Dateline NBC - Through the Pouring Rain

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Over 14 years, more than a dozen women were raped in their own homes by a stranger who terrorized a Tennessee neighborhood. In this Dateline classic, Keith Morrison tells the story of the man known as the Wooded Rapist, who came out of the woods, in the night, in the rain. Originally aired on NBC on October 9, 2009.

It was the year the rain changed. The year the rain in the dark, in the woods, became a thing to fear. The year a visitor came to call in a privileged green suburb called Forest Hills, and a Nashville lawyer learned about her security, or rather, that she was not secure at all. We're all safe. You know, a man's home is his castle. We're safe at home. Well, you're not always safe at home.

It was March 1994. That's when the terror began. It was the middle of the night. Pat Young, accomplished, gutsy woman, successful lawyer, engaged to be married, alone, asleep, in her house, heard something, felt something, opened her eyes. It was a stranger in my home. How terrifying is that? It's a life-altering event. Somehow, someway, a man had broken into Pat's house Now he loomed above her, anonymous, a stocking over his face, his hands on her

No question what he was there for You're at home sleeping in your bed and you wake up with a stranger telling you to do what I tell you I don't think anybody would doubt what's getting ready to happen The only doubt is you wonder, are you going to be killed? She struggled, he was much larger, aggressive, powerful. You're reduced to nothing so fast that everything, every ounce of power is taken away from you. You can have a weapon. I had a weapon. If you reach for the weapon, it's probably going to be used against you. So everything at your disposal is taken away. He pinned her down.

She felt she would die. And then she did the one thing she thought might survive her, to let someone know what had happened. I bit a piece out of his hand, which is why they had DNA in my case. And what, you held on to it, hid it? I put it under the bed. And were able to retrieve it later? The police found it later.

Courageous, the man had a gun on her, could have killed her any second. But at that moment, Pat Young made a decision. She would not be, refused to be, a passive victim, a sentiment she was going to share with other women yet to come. Pat Young risked her life and bit the man. Eventually, he fled into the woods behind her house. Then the police came, the questions began, the evidence searched. They found that bit of skin from the rapist's hand,

that precious little piece of DNA. And Pat, the tough, independent lawyer, got up the next day and went to work. My receptionist didn't recognize me. I was so swollen and beaten. And passed a lawyer downstairs. He told me later, he said, it looked a lot like Pat's hair. But I wonder if that was a car wreck or what.

They did not know who I was. Nashville D.A. Roger Moore heard about the vicious attacker, the violence of his assault, and was alarmed. We knew this was a person that needed to be found, and the sooner the better. And in 1994, we had the DNA. We had what it took to identify the person. And of course, had the DNA found its match in some database somewhere back then, back in 1994, what followed might never have happened. But there was no match, nothing in the file at least,

and so the evidence, useful though it was, sat, filed away, waiting for a suspect against which it could be compared. And years passed by in which this horrible but apparently solitary crime went on doing its corrosive work in the life of lawyer Pat Young. And she left her home in that leafy neighborhood, though there were other reasons too. But mostly she left behind her sense of personal safety. I would sit in a house.

Every door was locked. I would check with a handgun every door, every room, under every bed, in every closet, even though there was an alarm on where I went after I left my house. But I'd get in the car, and I'd know I've got to get out of the car and go in the house. What if he's here? What if someone's here? What if someone's between me and the house? And I did that for a long, long time. You tell yourself that you're being ridiculous, but it does, it alters you. So it did.

And Pat began to realize that she was in many ways alone. One of the worst remarks that got made to me was at a Christmas party and a woman said, oh, well, was it good for you? And I stood there and looked at her and said, oh my God. Oh, I went up to the host party and said, I have to go. He said, why? I said, because I'm going to hit somebody. I have to go home now. And then it was November 1998. It wasn't very far away, another of Nashville's green wooded suburbs. It happened again. And then again. And then again. He shows up and he shows up big. Reporter Dennis Ferrier.

