Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Modus Operandi

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

On the south side of St. Louis, a series of sexual assaults appears to follow the exact same pattern - leading police to dub the perpetrator, "The South Side Rapist." The last step in his modus operandi...was to disappear completely. 

This episode contains descriptions of violent crimes and sexual assaults. Please listen with caution. Antoinette Kovar was tired and glad to be going home when her shift ended at 2 a.m. on March 20, 1992. She was 25 and independent. She lived alone. After pulling into her driveway, she turned the headlights off and got the door key ready. Antoinette then walked the short path from the car to the house and turned the key in the lock.

She entered the house, but someone else was there. I thought he was just going to kill me. I couldn't imagine why anyone would come in my house. Why would he be here? What would his intentions be? That was Antoinette. The intruder would soon make his intentions clear. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I had my hand on the handle, but he was behind me

and had his hands over my eyes and my mouth and said, Don't say a word. I'm not going to hurt you. The next thing I remember, he was kind of dragging me from the back to the bedroom. He started to pull down my sweatpants that I had, and I said, oh my God, you've got to be kidding me. And he threw me on the bed and attempted to have oral sex with me. The attacker positioned himself on top of her, forcing himself between her legs. The assault continued until the phone rang. Antoinette told the masked man that her boyfriend was calling.

He would be over soon. The attacker quickly dressed and headed for the front door. Antoinette didn't want him to get away. Here she is to explain. He said, don't you come after me or I'll come back. Well, at that instant, when I heard the screen door close, I said, that's too bad. And I jumped up, grabbed my, it was a robe sitting on the, my stationary bike. I grabbed that, wrapped it around my bottom and I ran out the front door after him. But he was gone. I was in the middle of the street.

He was gone. I was in the middle of the street. He was gone. Antoinette went back into the house and immediately called 911 to report the attack. When the police arrived, they determined that the intruder entered through an unlocked window in the living room. The search for fingerprints only turned up matches for Antoinette, meaning that the rapist likely wore gloves. After being taken to the hospital, Antoinette was examined and her body was swabbed for any fluids the perpetrator left behind. A semen sample was collected. It potentially contained the DNA of the man responsible for the attack. All that was left to do was wait

for an arrest to be made. Antoinette was determined to protect herself from being attacked again. For like the next three months, I got the alarm put on the house. I walked from my garage door to my back door with a nine millimeter, daring any individual to come up on me and attempt to do what he had intended to finish, because I was going to let him have it. The rapist doesn't return to Antoinette's home, though 12 days after she was attacked, and less than a mile away, another woman was assaulted.

The attacker first punched the woman with his fist and ordered her to undress. Then, like with Antoinette, he first performed oral sex on his victim, followed by forced intercourse. Detectives watched for any other sexual assault cases that contained what appeared to be a signature behavior of the culprit. He would come through a window usually. He always wore gloves. He would either cover the victim's face or his face, was very careful about not being identified. We began to see a pattern developing, and we knew that we had a serial rapist. Over the next two months, four more victims report being raped by a man displaying the same pattern of behavior. After attacking the victims, the rapist added one more sickening detail. This is Detective Mark Chambers.

He would make them bathe after he raped them, I guess to destroy evidence. His thinking was he could destroy evidence that way. So he would make the victim bathe. The DNA collected from the six victims are compared, and the investigators' suspicions are confirmed. They were all raped by the same person. The Southside of St. Louis has the serial rapist on the loose. In May of 1992, St. Louis formed a task force to hunt for the assailant that was dubbed the Southside Rapist.

The team set up a hotline and asked the city for help. A new detective joined the effort. This is homicide detective Cliff Sassinger. The hotline was the main goal we had. People calling in with all kinds of tips and we follow each lead out. Hundreds of leads came out on this and a lot of good tips. More than 30 task force members investigated hundreds of possible suspects. After two months, investigators hadn't identified the rapist, who seemed to have vanished. Here's Detective Chambers. And of course the theory was then he was incarcerated somewhere, he was dead, or he just stopped, which I don't believe that, but some people believe that he may have

just stopped doing it. No one wanted more women to be raped, but the investigators ran out of leads based on the evidence available to them. This is Detective Chambers again. My job as an investigator is to find out primarily who did it and bring that person to justice. And yeah, it's very frustrating, especially when you have so many of these crimes taking place and you don't have anything. Three months after the hotline was created and the task force to catch the Southside rapist was formed,

they were dissolved. The attacks had stopped and they were out of Leeds. Knowing that the attacker was still out there made it more difficult for the victims to recover. Here's Antoinette again. Just every person you see walking down the street, everyone you see that says anything to you, you think, that could have been him.

