Tracy Nesdoly

Victim raped 'a day early'

A woman known as Jane Doe said as early as four days after she was raped at knifepoint in her own bed, the investigating officer told her she "was hit a day early" by a serial rapist the police were tracking.

Doe -- testifying in her own lawsuit against police -- said she couldn't remember if it was her first interview with Det. William Cameron or shortly thereafter when he told her much of the information police had against her attacker.

She said Cameron told her the rapist attacked women in second-or third-floor apartments with balconies and already had assaulted four women in her neighborhood.

"He told me there was no doubt in his mind I had been raped by a serial rapist and there were four other women he had raped," Doe testified. "He said that there were similarities, and the attacks were cyclical . . . He told me, in fact, I had been hit a day early.

"I was very shocked, very surprised and asked why if he had so much information they hadn't issued a warning."

She was told it wasn't police practice and the warning "would make women hysterical."

She said she told him that if the police wouldn't warn women, she'd do it herself. "He said if I did that I could be charged with interfering with a police investigation."

The lack of warning is the basis of Doe's $1,2 million lawsuit against the Metro Police. Cameron is one of the officers named in the suit in which Doe alleges the police used her as bait to capture rapist Paul Douglas Callow, who is serving a 20-year sentence after pleading guilty to five assaults. Doe was his fifth known victim.

Doe told the court that during her hour-long attack in August, 1986, she was terrified Callow would plunge a knife into her.

She described in harrowing detail how the rapist stunk of alcohol and chemicals. She said he was hot, his sweat dripping on to her as he attacked her.

"I could feel his sweat falling on me. I was envisioning his blood," she said, her voice faint. "When he was done raping me, he told me to stay where I was and not to do anything."

Callow, she said, talked to her throughout, asking "a lot of questions a person would ask you socially... it was terrorizing.

Because he had blindfolded her, she became utterly focused on sound. When she heard her door close, she called 911 and before she hung up six police officers were at her door.

"They were very excited, asking me a lot of questions," Doe said.

She went to Women's College Hospital and gave a lengthy statement to a female police officer. Four days later, Cameron told Doe the information that shocked her.

"I explained I already gave a very long interview, very precise," Doe said. Cameron told her he was the officer in charge and hadn't read the interview. Doe said he told her that he liked to do his interviews himself.