These are upscale neighborhoods. Very upscale neighborhoods, very nice neighborhoods. In 1998, it probably happened four times, but it happened the exact same way. Rainy night, wooded area, someone is attacked in their own home and the guy's got a mask, he's got gloves, he's got rope, he's got a condom.

It's like the same M.O. It's very meticulous. That was when people started talking about it? That's when people started talking about it, because you have someone in a very affluent part of town breaking in and raping people in a very brazen way. It's going to get attention. The rapes were always vicious, accompanied by brutal beatings, threats to kill the victims and their families, who were often asleep in the same house.

You have a husband upstairs and a woman downstairs, and he goes in and effectively rapes the woman downstairs while the husband is upstairs asleep. Just think how long he watched to understand that this was okay. Because he'd been watching them for some time. Who knows how long. And soon, a long, creeping terror wound its way around and through the leafy precincts of some of Nashville's most affluent citizens. You start to hear about this, and you're a woman living in that area, and it starts to rain, and you're afraid. You don't think you're going to live.

I was convinced I was going to die. That was it. I was not going to see my birthday. They were still gracious, the tree-studded lawns around Nashville, Tennessee. Gracious, lovely, but something else now, too. 70, 25, code 6. In the last years of the 20th century, an unknown rapist invaded the very places the women of Nashville had once felt most secure, their own homes. He had a knife or a gun, big athletic guy, powerful build, physically imposing, you know, ski mask, and said, I'll kill you if you don't do this. If you don't keep quiet and do this,

I'll go upstairs and kill your sleeping husband or other family members. There was always the threat. Only the ages of his victims varied much. His methods rarely did. He operated at night. He seemed to appear from the woods, then vanished back into them. And he attacked. When it rained. He became known as the wooded rapist of the public. Why that? A number of the incidents occurred during rainy nights where the victims lived in wooded lots

or where there were houses not really one on top of another. After each incident, the police searched the crime scene meticulously, but there were no telltale clothing fibers, no hairs, only the DNA that had no face, like a ghost. The rapist left behind no trace that could readily identify him. They immediately knew they had a real smart guy, and that always bothers them. As the number of attacks grew, the rapist seemed to redouble his efforts to hide his identity. You said they never saw his face, so they couldn't describe a face, but what else did they say about him? He made some of them take showers.

You know, once DNA came on the scene, then he would, like, try to make them go take a shower so that he could get rid of the evidence. So, a clever man in the dark, but maybe not as thorough as he imagined. Yes, he used a condom, he had the women shower, but he wasn't able to remove every vestige of a link to him. Any more than he could stop the determination of many of his victims

to save some piece of evidence that might someday be used against their attacker. The one thing he couldn't really control, which was DNA. You know, you're going to physically assault someone. It's going to be hard to make sure you have no DNA on them. That's probably his only mistake. The only problem was, of course, they couldn't locate a match. And as one attack turned into five, and the terror spread on dark and rainy nights,

police were reduced to issuing warnings. They told people that, you know, if you live in a wooded area, you know, keep your doors locked, you know, look out for anything suspicious. And then for a while, about a year, the attacks seemed to stop. Residents began to breathe a little easier. Now it was November 1999. A 16-year-old named Zaya Miller moved with her parents to a suburb called Brentwood. And she was far more concerned about making friends at her new school

than with looking over her shoulder. She was asleep. Her parents and her dog were nearby. And it was raining. It was a day before my 17th birthday. I was home in bed asleep. It was 2 in the morning. And to be woken up in your own home at gunpoint. Just like that.

It's terrifying. Totally shocking. I was convinced I was going to die. That was it. I was not going to see my birthday. I was not going to direct the school play two nights later. I was not going to see my parents again. There were a lot of things I wasn't going to do because that was it. I was dead. And now the attacker's method changed a little. Most of the women he'd assaulted in their houses, their bedrooms. But for Zaya, he had other plans.

