And he goes, “Well, I think it might be your guy. He wasn’t successful, but a lot of similarities.”

 So, I pull up the report, and sure enough, this poor woman, she was about 60. She had her two young grandchildren in the home with her, and she called in a prowler report. So, twice she calls the police and says, “There’s a guy in my backyard.” Every time the police comes, he’s gone. The third time, he actually takes one of those big landscaping bricks that where you would build a retaining wall. He takes one of those from the backyard, and he throws it through the bedroom window of one of the little kids.

Yeardley:  Oh my God.

Lindsey:  Shatters this glass window, and then jumps into the window wearing a ski mask and gloves, armed with a revolver. Scares the hell out of these kids and this poor woman. He corrals up all three of them and basically leads them through the house as if he’s looking for somebody, doesn’t say a word to them. And then once he gets all the way through the house, he leaves. Never says anything.

Yeardley:  So, he never even says, “I’m here for money.” He doesn’t even pull that?

Lindsey:  No.

Dave: He’s looking for his intended victim.

Lindsey:  Yes. So, what we learn when I get over there and talk to this woman is that she has a 19- or 20-year-old granddaughter that is normally at the house. It happened to not be there that day. So, that case did not get investigated initially. We didn’t get called out to it. So, we had to go back and backtrack and do a lot of the investigation on that one. And he didn’t cut the phone lines, but the offender disabled the exterior lights so that he could have the cover of darkness while he was conducting his surveillance on the house. So that’s 02:00 AM on Halloween. Then at about 04:00 AM. So, a few hours later, he moves to the north end of Tacoma.

 So, now he’s moved about a mile away from this early morning attack, and the offender ends up forcing his way into an apartment. This time it’s through an unlocked sliding glass door, and there are two adult males and an adult female who live in this apartment. He makes her remove her clothing. He duct tapes her hands behind her back, if I recall correctly. He takes the two males, ties them up with duct tape, takes all their phones, and puts the two males in the bathroom. And then he tells the female victim to call her 17-year-old sister to come over and bring money. And she does. Her sister comes over. Her sister is then ambushed. She is also tied up.

 While this is happening, the two male victims are able to break free of their bindings and jump out a window and start running and screaming through the complex, banging on doors, until someone opens the door and they call the police. The offender hears what’s going on, and he ends up fleeing. Now, he’s struck out twice. And that incident as well, we didn’t get called out to. I don’t even remember how I found out about that one, but I did find out about it that morning. And when I went and spoke to the officer who took the report, he tried to tell me that it was some kind of a neighbor dispute over a stolen Xbox or something like that, and that it had nothing to do with the serial rapist and blah, blah, blah.

 And so, I’m just ready to lose my mind at that point. But again, we had to backtrack. We had to go find the victims, bring them all in. They’re wondering what the hell is going on. Why is it that this isn’t being taken seriously? And so, it was pretty insane. Luckily, neither of the victims were sexually assaulted because he didn’t have time. He fled before that occurred. But obviously, he didn’t get what he wanted. So, that evening, he goes up north to a jurisdiction called Des Moines, which is in King County. It’s between Tacoma and Seattle. And he commits his final act of the evening. And in that case, it was also an apartment complex.

 He managed to make entry into a secured kind of a vestibule in this apartment complex. He got inside the secured door and then waited for the victims to open the door. And this is Halloween night. And so, you can imagine they’re surprised he’s wearing a mask. They initially thought it was like someone playing a joke or someone in a Halloween costume. He ends up tapping on the door. They open the door and he rushes inside the apartment. And the offender, again is armed with the same type of gun, a revolver with wooden grips. He’s wearing gloves, he’s got the ski mask on. And this time it’s a family of six in the home. So, an adult mother and father, two older children. And when I say children, they’re in their early 20s, a 12-year-old, and then a toddler. And so, he corrals up everybody in the house, takes everybody’s cellphones and hides them.

 He separates the two girls from everyone else and ties everybody else up together in the same room. But then he takes the two girls to a different room, sexually assaults both of them repeatedly, forces them to bathe and then makes them get dressed and reties them up afterwards and actually hands them a pair of scissors before he leaves and tells them, “Count to 100 or something like that and then you can cut yourself loose.” Well, he leaves and then about a minute later, he comes back. He comes back and he tells him, I was testing you. I wanted to see what you were going to do.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Lindsey:  So they are terrified. He leaves again. They don’t report it for 10 hours. And the only reason they reported it is one of them actually went to work after this, believe it or not, and told a coworker what had happened. And the coworker convinced them that they needed to report it to the police. They weren’t going to report it.

