Cold Case Files - The Flashlight Rapist

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

A Serial rapist is terrorizing Louisville, Kentucky as he blinds his victims by holding a mini-flashlight in his mouth. When he drops the tool after a victim’s boyfriend chases him from their home, a DNA profile is developed from saliva and his days as a free man are numbered. Sponsors: Apartments.com: To find whatever you’re searching for and more visit apartments.com the place to find a place. Hydrow: Head over to Hydrow.com and use code COLDCASE to save up to five hundred dollars! Progressive: Progressive.com  Rosetta Stone: Cold Case Files listeners can get Rosetta Stone’s lifetime membership for 50% off when you go to RosettaStone.com/coldcase 

The Hargan women seemed to have it all. We were blessed. My mom was amazing. But detectives would soon discover... Inside the house, there were the bodies of two women. A story of betrayal you would struggle to believe if it wasn't true. I am just praying to God this is a sick joke. From 48 Hours, this is Blood is Thicker, The Hargan Family Killings. Listen to Blood is Thicker, The Hargan Family Killings. Listen to Blood is Thicker, The Hargan Family Killings,

wherever you get your podcasts. This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. It was like a little pin light flashlight. He was holding it in his mouth. It was blinding them. They couldn't see it. So it's giving him the name of the flashlight rapist. He really was a bold, bold person.

There were children. There was husbands at home. He was on top of me and had my arms tied behind my back with my belt. It just kept getting more violent and more violent. And I just felt like that he would just keep on and keep on and keep on. We had to felt like that he would just keep on and keep on and keep on. We had to get this guy off the street.

From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. It's June 28, 1997. On the west side of Louisville, Kentucky, it's a hot and humid night. A woman falls asleep alone. Just before 6 a.m., she's awakened by a stranger in her bed. He fondled me and stuff. I knew what was going to happen. He made it point blank that he wasn't going to take no for an answer because he hit me with that stupid flashlight. Lisa Leach is blind, so the attacker will always be faceless to her. Leach can, however, sense bright lights. And then he put that flashlight in my face like he thought I could see it. He thought he was doing something, but he wasn't. The man rapes Lisa Leach

and Leach puts reality on hold, removing herself from the moment and waiting for the rest of her life to begin. When it happens, you're not thinking. You are not thinking. You're just happy you're alive, and you steal your house, and you run and wake up all your kids and check on them,

and then you go and call your mother, and then your mother says, call the police, and you're like, why and what? And you just don't know. You're not thinking. Louisville police arrive on scene and find a stepladder under Leach's open window. They believe the rapist simply climbed up and into her bedroom. At a local hospital, a nurse collects semen and sends it to the crime lab. Lisa Leach awaits the results. Initially, yeah, I thought it was going to be real quick.

I thought they'd get him real quick because, you know, I thought someone would say something or someone had saw something or something. But it never happened. The crime lab gets a DNA profile, but it does not match any offenders in the state database nor anyone on a short list of suspects. Within two weeks, Lisa Leach moves far away from Louisville.

Her case grows cold, and a rapist with a flashlight slips into obscurity. Two years later, May breezes waft through Louisville's Germantown neighborhood, a blue-collar quarter where everyone knows their neighbor and many sleep with windows open. Michelle Steinmecker is fast asleep when she's awakened by an intruder. I was sleeping on my stomach and he was practically like on top of me and had my arms tied behind my back with my belt and had a pair of pants of mine strangling around my neck. That's the first thing I ever knew. Steinmacher is gasping for air and can neither scream nor fight. The man drags her to the floor and rapes her with such violence, the Steinmacher fears she will not survive the attack. To be honest, I never really

thought if I get out of this. I mean, it was just basically, it was so traumatic and happening so quick that that thought never even entered my mind. I didn't think I was going to make it. The attack ends as suddenly as it begins. The rapist leaves and Louisville police arrive at the scene. Steinmecker tells them her attacker had a flashlight. In my face. And it blinds you to where all you can see is basically a silhouette of who's standing in front of you. Steinmecker knows only that he's a white man with brown hair and a slight build. Detective Marty Higgs had heard this before. I knew that because of the M.O. and everything else, that this was going to be the flashlight rapist.

Three weeks earlier, another Louisville woman had been raped. Like Steinmecker, she was attacked in her home. Also like Steinmecker, she was blinded by a flashlight. Higgs submits semen evidence from both cases to the Kentucky State Crime Lab. DNA analyst Sandra Hill processes the samples. Sandra Hill, DNA Analyst, Kentucky State Crime Lab, When I ran those, they matched each other, but then they also hit back to this other case we had no idea about, so it was a cold hit. The hit is to the Lisa Leach case, now two years cold.