I was taken to a second location. I was forcibly stripped. I was still at gunpoint. I was raped. I have no idea what strange world circumstances allowed it to happen, but I talked my way out of it. And I ran home, thinking the whole time there is a man with a gun and he is probably pointing it straight at me as I am running home. Through the pouring rain, she ran. Ran back to the same house which had once sheltered her. Ran back to a different life. My life changed, and my parents' lives changed.

Everything changed. It's like I lost my ability to love who I was. My sense of self was so completely destroyed. Again the police came. Again the questions. The trip to the hospital. The search for evidence. And there was that telltale DNA.

Otherwise, nothing. How is he different than a regular criminal? Most criminals are really dumb. You know, they make mistakes. They're thinking about what they want and not the result, so they make a mistake and they get caught. Well, this guy, no, it wasn't like that. It was like this was his hobby, and he was really, really good at it.

There were three more rapes in 1999 and 2000, then nothing for two years, then more, one in 2004, two in 2005, two in 2006, all confined to those wooded Nashville suburbs on rainy nights. But while the crimes were eerily similar, the victims were vastly different. A woman seven months pregnant was raped. No one was safe. The rapists seemed to get more brazen as time went on. The single-minded guy that just

was going to hurt women of any age, any circumstance, you know, raping a daughter in front of a mother, a mother in front of a daughter, but yet like wearing a condom, I'm just really weird and methodical. Still, his victims did what they could to identify the man or ghost or whatever he was, often managing to somehow preserve at least a vestige of their attacker's DNA. So in 2006, the district attorney's office brought an indictment that seemed to some, frankly, odd. An indictment against a phantom called the Woodard Rapist. The grand jury indicts this silhouette, you know, this invisible person. We have a five-count indictment, and he did five rapes, and he's this.

And, you know, we know his DNA, but they didn't know who he was. They had no idea. So why the indictment? Because for those five early cases of rape, the statute of limitations was running out. So that was why you had a grand jury with the name John Doe and somebody to indict, not so much for the theater, but to preserve the legality of the case. To preserve the legality, yes, sir. And then it was 2008.

14 years had elapsed. 13 Nashville women had been attacked. Some thought he would never slip up. But not everyone. What did you think? That sooner or later, there will be a mistake. He needs to be found. He's continuing to do horrible things to women. It was the rain that brought it on.

The rain and the dark. They called him the wooded rapist for the way he emerged from the trees, then vanished again. For 14 years, 13 attacks, 13 lifetimes of post-traumatic flashbacks. And I looked at every man. I could look at your arm and say, you could be him or you are not him. And it was one of the first rainstorms of the fall. And something about the way rain sounds outside of a glass door triggered some tiny little part of me that had that body memory of that exact same sound nine years before, and I lost it.

I was curled up in a ball on the floor crying and screaming before I knew what was going on. For all their trying over a decade and a half, and though they kept a bulging file full of cases, each with a sample of the rapist's DNA, they could not find him, could not figure out who he was. There may have been some who felt the police weren't trying hard enough, but not the women. They had already done what they could to identify the man, and they seemed to feel the police were doing their best too.

There was never a change in personnel that somebody didn't call me to say, this officer, this detective's out, has moved to here, I've got your case, can I come talk to you? And over the years, he kept in touch with me. He said, Zaya, I haven't forgotten about your case. We're still working on it. We're still looking for this guy. We're going to find him. It must have been enormous amounts of pressure, I mean, on both the investigators and on your office to get something done. The pressure on them to avoid another victim was tremendous. And I know one of the detectives who worked on the case for years, who has now gone to law school and is an attorney, still said that was one of his biggest regrets upon leaving the police department was that that was still an open case. The rain, the dark, the woods.

