Chapter OneOn Saturday, October 22, 1977, University Police Chief John Kleberg placed the area of Ohio State University’s medical school under heavy police security. Armed officers patrolled the campus in cruisers and on foot, and armed observers watched from rooftops. Women were warned not to walk alone, and to be cautious of men when entering their cars.
For the second time in eight days, a young woman had been kidnapped from the campus, at gunpoint, between seven and eight o’clock in the morning. The first was a twenty-five-year-old optometry student, the second a twenty-four-year-old nurse. Each had been driven into the countryside, raped, made to cash checks and then robbed.
The newspapers published police photographic composites, and the public responded with hundreds of phone calls, names and descriptions—all worthless. There were no significant leads and no suspects. Tension in the university community mounted. Pressure on Chief Kleberg grew more intense as student organizations and community groups demanded the capture of the man Ohio newspapers and TV broadcasters had begun to refer to as the “Campus Rapist.”
Kleberg put Eliot Boxerbaum, the young investigations supervisor, in charge of the manhunt. A self-styled liberal, Boxerbaum had become involved in police work while attending OSU following the student disturbances that closed the campus down in 1970. After his graduation that year, he was offered a job in the university police department if he would cut his long hair and shave off his mustache. He cut his hair, but he balked at shaving his mustache. They hired him anyway.
As Boxerbaum and Kleberg examined the photographic composites and the data provided by the two victims, everything seemed to point to a single assailant: a white American male, between twenty-three and twenty-seven, weighing between 175 and 185 pounds, with brown or reddish-brown hair. Both times the man had worn a brown jogging top, jeans and white sneakers.
Carrie Dryer, the first victim, remembered that the rapist wore gloves and carried a small revolver. Occasionally his eyes drifted from side to side—the symptom of an eye condition she recognized as nystagmus. He had handcuffed her to the inside of the door of her car and drove her to a desolate country area, where he raped her. After the rape he told her, “If you go to the police, don’t give them my description. If I see anything in the newspaper, I’ll send someone after you.” As if to prove he meant business, he took names from her address book.
Donna West, a short, plump nurse, said her assailant carried an automatic pistol. There was something on his hands—not dirt or grease, but an oily stain of some kind. At one point he had said his name was Phil. He cursed a lot. He wore brown-tinted sunglasses, and she never saw his eyes. He took the names of relatives and warned her that if she identified him, she or someone in her family would be harmed by a “brotherhood” that would carry out his threats. She, and the police, assumed he was boasting about being part of a terrorist organization or the Mafia.
Kleberg and Boxerbaum were confused by only one significant difference in the two descriptions. The first man was described as having a full, neatly trimmed mustache. The second was described as having a three-day growth of beard but no mustache.
Boxerbaum smiled. “I guess between the first time and the second he shaved it off.”
At the Central Police Station in downtown Columbus, Detective Nikki Miller, assigned to the Sexual Assault Squad, checked in for the second shift at three o’clock, Wednesday, October 26. She had just returned from a two-week vacation in Las Vegas, feeling and looking refreshed, her tan complementing her brown eyes and feathercut sandy hair. Detective Gramlich of the first shift told her he was transporting a young rape victim to University Hospital. Since it would be Miller’s case, Gramlich gave her the few details he had.
Polly Newton, a twenty-one-year-old student at Ohio State, had been abducted behind her apartment near the university campus at about eight o’clock that morning. After she parked her boyfriend’s blue Corvette, she was forced back inside and told to drive out to an isolated area in the countryside, where she was raped. Her assailant then made her drive back to Columbus to cash two checks, before having her drive him back to the campus area. Then he suggested that she cash another check, stop payment, and keep the money herself.
Because Nikki Miller had been on vacation, she hadn’t read of the university Campus Rapist or seen the composites. Detectives on the first shift filled her in on the details.
“The facts of this case,” Miller noted in her report, “are similar to those of two rape/abductions . . . being handled by the Ohio State University Police, that occurred in their jurisdiction.”
Nikki Miller and her partner, Officer A. J. Bessell, drove to University Hospital to interview Polly Newton, an auburn-haired girl.
The man who abducted her, Polly said, had told her that he was a member of the Weathermen, but that he also had another identity—as a businessman—and drove a Maserati. After Polly was treated at the hospital, she agreed to accompany Miller and Bessell to search for the place she’d been forced to drive to. But it was getting dark and she was becoming confused. She agreed to try again the following morning.
The Crime Scene Search Unit dusted her car for fingerprints. They found three partial prints with sufficient ridge detail to be used for comparison with any future suspects.
Miller and Bessell drove Polly back to the Detective Bureau to work with the department artist at making a composite drawing. Then Miller asked Polly to look through photographs of white male sex offenders. She studied three trays of mug shots, a hundred to a tray, with no success. At ten that evening, exhausted after seven hours with the police, she stopped.
At ten-fifteen the next morning, detectives of the Assault Squad morning shift picked up Polly Newton and drove her to Delaware County. In the daylight she was able to lead them to the scene of the rape, where they found 9-millimeter bullet casings near the edge of the pond. That, she told one of the detectives, was where the man had fired his gun at some beer bottles he had tossed into the water.
When they returned to headquarters, Nikki Miller had just arrived on duty. She sat Polly in a small room directly opposite the receptionist’s desk and brought in another tray of mug shots. She left Polly alone and shut the door.
A few minutes later, Eliot Boxerbaum arrived at the Detective Bureau with Donna West, the nurse who had been the second victim. He wanted her to go through the mug shots, too. He and Chief Kleberg had decided to keep the optometry student in reserve for a line-up identification in case the mug-shot evidence didn’t hold up in court.
Nikki Miller sat Donna West at a table in the corridor alongside the filing cabinets and brought her three trays of mug shots. “My God,” she said, “are there that many sex offenders walking the streets?” Boxerbaum and Miller waited nearby as Donna studied face after face. Looking angry and frustrated, she flipped through the photographs. She saw a face she recognized—not the man who’d raped her, but a former classmate, someone she’d seen on the street just the other day. She peeked at the back and saw he’d been arrested for indecent exposure. “Christ,” she mumbled, “you never know.”
Halfway through the tray, Donna hesitated at a picture of a handsome youth with muttonchop whiskers and dull, staring eyes. She jumped up, nearly knocking the chair over. “That’s him! That’s him! I’m positive!”
Miller had her sign her name on the back of the photograph, then got the I.D. number, checked it against the record and wrote down, “William S. Milligan.” It was an old mug shot.
She then slipped the identified photograph three quarters of the way back in a tray Polly Newton had not yet looked through. She, Boxerbaum, a detective named Brush and Officer Bessell went into the room to join Polly.
Nikki Miller felt Polly must have known they were waiting for her to pick out one of the photographs in that tray. Polly fingered the cards, flipping them carefully, and when she reached the halfway point, Miller found herself growing tense. If Polly picked out the same mug shot, they had the Campus Rapist.
Polly stopped at Milligan’s picture, then went past it. Miller felt the tension in her own shoulders and arms. Then Polly turned the photos back and looked again at the young man with the muttonchop whiskers. “Boy, that sure looks like him,” she said, “but I can’t say for sure.”
Boxerbaum was hesitant about filing for a warrant for Milligan’s arrest. Even though Donna West had made a positive identification, it bothered him that the picture was three years old. He wanted to wait for the fingerprint check. Detective Brush took Milligan’s I.D. down to the first-floor Bureau of Criminal Identification to match his fingerprints against the ones lifted from Polly’s car.
Copyright © 2026 by Daniel Keyes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