Forensic DNA tells Higgs the rapist was active at least two years ago and after a hiatus, is once again on the hunt. We realized that we were starting to get DNA matches and we had one perpetrator and he was on both sides of town. It became a concern for us. Higgs hits the streets, developing suspects and collecting their DNA. One by one, the suspects are cleared, and month by month, more attacks are uncovered. By summer's end, DNA confirms at least four sexual assaults to be the work of the flashlight rapist. He really didn't care if people were home. There were children in some of these houses that he broke into. There was husbands at home. He really was a bold, bold person

to even attempt these things. Sometimes fortune favors the bold, and sometimes it doesn't. The flashlight rapist is about to discover that difference in a close encounter of the worst kind. It's October 7th, 1999 in Louisville, Kentucky. Well past midnight, a crime scene that is now all too familiar begins to unfold. An intruder slips through a window and into a bedroom, the small flashlight clutched between

his teeth. But this time, when he climbs into the victim's bed, the would-be rapist discovers he has company. He was trying to sexually assault her with her boyfriend actually in the bed. She was thinking that it was her boyfriend at the time. She was trying to push him off, and that's when the boyfriend realized that there was somebody else in the bed with him. The boyfriend chases the attacker out of the house, but the intruder escapes.

In the kitchen, however, he's left something behind. We were able to actually find a small flashlight left at the scene of this particular attempt sexual assault. The item is bagged and sent to Sandra Hill at the crime lab. If the rapist carried the flashlight in his mouth, he might have left some saliva and his DNA behind. I tested the swabs as well as the flashlight for saliva. I extracted the DNA from that and received a profile

that matched all these other semen profiles. The unknown profile matches DNA found at four other assaults attributed to the flashlight rapist. The attacker himself, however, continues to elude authorities. That string of luck is about to run out when the flashlight rapist inadvertently targets the home of a cop. As summer gets closer and closer, it feels like every weekend there's another birthday party to go to. So I really want to look and feel my best. And that's exactly what I'm doing now that I have a hydro rower. It's my go-to for the ultimate full body workout. I mean, it's designed by rowers.

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instant alerts, you never have to worry about missing out on the perfect place. To find whatever you're searching for and more, visit Apartments.com, the place to find a place. In Louisville, a rapist is on the hunt, using a flashlight to blind his victims and then assaulting them. The number of women victimized is at six and counting, when Louisville's top brass decides their investigation needs a fresh set of eyes. In the three-bedroom house on the edge of Louisville, a man works late into the night. His name, Joe Richardson, newly minted head of Louisville's sex crimes unit. His reading material, a stack of unsolved rape cases.

I had all the case files pulled, had copies made, so I took them home and started reading about them because I knew this was a case that wasn't going to go away until he was caught. In his study of the flashlight rapist, Richardson spots an intriguing pattern. In addition to raping his victims, the offender often stole jewelry or cash. Richardson wonders if this rapist didn't start out as a second-story thief. Maybe the flashlight wasn't just for blinding victims. Maybe it was for keeping in his mouth when he was going through drawers of the house.

He's a burglar. They're stealing stuff. In neighborhoods where the rapist had attacked women in the past, Joe Richardson finds clusters of home invasions, many of which included a sexual component. That is, the intruder would rob the home, then subdue and fondle his victim before leaving the house. Although not technically a felony rape, Richardson believes these crimes to be the work of the flashlight rapist. If you looked at that clump and you felt

that he was responsible for all those cases, you know, just to reinforce the fact we had to get this guy off the street. Richardson expands the scope of the Louisville investigation to include property offenses as well as sexual assaults. It's an approach that quickly bears fruit. It's October 17, 2000, in Louisville, Kentucky. Bill Stivers is a Louisville detective. After a hard day at work, he's looking forward to some downtime. When he walks into his bedroom, he discovers a night of peace and quiet is simply not in the cards. I noticed the sounds of the outdoors were just a little bit clearer, a little bit crisper than they usually are. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I raised that blind and saw my broken window pane.

Stivers checks around for anything missing and notices his gold ring is gone. I was very upset. I was livid for two reasons. One, I was actually victimized. I had been victimized by a crime. And then also the loss, the loss of a very valuable piece of jewelry that had sentimental value, that had been in my family for years and years. As a detective, Stifers worked burglary for almost four years. Now he reaches out to a friend still on that beat, Detective Chris Horn. Since police officers hate to be victims of crimes, he took it very personal

and started to assist us in the investigation and took it upon himself to draw a sketch of this very unique ring. Stivers faxes the sketch to local pawn shops, hoping the thief might try to sell the item. One of the faxes lands on the desk of Rick Walker, a local pawn shop owner who doesn't recognize the drawing and sticks it in a drawer. About a week later, I purchased a ring. And after buying it, I realized I'd seen the ring before. And sure enough, it was the ring that was pictured on the fax.

