Gerald Arthur Friend (born November 24, 1937) is an American rapist and kidnapper from Lakewood, Washington, currently serving two consecutive 75-year terms at Airway Heights Corrections Center.
Friend was originally jailed for abducting a 12-year-old girl from Sumner, Washington, in July 1960, when he was 22. He picked up the hitchhiking girl and her brother, but forced the boy from the car at gunpoint. He then drove the girl to Mount Rainier National Park where he beat her, raped her, and cut her hair. The victim eventually escaped by jumping into a river, where she was discovered by a passing motorist. Several days later, Friend's father found him hiding in a field near their home; Friend drew a .22 pistol and was wounded in the ensuing struggle. His father took him to the hospital and turned him in to the police. [1] [2] Friend was convicted of rape and torture, and was sentenced to a minimum of 75 years. However, after serving 20 years at Walla Walla, and escaping twice, he was paroled in 1980. [3] [4]
In June 1987, he abducted a 14-year-old girl at knife-point when she accepted a ride after a rock concert. He repeatedly raped and tortured her while she was tied to a pulley suspended from the ceiling of his mobile home. The girl escaped by jumping from his truck at a gas station. Friend was stopped a day later for a traffic violation, and arrested when the deputies recognized him. He was convicted of first-degree kidnapping and rape that August. [2] [3] He was ordered to serve the remainder of his 1960 sentence, in addition to a second 75-year sentence. [4] The following year, his second victim sued the state and the Department of Corrections for prematurely paroling Friend in 1980. [4]
Police in King County suspected Friend in the Green River Killer case, and considered him a suspect in the murder of two girls in Tacoma in 1987. [3] However, police were unable to uncover a connection to those crimes.
The 1987 kidnapping of the 14-year-old victim was the inspiration for the Nirvana song "Polly", released in 1991. Songwriter Kurt Cobain had read about the incident in a newspaper. [5] [6]
Marc Paul Alain Dutroux is a Belgian convicted serial killer, serial rapist, and child molester. Initially convicted for the abduction and rape of five young girls in 1989, Dutroux was released on parole after just three years' imprisonment. He was arrested again in 1996 on suspicion of having abducted, tortured, and sexually abused six girls aged between 8 and 19, four of whom were killed. Dutroux's widely publicized trial ended with his conviction on all charges in 2004; he was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.
Kenneth Alessio Bianchi is an American serial killer, kidnapper, and rapist. He is known for the Hillside Strangler murders committed with his cousin Angelo Buono Jr. in Los Angeles, California, as well as for murdering two more women in Washington by himself. Bianchi is currently serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Washington State Penitentiary for these crimes. Bianchi was also at one time a suspect in the Alphabet murders, three unsolved murders in his home city of Rochester, New York, from 1971 to 1973.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
Joseph Edward Duncan III was an American convicted serial killer and child molester who was on death row in federal prison following the 2005 kidnappings and murders of members of the Groene family of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He was also serving 11 consecutive sentences of life without parole for the 1997 murder of Anthony Martinez of Beaumont, California. Additionally, Duncan confessed to — but had not been charged with — the 1996 murder of two girls, Sammiejo White and Carmen Cubias, in Seattle, Washington. At the time of the attack on the Groene family, Duncan was on the run from a child molestation charge in Minnesota.
Romona Moore was a 21-year-old Hunter College honors student who disappeared April 24, 2003, in Brooklyn, New York. Two months later, her body was discovered outside an abandoned house which an anonymous caller had directed her mother to. Two male suspects were arrested; they were convicted in 2006 of having kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered Moore. The young immigrant from Guyana had been living at home with her parents and relatives before she was kidnapped.
Kevin Coe is an American convicted rapist from Spokane, Washington, often referred to in the news media as the South Hill Rapist. As of May 2008, Coe is still a suspect in dozens of rapes, the number of which is unusually large; his convictions received an unusual amount of attention from appeals courts. His mother, Ruth, was convicted of hiring a hitman against the judge and the prosecutor at her son's trial following his conviction. The bizarre relationship between Coe and his mother became the subject of a nonfiction book, Son: A Psychopath and his Victims, by the crime author Jack Olsen.
Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom Jr., aged 23, were from Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. They were kidnapped on the evening of January 6, 2007, when Christian's vehicle was carjacked. The couple were taken to a rental house. Both of them were raped, tortured, and murdered. Four males and one female were arrested, charged, and convicted in the case. In 2007, a grand jury indicted Letalvis Darnell Cobbins, Lemaricus Devall Davidson, George Geovonni Thomas, and Vanessa Lynn Coleman on counts of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder. Also in 2007, Eric DeWayne Boyd was indicted by a federal grand jury of being an accessory to a carjacking, resulting in serious bodily injury to another person and misprision of a felony. In 2018, Boyd was indicted on state-level charges of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder.
The Ripper Crew or the Chicago Rippers was an organized crime group of serial killers, cannibals, rapists, and necrophiles. The group composed of Robin Gecht and three associates: Edward Spreitzer, and brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis. They were suspected in the murders of 17 women in Illinois in 1981 and 1982, as well as the unrelated fatal shooting of a man in a random drive-by shooting. According to one of the detectives who investigated the case, Gecht "made Manson look like a Boy Scout."
