The Killer Book of Cold Cases (15 page)

As an ex-paratrooper, I believe that Cooper did not survive the jump. For one thing, he exited the aircraft when it was going 200 miles an hour, and at that speed, he would have been tossed around as if he were a leaf. For another, the terrain was difficult. He would have had to be awfully lucky not to land in a place that was crowded with tall, spiky trees or rocks or in the Columbia River. Further evidence that he did not survive the jump is the fact that none of the money has ever been seen in circulation. Even if he had hidden the money with the idea of retrieving it later, he probably wasn’t in good enough shape to do so.

Prediction: Some day, someone may get lucky and find D.B. Cooper’s bones—if they still exist. That country is home to all kinds of wild animals.

“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.”

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.