Forensic Files - Season 5, Episode 1 - Badge of Deceit - Full Episode | Forensic Files

for 15 years a serial rapist preyed on single women in the small college town of lafayette louisiana
although his mo was always the same investigators had few clues to his identity the masked assailant would break into
women's homes late at night blind them with a flashlight and assault them at gunpoint
but when the locations of all these crimes were entered into a new computer program
police learned more about the perpetrator than they were prepared for [Music] [Applause]
[Music] [Applause] [Music] in august of 1995 in lafayette louisiana thousands of college students were
arriving for the fall semester at the university of louisiana one of the students beginning her senior
year was a 21 year old woman whom we'll call anne anne was working her way through school
at a local health club and earned extra money by babysitting for a friend who lived in an affluent suburb not far from
school in fact a city official lived right across the street from this woman where i babysat
i couldn't have picked a place to feel safer it was just a place that that had american dream
no one can hurt you here's written all over it on august 30th 1995 anne's friend had to go out of town for
a business trip so ann agreed to stay overnight with the two children [Music] and put them to bed around 10 o'clock
she allowed them to stay up a little later that night since they didn't have school the next
day afterwards ann started in on some of her homework after they were asleep i worked on the computer a little bit
decided to get a head start on some of the assignments that i'd gotten that day then probably around 11 o'clock
i decided to go to bed [Music] [Music] around 2 a.m anna woke to find a masked intruder armed with a gun he threatened
to kill her and the children he shone a flashlight in my face so i really couldn't see anything at all
he was wearing these wool gloves some really scratchy gloves he had a flashlight and then in one hand
and a gun in the other the man wore a knit hat and a bandana over his face and forced him to walk
through the entire house he said he was looking for money but took nothing of value
he found anne's home address in her backpack and said he would track her down if she did not do exactly as she
was told he really could kill me in just a second so i knew that to save my life and to
save the two children's lives i had to do what he said and so i did and and he raped me
later the perpetrator led anne to the bathroom told her to urinate and to count to 100 before getting up he also
told her not to call the police because if she did he said he would know about it and he would get revenge
he left without harming the children at the hospital a rape test kit recovered a semen sample but no other
trace evidence such as foreign hairs or fibers because of the flashlight cap and
bandana all ann could say was that the perpetrator was an overweight white male with piercing blue eyes
went to school the next day following sat in class and felt like everyone in there was looking
at me it felt like every white male who was slightly overweight that even slightly resembled
the man who would hurt me was staring at me and felt like that must be him maybe
that's him so i left that class and just cried and cried i knew that life was never going to be
the same [Music] one of ann's friends heard about the assault and called her with an important
piece of information she said i heard what happened to you and i really want to talk to you about
it it sounded a whole lot like what happened to me as we talked we found out this is the same guy
everything he did everything he said every movement was identical anne's friend had been raped three years
earlier just one mile from where anne was assaulted lafayette police detective mack galion
noticed that anne's case was similar to other unsolved rape cases some dating back 10 years
i researched previous sexual assaults as far back as 1982 but i think i found some as
early as 84 that were similar in uh mo if these cases were connected lafayette police not only had a serial
rapist on the loose but one sophisticated enough to elude police for years [Music]
to the lafayette police the rape of the 21 year old college student sounded similar to a number of other unsolved
rape cases all on the south side of the city four miles from where ann was assaulted
a 32 year old office worker living alone had also been raped a year before that one mile away a
40-year-old hotel receptionist living alone reported a similar attack all of the rapes were identical
the women were asleep the perpetrator had a gun and flashlight and wore heavy woolen gloves a bandana and knit cap
he walked the women through their homes saying he was looking for valuables but his motive wasn't robbery that type of
rapist wants to go through the whole scenario of if i'm in this room and i got to get out where can i go if i'm in
the living room where can i go in any position that house where can i get out if i need to
in many cases the perpetrator ordered the women to shower afterwards presumably to remove trace evidence such
as semen hair and fibers detective mack gallian identified a dozen rape cases all on the south side
of the city within a five mile radius all with the same mo in some of these cases semen samples
were collected from the victims in others washcloths found in the victims homes were found to contain
semen presumably from the perpetrator all were sent for dna testing if we can't find the sample we can't analyze
the sample and diluting a semen stain which only takes water is a very effective means
