“I was in shock,” Kristi Mills said to ABC’s 20/20. “Absolute shock. I looked at the door and saw the light there, and something just didn’t seem right. And that’s when I saw him.”
“The next thing I remember is he was on top of me in the bed,” she said. The intruder told her he was there to rob her Bloomington, Illinois, home and that he wouldn’t harm her as long as she stayed silent. If she didn’t, he would shoot her dead.
He wore gloves and a ski mask, and was calm, in complete control of himself. He used zip ties to secure her hands behind her back, and he ran duct tape across her eyes.
“He actually taped all the way around my head so that I wouldn’t be able to open my mouth at all. Put tape over my eyes,” Mills said.
He also put a pillowcase over her head, and then she was ready. Instead of burglarizing the house, he raped her for forty-five minutes. “He seemed very assertive when he talked and not like somebody who’s, you know, panicking. He seemed like he knew what he was doing,” Mills said.
When he was finished assaulting her, she was aware of him making sure he left no evidence behind, and then he took her still blindfolded into the bathroom. Mills heard the water running.
“I started to panic, and I thought he was going to shoot me in the bathtub,” she said. “Just over a month from my twentysixth birthday, and I was going to die.”
But it soon became obvious that the man had no intention of killing her. He just wanted to make sure that the water cleansed her of all potential trace evidence.
Later, one of the detectives on the case, Clay Wheeler, said investigators quickly realized that they were dealing with someone who knew all about evidence and was a cop, a security person, or a devotee of crime shows.
Mills had the reaction to the assault that most women have: she seriously considered not telling anyone about it. It was too embarrassing, too painful, she thought, to do so. But, she told reporters, she realized that “if I don’t tell the police, this person is going to rape yet another person.” She told the police.
Mills didn’t know that the man who had raped her was no ordinary rapist. The police had not released the names of his other two victims to the public, but the cops knew they were dealing with a serial rapist. The fourth victim was raped two years after the first. Sarah Kalmes-Gliege, then twenty-eight years old, awoke to find a stranger in her room in the middle of the night, and like many other rape victims, she noted various details about her attacker’s appearance. One thing she noticed, for example, was his walk, which she described as “cumbersome.” She also couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were bright blue.
“I knew I would pick them out if I ever saw them again,” she said.
As he had done with Mills and the other victims, the rapist forced Kalmes-Gliege to take a long bath to wash away evidence before he left.
The victims knew that their rapes were not crimes of opportunity. Like Mills, Kalmes-Gliege knew that she had been picked out and stalked by the rapist because he knew all kinds of intimate details about her life such as, she told an ABC reporter, “what my sister looked like, the car my fiancé drove, my work schedule, and where I worked. He knew everything about me and threatened to kill my family.”
Rape is hardly ever about sex. It is about power and domination, if you look into the background of most rapists—who, according to ex-Suffolk County District Attorney Kerry Trainor, are almost always young and white. Invariably the rapist has a problem with his mother, who terrifies him. This terror seeps into his unconscious mind, and the feeling is transposed or projected on someone who reminds him of his mother. He then handles the terror by dominating and defiling her to remove her as a threat to him.
Kalmes-Gliege could tell that the assault had nothing to do with sex. All that the rapist wanted to do was dominate and defile her, which he succeeded in doing.
As her ordeal went on, Kalmes-Gliege said, “all I could think was I can’t have someone call my family, my fiancé, my parents, my siblings and tell them that I have been killed six weeks before I [was supposed to] get married.”
Mills also remembered the rapist’s eyes. “When you’re staring into those eyes and that’s the only thing you can see and the only thing you can focus on, they stick with you.”
He also was a talker. “He’s actually engaging in conversation rather than just the quick act of violence,” Wheeler’s partner, Detective Matthew Dick, said. “His rape victims would detail how loving he would be to them before turning violent and angry.”
At one point, unable to catch up with the serial rapist, the cops contacted the FBI. Profilers from the Bureau surprised the cops when they said the man they were after would not be a person with dripping fangs but someone who appeared to a good citizen. Investigators were instructed not to look for someone with a criminal record but, rather for someone who on the surface was a solid citizen.
“The one thing [the FBI] did tell us that I’ll never forget was that this would be some guy that everybody works with. They’ll say, ‘No. He couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t do that,’ you know. And it’d be somebody that would be maybe a respected member of the community,” Wheeler said.
Despite the best efforts of the police, investigators couldn’t catch the rapist. And from December 2002 to January 2005, he raped four women in lengthy, brutal sessions.
Detectives Wheeler and Dick realized the criminal was a stalker. He was obsessed with his victims, gathering private details about them and repeating those details back during the rape. He knew the kinds of details about his victims that their friends would know so the press dubbed him “The Boyfriend Rapist.”
The police had no suspect in mind, and the next victim was already being stalked.
“I didn’t feel comfortable going outside by myself,” Jonelle Galuska said. She was constantly worried that she was being watched.
One night, she called the police after waking up startled. “I had a strange feeling,” she said later. “I [could] hear knocking at the door, like an urgent knock.”