When you pawn an item here in this county, you have to give identification and a fingerprint. So we then did have Joseph Cave as our suspect. Joseph Cave is a big seller, unloading hundreds of pieces of jewelry at pawn shops all over Louisville. The next day, Horn puts Cave under surveillance. The suspect does not disappoint. He then ended up committing a burglary while he was being surveyed. And the ironic thing is the victim of that burglary didn't even know that he had been in her house. She had been burglarized, and she was home at the time. Horn is waiting by Cave's Jeep when the thief returns.

In his pocket, Cave has necklaces, watches, jewelry, and more. It was a real small household flashlight, probably about four or five inches long, just your standard little household flashlight. Joe Cave eventually confesses to at least 50 break-ins, most of them involving a flashlight. It's an M.O. that sounds familiar. The district that I worked out of as a detective had several of these flashlight rapes occur in the district, and we had actually kept a case file on these rapes. Detective Horn calls Joe Richardson. When the two compare reports, one item in particular catches Richardson's eye.

I got to the point where it said he lived at 131 North 26th Street and about had a heart attack because that was the target area. Cave's home is right in the middle of an area worked by the flashlight rapist. Detective Horn continues to talk and to share reports, and other connections come fast. He told me that numerous victims of Cave's break-ins were home at the time, so that gave me a little more credence. Also, the yellow flashlight Cave was arrested with is the same make and model as the one left behind at the scene of an attempted rape.

Finally, Joe Cave's short stature and slight build is consistent with the victim's statements about the rapist. So I'm telling myself, this has to be the right guy this time. Richardson has worked up six other suspects, only to see them cleared when the DNA did not match. What will DNA say about Joe Cave? One of my goals this year is to push myself to try new hobbies and learn something new, and that's why I've been doing lessons on Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone is the most trusted language learning program available on desktop or as an app that truly immerses you in the language you want to learn. It has been a trusted expert for 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. The immersion helps you pick up the language quickly and the process is so intuitive. It helps you pick up a language naturally, first with words, then phrases, then sentences, and is designed for long-term retention.

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The detective is armed with a notebook and a cotton swab, hoping Joe Cave will agree to give his DNA. And he just right off the cuff looked down and said, I've never raped a woman. And I said, well, would you volunteer and give us consent to get a swab? And I don't want to give you a swab, and I want to see an attorney. And I got up and walked out. Richardson procures a search warrant, and a week later draws a syringe full of Joe Cave's blood. Six weeks after that, Sandra Hill has completed her DNA work. I remember standing there at the DNA instrument watching the profile coming off from his standard.

At that point, I had the DNA profile memorized. I had seen it so many times. And I was standing there, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's the profile. I answered the phone in my office, and the person on the other line was so excited, I couldn't recognize her voice. And she calmed down, it was Sandra. And she finally said, we got him. We got him. Perhaps no one is happier than Lisa Leach, Cave's first known rape victim. And then the DNA came back perfect. And that was the greatest feeling because it was like he left

his calling card, you know? He left his calling card and he got busted. And that was it. Joe Cave is arrested and eventually pleads guilty to five counts of aggravated rape and one count of attempted rape. At his sentencing, five victims take the stand, among them Lisa Leach, who asks the judge to give Joe Cave the maximum sentence, life without parole. I still haven't put a face on him because, of course, I'm blind. And being secure for me has always been a big thing. And I do not have that anymore, period. I told the judge that he wasn't a good person and that he would just keep on and keep on and keep on. Because while I was sitting there, you know, listening to the other ladies' impact statements, and it just kept getting more violent and more violent. And I just felt like

that when he does get out, he's not going to change. The judge sentences cave to life, but with the possibility of parole in 20 years. The sentence is not enough for Lisa Leach, who is already planning her trip before the parole board. If I have to go in there and be the most pitiless blind woman in the world to make them keep him, I swear I will. Oh yeah, I'll make sure I'm there and I'll make sure he don't get out. Some victims we're thinking about in 20 years, they'll go in front of the parole board to testify against him too. But in 20 years, we don't have to worry about this guy in our community. And these victims don't have to be fearful that the same guy might come back and attack them.

So I think we all won and Joe Cave lost. Cold Case Files is hosted by Marissa Pinson, To be continued... coldcasefiles at anetv.com. Stream your favorite drama movies and TV shows on Pluto TV. All for free. Watch all your favorite crime dramas like CSI and Blue Bloods. Or your favorite action dramas like Breaking Bad on Stories by AMC or The Walking Dead Universe. Plus, Pluto TV has hundreds of drama movies and TV shows. Download Pluto TV on all your favorite devices for free. Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.