Why did he say hi to me? Why is he looking at me? Does he know me? Did he know me? Did he come in my house? Does he know something that I should be knowing? And you just think, that could be him. Three years later, on January 19, 1995,

Detective Mark Chambers was sitting alone at St. Louis Metro PD. Detective Chambers was part of the sex crimes unit, so when the phone rang at 1 a.m., it was likely not going to be good news. It wasn't. A woman was on the other end of the phone. She'd just been raped. Here's Detective Chambers again. Apparently the rapist came through a kitchen window,

because we found the kitchen window open where he had gotten in. Came through a kitchen window and came upstairs. He was wearing a ski mask. He was armed with a gun. He had gloves on his hands. And he did basically the same thing that the Southside rapist had done in the past, including the bathing, made her bathe afterwards. And there was no doubt in my mind that it was the Southside rapist. When Detective Mark Kennedy began his shift at 8 a.m., Chambers was waiting for him in the squad room. He had some unbelievable information to share.

Here's Detective Chambers again. As soon as he came in the door, I said, Mark, you're not going to believe this. You know, the Southside rapist, I think he struck again. And his reaction was like, you've got to be kidding. You know, where? Chambers told Kennedy about the assault that was reported to him and how it matched the pattern of the Southside Rapist.

This is Detective Kennedy. The case had been dormant for almost three years, and people were kind of skeptical, but he was insistent that it was the Southside Rapist. Detective Chambers sent the DNA sample collected from the victim in 1995 to be compared to the Southside Rapist victims from three years prior. Four weeks later, the results come back. It's a match.

Here's Chambers again. Everything he did was the same as in the past cases. And I just knew it was him. I don't know, it was a good gut reaction maybe. I just knew it was him. In March of 1995, a team of sex crime detectives renewed the hunt for the Southside rapist. They dug through 10 years' worth of unsolved rape files,

trying to determine if any of them could be linked to their suspect. Detective Kennedy uncovered several cases that shared the Southside Rapist pattern, but no DNA evidence. Kennedy continued to dig and found two more rapes occurring within a month of each other in 1988. Here's Detective Kennedy again. We brought those cases out of our archives. We found the evidence. We asked the DNA unit to run that, and we linked those two cases also to 1992. We decided to call a meeting of all the interested departments from the area

to see if any of them had had any similar occurrences. At the meeting, more cases of rape were possibly being linked to the Southside rapist. From Collinsville, Illinois, Dave Roth submits two cases he believed were connected. Here's Detective Roth. He liked to go through windows. If a window would be open, he'd just rip the screen out and go in, unlock doors. He would be picking women that were by themselves a lot of the times, although that wasn't the case all the time. So the M.O.s just matched.

We started putting details up in the middle of the night to where we'd have cops and playing clothes in neighborhoods to where had been hit previously. Despite their best efforts, the rapists stayed at large, and the investigators weren't any closer to uncovering the identity of the person responsible for the attacks. Here's Dave Roth again. You feel like a moron. You feel like you're not doing your job. So you get very frustrated. I spent hours thinking and rethinking about it. Here's a guy, you know he's going to hit, and you know that the same people are going to be

asking you questions as to what you're doing to solve this. You know it's coming, and there's nothing you can do about it. That was Detective Sassinger, and unfortunately, he was right. The Southside Rapist did commit another assault. Hi, everyone. This is Jillian with Court Junkie. Court Junkie is a true crime podcast that covers court cases and criminal trials using audio clips and interviews with people close to the cases.

Court Junkie is available on Apple Podcasts and podcastone.com. In February 1995, in Collinsville, Jennifer Dewar, a 38-year-old woman, and her 8-year-old son were at home alone. After putting her son to bed, Jennifer relaxed on the couch and started to read. She fell asleep after less than 30 minutes.

