for 15 years, a serial rapist preyed on single woman in the small college town of lafayette, louisiana. although his m.o. was always the same, investigators had few clues to his identity. the masked assailant would break into women's homes late at night, blind them with a flashlight, and assault them at gunpoint. but when the locations of all these crimes were entered into a new computer program, police learned more about the perpetrator than they were prepared for. in august of 1995 in

lafayette, louisiana, thousands of college students were arriving for the fall semester at the university of louisiana. one of the students beginning her senior year was a 21-year-old woman whom we'll call ann. ann was working her way through school at a local health club and earned extra money by babysitting for a friend who lived in an affluent suburb not far from school. >> in fact, a city official lived right across the street from this woman where i babysat. i couldn't have picked a place to feel safer. it was just a place that had the american dream, no one could hurt you here written all over it. >> on august 30th, 1995, ann's friend had to go out of town for a business trip, so ann agreed to stay overnight with the two children. ann put them to bed around 10:00. she allowed them to stay up a

little later that night since they didn't have school the next day. afterwards, ann started in on some of her homework. >> worked on the computer a little bit. decided to get a head start on some of the assignments that i had gotten that day. probably around 11:00, i decided to go to bed. >> around 2:00 a.m., ann awoke to find a masked intruder armed with a gun. he threatened to kill her and the children. >> he shone a flashlight in my face, so i really couldn't see anything at all. he was wearing these wool gloves, really scratchy gloves, and he had a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. >> the man wore a knit hat and a bandana over his face and forced ann to walk through the entire house. he said he was looking for money but took nothing of value. he found ann's home address in

her backpack and said he would track her down if she did not do exactly as she was told. >> he really could kill me in just a second, so i knew to save my life and to save the two children's lives, i had to do what he said, and so i did and, he raped me. >> later, the perpetrator led ann to the bathroom, told her to urinate, and to count to 100 before getting up. he also told her not to call the police because, if she did, he said he would know about it and he would get revenge. he left without harming the children. at the hospital, a rape test kit recovered a semen sample, but no other trace evidence such as foreign hairs or fibers. because of the flashlight, cap, and bandana, all ann could say was that the perpetrator was an

overweight white male with piercing blue eyes. >> went to school the next day following, sat in class, and felt like everyone in there was looking at me. it felt like every white male who was slightly overweight, that even slightly resembled the man who had hurt me, was staring at me. felt like that must be him. maybe that's him, so i left that class and just cried and cried. i knew that life was never going to be the same. >> one of ann's friends heard about the assault and called her with an important piece of information. >> she said, i heard what happened to you. and i really want to talk to you about it. it sounded a whole lot like what happened to me. as we talked, we found out this is the same guy. everything he did, everything he said, every movement was identical.

>> ann's friend had been raped three years earlier just one mile from where ann was assaulted. a lafayette police detective matt gallien realized that ann's case was similar to other unsolved rape cases, some dating back ten years. >> i researched previous sexual assaults as far back as 1982. i think i found some as early as '84 that were similar in m.o. >> if these cases were connected, lafayette police not only had a serial rapist on the loose, but one sophisticated enough to elude police for years.

to the lafayette police, the rape of the 21-year-old college student sounded similar to a number of other unsolved rape cases all on the south side of the city. four miles from where ann was assaulted, a 32-year-old office worker living alone had also been raped.

a year before that, one mile away, a 40-year-old hotel receptionist living alone reported a similar attack. all of the rapes were identical. the women were asleep. the perpetrator had a gun, a flashlight and wore heavy woolen gloves, a bandana and a cap. he walked all of the women through the home saying he was looking for valuables, but his motive wasn't robbery. >> that type of rapist wants to go through the whole scenario. i'm in this room, i've got to get out, where can i go? >> in many cases, the perpetrator ordered the women to shower afterwards, presumably to remove trace evidence, such as semen, hair and fibers. detective matt gallien identified a dozen rape cases all on the south side of the city within a five-mile radius, all with the same m.o.

in some of these cases, semen samples were collected from the victims. in others, washcloths found in victims' homes were found to contain semen, presumably from the perpetrator. all were sent for dna testing. six of the semen samples matched. the others were inconclusive. investigators discovered that all of the women shopped at the same grocery store and many were members of the health club nearby. since most of the women were single and living alone, investigators suspected that the victims had been stalked, and there were some other clues that concerned police. first was something the perpetrator said to all of the women. >> he didn't say if you go to the police, i'll find out about it. he said, if you go to police, i'll know about it. the fact he uses the phrase "i will know" tells me he has a strong insight into the police department.