Yeardley:  One of the girls who’s sexually assaulted ends up telling a coworker, this is what happened to me last night. And the coworker says, “You need to call the police immediately.”

Lindsey:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  That behavior of the offender pretending to leave and coming back before obviously count to 100 is up, sounds so much like the Golden State Killer, so much like DeAngelo. And it’s also, for this offender, a kind of escalation, isn’t it? And obviously a power play.

Paul:  Right. There’s two sides to what the offender is doing, and either side could stand alone in the offender’s mind or it may be both. And one side is this is an MO aspect to what the offender is doing. He wants to be able to escape. He is leaving his victims alive, but he wants to be able to have enough time to put time and distance from the crime scene before they’re comfortable enough to be able to alert authorities. So, by him coming back before they can reach a 100, that’s now putting a fear aspect in their mind that they need to abide by his instructions or they may suffer greater harm.

 However, the other side to it, and this is going to be a behavioral aspect, and this is in part DeAngelo, there’s a sadistic act to this behavior where when the offender comes back in, these victims, they’re going to gasp, they’re going to be in fear, they’re going to tremble. And he may enjoy that aspect. And right now, I couldn’t say, with this particular offender is one side more important to him than the other? It may be both. So, he does have a lot of overlap with Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, in terms of this type of behavior.

Yeardley:  Yeah, it’s terrifying. So, I just am so curious. This offender, he just, he doesn’t seem to have any fear of how many people are in the house. And I’m curious, how do you overpower multiple male subjects if you are one guy.

Paul:  With a gun? You think about this offender in each instance, I believe, Lindsey, this is correct, with the details you had provided, he had a firearm with him.

Lindsey:  Yeah.

Paul:  With Gold StateKiller Joseph DeAngelo, if there was a male inside the house, he always had a gun. If there was no male inside the house, oftentimes he didn’t have a gun. He just relied on a knife, oftentimes a knife out of the woman’s own kitchen. The gun is the ultimate equalizer. It’s the ultimate control mechanism. These victims, they’re not hardcore criminals. They’re not used to being confronted with men in ski mask, waving a gun around. They’re going to abide by whatever this offender wants with the hope that if they cooperate, he will just take what he wants and leave, not thinking that it’s going to escalate to some level of physical violence.

Yeardley:  Right.

Dan:  That’s the power of the gun.

Lindsey:  Yeah. I think he had the element of surprise waking these people up in the middle of the night in a lot of the cases. So, they’re disoriented.

Dave:  Right. You’re behind the curve.

Lindsey:  Mm-hmm.

Dave:  And you think about that Halloween night where he’s got a backup and another backup plan for his attacks. He’s very prepared.

Yeardley:  So, Paul, I want to ask you about this because, again, it reminds me of DeAngelo, but it also seems rather unusual where this particular offender on Halloween night, when he breaks into the house with the grandmother and the two young children, he is looking for his specific victim, who happens to not be there that night. He moves on to another house where there is a 19-year-old and has her call her own sister over. The sister comes, he rapes them both. He is aware of a sister. I mean, that just seems like a lot of planning. Can you speak to that?

Paul:  Well, he’s a very organized offender. He’s doing a lot of surveillance. And under surveillance, he is spotting victims at these locations that he wants to victimize. And so, when he does go there and the victims that he wants aren’t there, especially in that second case, he’s going, “I want you to get your 17-year-old sister here.” He understands the dynamics of that family, and he’s understanding that he can possibly get away with making that demand and being able to satisfy what he really wants that night. It sounds like he wants both, but particularly that 17-year-old. It doesn’t escape my attention that this is on Halloween night. He’s wearing the ski mask while the trick or treaters are out. And so, he’s just kind of blending in, so, he’s taking advantage of that.

 So, he is in that realm of what I would say he’s an intelligent and sophisticated offender that is thinking and is putting the effort in ahead of time in order to maximize getting out of the crime what he wants.

Yeardley:  Right. It seems like such an extraordinary risk and also a really fast escalation in this series of crimes.

Paul:  He’s been plotting this though for a long time. I don’t know how far ahead he is surveilling each of these victims, but in his mind, he’s been thinking about this for a long time. What if I do this? How am I going to be able to accomplish a crime if I do this? What is going to be the ramification? And again, with DeAngelo, I know of a case in Stockton where he shows up and there was parents and two kids in the house. And when he walks in and takes an inventory of the people that are inside the house, he comes back and says, “Where’s the other one? The other kid?”