This is Jennifer. The next thing I knew, somebody apparently had shut the light off and was sitting on my lap facing me, pinning down my legs and arms and with a gloved hand over my face like this. And he said, if you make any noise, I'll kill you. You hear me? I'll kill you. Jennifer was startled awake, but unsure of what was happening. The attacker turned off

the lights, but even if he hadn't, he had a mask over his face. She didn't know what he wanted. Here's Jennifer again. This black dread just washed over me. I didn't know, really. But then he said something to the effect of, I ain't going to do nothing that ain't been done to you before. Oh, then I knew. And then I just, I just tried to fight him, but he had, had me pinned down so hard and so tightly I couldn't get away. The rapist forced Jennifer to her bedroom and assaulted her. He put a t-shirt and a pillowcase

over her face. When he finished, he sat on the edge of her bed and smoked a cigarette, threatening her. Here's Jennifer. He kept saying, go to the cops or call the cops. I'll come back and I'll kill you. But at the same time, I was determined to go to the police. There wasn't anything that was going to stop me. But I wanted to convince him that I wasn't going to go. After the rapist left, Jennifer drove herself and her son to the police station.

Detectives escorted her to the hospital where she was examined. The doctors used a rape kit to collect evidence from Jennifer and send it into the crime lab for DNA testing. Meanwhile, Jennifer begins to put her life back together. She starts by writing down everything she could remember about the attack. She gave six tight pages to Collinsville detectives. This is Jennifer again. They read that thing and they said,

this sounds exactly like the same man. This is the same modus operandi and everything. Six weeks later, the results of the DNA comparison confirm. Jennifer was the 13th known victim of the Southside rapist. This is Detective Sergeant Roth. We knew what his DNA was, we just didn't know who he was. So we started buckle-swabbing people, basically getting their spit and being able to get their DNA from there. And so we'd go after the white males in between certain ages,

see if they had any connections to St. Louis as well as Collinsville or those areas in between. Even with the additional evidence provided by Jennifer and her six pages of information, the detectives weren't able to make any progress in their hunt for the Southside rapist. They didn't give up, though. Here's Detective Kennedy. You didn't want to see him to continue to do this and affect these people's lives like this. You just didn't want to see that. And so it causes you to realize the importance of the case,

and it makes you want to focus even more on solving it. On May 10, 1995, in St. Charles, Missouri, Sukli Shultu went to bed with the windows of her house open. It was a warm night, and the breeze felt amazing. At around 2 a.m., she woke up. This is Sue. I saw a light come up my hallway, and I thought, you know, I knew it was a flashlight, and I thought, I can't believe my son would try to sneak in the house with a flashlight. And then just seconds later, the flashlight was shining bright in my face, and the voice just said, if you scream or make any noises, I'll kill you. He told Sue he was going to rape her, and then he taped her eyes closed using duct tape.

Here's Sue again. He gave me a list of sexual events that were going to take place. And, of course, I started praying out loud and telling me to be quiet, you know, when he first entered my bedroom. After the rape was over, he got me out of my bed, put me in my shower, insisted I take a shower. So I'm thinking that, you know, this is going to be over shortly. I want to make sure that none of the evidence goes away. I just put the stopper in the bathtub and let all the water remain in the tub for evidence. And he left.

When the investigators arrived, they processed the scene. Sue's actions helped preserve the DNA evidence left behind by the attacker. It was a match to the samples collected from the victims of the Southside Rapist. Here's Sue again. I didn't have a clue who it was who raped me. I have to tell you, you know, you look at everybody and you go, you listen for their voice to see if it resembles the voice

that you heard the night you were raped. After Sue's attack, the Southside Rapist had been connected to 18 rapes in 11 years. But the investigators still had no suspects. This is Detective Kennedy. The problem was that this guy was a ghost. He was a phantom. Nobody could tell you exactly what he looked like. And if you look at the composites over the years,

you'll have six or seven different composites that are completely different people. On September 12, 1998, Eugene Frigo and his girlfriend were spending a quiet Saturday night at home when he heard a noise coming from outside. This is Eugene. Well, we heard a loud boom, a beating, you know, somebody beating on a car hood or something. And then I stood up and looked out the vertical blinds and seen a face. And then he seen mine,

and he turned around and started running down the street. Eugene sees the man jump into a van, and he decides to follow him. He grabs his keys and starts to follow the man in the van with his car. Here's Eugene again. He was going up different streets, making sharp turns, and not slowing down at four-way intersections where you should, going through red lights. I mean, I had the really sense that he was really trying to get away for some reason.