David Parker Ray, also known as the Toy-Box Killer, was an American kidnapper, torturer, serial rapist and suspected serial killer. Though no bodies were found, Ray was accused by his accomplices of killing several women, and was suspected by the police to have murdered as many as sixty women from Arizona and New Mexico while living in Elephant Butte, New Mexico. Ray was convicted of kidnapping and torture in 2001, for which he received a lengthy sentence, but he was never convicted of murder. He died of a heart attack about one year after his convictions in two cases, the second of which resulted in a plea deal.
Terapon Dang Adhahn is a Thai convicted sex offender and a former Bhikkhu who, in May 2008, was sentenced to life in prison for raping and murdering 12-year-old Zina Linnik in Tacoma, Washington.
On June 10, 1991, Jaycee Lee Dugard, an eleven-year-old girl, was abducted from a street while walking to a school bus stop in Meyers, California, United States. Searches began immediately after Dugard's disappearance, but no reliable leads were generated, even though several people witnessed the kidnapping. Dugard remained missing for over 18 years until 2009, when a convicted sex offender, Phillip Garrido, visited the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, accompanied by two adolescent girls, who were discovered to be the biological daughters of Garrido and Dugard, on August 24 and 25 of that year. The unusual behavior of the trio sparked an investigation that led Garrido's parole officer, Edward Santos Jr. to order Garrido to take the two girls to a parole office in Concord, California, on August 26. Garrido was accompanied by a woman who was eventually identified as Dugard.
John Albert Gardner III is an American convicted double murderer, rapist, and child molester. He confessed to the February 2009 rape and murder of 14-year-old Amber Dubois from Escondido, California, and the February 2010 rape and murder of 17-year-old Chelsea King from Poway, California after he entered a plea agreement that spared him from execution. Additionally, Gardner attempted to rape 22-year-old Candice Moncayo of San Diego County, and had been previously incarcerated for the molestation of a 13-year-old girl.
In May 2014, Isidro Medrano Garcia, who had been living under the name Tomas Medrano or Tomas Madrano, was arrested and accused by police of kidnapping a 15-year-old girl in 2004 and repeatedly raping her and continuing to hold her captive until 2014. Garcia was accused of forcing the alleged victim to marry him in 2007. As time moved on, the woman had a child with Garcia on October 27, 2010, or in 2012, and they continued to live openly together as a family in Bell Gardens, California, until the woman contacted her sister through Facebook and met with her mother in April 2014. She filed a domestic violence complaint with Bell Gardens police on May 19, 2014. As a married couple, Garcia and the woman had an apparently active social life in the community, including hosting large parties and the woman spending time and running errands by herself, having her own car, and working outside the home. However, police said the woman had tried to escape twice and been severely beaten. Through his attorney, Garcia claimed that the woman made up the story of abuse because the couple was breaking up.
On January 22, 2016, three inmates of the Orange County Men's Central Jail in Santa Ana, California, escaped from the jail's maximum-security unit by climbing through the plumbing pipes and ascending to the roof. They stole a utility van and a taxi in Los Angeles, taking the taxi driver hostage, and drove to San Jose. One inmate, Bac Duong, went along with the hostage driver back to Southern California and surrendered to police in Santa Ana on January 29. The other two inmates, Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan Tieu, were arrested in San Francisco on January 30. Multiple people were arrested for allegedly aiding the inmates to escape, including a jail teacher.
Jessica Lynn Heeringa was a 25-year-old woman from Norton Shores, Michigan, who disappeared in the Exxon gas station where she was working the late shift on April 26, 2013.
Robert Carl Hohenberger was an American criminal, kidnapper and serial rapist, as well as the prime suspect in a series of murders committed against teenagers in Morgan City, Louisiana between March and May 1978. The FBI was brought in to investigate the killings, putting Hohenberger on a national wanted list, but he committed suicide before he could be apprehended.
Stanley Marvin Bernson is an American kidnapper, murderer and self-confessed serial killer. Convicted for two known murders in Oregon and Washington in 1978 and 1979, respectively, Bernson was later investigated for around 28 additional murders around the Northwest, some of which he claimed to have committed in the company of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy. No further victims have been linked to Bernson since his incarceration, and he continues to serve his life term at the Washington State Penitentiary.
James Ray Cable was an American serial killer. Originally convicted in 1990 for kidnapping and torturing a teenage girl, he was later linked via DNA to the murders of three women in across Kentucky between 1982 and 1989. He was subsequently charged with these crimes, but died while awaiting trial in 2013.
Martin Lee Sanders was an American serial killer and rapist. A truck driver, Sanders kidnapped and murdered two young women near Ephrata, Washington in 1980, followed by two teenage girls in Spokane in 1983. He was convicted of the latter killings in 1990, with the court agreeing to not prosecute him in the 1980 murders, and Sanders was sentenced to life imprisonment.
David Emery Misch is an American murderer and suspected serial killer who was convicted of the 1989 murder of a woman in California and later linked via DNA to three additional murders dating back to 1986. One of his accused victims is Michaela Garecht, a 9-year-old girl whose 1988 disappearance achieved notoriety in the San Francisco Bay Area.