"I wouldn't," he said.

Holly went silent.

She removed her clothes as he instructed her. She asked if he had a condom.

The intruder said he did not. Did she?

No.

He said he had not had s.e.x in six months and had been tested and was "clean."

Holly asked to go to the bathroom. He accompanied her, holding a handful of her hair. When she could not urinate, he turned on the faucet for her. Still no help.

Back in her bed, he kissed her neck and chest, working his way down to her v.a.g.i.n.a, where he performed extended c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s. He said he hoped she could reach o.r.g.a.s.m, and only stopped when she faked one.

He then tried to kiss her. When she resisted, he briefly inserted two fingers into her v.a.g.i.n.a before ordering Holly onto her stomach.

She, too, was complimented on her "nice a.s.s."

He perched behind her as he had with Iverson, and applied some Vaseline to her back before masturbating onto it. When he finished, she directed him to a box of tissues, with which he wiped off her back.

Before leaving, he asked her to get dressed again, and covered Holly with her blanket.

"He was very calm, almost trying to be nice," she later testified.

"Good night, Darla," he said as he left, getting her name wrong. He also warned her to keep her front door locked.

Six days later, at 2:50 a.m. on a Sunday morning, Pacific Beach resident Tammy Watkins,* twenty-three, was surprised by a man in a black mask who jumped out at her from a closet as Watkins walked into her bedroom.

She screamed.

"Stop screaming or I'll hurt you," he said, holding a knife to her throat. Watkins didn't answer, and began to cry.

"I'm not going to hurt you if you do as I say," he continued, and directed her to her bed.

"Okay, now sit here like a good little girl. Don't move. I'm going to the door," he told her in a voice Watkins described in court as "sort of soft and husky . . . gentle and nice."

He didn't touch Tammy. He just left, and did not return.

Approximately eighteen hours later, just after 9:00 that Sunday night, twenty-year-old Marsha Wilson* was alone in the Pacific Beach house she rented with four other young women. She heard a knock at the door. When Wilson answered it, an arm suddenly went around her neck. She felt a knife under her chin. He pushed her to her knees and told her not to scream or she would get hurt.

As before, he guided Wilson to a bed and told her to take her clothes off. He lay down beside her, still wearing his ski mask.

Later in court, Wilson was asked if the intruder said anything.

"Like, 'relax,' you know," she said. "Just basically trying to calm me down in a really nice kind of a sort of comforting tone."

When she asked him his age he said he was twenty-four.

He fondled her and performed c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s. Then as he m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed to erection, she asked him not to sodomize her, and if he had a condom.

He answered that he did not want to hurt her, and yes, he did have a condom, which he put on before subjecting her to a very brief v.a.g.i.n.al rape.

Afterward, he told Wilson he'd never raped anyone before and that he didn't enjoy it and wasn't going to do it again. He added that she need not worry about him returning to harm her, either. He wouldn't be coming back.

He did wait two months before striking again, this time choosing a different venue, the San Diego State University district, about five miles inland from Pacific Beach.

Victim number five was nineteen-year-old Tina Mitch.e.l.l,* who awoke at 2:45 a.m. on Friday, July 16, 1993, to find the rapist's hand over her mouth. He had come through the front door and into her bedroom, ignoring a second bedroom, where her roommate slept with her boyfriend. Neither awoke during the incident.

The ski-masked intruder told Mitch.e.l.l that if she did not scream she would not be hurt, and to nod if she understood him.

She nodded, and he removed his hand.

When he ordered her to undress, she protested.

He shoved her, not violently.

"He told me just follow along and I'd be okay," Mitch.e.l.l testified.

She took off her nightgown and underwear and let down her hair, as instructed. He complimented Mitch.e.l.l on her figure, and mentioned that she looked tense. He told her to lie on her stomach so he could give her a back rub.

He was polite and solicitous about her well-being throughout, Mitch.e.l.l said.

After about five minutes of c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s, he tried to kiss her, but was rebuffed. He put two fingers into her v.a.g.i.n.a, as he had with Dana Holly. But instead of simply masturbating, he stroked himself to erection, put on a condom as Mitch.e.l.l requested, and v.a.g.i.n.ally raped her. The a.s.sault lasted less than three minutes.

Afterward, he pulled the covers up around her, and wished her good night as he left.

He returned to Pacific Beach for his next a.s.sault. Unlike the other victims, Kim Caldwell, thirty-two, an airline sales agent, did not care if her ident.i.ty was known. In fact, she insisted on it, going to the San Diego Union-Tribune with the story of her physical and emotional ordeal.