Now it was April 29, 2008. The evening patrol shift had gathered for nightly briefing. The police department here had done, at roll call, the sergeant, before sending them out, he remembered, had said, Now, fellas, it's a rainy night. Keep an eye out for the wooded rapist. Same night, a few miles away, in a suburb called Brentwood, a favorite haunt of the rapist, a visiting couple from Michigan bedded down in

their camper in a relative's driveway. Their dog slept on the floor beside them. The hours ticked past midnight. And suddenly, dog starts barking, yapping. Woman looks out the window of her camper, and there's this ski mask right in her face. And he growls at her. And she says it was a really mean growl. Well, she gets on the phone and says, hey, I've got a, there's a man in a mask in this neighborhood. One of the officers who attended the briefing earlier that evening responded to the call. Not far from the visiting camper, he spotted a Jeep driving down the dark street. Pulls him over, ends up having to let him go.

You know, can't hold him, but now they've got him. You know, they have a face and a name. And what was his reason for being around there and for wearing this mask? He said he was going to a party. A party? Officers checked with neighbors. There was no party anywhere nearby. Certainly suspected that this guy might be a prowler, but you know, they let him go that day.

They didn't have it, but they notified everyone. And that of course started the 24-7 surveillance at him. What they needed desperately, the only thing that might link this suspect to the string of horrific rapes, was a sample of his DNA. But how to get it? Quietly, carefully, they went about the business of tracking their suspect. They watched his house. They followed his Jeep. They waited for an opening. And finally it came.

The man walked into a restaurant, ordered lunch, ate it, and left. The officers in Brentwood collected his utensils from a meal that he'd eaten and had left without clearing his tray and submitted those to our TBI crime lab. So as long as the person has thrown it away, doesn't want it anymore, you can go in and scoop it up. It's, I suppose, DNA dumpster diving. The results were back within 48 hours. The man's DNA matched DNA found on victims of the wooded rapist.

Within hours, he was arrested. And Zaya Miller, now 24 years old, answered her phone and found herself talking to one of the police officers who had been working her case for almost a decade. And he says, we got him. That's it, we got him. Did it register? Oh, yeah.

I was crying and laughing and screaming We got him. That's it. We got him. Did it register? Oh, yeah. I was crying and laughing and screaming and calmed down enough for about 20 seconds to say how and who. And the answer to that question was about as remarkable as any answer could be. It was May 1st, 2008, and finally there he was, the name and face behind the DNA. Suspected of at least 13 attacks in three counties. Robert Jason Burdick, 38 years old, record as clean as a whistle. This police decided had to be the man they called the wooded rapist.

The man who'd kept his identity a secret through 14 years of terror. And in a small town not far from Nashville, that news was about as shocking as a thing could be. There? Jason Burdick? Was that even remotely possible? I mean, it was all anybody was talking about. That, uh, can you believe it was Jason? Can you believe that he did that? Angela Greer, a nurse, happily married two children when we met. But once upon a time in Clarksville, Tennessee... He was probably my first true love. My first love.

They were both sophomores, both 16. Everybody knew him. Everybody liked him. He had a wonderful family. He came from a wonderful family. They went to church on Sundays. They were members of all the organizations. He was an athlete.

An alpha male in training. Someone men wanted to be like and women wanted to be with. He was popular, attractive, girls liked him, women liked him. In fact, Robert Jason Burdick had been a local football hero and something of a big man on campus. When Angela Greer moved to Clarksville as a teen, she felt privileged that he chose her as his girlfriend. He could smooth talk anybody.

Especially you. Yes, any of the girls. He had a way with the girls, that's for sure. After high school, Burdick tried a career as a prison corrections officer, but his success with women got him into trouble. There was a story, I think, about him leaving the prison system after having an affair. Apparently he left because he had an affair with somebody and that person's husband attacked him and there was a fight. And so Burdick built a new career in security systems,

learning the trade partially under the tutelage of former boss Howard Conestam. A very good employee. He was at work on time. He was always neatly groomed. And his luck with the ladies was always in play. I know that he dated several employees. The only feedback I got from one of the dates

was the fact that he was just way too polite. He was just way too nice, made her uncomfortable. Too polite? Too nice? Could the police have made a mistake? As the media dug, they discovered that Jason Burdick seemed to live an exemplary life. After a brief marriage, he became active on the charity circuit, once helping Habitat for Humanity by offering himself as a date for a charity auction prize, even dressing up as a mascot for a zoo benefit. I mean, this whole time he's either married or dating or bachelor auction. You know, he's out there in the community doing things. As news of Burdick's arrest spread, the shock spread with it.

