The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan

Author:Edna Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1987-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

South Florida police are just as baffled by the Pillowcase Rapist. It is always something. The most sophisticated and intense manhunt in state history has brought an army of police no closer to collaring him today than they were in 1981.

Like the Gentle Rapist, he also started out with a different moniker: As the Alisian Lakes Rapist, he attacked six women in that West Dade apartment complex. The rapes were the secret of both the police and the management of the sprawling Alisian Lakes Apartments.

What women residents did not know did hurt them. The rapist easily pried open the sliding glass doors of their two-story townhouselike apartments. Had the women been warned, it would have been a simple matter for them to secure their doors, yet neither police nor management cautioned anyone after the rapes began. Chatty monthly newsletters from the management shared social news and recipes and admonished tenants about illegal parking.

Not a word about a rapist.

Curious tenants who occasionally questioned the presence of police cars and detectives were told it was nothing, just a family quarrel. Traumatized and terrified, the sixth victim called me. She and her neighbors had heard whispers, rumors of other rapes. I confronted the police. It was true.

Women were furious at the management. Police were irked at the publicity. Now the rapist knew they were looking for him, they grumbled, and if it drove him to rape elsewhere, their chances of catching him were reduced. They had been hoping to catch him in the act, even though the rambling Alisian Lakes complex was a maze almost impossible to surveil. In other words, police hoped to get lucky, using the women tenants as sitting ducks.

I argued that if the publicity forced management to beef up security, alerted the women who lived there, and spared other victims, I could live with that. And if the rapist was forced to stalk a new neighborhood, maybe it would be one where he did not have the advantage and would make a mistake. I could live with that, too.

Victim number six filed a million-dollar damage suit against the firm that owns the complex. She charged that they failed to protect or warn tenants out of economic self-interest and that she was raped as a result. Even after the attack on her, management still did not inform other tenants of the danger. “I feel like going door-to-door telling everybody myself, just for their own protection,” she wept to me.

We still talk often. She speaks of little else: justice. An arrest, a trial, and a conviction might have helped her recapture the scattered fragments of her own life, but there has been no justice. She moves frequently and often calls police to say she has seen her attacker, or someone who could be him, in traffic, in restaurants, or on the street. Hospitalized by ulcers, distraught, and ill, she settled her civil suit on the eve of the trial, unable to relive the crime in a public courtroom, although she does so in private every day of her life.

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