In Dogged Pursuit of a Rapist

For five years, the horror story of the Cottonwood Pervert had no new chapters, no ending. His brazen daylight attacks abruptly stopped on a hot summer day in 1989 and police were left to ponder the fate of the elusive serial rapist.

None was more frustrated than Linda Faust, the civilian investigator for the Santa Ana Police Department who first theorized that the same mystery man terrorizing the Cottonwood area of Orange also was responsible for sex crimes and home burglaries across seven Orange County cities.

Faust and other investigators had put together a terrifying profile: a man who stalked his victims before attacking and left behind lurid notes but no fingerprints.

“It was one we didn’t want to let go of,” said Faust, who never put away the cold case’s files. They sat beside her desk, tauntingly within sight even though her quarry had vanished. “I knew he’d be back. It was just a feeling.”

Faust was right. A Santa Ana woman was raped at knifepoint in August 1994 and the rampage was on again. Another year would pass before police arrested Kenneth George Wade, the 46-year-old Temecula man who eventually confessed to Faust that he was the Cottonwood Pervert.

That jailhouse confession and her eight-year search for the serial rapist have made Faust a minor celebrity in law enforcement circles, earning her the department’s Police Service Medal and attention rarely bestowed on a civilian.

Hired to investigate relatively minor sex crimes, Faust never imagined she would be leading the hunt for one of Orange County’s most prolific sex predators, a suspect in close to 100 other sex and property crimes.

The spotlight has not been comfortable for the 53-year-old mother of three, who would much prefer to brag about her sons than herself. Only now, almost a year after Wade’s arrest, is she speaking publicly about the case for the first time. “I’ll talk about it, but the story is Wade, not me.”

In truth, the story is both of them, the pursuer and the predator. Faust’s dogged investigation and her interviews with victims put her inside Wade’s head long before they ever met. And, after his arrest, Wade named the investigator as his sole confidant when he confessed to 13 felonies.

The relationship is hard for Faust to describe.

“I did feel like I knew him already when we met,” she said. “The things he said to his victims are very telling, and I knew those things. It was a fascinating case in many ways.”

For eight years, it was also a frustrating case. Despite wildly brazen methods--committing many of his crimes in the nude and driving the same stolen car for a year--the Cottonwood Pervert escaped again and again.

His methods marked his crimes: He would sneak in through unlocked windows or doors or jimmy open sliding glass doors. He would visit his victims more than once, often at first only leaving notes or stealing “trophies,” such as panties. When he attacked, he would talk to the women, chiding them for poor home security and asking lewd questions.

The intruder was so successful at dodging police stakeouts and traps that investigators began to wonder if their target might be a rogue cop armed with insider information.

For Faust, the epic manhunt began in July 1987 when a pair of terrified roommates in a Santa Ana apartment reported finding an ominous, handwritten note. In explicit language, the note warned the women that they could have easily been rape victims.

The case was assigned to Faust, who spends most of her time hunting down obscene callers, flashers and other harassing sex crimes. Those crimes are classified as non-dangerous duty and routinely assigned to civilian investigators to free up sworn officers.

The frightening note was followed up by other reports that Faust handled of indecent exposures, public masturbation and prowling by an assailant of the same description: a bespectacled white man in his 30s with sandy brown hair and a mustache.

The man was added to a large stack of Santa Ana suspects being sought for crimes both tawdry and tragic, but not violent. That would soon change.

In November 1988, the Cottonwood Pervert again struck in the city, but this time he raped a woman in the city’s northeast area after ordering her son to go into another room to play. He took the woman’s diamond wedding ring as a souvenir but stole nothing else.

The escalation of violence was not the only new development in the case. As Faust pieced together the facts, she began to compare notes with detectives at work in other cities. The more she looked, the more links she found. The man who was exposing himself in Santa Ana, she suspected, had been committing violent offenses in other areas.

In Anaheim, Faust learned, a woman had been raped at knifepoint on New Year’s Eve 1987 by a man fitting the same description. The attacker lectured the woman about home security. Thirteen days later, the same man broke into the home again, calling his victim by name.

“He said to her, ‘I told you last time to lock up better. You know the drill,’ ” Faust said. “And he raped her again.”

Faust found seven other 1988 rapes in Anaheim, Fullerton and Tustin that had familiar traits and similar suspect descriptions. She also learned by combining the witness information that her quarry was apparently using a small fleet of stolen cars to travel to his crimes.

Because car thefts, burglaries and sex crimes are handled by different sets of specialized detectives within most all police departments, Faust realized that a growing crowd of investigators was chasing the same man without sharing information.

Faust compiled a detailed chronology of the serial rapist’s suspected crimes and began poring over potential suspects listed in national databases. Faust flooded local agencies with bulletins and the freshest composite drawings, while she and others visited apartment complexes to tell residents about the predator in their midst.

