One Sunday night in March, 1985, Michele Murray, a sophomore at Texas Tech University, tried to find a parking space near her dorm. In the preceding months, four women had been raped on or near the Texas Tech campus, in the small plains city of Lubbock; local newspapers speculated about a “Tech rapist,” but the police had no solid leads. As Murray parked in a church lot, a man wearing a yellow terry-cloth shirt and bluejeans approached the car. She felt a pang of fear, but at second glance the man seemed harmless—not particularly tall or muscular, with gaunt cheeks and bulging eyes. She rolled down the window.
“Do you have jumper cables?” he asked. She said no. For a moment, the man stared vacantly up at the night sky.
Then, in one quick motion, he forced the door open, pulled out a pocketknife, pushed Murray into the passenger seat, and held her in a headlock. He put the car in gear with his left hand and drove out of town, pressing her head down so that she could not see where they were going. Eventually, he stopped in a field. Murray could see the lights of downtown Lubbock in the distance. Threatening her with the knife, he ordered her to take off her sweatsuit. Despite her panic, she tried to memorize every detail of his appearance.
[For more of this story, written by Paul Kix, go to http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...-of-justice-paul-kix]
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