4

A VIOLENT ALCHEMY

August 10, 2010

Westminster, Colorado

EARLY ONE MORNING IN AUGUST, an older woman sat hunched on a bed in Room 24 of the emergency ward of St. Anthony North in suburban Denver. She was eating yogurt and sipping water from a clear plastic bottle. Her hair was dyed red, the color fading. She wore a white, long-sleeved hoodie with a rainbow splashed across its front. Her thin legs stuck out from a pair of blue shorts.

At 8:04 a.m. there was a knock, and a woman with long blond hair and wide blue eyes entered the room. She wore a blue polo shirt and khaki pants with a police badge resting on her hip. She glanced at the woman on the bed. She thought the older woman looked almost like a lost child, her eyes red, her cheeks streaked. She knelt and introduced herself. Her name was Detective Edna Hendershot. “I know that something terrible has happened to you,” she told the woman. “I’m here to find out about it.”

Sarah had already told her story to the neighbors she did not know, standing in the cool air outside her apartment in the light of early morning. She had already told the young officer who drove her to the hospital in his squad car. She had already told the other woman sitting quietly with her in the hospital room, a victim’s advocate the police had assigned to her for support.

She summoned herself. She would tell her story again.

Sarah had moved into a new apartment at the beginning of the month. After days of sorting and storing, of figuring where to put the couch and how to decorate her bedroom, of unpacking boxes of clothes and shoes and kitchen utensils, she decided to rest. She spent Monday morning dozing by the pool. She walked a trail that circled the apartment buildings. That evening, she had read her Bible in her apartment. At around midnight, she changed into her nightgown and fell asleep to the sound of an oscillating fan.

At around three thirty, she was startled awake. A heavy weight pressed into her back, pushing her hard into the bed. It was a man, straddling her with his legs. He had pinned her arms to her side. She cried out, a sound that seemed to die in her throat. “Just be quiet,” the man said. “I won’t hurt you if you do everything I say. But I do have a gun and can use it if I have to.”

The man wore a white T-shirt and sweatpants, Sarah told Hendershot. A black mask covered his face. He bound her hands behind her and stripped off her underwear. He ordered her onto the bed. He instructed her to pose. He took pictures with a camera. If she didn’t do it right, he would correct her. “If you don’t do what I say, then these pictures are going to be all over the Internet. Everyone will see them,” he told her.

For three hours, he forced Sarah to submit. He would rape her, then rest. Take pictures, then rest. Sarah called them “sessions.” She could remember nine of them. She would tell him that he was hurting her. “Just relax,” he’d say. At one point, Sarah told Hendershot, she pleaded with the rapist to stop.

“I’m not a bad person,” she told him.

“No, you’re not a bad person,” he answered. “But you left your window open.”

When he finished with her, the dawn light was creeping into her jumbled apartment. He set to work eradicating evidence. He cleaned Sarah’s body with moist towelettes. He ordered her to brush her teeth and her tongue. He had scooped up some of her bedding. “I’m not leaving any evidence here for the police to find, so I’ll have to take some things with me,” he told her.

He ordered Sarah into the bathroom. He told her to wash for twenty minutes. Sarah wanted to know when the time was up. She asked him to get her a timer.

Where is it? he asked.

There, on the kitchen counter, she told him. It was a white Sunbeam.

He cranked the dial to twenty minutes and placed it on the counter by the bathroom sink. Then he closed the door and left.

She stood in the shower, the water streaming down her body. She listened to each of the 1,200 seconds tick off, the timer whirring like a cicada in the summer. When it rang at last, she stepped from the shower. She dried herself off. And she began to catalog the damage.

The rapist had stolen a green satin pillow from the bed—the one given to her by her mother as a keepsake.

He had taken $200 from a safe beneath her bed.

He had stolen a camera.

He had changed her life forever.

It was not an easy story to tell. Sarah sobbed throughout the interview. The advocate comforted her. Hendershot comforted her. After thirty minutes, Hendershot decided Sarah had had enough. As she stood, Hendershot told Sarah that a nurse was going to examine her. Perhaps, she said, the rapist had not succeeded in covering his tracks. Perhaps some of his DNA remained inside her.

“I can only hope,” Sarah replied.

DRIVING TO SARAH’S apartment complex, Hendershot ticked off the tasks in her head. Sixteen years of police work had burned a crime scene checklist into her. She needed patrol officers to canvass neighbors and search dumpsters. She needed a criminalist to search the apartment and the grounds. She needed a crime analyst to start pulling records on everyone who had access to Sarah’s apartment.