When police officer Dave Zeamer arrived on the scene, he saw a man standing against the house. When the man noticed the police officer, he began to walk away.
Zeamer yelled for him to stop, and he did. But when he turned around, Zeamer got a shock. The man was a fellow police officer, Jeff Pelo, who at one point had been Zeamer’s supervisor.
Zeamer said he was relieved to see a fellow officer, but then he asked Pelo what he was doing out there. Pelo’s response was totally illogical. He said he was looking for a house for his mother-in-law. Zeamer couldn’t help but note that it was 1 a.m.
After that, at least one—and perhaps both—of the investigating detectives made the connection in their minds that Pelo was the rapist, in part because that seemed logical. A cop would have known how to cover his tracks. But proving that Pelo was the perp was a whole different matter. When investigators started to probe, they found potent evidence. For example, Pelo had run the licenses of three of the rape victims, which would have enabled him to collect all kinds of personal information about them—including where they lived. Investigators grilled Pelo, but he denied any guilt.
However, they obtained a search warrant for his home and found a ski mask made of fibers that matched the kind discovered on duct tape taken off Mills.
There was another indication. Detective Clay Wheeler said, “Victims described how [the rapist] would pull some of the items around from his belt. You know, the gloves that they described were consistent with what police officers or security officers commonly wear.”
At one point, victims got a chance to try to identify Pelo, even though he had worn a ski mask.
One lineup was a voice lineup. Said Detective Dick: “The third victim, when she heard his voice, she literally curled up into the fetal position and pulled herself into the wall of the interview room.”
“If you spend two hours listening to that person threaten [and] degrade you, it doesn’t take very much to recognize [his voice],” said Sarah Kalmes-Gliege.
Three of the four victims also picked Pelo out of a visual lineup showing suspects’ eyes.
Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, says the Innocence Project, playing a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing. While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge or jury, thirty years of strong social-science research have shown that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder or camera. We neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene: it must be preserved carefully and retrieved methodically, or it can be contaminated. The Innocence Project has worked on cases in which:
A variety of factors can affect accuracy, says the Innocence Project. Leading social-science researchers identify two main areas of influence. What are called estimator variables are those that cannot be controlled by the criminal justice system. They include things like the lighting when the crime took place or the distance from which the witness saw the perpetrator. Estimator variables also include more complex factors, such as race (identifications have proven to be less accurate when witnesses are identifying perpetrators of a different race than themselves), the presence of a weapon during a crime, and the degree of stress or trauma a witness experienced while seeing the perpetrator.
System variables are those that the criminal-justice system can and should control. They include all of the ways that law-enforcement agencies retrieve and record witness memory, such as lineups, photo arrays, and other identification procedures. System variables that substantially impact the accuracy of identifications include the type of lineup used, the selection of “fillers” (or members of a lineup or photo array who are not the actual suspect), blind administration, instructions to witnesses before identification procedures, administration of lineups or photo arrays, and communication with witnesses after they make an identification.
After a while, Dick and Wheeler became convinced that Pelo was the rapist, and they were ashamed, tormented that a cop could commit these acts. “To go to the victims and have to tell them that ‘this was one of my own that did this to you…’” Dick said. “It was pretty devastating.”
Sarah Kalmes-Gliege said Dick was choked up and teary when he told her. “And you could just see how much this breach of trust and the breach of the oath that they have taken to ‘serve and protect’ had affected them,” she said.
Jeffrey Pelo was sentenced to 440 years in jail. Despite the evidence against him, Pelo’s family stood by him. His wife of twenty years, Rickie, said that there was no real physical evidence against him, and their three kids backed him as well. His wife said she had tried to shut out the recent past, remembering him when she first met him at eighteen. Ironically, she said that she fell in love with his eyes. “His eyes were just beautiful, and I could lose myself in them.”
Information for the following Q & A came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice.
Q. What is regarded as the most common type or rape?
A. Blitz rape, which is an unexpected sexual assault committed by a stranger. It is one of the terms coined by Ann Burgess and Lynda Holmstrom in their studies of rape victims at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in the early 1970s. When women think of rape, unexpected assault comes to mind most often and is most feared because of the level of violence with which it is associated. “Blitz” is a German word that means “lightning strike.”
Q. Which gender more commonly stalks the other?
A. Men more commonly stalk women. All told, experts estimate that there are 1.4 million stalkers in America. These stalkers can take action in many ways, some of them quite upsetting:
Q. Do stalkers fall in different categories?
A. Yes. Forensic psychologists divide them into two general categories. About 25 percent of stalkers fall into the “love obsession” group. People who stalk celebrities fall into this category. They are also the people who become fixated on a coworker, acquaintance, or teacher. They live in a delusional fantasy world complete with their own script of how this object of their fixation loves them and is already in a relationship with them. Those in this category suffer from some form of mental illness, like paranoia or schizophrenia. The other 75 percent or so of stalkers are in the “simple obsession” group. These people have previously been in some form of relationship with the victim, either romantic or personal. When the relationship ends, the stalker feels lost and powerless. He cannot bear the thought of the victim being out of his life, so the patterns of stalking behavior begin. Unfortunately, this category produces the majority of domestic violence incidents, the worst of which end in murder-suicide.
