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JOHNNY GREEN/PA
DARK PATH: Teenagers walk past the site of the tenth rape attack
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Posted Sunday, Nov. 24, 2002; 2.02 p.m. GMT
He strikes on weekdays, usually in daylight. In the past 12
months he has raped at least nine women and attempted to rape
a tenth — victims ranging in age from 10 to 52 years
old. Police believe he preselects not the individual women
but the place he will attack them, usually woods or parkland
areas with access to the M25, the motorway around London.
And after the assaults he often takes a memento — clothing,
or a cell phone — from his victims, a modus operandi
that led the media to name him the "trophy rapist."
Any rapist is unspeakably cruel; this one takes obscene delight
in his cruelty. One anonymous victim has said the attacker
took her cell phone and used it to call her mother and boast,
"I've just raped your daughter." In October, the
52-year-old woman he attacked in August told Crimewatch,
a British TV program in which police enlist the public's help
to catch offenders: "I heard him slashing my clothes
and I was just paralyzed with fear. I didn't know if he'd
slash me, so I just ... you know, let him get on with it."
While some suggest that the rapist's motivation for taking
something from his victims is to remove evidence or prevent
them telephoning for help, others see it as a sexual fetish.
Or, says David Canter, head of the Center for Investigative
Psychology at the University of Liverpool, "It could
be a way of frightening his victims further — 'I've
got something of yours.'"
The search for the trophy rapist has turned into one of the
largest manhunts for a sex offender in British history, involving
more than 100 officers from five forces bordering the London
area. Initially, leads appeared scarce. Although police knew
the attacker was between 30 and 50 and between 1.65 m and
1.77 m, his DNA did not match any samples on the national
criminal database. And because he always approached his victims
from behind, descriptions of him were sketchy. But early this
month his tenth victim, a 14-year-old girl raped at knifepoint,
gave police their first description of his face — round,
with a long nose and light green or blue eyes. After a computer
simulation was published, police received up to 5,000 telephone
calls.
Police hope the trophy rapist's apparent lack of concern
about grabbing victims in daylight or near houses may lead
to his downfall. "He is a risk taker," Detective
Superintendent Mark Warwick said. "By taking risks, you
are going to slip up and give information away." In the
meantime, authorities have some chilling advice for women
in England's southeast who might need to pass through woodland,
or use footpaths adjacent to residential areas: Don't go alone.
Despite the attention that the trophy rapist has generated,
rapes and attempted rapes of this kind are still rare. In
general in Britain, only 8% of rape victims are attacked by
strangers — a figure that has remained static for several
years — while some 45% of victims are raped by a husband
or partner. Many others are victims of acquaintance or date
rape, and know their attacker only slightly. But rape statistics
are always imprecise because so few victims come forward.
Although 9,008 women went to the police in 2001 saying that
they had been victims of rape, the Home Office estimates that
the actual number of rapes that year was about 61,000 —
a reporting ratio of 15%. The Rape Crisis Federation notes
that of the approximately 50,000 women who contact them following
an assault, only about 12% go to the police.
In the face of evidence that acquaintance rape has been rising
for several decades in the U.K., the British government last
week — as part of a package of recommended measures
regarding violent and sexual crime — published a series
of proposed updates to the laws surrounding rape. One vital
component: the issue of consent. The paper proposes that women
who are unconscious or under the influence of drugs cannot
be deemed to have consented to sex, a change that shifts the
burden of proof of consent from a victim to her attacker.
Police hope the proposed reforms will help raise the conviction
rates for rape, which in parts of the U.K. are as low as 7.5%.
For authorities, catching and convicting rapists — those
committing high-profile attacks like the trophy rapist and
those committing the less sensational but equally insidious
assaults like date or spouse rape — is the highest priority
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