unfortunately for well in this particular case it wasn't effective enough six of the semen samples matched
the others were inconclusive investigators discovered that all of the women shopped at the same grocery store
and many were members of the health club nearby since most of the women were single and
living alone investigators suspected that the victims had been stalked and there were some other clues that
concerned police first was something the perpetrator said to all of the women he didn't say if you went to the police
with it i'll find out about it he said if you go to the police i will know about it and the fact that he uses the
the phrase i will know tells me that he has a stronger insight to the police department
another clue was the way the perpetrator held the flashlight high around his head
gripping it behind the lens a lay will probably point a flashlight out in front but most professionals that use
flashlights in their work sometimes hold it up like so including police officers this is a way
in which we usually hold off last ones since the perpetrator held his flashlight in the same way
investigators suspected he may be working in law enforcement or in a related field
crime analyst ronnie smith was asked to develop a psychological profile of the rapist by studying the manner in which
the crimes were committed smith says that by ordering the women to bathe after the rapes the rapist was
trying to do more than simply remove forensic evidence so it's kind of like to make a woman clean up is going to be
basically to get rid of the evidence but the outcome would be is you do feel better
about yourself because you're clean now and you don't have that that anger towards the guy
the rapist knew that bathing would reduce the likelihood of the victims reporting the crime and the
psychological games didn't stop there he gave me some warnings about making sure that
the lock on the window gets fixed gave me all sorts of fatherly sort of advice which was pretty disgusting after what
he'd done to me as if it were my fault that he came in and did that to me he's telling them okay this is not all
my fault okay if you would have done this this and this you wouldn't have been a part of it but the fact that you
did leave your door unlocked or you did leave your window unlocked uh this was what happened to you
but in one case the rapist got careless his bandana came loose for a moment giving the woman
a glimpse of his face from that description a police sketch artist prepared a composite drawing which was released to
the press unfortunately it did not appear to resemble anyone in the police department
who had piercing blue eyes the only other lead was from one of the rape victims who said
she saw a 10 year old brown ford pickup truck leaving the neighborhood immediately after she was assaulted
but there were over 12 000 brown tan and beige ford pickup trucks registered in the state of louisiana and none were
registered to an employee of the police department since most of the rapes occurred on the
south side of town the local press dubbed him the south side rapist the guy was good he was very good he
planned out everything he thought about it he knew what to do he handled himself well once he got in
and if the perpetrator was a member of law enforcement he would be very difficult to catch
in lafayette louisiana dna testing confirmed that a serial rapist was on the loose
police identified 12 unsolved rape cases all with the same mo the rapes began in 1984 and continued
into the 1990s but in 1995 after the sexual assault of the 21 year old college student the rapes
mysteriously stopped police checked hundreds of leads and eliminated thousands of suspects all
were dead ends police were starting to wonder whether they'd ever catch the south side rapist
and whether the perpetrator was simply too smart but a magazine article in police chief
magazine changed their luck it described a new technique called geographic profiling written by a
detective inspector with the vancouver police department kim rossmow the basic theory that underlies
geographic profiling is something called environmental criminology that means that people in regards to their
non-criminal behavior such as shopping will engage in many activities close to their home same thing applies to
criminals lafayette police asked detective rossmo to generate a geographic profile of their south side
rapist so rosmo flew to lafayette to inspect the crime scenes first with an aerial inspection then by
visiting the crime scenes at night and also during the day rossmo did not believe that the grocery
store or health club played any role in the selection of victims most of the rapes occurred in homes without window
coverings where it was easy to see inside from the street once back in vancouver detective rossmo
entered all of his information into a computer program he developed as part of his phd thesis in criminology a program
he calls rigel rosmo designed the program after studying the relationship between
hundreds of crimes and where the perpetrators lived in relation to the crimes they committed then the computer
assesses distances between the various crime sites and distances from the crime sites to
what is really a 40 000 pixel grid um covering the area where we call the hunting area where the crimes have taken
place for each one of those 40 000 pixels it'll sign a probability value representing the likelihood that's where
the offender lives when detective rossmo entered the locations of the 12 rape cases in
lafayette the computer identified something important it was a specific neighborhood
just two miles from each of the crime scenes according to the computer this one-half