Yeardley:  It’s terrifying.

Paul:  This really gives insight to what these offenders do. They survey, they understand the family dynamics, and then they fantasize about what they’re going to do, particularly with what Lindsey’s talking about with this offender. I want that 17-year-old girl here. That’s because he’s been fantasizing about her.

Yeardley:  And it must make him feel so powerful to be able to get the 17-year-old sister to actually get her over to the apartment. I mean, again, it just takes one more box in his fantasy this offender.

Paul:  He’s come in and he’s taken control, and he’s able to make the demands. And of course, the victims are in complete fear, “What is he going to do if we say no?”

Yeardley:  Exactly. The two girls on Halloween were the last incident on Halloween night, is that correct?

Lindsey:  Yes.

Yeardley:  Okay, so, Lindsey, in this last attack on Halloween night, the third attack, where he’s assaulting the two young women about how old are they? And do you know if they were sisters or how did they know each other?

Lindsey:  They were family members. I don’t recall if they were sisters or not, but they were both in their early 20s.

Yeardley:  Interesting. That’s actually a little bit older than his usual target it seems.

Dave:  I think he’s got a look, right?

Lindsey:  Yeah. It was more about, I think, the appearance than the actual age because we had a range of ages from 13 at the youngest up to mid-20s.

Paul:  Offenders may see a victim from afar, and based on what they perceive, that person checks the box and they make a decision, that is somebody I want to attack. They’re not thinking, “Oh, that victim isn’t 15, she’s only 13.” Basically, it’s whatever is about the victim. It could be the physical attributes, it could be the way the victim moves. There’s something about the victim that strikes the offender. We often will group victims based on select categories, you know, their age, their race, their hairstyle, their clothing, their economic status. Offenders don’t think that way. They look at the victim and they go, “Yes or no?” and sometimes you will have offenders who their sexual preference is with adults, but they offend in that younger age range. It’s just that they have slipped down.

 That younger victim just happened to satisfy a characteristic that the offender decided, “Yes, that is somebody that I will attack.” So, this is something we see where sometimes you’ll have a series and you will get victims of dramatic age ranges, but it doesn’t mean that the offender is purposefully choosing somebody who is much younger or much older. It’s just that victim satisfies a need.

Yeardley:  Right. That’s terrifying.

[Break]

Lindsey:  So, fast forward maybe a week after this last attack that occurred on Halloween, and the offender again breaks into an apartment. There was a mother and her two young teenage daughters living in the home, 13 and 15, I believe. He comes in through an unlocked window, through the kitchen and confronts the two girls in their beds while they’re asleep. Same getup as usual, he’s got the ski mask, the gloves, the gun, everything. He ends up threatening the girls. “Don’t make any noise or I’ll kill your mom.” Mom was asleep in the living room at the time. So, he begins his sexual assaults on these two girls. And at some point, mom wakes up and here’s what’s happening.

 She comes back there, and he takes control of mom, takes her back out into the living room and actually duct tapes her to a lamp, like a floor lamp, using duct tape and a dog leash, and then duct tapes her head and her eyes and everything so that she cannot help her children. I believe he also forced at least one of the girls to take some pills that he had with him. He took some pills and eventually he fell asleep and basically is out cold. Apparently, this is a lot of work for him. The victims see their window to escape, and so they grab their mom and they flee, and they end up going to a friend’s house, and they call the police. Police come, surround up the apartment. He’s still in there.

Yeardley:  The offender is out cold in the apartment.

Lindsey:  He’s out cold. Yeah. So, they surround this place up, and I don’t know if they had a bullhorn or what the situation was, but he eventually recognizes that the cops are outside. He comes out, he’s still wearing the ski mask. He’s got no shirt on, and he’s got the gun still, and he comes out onto an elevated patio deck area. He sees all the cops out there. He goes back inside the apartment, comes back out again. This time, he’s lost the ski mask. He’s got a bundle of something in his hands, and he chucks it and throws it off into the bushes. And they try tasing him. It doesn’t work. He ends up jumping off of the second story balcony down below, and then he takes off on foot.