Among women in particular, one woman called him, quote, the best guy I ever dated. Jason's family stood up for him, of course, insisting there must be some mistake. But back in Clarksville, Angela Greer and a few others, whose memories stretch back to those high school days, began to reflect on a darker side of their old friend. And another memory came bubbling up. He had this reputation. I know that he did actually get in trouble for vandalism.

A childish prank? Angela says she never did find out exactly what got Jason accused of vandalism, but there was nothing at all childish about an incident at the mall after Angela discovered he'd been two-timing her. I noticed he was with the girl that he was dating. And I turned to her and I said, if you're smart, you'll run.

And I just turned to walk away. And that's when he grabbed me. And he assaulted me in the mall, right there in front of everybody. What happened? He grabbed me by my hair and spun me around and he hit me. You mean punched you? Punched me in the face, yeah. You don't punch a girl. He punched you.

He punched me, but I fought back. And he had a scratch that kind of ran down the whole side of his face here. How badly did he hurt you when he hit you? Like, did he bruise your face or anything like that? Yeah, I was all bruised up on one side of my face. Oh, really? Yeah, we had to take pictures. Angela pressed charges,

and Jason Burdick, pride of his town and his family, was sent to a youth detention center. For how long? I'm not sure exactly how long he went. I know he missed Christmas and that upset his family very much. The family, said Angela, was not at all prepared to accept the proposition that Jason was anything other than a gentleman wrongly accused. They blamed me. They brought every gift I ever bought them. Anything that had anything to do

with me that was in that house, they brought and dropped on my doorstep. So they couldn't believe that their son had actually done anything bad to you? No, no, they couldn't. They never, they could never see anything that he did was wrong. And neither, apparently, could much of the rest of Clarksville. I can't tell you who it was. Somebody set my yard on fire. I became an outcast when I sent the golden boy to Spencer. Did you ever feel guilty about the fact that you turned him in?

Yes, I did. I carried a lot of guilt for a long time. For a long time. But now, that same golden boy was about to go on trial for brutalizing more than a dozen women, many of whom had stood up to their attacker in ways that would finally make it possible to try Jason Burdick rape. Even as they were being victimized, they kept a cool head and the 61-year-old woman who was forced to take a shower was moving but leaving certain areas covered at all times in the shower.

So that she didn't wash it away. Right. So even after being terrorized like that, she keeps her wits and preserves its DNA. But did the police have the right man? On April 27, 2009, Burdick was headed to court for the first of what could be as many as 13 trials. One victim, the eldest of them, would have her day in court, but of course a dozen others had a very personal stake in the outcome. They'd already fought back by collecting those crucial bits of DNA. And now the very first of the Woodard rapists' victims

decided to continue that fight by keeping a silent vigil in court as the trial phase began. I asked the victim if it would bother her if I stayed. And she said, no, please stay. And we sat back there watching for a while, and I finally turned around and said, do you think he even knows who I am? I said, do you think he knows I'm even back here? And we just pondered that for a while, and I don't know the answer to it. Are you Robert Burdick?

Yes, ma'am. The man known as the Woodard Rapist had attacked 13 women. Now, Robert Jason Burdick, a well-liked Nashville bachelor, would stand trial for, one by one, each of the crimes. Do you understand the charges, or do you want me to read the indictments? I understand the charges. The victims? A grandmother, a teenager, a mother-to-be,

seven months pregnant, and more. He was even accused of raping a friend's niece, and then calmly taking that same niece and her family out to dinner weeks later without being recognized. And now the prosecutor set out to link him to his vicious work, with a strand of evidence unlike any other, his own DNA. Tiny amounts, yes, a few cells, little more, but enough? Oh, yes, said the prosecutor. This is the holy grail. It's the gold standard. I think jurors have just, and the public, have come to see it as, if not foolproof, but something that they can believe in. A terrible kind of sorority of alleged victims had a special stake in the outcome of the trial.