Eugene realized there was a cell phone in his car, and he placed a call to 911. Here's a recording of that call. 911. Yeah, I was at my house. I heard somebody kicking the cars and everything, and I looked out the window, and there was somebody on my porch. The guy spotted me. He ran away. His car was parked at the end of my street.

I got him in front of me right now. His license plate is 090 BNP, Missouri. I'm going, man, that's not going to slow down. I looked down at the speedometer. It was like 85 miles an hour. You know, it's pretty quick. I'm thinking like, God, I hope the police get here pretty soon and slow this thing down a little bit. Okay, I got the plate, sir, but I need you to stop following The next morning, police visited Eugenia's home. They took a look around. Here's Eugenia again. And then they took a walk around the house,

and that's when they discovered that the side window had been kicked in. Apparently that was the noise. Eugene and his girlfriend file a police report that found its way to the desk of Detective Randy Sassinger, who was investigating the Southside rapist. He ran the license plate number of the van, but the plates were stolen. The detectives entered the number into a database to see if any other law enforcement agency had run the plate within five months. Here's Detective Sassinger. A postal inspector had run the plate,

and Dennis Simpson was the postal inspector, and I asked him why he had processed the plate. It turned out that four months prior, Simpson was doing surveillance at a house suspected of trafficking narcotics. Here's Postal Inspector Dennis Simpson. Part of that surveillance was monitoring who went in and out of the house, writing down license plates of vehicles that came and went. And one of the license plates that I wrote down happened to be one Detective Sassinger was interested in. So I asked him if he wouldn't mind if I would follow up the plate and actually go to the address, and he didn't care. He said it was all right. His investigation was cold.

That was Detective Sassinger, who started watching the house on October 15th. He watched it for almost two weeks before the van with a matching license plate number pulled into the driveway. Here's Sassinger again. for almost two weeks before the van with a matching license plate number pulled into the driveway. Here's Sassinger again. We drove over to the address and I asked who owned the vehicle and a person named Dennis Rabbit said he was the owner of the vehicle and I said well guess what I got a owner on this vehicle you know you're with me. Dennis Rabbit went with Detective Sassinger to the police station for questioning. The investigators needed definitive evidence if they were going to confirm or eliminate Rabbit as the Southside Rapist. This is Detective Sassinger again. We talked about the investigation of the Southside Rapist,

and that I had fingerprints on other burglaries in the same area, and that I would like him to consent to be fingerprinted as a way of eliminating him if he's not the person responsible. And I also told him about the DNA buckle swab, which would give me a DNA sample for possible elimination as a Southside rapist. The interview lasted four hours, and eventually, Rabbit agreed to provide the detectives with fingerprints and a DNA sample. While they waited for the results, detectives had no choice but to release him. The streaming is easy. Stream hundreds of free movies on all your favorite devices all summer long. Chill out poolside with Mission Impossible and Transformers. Or stay cool inside watching Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,

Titanic, or The Wolf of Wall Street. No matter your vibe, download the Pluto TV app to spend summer doing what you love, watching endless movies. Tell me that's not the deal of the summer. Summer of Cinema on Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never. DNA analyst Mary Beth Carr compared Dennis Rabbit's DNA profile to that of the Southside Rapist.

After six years and more than 600 DNA comparisons, she had little hope for a match. Here's DNA analyst Carr. I was working on the computer and looking, doing the analysis, and I was like, oh my God, it's him. I even said it in the lab. I was looking at the computer. I was like, oh my God. About fell off the chair. Mary Beth Carr matched Dennis Rabbit's DNA profile to the genetic signature of the Southside rapist. The first person she notified was Detective Randy Sassinger. I think I almost broke her in half.

She tells me that and I grabbed her and squeezed her and I was glad to see the end of this, you know. Detective Kennedy, who had been working the case since 1995, was notified about the discovery by his partner. This is Detective Kennedy. She says, hey, you're not going to believe this, but Randy solved it. He's got the guy. I said, he's got him right there at the station now?