All hands on deck, she thought to herself.

Hendershot was raised in the sprawling middle-class suburbs northwest of Denver. She spent her childhood in Arvada, a close-in suburb of a hundred thousand. Her mother taught music at local elementary schools and played piano and organ for the Presbyterian church. Her father worked in Colorado’s state assembly building in Denver and got involved in local politics. She was the middle kid, sandwiched between an older and younger brother.

Her parents did their best to make her ladylike. Her mother enrolled her in ballet classes and tried to teach her piano. The pair made regular trips to an arts center just blocks from home. None of it stuck.

“I would go into the living room where the piano was, and my nice mom would be sitting there at the piano wanting me to play the piano. I would just be horrible to her. I know I was really mean about it, but I hated it. I wanted to be outside, running around and playing with my friends. I didn’t want to play the dumb piano.”

Hendershot was the classic tomboy. She loved sports. She was a swimmer. She excelled at soccer. At a time when girls’ athletics was just taking off, Hendershot was already traveling across Colorado on competitive club teams. She competed in high school as starting goalie for Arvada High.

Hendershot could never say exactly what drew her to police work. She didn’t have close family who were cops or criminals—the common motivators for many in law enforcement. It was something that was meant to be. “I don’t have a storybook answer,” she’d tell people. “I just always knew that it was what I was supposed to do.”

Her career path wasn’t straight. After graduating from high school in 1988, she studied criminal justice at two colleges. But money was tight, so she started working and going to school part-time. She manned the register at a Wendy’s. She bussed tables and worked as a waitress for $2.50 an hour and tips at a local Mexican restaurant.

But she was determined to become a cop. In 1990, she got a job as a records clerk at the Adams County sheriff’s office, reviewing inmate files from the local jail. A year later, she quit that job to start handling emergency calls as a 911 dispatcher for the Arvada Police Department. She worked nights and took classes during the day, paying her own way through police academy. When she graduated, she didn’t stray from home. Westminster, the town next to Arvada, hired her as a patrol officer. She was sworn in on September 19, 1994.

Westminster often gets called a bedroom community of Denver. And in some ways it is, a mostly middle-class, mostly white town of a hundred thousand. Knots of parents cluster each weekend on the sidelines of kids’ soccer matches. Big-box stores bunch together at major intersections. Ranch-style houses and apartment complexes sprawl in every direction around the Denver–Boulder Turnpike, which serves as the city’s spine. But like many inner suburbs, Westminster defies saccharine characterization. Gangs and drugs plague the neighborhoods that bump against Denver. There was plenty of crime for a young cop who wanted to make a mark.

After five years on the street, Hendershot beat out competitors for a spot on the West Metro Drug Task Force. The elite unit drew cops from around the region to crack down on narcotics and gangs. She was the only woman on the squad. The other cops took to calling her “Ed.”

Hendershot learned that her gender could be a kind of superpower. Both colleagues and criminals found her looks striking. When her supervisors were stumped on how to get close to a drug dealer, she’d volunteer for the job. “This sounds arrogant, but they would say, ‘Who can get to this guy?’ I’d say, ‘I can probably do it.’ It’s disgusting what you can get with a hair flip and a giggle.”

She was good at working undercover. She could be the dumb blonde. Or the hot biker chick. Or the stressed-out mother in the middle of a custody dispute. When suspects asked her to do a line, or to take off her clothes, she had an excuse. “I’ll go home, and I’ll get beat up,” she’d say. Or “I’ve got court tomorrow with social services. I can’t be high.” Once, she worked a case involving a crooked deputy who was smuggling drugs and weapons to gang members in jail. Hendershot worked her way into the suspect’s confidence by befriending a gang member, who made introductions. After the dirty cop was arrested, Hendershot showed up on scene. The gang member—hardened, streetwise—was there, too, in handcuffs. He refused to believe that Hendershot was really a cop. “I took a lot of pride in that,” she says. “I was able to be so believable that he bought it.”

Hendershot racked up praise. She was selected to serve as a field training officer, a position of trust where she mentored young officers. For twelve years straight, when Hendershot’s bosses filled out her performance evaluation, they gave her the highest possible mark for teamwork: “exceptional.”