>> another clue is the way the perpetrator held the flashlight high around his head, gripping it behind the lens. >> a layperson will probably point a flashlight out in front. most professionals will hold it up like so. police officers, this is the way we usually hold our flashlights. >> since the perpetrator held his flashlight in the same way, investigators suspected he may be working in law enforcement or in a related field. crime analyst ronnie smith was asked to develop a psychological profile of the rapist by studying the manner in which the crimes were committed. smith said by ordering the women to bathe after the rapes, the rapist was trying to do more than simply remove forensic evidence. >> to make a woman clean up, you

do feel better about yourself. because you're clean now and you don't have that anger towards the guy. >> the rapist knew that bathing would reduce the likelihood of the victims reporting the crime. and the psychological gains didn't stop there. >> he gave me some warnings about making sure the lock on the window gets fixed. gave me all sorts of fatherly sort of advice, which was pretty disgusting after what he had done to me, as if it were my fault that he came in and did that to me. >> he's telling them, okay, this is not all my fault, okay? if you had done this, this, and this, you wouldn't have been a part of it. but the fact you did leave your door unlocked or your window unlocked, this is what happened to you. >> in one case, the rapist got careless. his bandanna came loose for a moment, giving the woman a glimpse of his face.

from that description, a police sketch artist prepared a composite drawing which was released to the press. it did not resemble anyone in the police department who had piercing blue eyes. the only other lead was from one of the rape victims who said she saw a 10-year-old brown ford pickup truck leaving the neighborhood immediately after she was assaulted. but there were over 12,000 brown, tan, and beige ford pickup trucks in the state of louisiana, and none of them were registered to an employee of the police department. since most of the rapes occurred on the south side of town, the local press dubbed him the "south side rapist." >> the guy was good. he was very good. he planned out everything. he thought about it. he knew what to do. he handled himself well once he got in.

>> and if the perpetrator was a member of law enforcement, he would be very difficult to catch.

in lafayette, louisiana, dna testing confirmed that a serial rapist was on the loose. police identified 12 unsolved rape cases, all with the same m.o. the rapes began in 1984 and continued into the 1990s. but in 1995, after the sexual assault of the 21-year-old college student, the rapes mysteriously stopped. police checked hundreds of leads and eliminated thousands of suspects. all were dead ends. police were starting to wonder whether they'd ever catch the south side rapist and whether the perpetrator was simply too smart. but a magazine article in "police chief" magazine changed their luck. it described a new technique called geographic profiling written by a detective inspector with the vancouver police

department, ken rosmo. >> the basic theory that underlies geographic profiling is something called environmental criminology. that means people in regards to their noncriminal behavior, such as shopping, will engage in many activities close to their home. same thing applies to criminals. >> lafayette police asked detective rosmo to generate a geographic profile of their south side rapist. so he flew to lafayette to inspect the crime scenes. first, with an aerial inspection, then by visiting the crime scenes at night and also during the day. rosmo did not believe the grocery store or health club played any role in identifying the victims. most of the rapes occurred in homes without window coverings, where it was easy to see inside from the street. once back in vancouver, the detective entered all of his

information into a computer program he developed as part of his ph.d. thesis in criminology, a program he calls rigel. rosmo designed the program after studying the relationship between hundreds of crimes and where the perpetrators lived in relation to the crimes they committed. >> then the computer assesses distances between the various crime sites and distances from the crime sites to what is really a 40,000 pixel grid covering the area where what we call the hunting area where the crimes have taken place. for each of those 40,000 pixels it will assign a probability that's the likelihood where the perpetrator lives. >> when detective rosmo entered the locations of the 12 rape cases in lafayette, the computer identified something important. it was a specific neighborhood just two miles from each of the crime scenes.