At least one of them, Pat Young, the wooded rapist's first known victim, a lawyer, was determined to be in court every day. For years, I've wondered who he is. I mean, just who is this guy? It's sort of like going to the zoo. I wanted to see him. You recall the events of the evening of November the 18th. The first case was the newest crime and the eldest victim, a 61-year-old woman, who might quite reasonably have found it very painful to get up in court and reveal what her attacker did to her. But when the trial began, it was she the prosecutor called upon. And so she took the stand and told her story. As horrifying and humiliating as it was, in court she did not waver, though the judge granted her at least a sliver of privacy by ordering the courtroom cameras to turn away from her face. It was like a fog

of him saying it twice, very strongly, get up, get up. She recalled how she'd been awoken on the night of her attack by an intruder wearing a ski mask. What happened from that point on? You've gotten up, the person is there. He immediately put duct tape across my eyes, told me to take off my clothes, and put duct tape on my wrist. Are you at that time nude? Yes, sir. That's correct. Tell the jury what happened to you. At that time, he French kissed me

and then he kissed my breast. And then the nightmare got worse. Were these acts with or against your consent? Well, I would have chosen for him not to. Why did you allow him to do this? Because I wanted to stay alive. After he finished, the attacker made her shower, his intention that she wash away his telltale DNA. But she did not, did not wash it away. She did the only thing she knew how to do, she said, in effect, to fight back. I didn't get under the water when I got in the shower. I stood next to the glass. And why did you do that? Just to preserve any evidence if there was any. And then, after her attacker left, she called police. I took two cotton swabs from Q-tips from my cabinet

and swabbed my mouth out, put it in a Ziploc bag. At the hospital, a nurse took more samples from her body, samples analyzed by experts, who matched them against the unique DNA profile of the defendant. What were your findings, if any, with respect to a comparison of the known DNA profile, excuse me, of Robert Jason Burdick with the perpetrator DNA. I found that the profiles did match,

and the probability of finding an unrelated individual having the same DNA profile exceeded the world population. The possibility it was someone else's DNA? Billions and billions to one against. So Mr. Burdick's DNA matches the perpetrator DNA from her body, correct? Yes, sir. There was more traditional evidence, too, against Burdick. Circumstantial stuff in his Jeep, for example.

This is a one-roll green duct tape and 13 condoms. Not so unusual, perhaps, to find condoms in a bachelor's car. But then a search of Burdick's home revealed more items that could have been tools of a very nasty trade. There were quite a few black clothes that were located in the far end of a dresser. And, I mean, there were quite a few other things. There were obviously a few handguns that we recovered. And anything dealing with nighttime

activities? There were some night vision goggles that were recovered. I recall some like anti-dog barking devices. But no testimony was as damning as the DNA evidence. After all, no one on earth could have the same DNA as Robert Jason Burdick. Unless, unless he had an identical twin and Burdick was adopted. Was there an unknown twin somewhere? Somebody with Burdick's identical DNA? Someone else committing these horrific crimes? Could the DNA be pointing to the wrong man? Robert Jason Burdick was on trial for the first of 13 rape charges, but no victim had ever seen his face. He left no visible evidence except prosecutors claimed his DNA. Fletcher Long, the lead defense attorney, maintained that wasn't enough.

They don't have anything from inside the house that ties them to Mr. Burdick. They don't have anything they retrieved from the yard that ties them to Mr. Burdick, they have nothing but DNA evidence. That DNA evidence had tagged Jason Burdick as its owner, but the defense made the jury aware that in rare cases, two people could share the same DNA. And the probability increases as the degree of kinship to the defendant gets greater. Would you agree? Yes, starting with identical twins, they have identical DNA. Did you have any hope that you might be able to use the evil twin defense? No. They sure thought we were going to say that, didn't they?