By 2007, things were changing in Hendershot’s personal life. She got married again—her first marriage had ended in divorce years before. Her new husband was Mike Hendershot, who had been a police sergeant in Golden and later became a commander at another agency in the Denver suburbs. He proposed to her under the Eiffel Tower. They had found a house big enough for their dog and two cats and moved in together.

Hendershot decided to move out of undercover work—she had spent enough time on the squad that criminals might start to recognize her. But she was nervous about a new assignment. She wondered whether she’d ever be as good at anything else. Okay, great, now what? she thought to herself. I peaked before I’m forty. Yay!

Her new post was in the Crimes Against Persons division. Here, suddenly, was a new world. Her victims were people who had been injured, raped, or killed. When she filled out paperwork as a narcotics cop, the victim was the “State of Colorado” or the “United States of America.” Now, she wrote down someone’s name. Someone with whom she had sat and talked, someone whose pain she had seen firsthand, someone whose death had sent a family reeling.

It was a little overwhelming.

“I literally had a physical reaction to that. Holy shit. This is a big deal. They are one hundred percent depending on you. It’s all you.”

AFTER FINISHING THE interview at the hospital, Hendershot drove to Sarah’s apartment on the city’s west side. It was 10:00 a.m., already hot. The buildings in the apartment complex were three stories tall, with orange panels and brick facades. They shared a pool, a clubhouse, and a trail. The renters were blue collar: health aides, cable installers, fast-food workers.

Outside the apartment, Hendershot met Officer Chris Pyler, who had spent the morning tracking down witnesses. He had spoken with the neighbors who called the police after Sarah banged on their door for help. They, too, were new to the complex. They had listened to Sarah recount the details of the rape. The wife had trouble believing all of them.

For instance, Sarah told the neighbors that the rapist had made her wash her hair. But Sarah’s hair had been dry. The wife also thought Sarah made odd remarks. Sarah had told them, “Oh, you just moved in here. This is the last thing you need.” The wife didn’t think that Sarah was lying, necessarily. She just thought she was behaving strangely.

It’s not what I would have done, the wife told Pyler.

The woman’s skepticism was not surprising. When it came to rape, victims frequently encountered doubt—from police, yes, but also from family and friends. There was a sense both in police departments and among the general public that not all reports of rape were true. The problem was, no one knew just how many. Criminologists had spent decades trying to determine how many women lie when they report being raped. The answers were all over the map. A police surgeon in England concluded in a 2006 report that 90 percent of rape allegations were false—a widely criticized figure based on a tiny sample of eighteen cases. The feminist Susan Brownmiller, whose groundbreaking work Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape influenced a generation of activists, pegged the number at 2 percent—though that figure, too, had been sharply questioned.

Researchers who specialized in sexual assault had settled on a range—somewhere between 2 percent and 8 percent of rape allegations were false. But this range was tied to a specific definition: it only counted those rape allegations where police could prove a woman had knowingly lied. In reality, that didn’t happen very often. Cops simply dropped cases where they had doubts, conducting no further investigation. The true percentage of false reports proved elusive—obscured by advocacy, different definitions of sexual assault, and the near impossibility of extracting concrete data from a crime shrouded in shame and secrecy.

For her own work, Hendershot needed what she called “definitive” evidence before dismissing a sexual assault allegation as false. There was this guy who had come to an emergency room with a mutilated testicle. It was so badly cut up that doctors had to remove it. The man told the doctors that he had been attacked with a knife and raped. Hendershot spent weeks running down the leads that the man supplied, even driving to Wyoming to search for evidence. But then she found that the man was part of an online pornographic chat room where people engaged in genital mutilation. Hendershot charged him with filing a false report to police—but only after she watched a video of the man maiming himself with a razor and an elastic band usually used to neuter cattle. In other words, she set the bar high.

After talking with Pyler, Hendershot walked into the apartment to check out the crime scene. She was relieved to see an old friend: Katherine Ellis, one of the senior crime scene investigators for the Westminster Police Department. Ellis had been on scene since 7:38 a.m., rushing out after she heard about the rape on a police radio installed in the department’s crime laboratory.

The two had met years before, when both worked as dispatchers at a nearby police department. They had advanced upward through their careers together. Ellis’s path led her into crime scene investigations long before the field became popular on television. “I was CSI before there was CSI,” she would joke. Over the years, she had built a reputation for thoroughness. She took training courses at the elite FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. She had an eidetic memory. Years later, she could recall the case number of a criminal report by heart. She was a realist about her job. “It’s not glamorous,” she’d say. “It’s dumpsters and dismembered children and crawl spaces.”

