Fifteen-year-old Kris MacFarlane was alone in the house practicing the piano in the living room when she heard the soft sound of fabric tearing. She paused. It's nothing, she thought. She resumed playing.
Suddenly there was a large man behind her, pressing a knife to her throat. She thought that if she coughed, it would go in.
"Make a move and I'll kill you," he rasped between closed teeth. She obeyed in mind-numbed terror as he slipped prepared bindings _ her sister's shoelaces _ around her wrists. He stuffed a cloth from his pocket into her mouth, tied another around her head as a gag and pushed her to the backyard picnic table.
"If you say anything or flinch," he commanded, "I'll push the knife all the way in and I will be gone in the dark of the night."
It was days before Christmas 1976, early in a series of increasingly nightmarish attacks on terrified suburbanites in Sacramento and beyond. The rapist would advance from stealth attacks on vulnerable victims to blitz rushes on couples, entire families in the house. He would hold men prisoner with plates balanced on their backs as their wives were raped again and again. He locked children in the bathroom. He loitered, rifled drawers and raided the kitchen, and spent long minutes silently gazing at his victims.
He had stalked them for days, standing outside windows, in the bushes. He slipped undetected past police patrols, planted false clues to taunt detectives.
Kris had been alone at home just 10 minutes. Her parents were at a holiday party. Her sister was at work. Her best friend had just left to bake Christmas cookies. Later she would believe he had been hiding inside the closet all along, waiting.
Over the next two hours the man in the red ski mask dragged the teenager outside and back in, moving her from room to room to repeatedly rape and assault her. He put his penis between her hands bound behind her back and commanded her to stroke it _ a ritual repeated so often in his attacks that police came to rely on the forced masturbation as an identifying trait. Then he raped her on her parents' bed, twice in the living room, once by the fireplace.
"Isn't this good?" he whispered into her ear.
Between attacks he shoved the bound, naked girl back outside into the cold to shiver as he rifled through the house, returning to the same places again and again. She heard the clinking of cutlery in the buffet.
She tested him and shifted an elbow. He was on her instantly, his harsh whisper in her ear.
After the third rape, when Kris thought she could endure no more, she moved again and realized he was gone.
This was her initiation into a sisterhood in shadows, 49 rape and sexual assault victims so faceless to the rest of the world that when they met 40 years later, they introduced themselves by number. "Hello," Kris would say, "I'm No. 10."