And she says, no, no, no, we know who it is, though. We know who it is. You've got to get in right away. Kennedy dispatched a team of detectives to Rabbit's last known address, but they couldn't locate the suspect. They searched the neighborhood and the entire city, but they couldn't find him. Dennis Rabbit, it appeared, had decided to run. Here's Kennedy again. We couldn't find him anywhere. But see, the problem was that Dennis had no fixed residence. He sometimes stayed with friends, other times he'd stay with a girlfriend. So we weren't convinced that he had left the state yet. Three months passed with no sign of Dennis Rabbit anywhere.

With so many victims and the perpetrator just out of reach, the pressure on law enforcement for an arrest was building. And the victims wondered why he was ever released in the first place. Here's Antoinette Kovar again. It was a mistake. It was a terrible mistake. And I'm sure they're paying for it, but it was a mistake. Somebody in another jurisdiction, not even 30 miles away, is looking for a man and has been looking for a man for 10 years, and you have him in your hands, and all of a sudden,

he's gone. A thousand miles away from St. Louis, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a mother calls the police to report that her 15-year-old daughter is missing. This is Detective Anthony Max from the Albuquerque Police. She found a note that had a person's name by the name of Nathan Babbitt, a phone number, and a room number, and she gave that to the sheriff's department. The phone number was traced back to the Freeway Inn, a cheap motel on the outskirts of the city. Officer Scott Parsons and his partner knocked on the door of room 121. A middle-aged man answered.

He saw both of us standing in our uniforms and raised his hands and said, you know, she told me she was 18. And anytime somebody begins their conversation with a police officer, when she told me she was 18, there's probably going to be a problem. That was Officer Parsons. He and his partner asked the man for identification. Here's Officer Parsons again. He began by saying he was Dennis Babbitt.

It was only about the third or fourth attempt by myself and my partner that we were able to get his correct information. He was definitely trying his hardest to conceal his identity. While Parsons waited with the suspect, his partner entered the man's details into the computer. Five minutes later, the system showed that Dennis Rabbit had several outstanding warrants from St. Louis. When the officers told Rabbit he was under arrest, he ran from the motel room and into the parking lot. This is Officer Parsons again. Mr. Rabbit had decided to try to cut between cars, so my in-orbit takedown ended up taking him down into a minivan, at which point Officer Middleton, my partner,

did basically a hockey check into the minivan. Albuquerque PD notified the FBI that Dennis Rabbit was in custody. The news traveled quickly to St. Louis. This is Detective Kennedy. I'm laying in bed on a Sunday morning, 10 o'clock in the morning. Paul Swenson from the FBI calls me up and says, we've got him. I say, hey, don't play with me, Paul. He goes, no, no, I'm not playing. This is for real. We've got him.

They still got him. They're on the parking lot in Albuquerque. They haven't even brought him back to the station yet. I just wanted you to know. The St. Louis detectives traveled to New Mexico and returned Rabbit to Missouri for questioning. He was interviewed by Detective Kennedy. Here's some of the audio from that interview. And understanding these rights, do you agree to be interviewed? Yes, sir. Okay.

We're going to start off in 1998. We're going to try to work our way backwards. They asked him about the details of Jennifer Drewer's rape in Collinsville. I'd seen her sleeping on the couch. How did you see her sleeping on the couch? I went to the front door and looked through the window. I went to the living room, and before I woke her up, I turned the line out. And then I accosted her. I also had a fake pistol with me.

And I took her in the bedroom and I raped her. After two hours, Rabbit added 23 names to the list of women he had violated. He eventually pleaded guilty to 49 charges of sexual assault and was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences. This is Dennis Rabbit. Yeah, I deserve to be here the rest of my life, but I also deserve some answers on why, where, and why this started. And I think the people out there would be better suited if we came up with some answers. I did some terrible things, you know, and I needed to get it out of me and I needed to set myself free and I needed to help those people that I did hurt

the best way I could. By admitting to his crimes and pleading guilty, did Dennis Rabbit help his victims with their recoveries? Here's Antoinette Kovar again. Thank God they got the right guy, and I didn't have to testify and go through it all over again because they surely could have dragged it out. And for what reason, I don't know.

He admitted to it, and I was glad that it was over. maples were distributed by podcast one the cold case files tv series was produced by curtis productions and hosted by bill curtis check out more cold case files at aetv.com and by downloading the aene app to learn more about cases like this one visit the aene real crime blog at aetv.com slash real crime