District and Montgomery County police are expanding their efforts to capture the serial rapist who killed Christine Mirzayan in Georgetown in 1998. They hope to launch a website soon featuring information on him, as well as a composite. The suspect is believed to have raped eight women in Maryland over a seven-year period before raping and killing Mirzayan, a 28-year-old intern from California whose unsolved slaying generated headlines from coast to coast. Police didn’t know that the “Potomac Rapist” was her killer until 2006, when a DNA match was made.
Though DNA has not connected the so-called Potomac Rapist to any crimes committed since then, police believe he could still be in the area, since backup at DNA labs could be keeping them from receiving information sooner, said Capt. Michael Farish, D.C.’s homicide branch commander.
“It’s kind of hard to believe that someone with that history and that level of violence just suddenly decided to stop or fall off the grid,” Farish said.
He would enter his victims’ homes before they returned at the end of the day or break in after they were there. The attacks happened between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., an unusual time for rapes, said Joe Mudano, a detective in the Montgomery County Police cold case unit.
“You just can’t get a riskier time to commit these crimes,” Mudano said. “Everyone’s coming home that time, there’s people on the street, neighbors are home.”
In some cases, the victims’ children were sleeping in another part of the house. The timing suggests something unusual about the attacker:
“You would think that he’s probably married or is accountable to somebody, that he can’t be out all night,” Mudano said. The attacker would enter unarmed, sometimes through a second-story window, though without using a ladder. In some cases, he used a screwdriver or knife that he found in his victim’s home as a weapon. And he always threw a blanket over the woman’s head.
“They probably had crossed paths at one time,” Mudano said. “He went to great lengths to cover their faces, he did not want them to look at his face.”
Police believe he could have been a construction worker, since the homes he entered were in or close to neighborhoods under construction. Police said he was an African-American man between 5 foot 10 inches and 6 feet tall and weighing 160 to 180 lbs.
Information about the case can be left anonymously by calling Crime Solvers toll-free 866-411-TIPS. Those providing Crime Solvers tips may receiver a reward of up to $1,000.