"A primary reason rapists continue to rape-not why they rape, but why they continue-is because women live in fear," she told reporter Kathryn Balint. "Rapists know that and they rape and they rape and they rape. I believe that women need to fight back."

Later in court, Caldwell would describe how she was awakened in bed at 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 17, 1993, by a man in a ski mask on top of her. He had a knife at her throat, and was saying, "Kim, wake up!"

She fought, furiously.

"Calm down, calm down, calm down," he kept saying to her. Then he began ma.s.saging her shoulders with one hand as he continued holding the knife at her throat with the other.

He told Caldwell, as he had told Molly Iverson a year earlier, that his name was Johnny. Iverson had thought him to be in his late twenties; Caldwell guessed he was thirty to thirty-five.

"Johnny" told Caldwell he had been watching her for a long time.

"He said he had watched me when I came home at nights," she testified. "He watched me when I usually got something to eat in the kitchen . . . and he watched me in the living room watching television. And he said that his favorite time to watch me was in the bedroom when I was reading. He said he did that a lot."

Her attacker told Caldwell to remove her one garment, a T-shirt, pushed her down on the bed, and began kissing her neck and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and performing c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s. He kept telling her to relax and, over and over, that she had to achieve an o.r.g.a.s.m.

He strove ardently to kiss her lips, but she clenched her teeth in refusal.

When he reached to put his fingers in her v.a.g.i.n.a, she grabbed for the knife he laid aside. He noticed her movement, and took the knife back from her. Then he placed the blade between her legs, but he did not touch her with the weapon or threaten her with it.

Finally, he pulled a condom out of a f.a.n.n.y pack, and put it on, only to lose his erection. "Johnny" went back to fondling and kissing her until he was hard once again, and then quickly raped Caldwell v.a.g.i.n.ally. Once finished, he removed the condom, tied a knot in it, and placed it in a Baggie back in the f.a.n.n.y pack.

Caldwell was shaking with fear and anger. The rapist tucked her blankets around her and then sat down on the bed to ask if she wanted him to leave.

"It was like he was trying to be nice," she'd remember. "It was like it was a date almost . . . he was apologizing the whole time."

On the way out, he called her Kim.

He found his final victim, twenty-three-year-old Jane Phillips,* back in the vicinity of San Diego State.

She was awakened at about 1:00 a.m. on Friday, October 29, 1993, by the rapist standing over her. Instead of the ski mask, he was wearing what Phillips later described as a ski cap and a Lone Ranger mask. He put his hand over her mouth and pushed her head down into her pillow.

"Don't move. Don't talk. I don't want to have to hurt you," he said.

He seemed aware that Jane shared her apartment with a roommate who was sleeping nearby.

"I'll take my hand away if you promise not to scream," he said. "We have to be quiet. We don't want to wake our roommate up."

She started crying, and jumped at the sight of his knife, which nicked her in the chin. He seemed more scared than she, Phillips later testified.

"It's okay, it's okay, you're not bleeding, see?" he told her. "You have to listen to what I say and do what I say or else you're going to get hurt, because it's a very sharp knife."

He helped her sit up and remove her sweatshirt.

"He told me 'we are going to have s.e.x,' " she testified. "Then he said the first thing he wanted to do [was] 'taste you and smell you' and he said he wanted to make me come. He wanted me to have an o.r.g.a.s.m, and then he started to perform oral s.e.x."

Disappointed anew that his victim did not respond as he had hoped, the rapist put on his condom and entered her v.a.g.i.n.ally. She wouldn't look at him, which further upset him.

"He would take my hands and put them on his shoulders, and then my hands would fall away. Or he'd take my legs, lift them up for deeper penetration. And my legs would fall away. He [was] continually getting soft so he would have to pull out, m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, harden himself up and proceed."

Phillips recollected her rapist lost his erection five or six times before he was through. Then, as before, he tucked her in and sat down to talk.

He asked how she felt and if she would now be angry at all men or just him.

"I know you didn't enjoy yourself," he said. "But I thought it could be different with you."

"It was almost like he was my boyfriend," Phillips reported. "He wanted to be my boyfriend. He was almost loving in a way."

He left by her open sliding gla.s.s door.

Next morning, Phillips discovered the spent condom where he'd discarded it, near the front of her parked car.

It would prove a vital piece of evidence.

Kenneth Bogard-"Bogey" to his friends-was well known around San Diego as a singer and lead guitarist for Dr. Chico's Island Sounds, a popular local rock group. His neighbors in the city's Hillcrest neighborhood described him as likable and outgoing.