No. One thing you have to do is you have to shake the science. A long shot, of course. And in the end, the defense did not use it because the prosecution was ready. Identical twins may share the same DNA, but they don't share the same fingerprints. And you had fingerprints from some of the other cases. Yes, that was what the defense would have been confronted with had they gone any further. Ladies and gentlemen, the stipulation is the fact that Mr. Robin Jason Burdick does not have a twin.

The only hope for the defense was to prove that the DNA found on the victim had been tainted somehow during the investigation. The victim had some swabs that she brought to General Hospital that were taken from inside her mouth. Is that right? She said it was around her mouth. Can you tell us who all had handled those? I think they were in a plastic bag. I think it was only her. We felt like we put on a contamination case. The lead detective admitted that the DNA that the victim took herself was put in a plastic bag, and that was the worst place in which it could have been put. But there had been other DNA samples taken at the hospital,

samples that could not have been tainted, and each one pointed to Burdick. There wasn't much the defense could do to combat the science. They had nothing. These DNA cases are slamming shut pretty fast. I mean, the defense did not have a single witness. Now, have you discussed... The defense decided not to put Jason Burdick on the stand. Have you made the decision?

Do you choose to testify or not to testify? Not to testify. All right, thank you, sir. All right, we can bring the jury in. And that was his right, of course, not to testify. All right, thank you, sir. All right, we can bring the jury in. And that was his right, of course, not to testify. The trial was brief, lasted just three days. The DNA in and on her body is his, to the exclusion of everyone in the world.

Is he the man who committed these crimes? And I submit to you in closing, beyond any reasonable doubt, he is that man. I would ask you to so find. Thank you. None of it connects at all with Mr. Burden. Not a thing. I mean, this case is a DNA case. That's it. That's all they've got. In the case of the state of Tennessee versus Robert Jason Burdick... And the verdict came quickly.

Two hours later, the jury returned. Wherein the charged defense is aggravated rape as the jury arrived at a verdict. Yes, Your Honor. What verdict. Yes, sir. What is the verdict, sir? Guilty. Verdict's family was obviously distraught, his father in particular. What are you doing? You're touching people.

Hey, baby, you kicked me. No, no, yes, you did. He did that, sir. A very different kind of moment for the victim in the case and the women who had shared her horror. At the end of that first trial, you found yourself in tears. Tough lawyer like you. Here I am squawking in the back of the courtroom.

And it does, it comes out of nowhere. It has since 1994. Jason Burdick was sentenced to 32 years in prison. But even with that guilty verdict, there were questions still unanswered. If Burdick was the wooded rapist, how did he choose his victims? How did he keep his identity so well hidden from those women? And how did he avoid detection for all those years? The trial didn't really answer those questions fully, but as it ended, there were more charges, more cases to come.

In October 2009, Pat Young, Robert Burdick's first known victim, had her case heard. In that trial, Burdick was convicted of attempted rape. Zaya Miller's case went to trial in 2010, and Burdick was found guilty of aggravated rape and aggravated kidnapping. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Since then, prosecutors have dismissed several other charges against him, saying the victims in those cases were satisfied with the prison sentence as Burdick was already serving. Though he's behind bars, the damage Burdick did lingers on. Isaiah Miller told us when we spoke to her for this report.

There are things that are gone in my life that I will never get back. Rain, which used to be my favorite thing, in fall, which is my favorite season, will always make me just a little bit on edge. I will not sleep with the lights off. I'm terrified of the dark. I hate being near woods at night. In some sense, all of us died. A part of every single one of us died the moment that he took us.

And now, on the nights when the rain begins in the wooded suburbs around Nashville, Tennessee, there are some who hear not just the sound of drops on darkened roofs and windows, but an echo of the women with the courage and presence of mind to cleanse the terror from the rain.