By the time Hendershot arrived, Ellis had already walked through the apartment room by room. Her notes reflected her obsession with capturing every detail of a crime scene:

Unit is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a kitchen, dining area, and living room….The entryway opens into the living room. The living room was located on the south side of the apartment. It was furnished with a piano against the east wall, a leather sofa along the south wall, a round coffee table in front of the sofa, a round end table on the west side of the sofa and a rocker glider. The sofa had a stack of newspapers and a folder for restaurant and grocery coupons on the west cushion, an indentation that could be a foot impression on the middle cushion and a Bible and prayer book open on the east cushion.

Over five hours in the apartment, Ellis dusted for fingerprints on the windowsills, doors, and counters. She deployed cotton swabs across surfaces throughout the home: the living room window, the mattress topper, the bathroom sink and toilet. She took hundreds of photos of the disarray in the master bedroom, the living room, the back porch. She checked the apartment’s two outside doors and windows for signs of forced entry. She bagged up evidence—the pale-green flat sheets that the rapist had left behind; purple kitchen gloves found near the sink; a red, orange, and white comforter. She used a special lamp to check the mattress topper for genetic material.

Hendershot told Ellis about the rapist picking up the white Sunbeam timer from Sarah’s kitchen. When Ellis got to the bathroom, she found it perched on the edge of the vanity. It was one item in the apartment that she knew the rapist had touched. She collected it as evidence to check for the presence of DNA.

Ellis assumed that a crime occurred as the victim recounted it. But as she examined a scene, she focused on the evidence—whether contradictory or confirmatory. Her job, as she saw it, was to uncover the truth, whatever it was. “We report what the evidence shows us. Not what you’re telling us. You want evidence to scream, ‘Liar liar.’ Not you.”

So far, though, Ellis had not found much evidence of anything in Sarah’s apartment. She noted that a screen had fallen to the ground under a window near the back door—but that could have happened at any time. On the couch, under a window, there was the depression that looked as if it could have been made by someone stepping on a cushion. But she had found no indication of forced entry. No pry marks on any of the doorframes. No broken windowpanes. She discovered no fingerprints on the windowsills or couch or in the bedroom. Illuminating the apartment had revealed only a small amount of body fluids, restricted to the bed.

One thing, however, did stand out. On the railing surrounding the back porch, Ellis noticed strange impressions—a row of small, hexagonal marks. Like a honeycomb, she thought. She took pictures to make sure they were preserved.

But she was not certain what could have caused them. Maybe a mover’s blanket tossed over the railing?

What a weird pattern, she thought to herself.

TWO DAYS AFTER the rape, Hendershot met Sarah at the Westminster police station. They sat across from each other in an interview room, a desk between them. Hendershot turned on her tape recorder. She hoped enough time had passed to allow Sarah to recall additional details. She started slow: What was Sarah’s life like in the days and months before the rape?

Sarah told her story. She had divorced late in life, after decades in a loveless, angry marriage. “I just decided I wasn’t going to live like that any longer,” she said. She found new love with a man twenty years her senior. He had a large family. She had no children. They attended church together. She sang in the choir. They spent nights out at Denny’s. They married in October 2009 and moved into an apartment big enough for two. Then, he was diagnosed with cancer. Eight weeks after her wedding, Sarah buried her husband. Her decision to move into a smaller apartment at a new complex was the first step toward acknowledging the reality of widowhood. She signed the lease on July 28, 2010. The rapist had struck thirteen days later.

And what about the rape? Hendershot asked. “We talked about how you were ready for bed and you went to bed about midnight. And then what do you remember happening next?”

“I just remember, um, there was someone on top of me. I was on my back. I mean I was on my stomach, I was on my stomach,” Sarah said. She stopped, flustered. “Do we have to go through the whole sequence again?”

Hendershot understood. She had worked more than a hundred rape cases. She knew how difficult it was to talk about rape—so difficult that it stopped many women from reporting at all. One of the top reasons was the fear of not being believed. Younger cops were often puzzled. You want to catch the guy? Why not spill the details?

Hendershot had a standard comeback: “Tell me about the last time you and your wife had sex. Tell me right now,” she’d say. Those who didn’t let out an embarrassed laugh reacted with shocked silence. They got the message.