Faust’s boss, Lt. Hugh Mooney, assigned Faust full time to the case in January 1995, after another spate of new local crimes. It might have been perceived as an unusual move to give a civilian employee such a high-profile case, but Mooney said no one who knew Faust blinked.

“No one could have done a better job on this case,” Mooney said. “No one knew the case like she did. She was determined and relentless. She was not going to let this go on.”

While police focused efforts on the Santa Ana and Orange apartment buildings that the stalker favored, Kenneth George Wade was leading a seemingly quiet life an hour’s drive away in Temecula. As manager of a pool hall, the slender, hazel-eyed Wade was known as personable and generous, a gregarious carouser with a mellow demeanor.

Few at the pool hall knew about his past, marked by frequent brushes with the law and a childhood in an abusive household. Wade apparently never committed sex crimes on his own turf--his secret life was instead led in Orange County, authorities suspect.

Every few weeks, Wade would travel to Orange County to buy supplies for the pool hall, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan McNerney, who prosecuted Wade. “Maybe 10 times a year he would travel into the area and that’s when he’d go on his binges, committing crimes at two, three or four sites in a single day or visit.”

The rampage left more than 80 victims of assorted break-ins, thefts and attacks, and Faust saw each as a potential key to catching her quarry. She visited each woman she could find and asked them to search their minds for details, anything that could help. She listened as the women, some sobbing and others somber, relived the attacks.

Some common threads wound through the harrowing stories. Most obvious, Faust said, were the words of the attacker himself.

He would tell them, “I’m not diseased” and add that in a few minutes he “would be on the freeway and gone,” Faust said. He often used the same words to demand certain sexual acts and would often bemoan how his sexual performance problems dissuaded girlfriends.

He would also give the victims a choice between the different sexual acts he would force them to do, perhaps trying to shed some of the responsibility for his actions, Faust said.

The rapist also made it clear he had been watching his victims, mentioning their recent activities and visitors.

“Control. He would say he didn’t want to hurt them, that he wouldn’t hurt them if they did what he said,” Faust said. “It was all about control.”

Verbal contact and control was so important to the rapist that he ran off in disgust after a Spanish-speaking woman he stalked at a Santa Ana laundry told him she could not speak English. The woman was lying, and her gambit likely saved her from being raped, Faust said.

The more Faust compiled on the Cottonwood Pervert, the more frustrated she grew with his ability to elude capture. Each new crime weighed on her, said Santa Ana Police Sgt. Dick Faust, her husband of 35 years.

“You can’t take the work home,” he said. “But she did take it personal. She took the victims to heart and, for them, she worked the case to the nth degree. The victims were always on her mind.”

Perhaps most frightening for those victims was the stalker’s habit of revisiting women months or even years after an attack. The prowler broke into one Santa Ana woman’s home in 1987 and exposed himself. In 1994, the same man came back and tried to rape her. Three months after that, she answered a knock on her sliding glass door and saw the man again, standing outside nude and masturbating as he asked to use the phone.

One victim was assaulted again after moving to a new address, adding stock to the theory that the rapist was a police officer. Faust now theorizes that Wade used his part-time career as a jeweler to access credit records and track his victims.

After Wade’s arrest, Faust called the three dozen Santa Ana victims of the Cottonwood Pervert and some in other cities. Knowing that the stalker had often revisited victims, Faust wanted the women to know that their nights of anxiety appeared to be over.

Faust is fiercely protective of the victims, a group that includes homemakers, a real estate agent, an interior decorator, schoolteachers, waitresses and sales clerks. Most are white, single and living alone. The investigator agreed to be interviewed for this story only if the victims were not approached for comment.

“You are truly a guardian angel,” reads a card to Faust, one of the dozens of letters from victims she received since Wade’s arrest. “It’s nice to know that the victims were not forgotten. . . . I am sure that I will never forget, but maybe now I can stop looking over my shoulder.”

Faust wonders if most of the victims will ever truly recover.

“The notes, the way he would come into their home and know their names--that all makes them realize how vulnerable they are. They may never feel safe again. It’s a life-altering event. That’s why this case was so important. We had to get him.”

And police did get their quarry. The horror story of the Cottonwood Pervert ended on July 24, 1995, the day the intruder finally ran out of luck.

He struck first in the afternoon that day, crawling under an open garage door to confront an Anaheim woman, grabbing at her breasts and crotch. The woman fought back and the two tumbled to the kitchen floor. Her screams and a hard kick to his groin sent the attacker racing down the street.

A short time later, the same man tried to enter a house in nearby Orange, only to be foiled a second time. This time his victim called out to her husband, who chased the prowler off.