according to the computer, this one-half square mile area was the neighborhood in which the perpetrator either lived or worked. surprisingly, a deputy sheriff from lafayette lived in that very neighborhood at the time the assaults took place, although he had recently moved. his name was randy como, a 20-year veteran of the sheriff's department who often worked on juvenile rape cases. he was divorced, had a young daughter and was engaged to a volunteer at the local rape crisis center. during the ten years that the rapes occurred, como was living in the center of the area identified by the geographic profile. one of como's friends was sergeant terry regan, the officer in charge of the south side rapist task force.

>> you're not going to be able to print this, but i was pissed off. we go all the way back to the mid '80s working cases together. we visited together. i am personal friends with randy como. >> but police needed to make sure that randy como was the rapist, and they needed to gather more evidence before proceeding. for that, they looked in a most unlikely place. his garbage.

lafayette police discovered that one of their own sheriff's deputies, randy como, was living in the neighborhood identified by the computerized geographic profile. but como's colleagues weren't entirely convinced he was the perpetrator. >> the only reason i didn't want any of this to get out, in the beginning, i wasn't really sure he was the actual perpetrator. so i didn't want to ruin his career until we found out for sure. >> at about the same time, an anonymous caller told police that randy como was the rapist they were looking for. faith moody runs the local rape crisis center and was alarmed to learn that randy como was a suspect.

>> the sense of betrayal for it being randy como, and i have a hard time sometimes calling him detective, was that he did work cases under the children's advocacy center. he had worked cases for us as sexual abuse response center. >> since police had a dna profile of the south side rapist from semen samples from the victims, they wanted to gather a dna sample from randy como for comparison without his knowledge. so they sterilized an ash tray and discreetly placed it in front of him at the police station during his coffee break. when como left, the entire ash tray was sent to the forensic lab for testing. and when the dna profile of the semen taken from six of the rape cases was compared to the dna profile from como's saliva, investigators had a match.

randy como was the south side rapist. >> we were really shocked and taken aback by the fact it was one of our own. we were very disappointed. once he crossed that line, he was just another criminal to us. >> immediately following como's arrest, he confessed, not only to the rapes he was accused of but the two other rapes the police knew nothing else about bringing the total to 14. when police searched como's apartment, they found underwear from his victims which he kept as trophies, books on rape and road maps of the south side neighborhoods. police also found a brown ford pickup truck at como's brother's home 200 miles away in shreveport, louisiana. for close to 15 years, como stalked his prey and used his police training to control his victims from the very outset of

the assaults. but he unwittingly left an important clue. a trail that led from his crime scenes straight back to his own neighborhood. most of his crimes happened within two miles of his home. >> we were looking for somebody who was right under our noses all the time. somebody who had the information, somebody who knew. >> even being a cop and having that inside authority, you know you're still going to mess up. you're still going to do something wrong. all you have to do is find that one thing wrong in each case, and you can build on that. >> randy como pleaded guilty to six counts of aggravated assault and was sentenced to six life terms in prison. >> if i could turn back time, i would never want this to happen again. it was the most awful thing in my life that could happen. but again, i chose to use this as an opportunity to learn more about myself, to appreciate the people that i have in my life

because they could be gone tomorrow. and that has given me so much more than i had before this more than i had before this happened. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com in august of 1986, betty wolsieffer, a 32-year-old housewife and mother, was strangled and murdered by an assailant who had broken into her home. her husband, dr. glen wolsieffer, had also been strangled and knocked unconscious, but survived the attack. his brother, neil, lived across the street and was the first to arrive at the scene. a few months later neil was dead, too, some say because of what he learned about the intruder. glen and betty wolsieffer had been married for ninar