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 Typical Attack

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.

'Mall Rapist' Becomes Increasingly Bold

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."

Perry was caught on a surveillance camera only twice in almost six years.The first image was of limited value -- a fuzzy image captured in a Sears store after he had fondled a female clerk. He was brazen, yet meticulous. He knew that if he acted like he belonged, he could get away with almost anything.

Psychologist Anna Salter has interviewed hundreds of sexual predators and written several books about them.

"They are getting off on power," Salter said. "Otherwise, they'd be having consensual sex with people who wanted to have sex with them. They're excited by the person's helplessness and their powerfulness. But they're also getting excited sexually. ... The truth is, for people like this, violence excites them sexually."

Wall said Perry's favorite activity was what he called his personal voyeurism. He would spend hours at the mall in the evenings, she said. "He would go and film people through all the aisles of these department stores and through malls. And he would look for his particular preferred victim. So he would follow these people for hours and hours and hours. … It was like watching a shark hunting a fish in the ocean."

Wall described some of Perry's videos. "It was unbelievable and eye-poppingly, stunningly shocking to us to look at these videos and see Perry walking through these stores, following these mothers and fathers who have their children with them. And the minute they leave their child alone in an aisle looking at the dollies or looking at the books, Perry moves in like a shark," she said.

Even knowing his victims' parents were in the same store -- sometimes just an aisle away -- Perry attacked. Often, the children never made any noise or attempted to fight back.

Salter said this is a common response among children who are victims of abuse. "I think kids just go into denial. … Whatever the reason, it is absolutely a fact that when confronted with abuse, the typical kid shuts down, gets like a small animal, like a rabbit or something, and just freezes," Salter explained.

Perry's success depended on that blank, frozen reaction from his child victims. He was taking tremendous risks, attacking people in public places. But the clues were beginning to stack up.

Putting Together the Clues

By 2001, Wall began to piece together the double life of the Mall Rapist. She developed a partial profile that labeled him as a 30-something, blue-collar worker who traveled a lot for his business and was off by mid-afternoon. Complicating matters, he drove not one car, but several. In fact, most of that was true.

Perry worked at the National Tower Service Co. He was crew chief of a team that constructed very tall communications towers. He left work at 3 p.m., and had access to more than a dozen pickup trucks.

But when Wall asked for a list of pickup trucks in the county, she learned there were 11,000. Wall was further frustrated when she put a red pickup truck like Perry's on a wanted poster. The truck never surfaced again in another attack, she said.

"We knew he was watching TV and we knew he was reading the news, because his attacks would stop every time a story came out," she said.

'Mall Rapist' Shifts Focus

Suddenly in 2003, the "Mall Rapist" attacks stopped in Madison. Wall had no way of knowing that Perry, worried about getting caught, had now changed his taste for perversion again. He had shifted his focus to the children in his own suburban neighborhood. And he spent hours on Internet child porn sites and chat rooms.

But Wall said Perry later admitted the children didn't satisfy him because they were cooperative. "Even the children he perpetrated on, he started to orchestrate those acts as rapes. But it wasn't successful, and hence that's why he ultimately returned to the street," Wall said.

On this last return to the street, Perry would meet his final target, 13-year-old Cassie Chivers, who was with her family at a Comfort Inn hotel in Madison. It was only the second time in five years his image is caught on tape.

Cassie was running a short errand at the hotel. As she attempted to exit the elevator, Perry grabbed her, dragged her through a quiet hallway and down a stairwell. "I remember thinking, 'If he rapes me and shoots me, it's OK because I'll go to heaven,' " she said.

As fate would have it, Cassie had recently asked her parents what to do if she was ever in such a situation after watching news reports about the case of 11-year-old Carlie Bruscia, whose abduction in Sarasota, Fla., was caught on a surveillance camera. On the tape, Carlie appeared to go with her abductor willingly, and was later found dead.

Cassie's father, the Rev. Charlie Chivers, said he told his daughter, " 'If I was you, I'd kick, scream, fight and make noise. I'd do whatever I could to draw attention, because chances are he's going to shoot you anyway.' "

At nearly the exact moment Cassie left the group to run a quick errand, Perry walked past the hotel entrance, in plain view of the security camera, and headed for the elevator.

"When the door opened to the level that I was supposed to get out, I just remember all of a sudden just like feeling a hand over my mouth. And it was a leather glove and he showed me a gun," Cassie recalled. "And I remember hearing him say, 'You scream, I'll blow out your brains.' And then it hit me. This isn't a dream.

"We were going down the stairs and I just began to say 'Jesus, I love you.' He told me to shut up,' " she said.

Perry dragged her down a stairwell and outside the hotel. She could see family and friends nearby. At that point, Cassie said, she remembered her father's advice. "I thought about my daddy and what he would want me to do and he would want me to run and he would want me to scream and try to get away," she said.

Cassie broke free and began to scream out, then ran away from Perry. Her family and friends rushed toward her and took her into the hotel. There she spoke to police.

As in dozens of his previous attacks, Perry had taken a huge risk by walking into a crowded public area to abduct a girl, but this time he just narrowly escaped.

When Perry's wife saw news coverage of the incident that showed the attacker on the hotel's surveillance video, she was surprised by her husband's reaction to the report. "I remember coming home and seeing this on the news and I looked at him and I said, 'Would you look at this crazy man?' ... He didn't look."

Although the "Mall Rapist" had been quiet for more than a year, Wall thought there was something hauntingly familiar about the man in the Comfort Inn attack. He was the same height and build of the man caught on tape in the Sears attack.

It looked like the Mall Rapist was back.

At home in a Madison suburb, Joanne began to ask questions. The home computer, a haven for many of her husband's secrets, was slowly dividing their marriage.

"He had his own password. And I even asked him , 'Why? What's the big deal? It's just me.' ... You know, 'What's the big secret?' Well, there was a big secret," she said.

Internet Child Porn Investigation Leads to Perry

But Perry's secret was about to be exposed. In Atlanta, FBI agents were monitoring Internet chat room conversations between men eager to arrange dates to have sex with children. That investigation led agents to the arrest of Thomas Redeker in upstate New York. In his house, FBI agents found a videotape showing Redeker and another man engaging in sexual activity with a young child. Redeker admitted that the other man was Perry.

Within hours, a team of 17 FBI agents and local police surrounded Perry's house in Madison. "They found a safe in a crawl space in the basement of our home. And it had -- that's where all the evidence, that and the PC," Joanne said.

Agents discovered 121 CDs containing hours of child pornography and in the basement safe they found dozens of pictures of young children he had stalked. Most were shot from the waist down, from behind. Almost all were of pre-teen girls. He stalked them at the county fair, at a public pool in mall parking lots, the supermarket and in the aisles at mall stores.

With Support from Friends and Family, Victims Triumph

Three months later in a Madison courtroom, with many of Perry's victims watching, Chivers stood and spoke directly to the man who might have killed his daughter. Then 13-year-old Cassie approached the podium to confront the man who held a gun to her head.

Cassie says she forgives him.

Kelly has a message for Perry, too. She wants Perry to know that with the help of her family and college roommates, she is still standing strong. "I would just want to say, even though you did this to me, I'm still living my life."

James Perry, now 36, was sentenced in November 2004 to 470 years in prison for creating child pornography, rape, child sexual assault and kidnapping. It is the longest sentence for sex crimes in Wisconsin history.

This story originally aired on "20/20" March 4, 2005.