A woman identifying herself only as Janis, who lived in the same apartment building with the thirty-six-year-old Bogard, told the San Diego Union-Tribune, "I've seen him lots of times in the Jacuzzi with a girlfriend, a girl with blond hair. He's very handsome, a good-looking guy. He looks like a cross between Barry Manilow and Rod Stewart."

But Bogey Bogard had a hidden personal history.

In 1980, at age twenty-three, he was convicted in his home state, New Jersey, of masturbating in public as he fondled an article of infant's clothing. Nine years later, he was charged again in California with public masturbation, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.

In the summer of 1993, he was caught with a video camera in the Wet Seal, a women's chain clothing store located about three miles north of Pacific Beach. Bogard had slung the camera low from his shoulder, and turned it on in an attempt to videotape under women's dresses as they shopped.

"When the police looked at the tape," says Dan Lamborn, the San Diego County deputy district attorney who would eventually prosecute Bogard as the Pacific Beach Rapist, "they found other footage of him peeking into women's apartments through blinds. He had shots of a woman undressing, another woman having s.e.x, and another of a woman sunbathing, focusing in tight on her crotch."

In 1992, Bogard also was caught masturbating outside a coed's apartment in the San Diego State area. The same neighborhood had been plagued previously by a flasher nicknamed Zorro, for the mask he habitually wore.

On a second occasion, police responding to a report of a masked man masturbating discovered Bogard in the vicinity with Vaseline on his hand. They later recovered a Zorro mask nearby.

"They detained him, but didn't file a case because they didn't actually see him masturbating," says Lamborn.

The two incidents persuaded the police they should take a closer look at Bogard. In December, they obtained a court order to take tissue samples, which proved a match for the s.e.m.e.n in the condom discarded near the front of Jane Phillips's car in October, as well as other specimens recovered from the various Pacific Beach Rapist crime scenes.

Bogard was arrested in January 1994.

In all, Lamborn had DNA evidence that directly implicated Bogard in only one of the a.s.saults. Bogard vehemently denied all guilt. And after viewing Bogard in a lineup, only one of his victims, Dana Holly, was able to identify him as her attacker, and then only indirectly, by his voice.

There were no eyewitnesses to any of the a.s.saults. What is more, there was no fingerprint evidence.

It was going to be an uphill prosecution, but for two key factors. One, the judge let in Bogard's videotape, which the deputy district attorney was pleased to show the jury.

"The videotape clearly shows he was a pervert, and that of course was fifty percent of the battle in front of a jury," says Lamborn.

Lamborn's other weapon was Roy Hazelwood.

Lacking any solid eyewitness identifications, the prosecutor needed to tie the crimes together in a way the jury could follow. So as he prepared for trial, Lamborn contacted Hazelwood, who had just retired, and hired Roy to conduct a linkage a.n.a.lysis.

Bogard's trial was held in May 1995, in San Diego's seven-story county courthouse, a plain and architecturally undistinguished box erected downtown in the 1960s.

Inside superior court judge John Thompson's windowless, fluorescent-lit third-floor courtroom, Hazelwood took the stand, turned to the jury, and began to testify. Dan Lamborn remembers he had little to do except to occasionally interject a question or ask for amplification.

"Roy," says Lamborn, "was the star of the show."

Hazelwood explained to the jury his rapist typology, the motivational roles of power and anger in rape, the difference between MO and ritual, and how, if enough behavioral evidence is available for him to study, he can say with expert a.s.surance whether a single criminal or multiple offenders committed a given set of deviant crimes, such as serial rape.

Among the Pacific Beach Rapist cases he reviewed, Roy said, he believed the same man a.s.saulted Iverson, Holly, Wilson, Mitch.e.l.l, Caldwell, and Phillips. He said there was not enough behavioral evidence to confidently link that offender to Tammy Watkins or to say with certainty that Molly Iverson's second intruder was also her a.s.sailant.

"I noticed that all of the attacks were in the victims' residences," said Hazelwood. "And I noticed that each of the entries were made through an unlocked window or door.

"I noticed the offender was armed with a knife, a weapon of choice, and he brought it with him. He took the weapon with him when he left.

"He attempted to protect his ident.i.ty by wearing a mask in each of the crimes. He took nothing at all with him.

"The two neighborhoods were very similar as to the age of their residents and the local socioeconomics, and they were within five or six miles of each other."

Hazelwood noted all the crimes occurred late at night, and that the UNSUB endeavored in most of them to deny the police scientific evidence. Either he wiped himself when he was through or he used condoms.

"I then considered the ritualistic similarities," Roy continued. "I looked for the theme running through these a.s.saults.