Patterns likely key to serial rapists

Scientific police profiles suggest most assailants' methods distinctive

JEFF PORTER

ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Early that morning, before daylight, he climbed the stairs to the woman's apartment, unscrewed the porch-light bulb and rang the doorbell. He called out the woman's first name. She opened the door. He pointed a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol at her face.
He made her cut her own telephone cord. He demanded money, and the 23-year-old woman gave him $ 30. Then he told her to take off her robe. Not wanting to die, she did.
“Just please don't hurt my baby,” she implored. Her young son was still asleep in a bedroom.
The unwelcome visitor, his face hidden by a ski mask, raped the woman on her living-room couch.
The rapist demanded a wet towel with soap and she brought it. He told her to bring him a dry towel and she brought it.
Then he left.
It didn't happen in Little Rock, where a serial rapist has assaulted four women since Jan. 2. Instead, it happened almost five years ago, May 7, 1996, in Pine Bluff, the last crime of a serial rapist who's now locked up in prison for years.
Little Rock police are still pursuing the current rapist, tracking down DNA samples and following up on a flood of telephone calls.
They may also lean on a science developed in the 1970s to help the police with hard-to-solve serial crimes. The criminologists, psychiatrists and academics who have examined in detail such crimes and the people who do them call it profiling.
Profilers quantify the serial rapists' actions and motives, where and when they strike, their choice of race and age of their victims.
They have found that many, like the Pine Bluff rapist, stick rigidly to a distinctive pattern.
Wilbert Brown Jr. started raping women at 14, in July 1995. By May 1996, when he was caught, he'd raped six women and started to rape another, but later told police “she too old.” She was 73. Brown will turn 21 this fall, and, according to the prison system, the earliest he can get out is 2031. He'll be 50. The Little Rock rapist has been described as in his 20s, but before he was caught, Brown was sometimes described as older than he actually was.
Brown and Little Rock's current serial rapist aren't the only ones. There's Robert Todd Burmingham, the “blue-light rapist,” who used a flashing light -- like those on police cars -- to stop unsuspecting women on rural roads. There's Bernard Ali Bynum, who raped and robbed three older women in west Little Rock almost eight years ago. They're both still in prison.
Indeed, since 1987, when the state's court system began keeping close track of all felony criminal cases, at least 759 serial rapists -- that is, those charged with more than one count of rape -- have struck in Arkansas. At least 51 are like Brown, in that they also rob or burglarize.
Those are the ones who have been caught. Many others aren't.
Brown fits a classic mold. Most serial rapists strike strangers, and half are under 18 years old. Like many, Brown chose to strike close to home -- all of his rapes were within three miles of his address in Pine Bluff. Most of his victims lived just a few blocks apart.
A 1998 study examining 108 serial rapists shows that some travel between cities. Generally speaking, the older they are, the farther they go. But serial rapists who confine their crimes to one location typically strike in an area that would fit within a circle with a three-mile diameter. Almost half of the serial rapists studied found at least one victim within a half-mile of their homes.
Janet Warren, a University of Virginia professor and one of the study's authors, said most serial rapists follow a pattern, consciously or not. Like most people, they tend to move in areas with which they are familiar.
The targets of Little Rock's rapist have been separated by no more than six miles. Is he also striking close to where he lives or works?
Deborah Laufersweiler-Dwyer, a criminal-justice professor with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, noted that he stole a Porsche -- not far from his second rape -- the day before his third rape, then abandoned it at a Sam's Club at 900 W. Bowman Road on Feb. 2.
“I think he's traveling on foot and public transportation,” Laufersweiler-Dwyer said.
Brown certainly traveled on foot, sneaking out of his brother's house in the middle of the night. He was also a drug addict. “Every time I smoked some crack, I just do it then. I just do it then,” he told the Pine Bluff police.
Laufersweiler-Dwyer said use of crack cocaine and rape sometimes go together. But she thinks it unlikely that Little Rock's serial rapist is a drug addict, because he simply abandoned the car instead of selling it or stripping it for parts.
Brown followed another pattern in his rapes. Each time, he broke in or, in one case, tricked a woman into opening her front door. “The most common place [for rape] is your own home,” Warren said.
Brown robbed or burglarized his victims, as has the rapist in west Little Rock. The serial rapist, though, “is not a true robber,” Laufersweiler-Dwyer said. “He's a rapist who just happens to take money. It's not the object of this. The objective is the rape. The robbery is secondary.”
While Brown brandished a weapon -- in one case a knife but in the others a gun -- he never stabbed or shot anyone.
“That's very common,” Warren said. Not to minimize the trauma of the rape itself, she said, but most serial rapists don't go beyond that.
Little Rock's serial rapist is using tactics similar to Brown's -- bursting into one apartment, confronting women leaving their homes and forcing them back inside, robbing a dry-cleaning business -- and so far hasn't become extremely violent. He has used a silver-colored handgun to force his victims to submit.
That doesn't entirely eliminate the chance that he could become more violent, said psychiatrist Alen Salerian, medical director of the Washington, D.C., Psychiatric Center outpatient clinic, because rapists are by nature unpredictable.
“If things go wrong, you don't know what would happen,” he said. The rapist's crime, he said, can be “almost a ritual.” And if the victim doesn't follow the ritual, the rapist may become irrationally angry.
Part of Salerian's work is to find a rapist's motive. And for him, the explanations are never simple.
For some, “it's a very complex disease,” with brain chemistry out of balance, combining such problems as obsessive-compulsive behavior with other factors -- a traumatic childhood, bad genes, a history of rejection and anger.
“These are disorders. These are real illnesses,” Salerian said. “They are treatable.”
A Department of Justice study in 1997 showed that about 20 percent of the rapists in prison reported they'd been abused as children.
Salerian said it's possible for a serial rapist to stop -- one of his patients is a man who raped several women years ago -- if one crucial factor of his behavior is changed. But his deep-rooted personality problem would likely remain.
If their rapes continue, he said, a large number of rapists become miserable and begin feeling guilty, perhaps looking forward to being stopped. One study co-authored by Warren concludes that rapists often feel guilty or remorseful after their attacks.
That's consistent with the Brown case, according to Pine Bluff police Sgt. Michael Knowlton, one of the investigators. “I really think he wanted to get caught,” he said.
Until a serial rapist is caught, Warren said, he often keeps close track of news reports about himself. And while the media can help warn potential victims, they can also tip off the rapist.
“Whatever you write,” Warren said, “he's going to read.”

This article was published on Monday, February 19, 2001

Back to RESUME