In the interview room, Sarah went over the basics again. But she added new details. For instance, she remembered that the attacker had placed thigh-high stockings on her legs. But she couldn’t recall their color or where they came from.

“How did they get on you?” Hendershot asked.

Sarah could not describe how.

“And how come you don’t see them?” Hendershot asked.

“I think I was, I think I was on my stomach.”

Sarah remembered, too, that the rapist had asked whether she had high heels. When she told him no, he came back from her closet with a pair of her own shoes.

“I had this image of what they might have been, but I’m still not sure,” she said. She did not know what pair of shoes he had grabbed, nor if he had taken them when he left.

Hendershot was not discouraged. She kept probing. She tried to get Sarah to give her a better description.

“What about by his eyes? Do you remember anything by his eyes?”

“I certainly don’t remember anything, really, about his face, I really don’t.”

“Okay. So no eye color?”

“Um, I couldn’t tell.”

“Any facial hair?”

Sarah shook her head no. “I could not tell you, I can’t.”

If Sarah’s visual memory was lacking, her aural recollections were precise. She knew that the rapist carried a gym bag because she remembered the noise of zipping. She knew he had gone to the bathroom because she heard him urinating. She couldn’t describe the camera he had used, even though he had pointed it directly at her. All she could remember was the sound. Click. Click. Click.

But more often, Sarah’s story rambled, a jumble of moments and memories, unordered by time. She would struggle to piece together the sequence of events. She told Hendershot that she knew the time that the rapist left because she had seen some little girls playing outside her apartment. She thought for a moment. She had called the cops at around 7:00 a.m. Why would children be outside at that hour? “No, that doesn’t make sense,” she said, almost to herself.

Sarah grew frustrated at the lacunae of her story. “You know, most of the time my eyes were closed,” she told Hendershot. “Part of the time, ’cuz he was forcing me. Part of the time, I just didn’t even want to look.”

Hendershot reassured her. “If you don’t remember, that’s okay.”

Sarah’s fractured world did not alarm Hendershot. She had learned that people who got hurt in traumatic events often had altered memories. Many could no longer recall events in chronological order. Trauma can warp the brain. A car accident. A tree falling close by. Seeing your buddy shot on the battlefield. In those terrifying seconds, the rush of adrenaline and cortisol created a violent alchemy. The mind became an uncertain eyewitness of its own experience. Events were unlinked from the time when they occurred. Memories got buried. Images could arise days, months, even years later, unwanted and unbidden, picture-perfect in clarity, like a landscape suddenly illuminated by lightning.

Rape was a special case. The experience of rape, the feeling of helplessness, impaired memories in ways that seemed almost designed to frustrate investigators. To endure the terrible present of violation, many women looked away from what was happening to them, looked away from their attacker. They focused on a lampshade or a painting on the wall. Or they closed their eyes. That meant women could often not describe the rapist, or what he wore, or the room, the time, the surroundings.

Psychologists have documented the role that a powerful, central detail can play in the formation of memories. At a moment of crisis, the brain fiercely grasps on to something that will help it survive. In some cases, this is the actual threat, like when a cop can describe a weapon pointed at him in extraordinary detail but has trouble recalling the clothing a suspect wore. In other cases, though, the salient detail is not the immediate threat. Indeed, it can be something not tied to the anguish of the rape at all—say, a lamp on a nearby nightstand or a streetlight in the distance. By fixing on such a detail, the mind can shift away from the immediate horror to a cognitively safer place.

Rebecca Campbell, a leading researcher of sexual assault at Michigan State University, says that victims often describe their experience of rape using the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle. When solving a puzzle, the first thing most people do is flip all the pieces right side up. Next, they sort them into edge pieces, corner pieces, and body pieces. Then, they look at the picture on the box to figure out how to put the pieces together.

But rape victims have no way to solve the puzzle. They don’t have all the pieces. They can’t sort them in any meaningful way. And who can stand to gaze at such an awful picture, if they can even form the image? “A trauma memory doesn’t come together in a nice, neat, orderly memory,” says Campbell, who studies trauma’s effects on the brain. “It is scattered throughout the brain. Literally.”

It was Hendershot’s job to help Sarah piece together the puzzle. But at the end of the interview, she felt no closer to connecting a suspect to the crime. The rapist was smart. He had given away few clues to his identity.

