Midwestern 'Mall Rapist' Lived Double Life

May 26, 2006 — -- He was known as "The Mall Rapist," and over five years James Perry committed dozens of sexual attacks against children and young women. He stalked girls in the malls and shopping center parking lots, meticulously planning when and where to attack, specializing in petite young women working alone in strip malls and shopping centers around Madison, Wis.

It can be argued that Perry's wife, who we'll identify as Joanne, was his first victim. For eight years, Perry completely fooled his family and community. The couple had two young daughters and lived in a family neighborhood near Madison.

"I was living with pure evil, a manipulator, a liar, pure evil," Joanne said. "And I didn't know."

She said her husband was "loved by so many people. ... You just couldn't help but like the guy. ... He was so smart. He really had so much to offer."

She would not find out until much later that she was the perfect cover for a sexual predator. Her husband lived a double life -- deceiving everyone he met. One life was that of the family man. The other was that of a sexual predator who terrorized four states -- Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and Texas -- fondling, raping, then distributing video of his attacks in the dark world of Internet porn.

But Perry was being tracked by a determined sex-crime expert, Madison police detective Maureen Wall. For five years, Wall pursued Perry, a hunt made frustrating because he melted so well into the community as a regular guy.

A 16-year-old girl, Kelly, was one of Perry's victims. She was working solo in a children's dance clothing shop at a strip mall on a slow evening in February 2000. Perry was browsing through merchandise in the rear of the store and asked Kelly to help him.

"The next thing I knew, he had me around the neck, and I felt something cold on my neck. And we later found out that that was his little jackknife," Kelly said.

"You always hear, 'Fight back.' ...Well, when you have a knife up to your neck, what are you going to do to get out of this situation? He was way, way stronger than I was, bigger than I was, taller than I was and I was just terrified. I mean, just terrified. What are you going to do in that situation? I figured the best thing to do was cooperate it. Cooperate with him, and deal with the consequences later," Kelly said.

The attack on Kelly was typical of the way Perry operated. He had walked into an open shop during business hours, wearing a baseball cap, raped a woman at knifepoint and then was seen driving away in a red pickup truck..

The red pickup began to tie some of the attacks together for Wall. "Because they were happening with such frequency in February of 2000 -- about the rate of every two to four days -- that information was very important," the detective said.

By August 2000, the Mall Rapist was connected to more than 20 sexual assaults in strip mall parking lots and shopping centers around Madison.

Wall said Perry was becoming increasingly bold in his attacks. "He would walk right past security cameras, look into the face of the security camera and walk right in and perpetrate a rape in a store. And with impunity and with disregard for the fact that he would be on camera and could be identified. He told us later, 'I knew that most of those cameras are dummies.' And that was really frustrating to us because he was, in fact, absolutely correct."