There’s been a big story here in Nashville the past few days. A man suspected of being what police had dubbed “The Wooded Rapist” was arrested earlier this week.
News broke about the arrest on Thursday. I was watching with my mom when police held a press conference in which they said they believed they had caught the man thought to be a serial rapist. One who had terrorized certain neighborhoods in Nashville for nearly 14 years.
What caught my eye was not that it was a breaking story, but because the picture of the suspect on the screen looked an awful lot like a man I know from volleyball.
“That looks like a guy I know named Jason,” I told my mom as I watched in disbelief.
Then they showed the suspect’s name: Robert Jason Burdick.
“That’s not the best picture of him, but I swear that looks like the guy I play volleyball with in the park and during indoor season,” I gasped in disbelief.
Wayne wouldn’t know the guy’s last name, but my friend James would. I called him and he hopped online to check the story out and confirmed it sure did look to be the same Jason we knew.
Freaky!
Especially because the Jason I knew was a charmer and came across very gentlemanly. Not that rape is ever a gentlemanly thing to do, but his were particularly violent. (At either knife or gunpoint and he broke into homes that backed up to wooded lots, hence why they called him the Wooded Rapist.) I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that someone I thought was pretty decent and nice could be so evil.
Later that night on the news, as they revealed how the arrest came to be, they told about a woman’s parents in from out of town who were in their camper in her backyard. Their little dog named Bailey started going crazy barking like mad. They went to check it out and that’s when they saw the masked man crouching in the woods behind their daughter’s house.
The man fled, but they called the police, who later stopped a man leaving the area. They didn’t arrest him then. Undercover cops followed him for a few days, somehow obtained his DNA from a local diner, verified it matched DNA from the crime scenes, then made the arrest.
But the dog sensing a stranger’s presence and alerting his people helped break a case that police had found hard to crack.
Good dog!
(And I should know Tuesday when I go play in the park if it was in fact the Jason I’m thinking it was.)
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