Q. How many women and how many men will be stalked in their lifetime?
A. Eight percent of American women and 2 percent of American men—1.4 million stalking victims every year. Most stalkers have been in relationships with the people they stalk, but many have never even met the victims or were just casual acquaintances.
Q. How many stalkers are violent?
A. 30 percent, almost one-third—a scary figure.
Q. If someone is being stalked, is it wise for them to get a restraining order?
A. 3. If you are being stalked, talk it over with an expert to see if a restraining order would work in your case. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Q. How many women have been raped or have been the victims of attempted rape?
A. According to the Department of Justice, around 17 percent, almost one in five. This high of a percentage may seem shocking, but a close look at how rape occurs makes it understandable. For one thing, Department of Justice statistics reveal that 50 percent of all rape victims are known by their attackers, that they are victims of acquaintance, date, or convenience rape. These are essentially rapes of opportunity. Other types of rape fatten the percentage, including statutory rape, which is sex with someone under the age of consent; marital rape, or unwanted sex in marriage; blitz rape, an unexpected assault by a stranger; incest; so-called “group” rape (also known as “pack” or “gang” rape or “pulling train”); and “gray” rape, which gets its name from rape charges being difficult to prove. Given all the ways that women can be assaulted, it’s a wonder that the rape percentage isn’t higher.
Q. How many rapists know their victims?
A. Astonishingly, 50 percent. Rapists who know their victims casually or intimately are far more common than is generally believed. The act is known as acquaintance, date, or convenience rape. One myth is that such rapes are less traumatic than when the victim does not know the assaulter. In fact, the sense of betrayal and shock is likely to be greater.—Department of Justice
Q. Has rape always been seen as a crime?
A. For ages, 100 percent of rapes were seen in most cultures as less a crime against a particular girl or woman than against the male figure she “belonged” to. Thus, the penalty for rape was often a fine payable to the father or the husband whose “goods” had been damaged.—FBI
Q. How many rapists use weapons?
A. In 2004, 8 percent of all rapes or sexual assaults involved the use of a weapon.—Department of Justice
Q. Is incest considered rape?
A. Incest is a sexual assault on a child by an elder relative, and it is definitely considered rape. Psychologists estimate that 40 million adults—20 percent or more—in the United States, 15 million of those being male, were sexually abused by family members or other elders who they depended on. Psychologists often call these victims “secret survivors,” but survive is about all they do. They carry the trauma deep inside themselves, unable to tell anyone what happened, and a parent who knows also says nothing because, like the child, they may be dependent on the assaulter. Of course, many times these long-repressed memories emerge in adulthood, but by then it’s too late to reconstruct the shattered psyche of the child, now an adult, and there is no legal recourse. The statute of limitations has run out on the perpetrator.
Q. Can a woman rape a man?
A. While the universal perception of rape involves the sexually aggressive male violating the female, there have been numerous cases of women raping men. Criminologists believe that most of these incidents are never reported because victims fear not being believed or don’t wish to endure the embarrassment of filing a police report or having to testify in an often unsympathetic courtroom. Some criminologists say this type of rape happens 5 percent of the time when a woman wants to be intimate with a man. Most people think it would be impossible for a woman to rape a man due to the anatomical prerequisite of sexual arousal (an erection) to complete the act, but, in fact, males who are psychologically unwilling participants can find themselves becoming erect due to autonomic response (which is the part of the nervous system that governs involuntary actions). An aggressive female can achieve the desired result in her victim through manual stimulation and other sexually provocative contact. Heightened emotional states (such as fear) can also produce an erection. At this point, forced penetration can occur (which is the legal definition of rape). Drugs or alcohol, or both, are often found to be contributing factors.
Q. What percentage of rape accusations are false?
A. The FBI has estimated that around 8 percent of rape accusations are false. The number is small because not many people would want to go through the trauma of accusing someone and then possibly going through a trial. Men should know the law to protect themselves from false accusations. There are a number of situations in which a man can be considered to have committed rape under the law:
Q. How does rape on campus differ than other kinds of rape?
A. First, up to 85 percent of all women raped on campus know their attacker. Second, either the offender or the victim has been drinking 75 percent of the time. And, while 40 percent of all rapes are reported in the United States, only 5 percent of all rapes on campus are reported. Embarrassment is the main reason why women don’t report the rapes.—Department of Justice
Q. How many women in America are prostitutes?
A. According to the National Task Force on Prostitution, an astonishing 1 percent, or one million women, prostitute themselves. In a study of women who get into prostitution, the proximate cause for 80 percent is drug use. The woman needs a way to obtain the funds to buy drugs. But even more basic than this is that these women have been sexually abused as children, and the drug or alcohol they take acts as an anesthetic to deal with the lifelong anxiety and depression that the abuse has inculcated.