The Profiler

A 33-year-old woman called "Karen" says there is a man out there who wants to kill her.

"I still to this day wonder ,"Why me?'," she says. "The only way I will ever get my life back is if he's in jail."

Over the last year and a half, she's told police that he's already viciously attacked her – not once, but three times.

What's scariest for Karen is that he's a stranger - she has no idea who he is or whether he'll be back.

The case has Karen terrified, and the police in two Oregon towns absolutely baffled.

"In my 12 years experience, I've had nothing like this before," says Det. Larry Braaksma, with the Tualatin Police Department.

With no witnesses to any of the attacks, police are left with little more than the bizarre details provided by Karen, the stalker's only known victim.

And they're getting worried, because each attack seems to be more violent than the last. Correspondent Erin Moriarty reports.

"This case may be just one of these once-in-a-lifetime, atypical, doesn't-fit-in-any-of-the-boxes-that-we-have sort of case," says McCrary.

48 Hours asked this world-renowned criminal profiler to come to Oregon to see if he could assist investigators here.

What really is a criminal profile? "We look at all of the behavior that an offender exhibits during the course of the commission of the crime, every choice he makes, and then we also analyze all the forensic evidence," says McCrary. "From that, we try to draw some logical inferences and deductions about who this offender might be"

The first attack occurred on Feb. 1, 2002. Karen's husband Ben, a welder, was working a night shift. She says she was home alone, vacuuming, when a man was inside her house. Then, she says, she was knocked to the ground, struck repeatedly in the face, and did not get a good look at her attacker.

What did he do after that? "First thing, he did was he grabbed my mouth and my nose so I couldn't breathe," says Karen.

And, according to Karen, the intruder came prepared.

"And then he got me down, he tied me up, he gagged me," she adds, with nylons that weren't hers.

Before he could hurt her more, Karen says, he was frightened away by approaching headlights. She thought she was lucky. But this was just the beginning.

But on Aug. 27, 2002, almost seven months later, Karen was walking her dog in a neighborhood park when she says the same man attacked her again. This time, she told police she was raped and slashed.

"She was right in here, so this guy's obviously bold enough to do this right here in the open," says McCrary, pointing to the scene of the attack. "This time of day, full daylight, very high risk, with her dog."

Karen said she had cuts where the attacker had removed her clothing, and lots of bruising on her neck. She also claimed to have internal bleeding that continued for a few weeks.

"It's been hard, it's been real hard," says Ben, who's been married to Karen for four years. "This is all going on with her and I haven't been able to prevent the attacks. And as a husband, that's a hard thing to handle sometimes."

There were no witnesses to this attack, and the mystery man vanished once more. But this time, Karen says, she saw his face. She told cops that he was a 6-foot, white male, fairly muscular, weighing 200-plus pounds, with a Boston accent.

And he may have been watching Karen, because on March 26 of this year, she says he attacked her a third time. This time, it happened when she was alone at work in a medical clinic.

This time, she was stabbed three times. She says she was able to fight him off with pepper spray. But once again he vanished, leaving no clues for police to follow.

"If they don't have any suspects, a profile can help them develop one," says McCrary.

But as McCrary visits each of the crime scenes, he begins to see that the pieces of this puzzle just don't fit.

And he's beginning to consider a startling possibility: Is Karen telling the whole truth?

"The very first phase is to determine whether or not a crime has been committed," says McCrary.

"I have complete trust and faith in her," says Karen's husband, Ben.

"How can you turn his behavior into a trap," says McCrary.

In that way, the ancient art of Shorinji Kempo is a lot like criminal profiling. "You have to have the ability to stay focused, stay calm," says McCrary. "You're looking at the offender's behavior, what he's doing, how he's doing that."

In the 1980s, McCrary helped the FBI develop the art of profiling, the innovative way to identify criminals through their patterns of behavior.

"We get the most difficult, the most violent crimes - typically the darkest, most pathologically driven, most horrendous or heinous crimes that are out there," he says.

And they get criminals, like the one who has terrorized this woman in Oregon and managed to elude police.

"What do we know about this guy, what do we know about what he's doing, how can we use that to our advantage," says McCrary.

To show how profiling works, McCrary, now retired, has just written his first book, "The Unknown Darkness: Profiling the Predators Among Us."

Perhaps no case he writes about put his skills more to the test than the one he encountered in 1989.

McCrary was asked to help local investigators track down one of the most dangerous killers New York State had ever seen.

It was winter, and the city of Rochester, N.Y., was frozen with fear. A killer was on the loose and targeting young women.

But Rochester Police Detectives Lenny Boriello and Billy Barnes knew many of the victims, who worked as prostitutes. And along the Red Light District of Rochester, they became easy targets for a cold-blooded killer.

Nine women were murdered within four months – yet the killer still managed to elude police. That's when local authorities turned to the FBI and McCrary for help.

McCrary visited all the crime scenes, and he went through all the case files. What could he tell about the killer?

"This is an older offender. This is a criminally sophisticated offender. This is no teenage kid doing this stuff," says McCrary. "There's no sign of panic - at any of these scenes. The anger was controlled. But it was a controlled rage, controlled anger."

McCrary also knew this killer didn't look anything like one. He knew that because of what happened to one prostitute, June Cicero - one of the smartest women on the streets.

"If he could do her, then he could do anybody out there," says McCrary. "Just kind of tore your heart out when you realized that's who we're dealing with now - that this guy's that good, that he could get June, lure her out and get her alone and do her."

McCrary believed the killer was in his late 20s or early 30s with a history of violent sexual crime. What's more, this was a man who clearly enjoyed killing – someone who would often return to the scene. And that fact gave McCrary an idea for catching him.

