CRIMINAL COLD CASES-FUGITIVES FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE-20-THE SOUTHSIDE RAPIST

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DENNIS NATHANIEL RABBITT:
THE SOUTHSIDE RAPIST
IT WAS YEARS BEFORE POLICE EVEN REALIZED WHAT WAS HAPPENING, BUT THEN RAPE IS PERHAPS THE MOST UNDER-REPORTED OF CRIMES. ACCORDING TO A 1996 SURVEY, ONLY THIRTY-NINE PER CENT OF SUCH CRIMES ARE EVER RELAYED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS. EVEN SO, THERE ARE SOME WOMEN IN ST LOUIS, MISSOURI, WHO WOULD CLAIM BITTERLY THAT THE POLICE WOULD RATHER THE FIGURE WAS EVEN LESS.

Nevertheless, the following modus operandi of the person concerned began to emerge: between 1988 and 1997 an individual was breaking into women's houses at night, after they had gone to bed, usually through an unlocked door or open window. He wore a ski-mask and gloves to protect his identity. After the rape, he would usually force the victim to bathe, presumably to destroy any forensic evidence of his crime. The rapes took place in the better neighbourhoods of St Louis, towards the south of the city, areas that had always been relatively safe and crime-free, and for this anomaly the unknown criminal was dubbed the Southside Rapist. When DNA evidence finally brought his reign of terror to an end, the head of the city police department was compelled to open a new, dedicated crime lab, so no other criminal should escape this newer, longer arm of the law.

Under heavy police protection, including a bullet-proof vest and riot helmet, Dennis Rabbitt is transferred across state. So prolific was the range of his attacks, authorities in St Louis had to discuss which municipality would prosecute him first

The man behind the mask
Dennis Nathaniel Rabbitt was born in St Louis in 1957, to a middle-class family. His father was blind, and he was brought up mostly by his stepfather and his mother. During his adolescence, Rabbitt claims his mother drilled a hole in the bathroom door so she could watch him masturbate. Later in his teenage years he returned home one day to find his mother unconscious near the living room, and his stepfather upstairs in their bedroom, dead, with a gun in his hand and blood on the walls.

Rabbitt later said he knew something was wrong with him from an early age. By seventeen, his criminal record had begun, and he had become a known burglar. This did not stop him from leading the semblance of a normal life, however, and Rabbitt eventually married, and became the father of two. During this time he ran a bar and restaurant in downtown St Louis, and those that knew him described him as a typical married father. He was to describe the break-up of his marriage as one of the worst events in his life, although it was he who filed for divorce, in 1987. Observers who watched the case unfold were quick to point out that the first rape of which he was suspected occurred the following year.

The nightmare begins
As the police found out, while his modus operandi remained fairly consistent, there was no link between the victims of the Southside Rapist, other than that they were women, and they were vulnerable. He had no physical type, or racial preference. The age varied hugely too, starting in the mid-teens and ending in the early eighties. There were no other causative factors that linked them, none of the women knew each other, their daily movements were all different, and they worked and shopped in different areas. Yet each one would awake sometime in the night with a masked man sitting on their chest or legs, holding a knife at their throat, or pointing a gun at their head. Other than the rape itself he inflicted no other harm upon them, which would tend to categorize him as a power-assurance rapist, sometimes described by police as a 'gentleman rapist'. Rabbitt fits the profile reasonably well, being a man of average intelligence, who was rarely physically aggressive, who worried about his social status and may have been insecure about his masculinity, and who had failed at maintaining a strong romantic relationship. He also fantasized that the rape was consensual sex; desired and enjoyed by his female victim. It was anything but; even Jennifer Jewer, a woman of strong Baptist faith, who famously forgave him in court, eventually slid into a paralysing depression that cost her her job.

'To Serve And Protect'?
For over a decade, the St Louis Metropolitan Police were at a loss, while the rapes continued. 'He terrorized the city', Police Chief Joe Mokwa confessed. 'We didn't know who he was or where he was going to strike next. We had no solid eyewitnesses to identify him.' In an attempt to narrow down the rapist's area of operations, they contacted James LeBeau, an administration of justice professor at the Southern Illinois University, in 1996. LeBeau was a pioneer of crime mapping (LeBeau: '[Crime mapping] is a generic term for taking locations of crimes and putting them on a map, putting spatial information in a geographical format'). But while crime mapping went on to prove itself useful for the purposes of trend-spotting and expending resources, it brought St Louis police no closer to the fleet-footed Southside Rapist.

Despite their best efforts, however, many remain critical of the Metropolitan Police's handling of the case, and their handling of rape cases in general. Statistically, St Louis officially had fewer rapes than most American cities, even while the Southside Rapist was at his busiest. As the St Louis Post-Dispatch has reported, this was largely because for decades huge numbers of rapes were never even filed on system, but simply kept as 'memos' for a period of months before being shredded. As late as 2005 the department had to increase its annual rape figure by fifty-three per cent. Physical evidence from rape kits was frequently destroyed too, often without ever having been analysed. In such a culture, critics argue, it is no wonder Dennis Rabbitt got away with so much for so long. There are also allegations that before Rabbitt was identified as the Southside Rapist he was found by police drunkenly passed out in public only a few houses away from where a rape had occurred the night before.

Manhunt
Frustrated, the police returned to their crime mapping. Could this new technique be honed and refined to produce a better result? The case had been cold for three years when they extended their search outside the Southside area and begun to look further afield, at rapes in less affluent parts of the city, even in other counties. With these extra cases taken into account, the profile of the perpetrator became clearer, and the list of suspects drastically shorter. Dennis Rabbitt, who had by now been arrested twice for attempted burglaries (failed rapes, he later confessed), was on the list. Crime mapping had worked after all: the officers had just needed to take in all of St Louis.

Under the guise of a peeping-tom investigation, they obtained a saliva sample from Rabbitt and analysed his DNA. It was a perfect match for the Southside Rapist, but when the tests were finished they found Rabbitt had left his new job in waste disposal and fled the city, almost immediately after giving the sample. The manhunt lasted for months. After an appearance on America's Most Wanted , a woman tipped off his whereabouts for a twenty-five thousand dollar reward. The FBI caught up with him in a motel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a fifteen-year-old girl in tow. He initially claimed to be Nathan Babbitt, but this modest alias could not hide his tattoos, which matched the description on record.

Behind bars
Dennis Rabbitt was tried not once but several times, in different counties, until he had been tried for each of the twenty rapes his DNA linked him to, and was found guilty on each count. He was sentenced to five life sentences in Missouri and an additional sixty years in Illinois. There are numerous but inconsistent reports that he has confessed to many more rapes than the twenty he was convicted of, from a total of twenty nine up to a hundred. 'It's only logical that there are many more rapes than we know about', St Louis Detective Mark Kennedy once said. 'Even if he averaged only four a year, that's more than one hundred rapes.' In April 2005 Rabbitt was stabbed, repeatedly but not fatally, in the exercise grounds of the South Central Correctional Center, and moved elsewhere. Outside prison walls, St Louis police were so impressed by the efficacy of DNA evidence that they opened a new crime lab on Clarke Avenue that now oversees a hundred thousand cases a year. And in and around the Gateway City, a number of traumatized but relieved women are trying to get on with their lives.