 So, they end up shooting him. They only got him in the elbow. So, he was incapacitated and taken into custody at that point. He had duct tape still stuck to his underwear, but he was in complete denial. “I didn’t do anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know nothing about nothing. I was just taking a nap out here,” basically, is what his story was. He lied about his name when he got to the hospital. They eventually identified him through fingerprints as Anthony Casper Dias. So, then our investigation into him begins. And Dias was in his mid-20s when we arrested him. Turned out he was married. He had two young children. He was unemployed at the time. And when we served a search warrant on his house that night, we found duct tape, gloves, ski mask. He had a device that was used to test phone lines inside the house.

 One thing that we found that was interesting, we found the two types of Nike shoes that the FBI said were the shoes from the two attacks. But interestingly, we found a pack of these Marlboro blue 72 cigarettes. And the victims from one of the Halloween attacks in Tacoma had reported that’s the only thing he took, was a pack of these Marlboro Blue 72 cigarettes. Well, we found that cigarette pack in the house and he smoked KOOLS. Every other cigarette we found in the house and all his cigarette, paraphernalia that we found was all KOOL brand. So, we believed that those were the cigarettes Dias took from the second attack on Halloween in Tacoma that day, although we could never prove it. So, he’s in the hospital for a short period of time.

 Dias ends up getting released and booked into jail in Pierce County. And he was booked on 20 felonies, class A felonies with a weapon enhancement for each class A felony.

Yeardley: Did Dias have a history of violent crime?

Lindsey:  No. He had a driving while license suspended or something like that, some minor traffic situation. But that was his only conviction, so there was no reason for his DNA to be in the database. We did collect his DNA via search warrant and confirmed pretty quickly that his DNA matched the DNA from all of the other cases.

Yeardley:  You have a lot of compelling evidence against Dias. Did he take a deal or did he go to trial?

Lindsey:  He ended up going to trial. He actually, prior to going to trial, he tried to kill himself. He hung himself in the jail, but he was not successful. He also wrote a really incriminating note to his wife when she came to visit him. And then when the guards came to take the note, he tried to rip it up and throw it in the trash, but they pieced it back together and gave it to me. And he basically said, like, you know, “I robbed some people. I had to get mean. You know, I never took all their shit.”  t was like rambling. He was on Ecstasy during this timeframe, and basically was out of his mind. He never gave an interview. So, we really never learned the true extent of all of his crimes or what his motivations were, any of that stuff.

Yeardley:  What happened at trial?

Lindsey:  He ended up being found guilty on all 20 counts in Pierce County, and he got sentenced to like it was 227 years to life just for the Pierce County cases. He ended up taking a plea in King County and got another 37 years for the King County cases. But interestingly, I’ve never heard a judge berate someone the way that the judge berated Dias at his sentencing. And then after he was sentenced, his defense attorney came up to me and my partner and shook our hands and said, congratulations. You just took a really dangerous guy off the street.

Yeardley:  Wow.

Dave:  For a defense attorney to make that kind of admission or acknowledgement is huge.

Lindsey:  Yeah. Yeah. It was unbelievable that you could just be in your home with a family of six, minding your own business, and have some lunatic break into your house in the middle of the night, and do all these horrendous things.

Yeardley:  Did you have to testify at trial at Dias’ first trial?

Lindsey:  I did, yeah. I think I testified twice in that trial. And it was a lot, trying to keep all the facts [chuckles] straight and all the different cases and what my role was. But it was one of those cases where I had to put a lot of time and effort into prepping myself and prepping the prosecutors because they don’t really know what happened. So having to take them to all the crime scenes to show them all the evidence, to go through everything with them step by step, so that they truly understood what happened in order to prosecute the cases.

Yeardley:  Would Dias look at you when you were testifying?

Lindsey:  No, he didn’t. He would just sit there and stare down at his notepad. He seemed like he didn’t really care what was going on.

Yeardley:  So, no remorse that you could see?

Lindsey:  Oh, definitely not.

Yeardley:  Did Dias end up having to register as a sex offender?

Lindsey:  No. Because he never got out of prison. You only have to register once you get out. You’re not registered when you’re in.

Yeardley:  Where is Anthony Dias now in serving his couple hundred-year sentence?

Lindsey:  Well, he died in prison in 2017 at the ripe old age of 37, I believe.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God. Did somebody kill him in prison?

Lindsey:  They reported it as a natural death, so I don’t know what that means at age 37. I don’t know if he had some preexisting condition or disease or what. And we never found any other cases. We did a pretty extensive search nationally because he came from the east coast and we never identified any other cases, which I kind of find hard to believe, given how quickly he ramped up and went from 0 to 100. But we didn’t find any other cases linked to him.