As they wrapped up the interview, Hendershot decided to give Sarah some good news. The $200 was gone, but in the apartment, the cops had found the camera Sarah believed had been stolen. Perhaps she had just overlooked it when she surveyed her belongings after the rape.

“But there were two cameras,” Sarah said.

“There were two cameras—what do you mean?” Hendershot asked. She had thought there was only one in Sarah’s place.

“Well, there was a pink Sony, and then there was a bigger camera, mostly silver.”

The cops had found the silver camera, Hendershot knew. Where was the pink Sony? She dispatched police to Westminster’s pawnshops, to look for any reports of somebody hocking a pink camera. There were none.

Hendershot was setting up an interview with a Comcast cable guy who had serviced Sarah’s apartment complex when she got a call. It was a police sergeant from Aurora, a wealthier suburb thirty miles to the southeast of Westminster.

Through chatter among cops, the sergeant had learned details about the rape in Westminster. One of her detectives had a similar case, she told Hendershot. Perhaps they should compare notes.

Hendershot had just caught her first break.

TWO WEEKS AFTER Sarah’s rape, Hendershot sat down in a small conference room at the Westminster Police Department. Across from her was Scott Burgess, a detective from Aurora. Burgess had salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, pressed slacks, and a tie to work. He was a precise, careful man. On some days, he looped his tie once, twice, three, four times into an Eldredge knot. It was one of the hardest knots to tie. Ties.com gave it five out of five for difficulty.

Aurora’s police department had created a specialized sex crimes unit five years earlier. Burgess was one of its pioneers. “I was so lucky to get that draw,” he says. Like Hendershot, he loved the idea of helping other people. And Burgess understood victims. “One thing I learned is that there is no right way for a victim to respond to these assaults. I’ve had victims bring me to tears in an interview where you find out later that they’re false reports. I’ve also had victims that I would think to myself afterward, ‘There’s no way that this happened. You don’t come across like that after something so heinous.’ The thing I learned is there is no proper response.”

The lesson served him well when he had responded to the rape in Aurora in October 2009. The victim was a woman named Doris, a sixty-five-year-old divorcée who worked as a housemother at a local fraternity. She had been raped at her home in a neighborhood in south Aurora. When Burgess interviewed her the following day, Doris seemed “composed,” he told Hendershot. She had “a very matter-of-fact demeanor, was not emotional.

“I don’t recall any sort of an outpouring, or a breaking down,” he said. “It was just, ‘This happened. Now let’s see what we can do.’ ”

With Hendershot listening, Burgess reviewed the bullet points in his report:

Doris had described the rapist as “nice” and “gentle.” During the attack, she had told him that she was sixty-five years old, too old to rape. “That’s not old,” the rapist had responded.

Doris told Burgess that just before the man began to rape her, he removed the pink curlers from her hair.

“I know I’m going to feel bad about this later, but I can’t help it,” he had told her.

“You should get help,” Doris told him.

“It’s too late for that,” he replied.

Doris said she tried to be sympathetic. He was still young. Maybe he had been abused as a child. It was not too late to change.

The man slapped down the idea. He had never been abused. His parents were loving. He didn’t smoke, drink, or do any drugs.

“If they knew what I did, it would kill them,” he told her.

He had to rape. It was a “compulsion,” he told Doris. He had been fighting it a long time. He had lost again and again.

“I can’t help this,” he said.

Doris told Burgess that the man had begun to fill the bathtub with water after he ordered her into the bathroom. For a brief second, she imagined the worst.

“I immediately thought he was going to drown me,” she said.

Instead, he told her to wash herself off.

“Give me twenty minutes because I want to be thorough,” he told her.

When she got out, the clock said 3:45 a.m. She was too scared to call the police. She dressed. She made herself a cup of coffee. She sat down at her computer. She browsed the Internet.

Finally, at 6:00 a.m., Doris noticed that she was bleeding from her vagina. She drove herself to an emergency clinic. They told her to keep driving, directing her to the Medical Center of Aurora, which had resources for rape victims. There, a nurse called the police. The hospital performed a three-hour forensic exam to salvage any traces of DNA that might remain on her body.

Burgess told Hendershot that he realized the case would be difficult. Doris recalled many details of the rape. But her memories didn’t reveal much about the rapist’s identity. “How do I even put this out to the department?” Burgess asked himself at the time. “I can’t even tell you really, confidently, what racial or ethnic makeup my suspect might be, because everything was covered.” He told Hendershot that he imagined the attacker as a kind of rape expert—“ultra-prepared,” as he described it. “This guy was very meticulous.”