square mile area was the neighborhood in which the perpetrator either lived or worked
surprisingly a deputy sheriff from lafayette lived in that very neighborhood at the time the
assaults took place although he had recently moved his name was randy como a 20-year veteran of the sheriff's
department who often worked on juvenile rape cases he was divorced had a young daughter and
was engaged to a volunteer at the local rape crisis center during the 10 years that the rapes
occurred como was living in the center of the area identified by the geographic profile
one of como's friends was sergeant terry regan the officer in charge of the south
side rapist task force united bell apprentice but i was pissed off we go all the way back until the mid 80s
working cases together we visited together i am personal friends with randy cuomo
but police needed to make sure that randy como was the rapist and they needed to gather more evidence before
proceeding for that they looked in the most unlikely place is garbage [Music] lafayette police discovered that one of
their own sheriff's deputies randy como was living in the neighborhood identified by the computerized
geographic profile but como's colleagues weren't entirely convinced he was the perpetrator another
reason i didn't want any of this to get out is because at the beginning i wasn't
really sure that he was in fact the actual perpetrator so i didn't want to ruin his career
until we found out for sure at about the same time an anonymous caller told police that
randy como was the rapist they were looking for faith moody runs the local rape crisis
center and was alarmed to learn that randy cuomo was a suspect the sense of betrayal for it being
randy como and i have a hard time sometimes calling him detective was that he did work cases under the
children's advocacy center he had work cases for us as sexual abuse response center
since police had a dna profile of the south side rapist from semen samples from the victims they wanted to gather a
dna sample from randy cuomo for comparison without his knowledge so they sterilized an ashtray and
discreetly placed it in front of him at the police station during his coffee break
[Music] when como left the entire ashtray was sent to the forensic lab for testing
[Music] investigators hoped that one of como's cigarettes would contain enough of his
saliva for dna testing first the end of the cigarette was placed into a vial along with a chemical cocktail
that dissolves everything except the epithelial cells from como's saliva a rich source of dna
then phenol chloroform was added which allowed the dna to float free in this gel-like bundle of molecules
was randy como's genetic blueprint that blueprint the dna profile can be visualized with the test known as pcr
and when the dna profile of the semen taken from six of the rape cases was compared to the dna profile from como's
saliva investigators had a match randy cuomo was the south side rapist we were really shocked
and taken aback by the fact that it was it was one of our own uh we were very disappointed
once he crossed that line he was just another criminal to us immediately following como's arrest he
confessed not only to the rapes he was accused of but the two other rapes the police knew nothing about bringing the
total to 14. when police searched como's apartment they found underwear from his victims
which he kept as trophies books on rape and road maps of the south side neighborhoods
[Applause] police also found a brown ford pickup truck at como's brother's home 200 miles
away in shreveport louisiana [Applause] for close to 15 years como stalked his prey and used his police training to
control his victims from the very outset of the assaults but he unwittingly left an important
clue a trail that led from his crime scenes straight back to his own neighborhood most of his crimes happened
within two miles of his home we were looking for somebody who was right under our noses all the time
somebody who had the information somebody who knew and probably at some point was laughing at
us the whole entire time even being a cop and having that inside authority you know you're still going to
mess up you're still going to do something wrong and all you got to do is find that one
thing wrong in each case and you can build on that randy cuomo pleaded guilty to six counts
of aggravated assault and was sentenced to six life terms in prison if i could turn back time i would never
want this to happen again it was the most awful thing in my life that could happen but again i
chose to use this as an opportunity to to learn more about myself to appreciate the people that i have in
my life because they could be gone tomorrow and that has given me so much more than i had
before this happened [Music] [Music] you

Women in a Louisiana city live in fear of a rapist who leaves no clues to his identity. But technology and behavioral science combine to give police a new forensic tool. Police narrow their search to one man, local policeman Randy Comeaux.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

The episode details the South Side Rapist case and Randy Como's capture through DNA evidence and geographic profiling.

Key points

The South Side Rapist. For 15 years, a serial rapist terrorized Lafayette, Louisiana, evading capture until a breakthrough.
A Shocking Revelation. Detectives discover that one of their own, Randy Como, is the rapist they've been hunting.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I had to do what he said and so I did and he raped me.

Anne recounts her traumatic experience with the intruder.

4:00WatchNov 11, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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