At a third site, the stalker--now wearing only white high-top sneakers--entered an Anaheim house and crept up behind his victim, who was packing boxes. The woman spun and bashed her attacker in the head with a hefty tape dispenser, sending the dazed man fleeing.

“He was having a bad day, a very bad day,” Faust said.

Anaheim police, meanwhile, recognized the Cottonwood Pervert’s pattern. Faust’s bulletins had educated officers about what to look for, and Anaheim Police Lt. Joe Reiss had been listening. He and undercover officers fanned out near the site of the day’s first attack, hoping the rapist would stick to his habit of returning to the scene.

Reiss saw a man drive by in a white Honda with a stolen plate that had been listed in one of Faust’s bulletins. After a high-speed pursuit that wound back into north Orange, the suspect ditched his car in the sprawling apartment complexes in Cottonwood, the winding streets he knew so well.

The suspect bolted from the car, slipped through a fence and down into a riverbed, where Reiss tackled him. It was over. The Cottonwood Pervert was cuffed and marched past the same apartments where he had preyed on women. He told officers his name, Kenneth George Wade.

Wade, it turned out, had been in prison for much of the five-year hiatus in the Cottonwood Pervert’s spree, serving time for armed robbery and car theft. During the lull, Wade also might have worked as a long-distance trucker, a fact that chills Faust’s blood. “It makes you wonder how many victims there could be that we don’t know about.”

A few hours after Wade’s arrest, Faust and Anaheim Police Det. Ron Drvol walked into an interrogation room no bigger than a large closet and locked eyes for the first time with the man she had been hunting for eight years. She was struck by how much he resembled the composite drawing she had drafted months earlier on her computer.

Wade would not speak that night, invoking his Miranda rights. But his badly rattled family members, shocked by the accusations, did talk to Faust. She won them over, Mooney says, and used their influence and information to persuade Wade to confess.

Speaking to him at the Orange County Jail, Faust laid out all she knew, overwhelming Wade with her knowledge of details about his crimes and his traumatic family history. Then she offered him the power to spare himself, his family and even his victims a long, painful trial.

“In a way, it was a feminine approach, different than your usual hard-nosed, aggressive cop approach,” Mooney said. “She empowered herself with the cooperation of all these victims and the family. She was assertive, but she also empowered him to end the whole thing.”

Faust said she used a subtle approach because she knew Wade, like most rapists, hungers for control. But she said Wade might have had a simpler reason for opening up: “He likes to talk to females. We know that.”

On Friday the 13th in October 1995, as Faust sat in the courtroom gallery with six victims, Wade entered a surprise guilty plea to 13 crimes. The charges were one rape, one count of penetration with a foreign object, nine burglaries, one car theft and one charge of evading arrest. As a “three-strikes” offender, those convictions were enough to earn a sentence of 60 years to life.

Wade will not be eligible for parole until he is 93. He did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this story.

The conviction did not end Faust’s bizarre dance with her long-time quarry. She and Sgt. Chuck Johnson visited the shackled Wade in prison, hoping to learn more about his crimes. “There were some mind games going on, he wanted to be in control, but it was valuable to us,” she said.

Faust said she doubts she will ever see Wade again. “There’s a lot there, someone should interview him. But not me.”

Faust downplays the attention she has received for the Wade case. She keeps her Santa Ana Police Service Medal--the only one ever won by a civilian--at home, displayed next to the one her husband won in 1987 for saving the life of a mentally ill man.

Still, a year after Wade’s arrest, 11 black notebooks encompassing much of the casework still sit next to Faust’s desk, right below a large wall map with dots marking the Cottonwood Pervert’s rampage. Some of the items are tabbed to be included in a planned archive of the department’s biggest cases.

“I should take it down,” she said, studying the map and its collection of colorful dots and bad memories. “It lasted so long. Maybe it’s hard for me to believe it’s all really over.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile: Linda Faust

Age: 53

Professional: Civilian investigator for Santa Ana Police Department, where she also worked as a parking control officer. Previously a law office secretary.

Personal: Native of Pasadena who now lives in Orange County. Married for 35 years this month to Sgt. Dick Faust, a 28-year Santa Ana police veteran whom she started dating when both were in junior high. Has three sons: Gary, a Huntington Beach police officer, Mike, an Irvine computer programmer, and Steve, an Idaho sales representative.

Quote: “I used to work in a [defense] attorney’s office but I left because I felt like I had a conflict of interest. I saw the people coming in and I just felt like I was on the wrong side. That sounds bad, but I felt a real conflict.”

Researched by GEOFF BOUCHER / Los Angeles Times

Stalking Ground

From 1987 to 1995, the elusive serial rapist dubbed the Cottonwood Pervert committed a wide array of sex and property crimes in neighborhoods close to Orange County freeways. Kenneth George Wade was convicted of 13 of those crimes a year ago and is serving a minimum 60-year prison sentence.