Burgess’s report recounted his efforts. He sent patrol officers to canvass Doris’s neighborhood, a cluster of modest homes on a small cul-de-sac off one of Aurora’s main east–west thoroughfares. One officer dug through thirty trash cans and three portable toilets at a nearby baseball field. Another officer chased down a man seen walking near the crime scene with a weapon, only to find it was a BB gun. When police pulled over a man for speeding near the scene, they discovered a pink sheet, some towels, and two black bags in his trunk. The officer retrieved the sheets from Doris’s house. They didn’t match. For good measure, the officer called the man’s girlfriend. She backed up his story, explaining that she left the sheets in his trunk after doing laundry.

Burgess’s initial suspicion focused on the fraternity house brothers. Doris didn’t think so: “It’s not one of my guys,” she told him, saying that she would recognize the voice. Burgess, however, contacted the police who patrolled the campus to see if they had recorded any similar assaults. A police sergeant directed him to a single case, involving a student who was six feet one and weighed 160 pounds. Police had stopped him for behaving strangely in November 2008. In the trunk of his car, they found police-style equipment—a flashing light that could be mounted on top of a vehicle, a baton, a Breathalyzer, and a 9mm Beretta. But the man had no criminal record. Burgess put the case, and his theory, aside.

Doris had provided a detailed description. But it was a description of a phantom: a masked man dressed in gray. There were no other clues. No eyewitnesses. No video surveillance.

On December 31, 2009, with the year coming to a close, Burgess wrote down the case status in capital letters: INACTIVE.

He wasn’t closing the case. There was a possibility that some other clue might trickle in. But he knew, inside, what “inactive” meant. “They’re not going to go anywhere.”

It was a crushing conclusion for Burgess. The case haunted him. He considered Doris’s rape one of the two or three worst cases he had investigated in his career. He would ask himself why she had been targeted. He was glad he could never reach an answer. “If you understand that, that’s a bad thing,” he’d say to himself.

Burgess left the meeting with Hendershot with new hope. The circumstantial evidence suggested one conclusion: the same person raped both Doris and Sarah. If Hendershot caught a break in her case, maybe he’d catch a break in his. Eight months after archiving Doris’s case, Burgess updated the file. The investigation was active again. All it took was one misstep by the rapist. One mistake, two crimes solved.

It was simple math.

IN THE WEEKS after Sarah’s rape, Hendershot played coach to a team of detectives, criminalists, crime analysts, and street cops. She had a half dozen cops check every trash can near the apartment in hopes that the rapist had tossed something as he fled. She had them scour the ditches and a retention pond, too. She ran names through Colorado’s sex offender registry: the cable guy who had briefly chatted with the victim while setting up her Internet; neighbors throughout the apartment complex; even the garbagemen. No hits.

Leads poured in. One by one, Hendershot knocked them down. Police had arrested Sarah’s ex-husband for rape in 1978. But Sarah insisted that she would have recognized her ex, mask or no. Police were investigating another stranger rape in the apartment complex where Sarah had lived with her deceased husband. But the suspect was a Saudi Arabian man who fled the country. One cop called to say he remembered a case from years ago that involved a man who carried a “rape tool kit.” That guy turned out to be too old.

Finally, there was the young man with the black backpack who had been spotted wandering along a wooded creek less than two miles from Sarah’s apartment complex. He turned out to be a college student with a green streak. Early one morning, he’d gone to the creek to arrange river rocks to improve circulation in stagnant pools of water. He confessed to showing “a little attitude” when cops questioned him. But he wasn’t a rapist.

Hendershot knew that rapes—especially stranger attacks—are usually solved in the first week. Each hour, each day, that passed reduced the chance of catching the attacker. She was running out of leads to chase. Other criminal cases were piling up. The trail was growing cold.

By December 2010, Hendershot was feeling déjà vu. She was in the same spot Burgess had been in a year earlier. Actually, it was a worse spot. Because now, the detectives had reason to believe that a serial rapist was on the loose. One who had raped two women for several hours but managed to leave behind no real clues. No eyewitnesses. No description. No fingerprints. And not enough DNA to enter into any database.

What’s more, both Hendershot and Burgess believed that the rapist would probably strike again.

All they could do was wait. Wait for a mistake. Or wait for another rape.

The calculations had changed. The math was not so simple.

Who was this guy?