Dan:  I’m curious, Dias’ wife and his family, how did they react to the news of this and obviously the court procedures?

Lindsey:  So, his wife refused to talk to us. We actually staked out her workplace and basically had to try and ambush her at one point to get her to talk to us. And she refused, never gave an interview. She did come to the trial. She broke down crying when he was convicted.

Yeardley:  And Dias never gave any statements. You never were able to actually learn how he ended up choosing his victims?

Lindsey:  No, we didn’t. I think malls were some of his target locations because we had multiple victims that had been at shopping malls, not the same mall, but various shopping malls in the area. And so, I think that was maybe one of his locations where he might see somebody come to their car and then follow them home.

Dave:  You just think about the offender’s day. So, he’s unemployed. I’m sure the wife is saying, “Hey, you need to go out and find work.” So, what is he doing? He’s going out saying that he’s trying to find work, but he’s just looking for victims.

Lindsey:  Right. I was really hoping we’d find some kind of journal or some writings or something where he would have maybe kept track of his target list, so to speak. The only thing we did find that was indicative of him writing things down. We found a glove at his house that had an apartment number written on it, and that corresponded with one of the apartment numbers for one of the cases.

Yeardley:  Wow. And you have a teenage daughter, but even you said that this case really set your hair on fire in terms of situational awareness and stuff. [chuckles] I just always imagine because we’ve talked to you several times now, and the kinds of cases you’ve investigated, what it’s like to be your daughter [Lindsey laughs] and have a mom. And your husband’s in law enforcement as well, isn’t he?

Lindsey:  Yes.

Yeardley:  [laughs] Like, is she allowed to leave the house ever? [laughs]

Lindsey:  She is now. Now that she’s a little bit older, and also she’s bigger than most guys, so she’s like 5’11” now and so, I think pretty sure she could take anybody on, but. Yeah. And it’s funny, too because she has now developed that situational awareness. We went on a road trip over the summer, and we ended up basically stopping at a roadside motel. And my daughter looks around, she’s like, mom, this place is sketchy.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  I love her.

[laughter]

Lindsey:  Fair assessment. Yes.

Yeardley:  It’s rubbed off in the best possible way. That’s so awesome.

Dave:  Right. It’s six hours and we’re out of here.

[laughter]

Lindsey:  Yeah.

Dan:  Just to try to wrap this up a little bit, thinking about the victims in this case, I’m sure you guys threw a lot of resources at them to hopefully be a sherpa as they recovered from these attacks.

Lindsey:  Yeah, I mean, we were lucky that in our system that we worked within, we had some really great advocates that we had access to and that our victims had access to. Because this is not something that you just walk away from.

Dan:  You don’t just get over it.

Lindsey:  No, no, absolutely not. I mean, I had a hard time getting over it, and I just investigated it, so I can’t even imagine what these victims have to deal with.

Yeardley:  Yeah. Lindsey, this was amazing and what incredible work. And again, I don’t know how you ever leave the house. I just don’t know how. How any of you leave the house after the kinds of things that you’ve seen and investigated. But thank you for bringing us that today. It’s so good to see you even over Zoom. Before you go, Linds, remind our listeners the name of your book.

Lindsey:  Yes, it’s called In My DNA: My Career Investigating Your Worst Nightmares.

Yeardley:  Such a good title, because it really sums it up. [laughs]

Dave:  Yep.

Yeardley:  Thank you.

Dan:  Now, great job, Lindsey.

Dave:  Yeah. Again, nicely done. I’m glad it was just a matter of weeks before it was solved.

Paul:  Thanks again, Lindsey. Great to see you again.

Lindsey:  Oh, well, it’s great to see you all again. Always love chatting with you. And I guess until next time.

[music]

Yeardley:  Small Town Dicks was created by Detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith. Our senior editor is Soren Begin and our editors are Christina Bracamontes and Erin Phelps. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Gary Scott is our executive producer and Logan Heftel is our production manager. Our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monika Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @smalltowndicks, we love hearing from you.

 Oh, our groovy theme song was composed by John Forrest. Also, if you’d like to support the making of this podcast, hop on over to patreon.com/smalltowndickspodcast. There, for a small subscription fee, you’ll find exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else. The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to SpeechDocs and they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com. Thank you SpeechDocs for this wonderful service. Small Town Dicks is an Audio 99 production. Small Town Fam, thanks for listening. Nobody is better than you.

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