"Let's use that behavior to our benefit and maybe we can catch him coming back to one of these scenes," says McCrary, who was using his profile to try to guess what his next step would be.

And that is exactly what happened. On Jan. 3, 1990, during an aerial search, state police discovered a female body - and standing just a few feet away, on a bridge, was a man.

As McCrary predicted, the killer was caught returning to the scene. But there was one element in McCrary's profile that was off.

"The one thing that surprised me was his age. He was 44 at the time," says McCrary. "I was wrong about that. We're not going to be 100 percent accurate on a profile. We're not at that stage of the game that we can do. We may never be there."

That man was Arthur Shawcross, and 13 years later, this killer of 11 women agreed to sit down with 48 Hours for a rare interview.

He remembers his first victim, Dorothy Blackburn. And he remembers the other 10 victims as well. A clearly unrepentant Shawcross, who strangled his victims, is now serving a 250-year prison sentence.

He was caught when he returned to the crime scene where June Cicero's body was found: "I didn't remember her body was there. I had to urinate. So I pulled over, urinated in a bottle."

But McCrary doesn't believe that story at all: "He knew exactly where that body was. This is way out in the country. It's a kind of a rural road out there. He knew exactly where the body was."

Looking at the face of his former foe, McCrary says he believes Shawcross killed women because he couldn't perform sexually: "These are losers in life. And this is their way of getting power over a community, have a community really in the palm of their hand,in a grip of fear."

Shawcross admits he probably would have continued committing the killings if he hadn't been caught.

Police are no closer to finding the man Karen says has stalked and attacked her three times. But McCrary has encouraged them to take another look at the little evidence they do have – and test a pair of pantyhose that Karen said her stalker brought with him to the first attack and used to tie her up.

"I got into the job to put the bad guys in jail and protect the innocent and we wanted to do that," says Det. Johnston, who is anxious for a break in case of their mystery rapist. "It's almost a trial-and-error, coming here, looking at the evidence and seeing what we can find."

These DNA tests are crucial. Police are desperate to find some evidence, any evidence, that the attacker actually exists. Because of inconsistencies in Karen's story, they are beginning to doubt it. On the other hand, if they are wrong, not believing Karen could compound the damage done by the rapist.

"It's a fine line and you've got to walk it," says Johnston. "You still have to look at it as, 'Yeah, this happened and we're going to do everything we can to find the person that did this.'"

But what particularly concerns Johnston and the other investigators is that while Karen described three very different attacks, her bruises seem very similar – and they seemed to be in the same location, the same type of bruises in each attack.

And then there are the injuries that investigators think Karen should have, but doesn't. For instance, people who get attacked with knives usually put their hands up, resulting in defensive wounds on their hands and fingers. In this case, there was none of that.

Taking a look at Karen's cuts, did it look like the attacker was trying to hurt her? McCrary says no: "Not really. These are superficial, very superficial wounds, and if this offender is a sadistic offender, he's going to torture her with a knife. There's none of that."

In fact, McCrary, who has studied hundreds of attackers for the FBI, is now having suspicions: "I've seen a number of cases where victims have self-inflicted injuries and sometimes very, very serious injuries."

And suspicions only grow when investigators sit down with McCrary and listen to a tape of the 911 call that Karen made during the third attack. "Clearly what's unusual is sort of this flat affect [in her voice]," says McCrary. "Usually they're panicked and they're not sure the guy is still there, and they want help on the way."

Now, he and the police aren't sure whether a crime really occurred. And the crime lab's findings are about to support their suspicions.

It turns out there is DNA on the pantyhose, but it's not what the investigators were expecting. Technicians found what they believe is Karen's DNA on the crotch panel – DNA that is consistent with someone wearing these stockings, not having them around her neck.

Technicians also found a minute amount of unidentified male DNA, but they don't believe it belongs to a mystery rapist.

Convinced now that Karen is not telling the whole truth, investigators ask her to take a polygraph test. "It's as bad or close to as bad as what the attacker did to me, just by different people," she says, stunned that police think she fabricated the attacks.

"It just makes no sense. The whole thing just makes no sense," she adds. "I mean, I've been living in hell going on two years. I have no life. We're probably going to lose our house."

But it's about to get even worse. According to Johnston, the polygrapher said there were obvious signs of deception – that Karen may be lying.

How does she explain the fact that she's flunked the polygraph test? "I guess it's like my therapist said," says Karen. "You take someone that's already at a high level of anxiety - all the symptoms I'm having, the medication I'm on, she said it's not uncommon."

But Karen has more difficulty explaining the DNA found on the crotch panel of pantyhose that she has always insisted were not hers. When 48 Hours first talked to Karen, she said that the attacker brought the pantyhose with him. That would make it impossible to have her DNA on the crotch panel if he brought it in.

Her response? "Well, if he was stalking me, I mean, my husband and I are both gone all day, we have a carport, we didn't have a garage, wide open to anyone who wanted to go in there, we had an awful lot of stuff stored in our carport," says Karen. "I'm not saying that's where he got it. I'm saying that's a possibility. "

Why would anyone make up such a story? McCrary says, in his experience, it's usually for attention or money. But 48 Hours has learned that Karen collected almost $9,700 from the state's crime victim fund.

Her reaction: "Why would I want to do this to myself? I mean there's no financial advantage. We were a two-income family making pretty decent money, that's why we bought this house based on that. So financially, if I thought I'd be reaming in the money, I mean, this isn't the way to go about it."

The police in the city of Tualatin want to talk to Karen again. But in Oregon City, Det. Johnston says he no longer believes there is a case to investigate.

"There's a monster out there," says Karen. "If he doesn't get me again someday, I guarantee you, he's not gonna stop."