Vicious attacks on women along the beaches of San Diego began in the spring. In the wee hours of one morning, while a couple was sitting on the beach, a lone male gunman with a nylon stocking over his head robbed them and raped the woman. On the Fourth of July, a man of similar description raped a woman at another beach. Two weeks later, at another beach, the gunman approached two young girls, ages 13 and 14, and ordered them to tie up their somewhat older male consort. After this, he repeatedly raped the girls. During the assaults, the attacker asked one of the crying girls to become more sexually involved in the act. He asked the other if she was a virgin, and when she said yes, the rapist said he would change that soon.
The police had very little to go on and no definite leads. They staked out decoy teams, but the rapist eluded them. Police officials trying to understand his pattern noted that he would generally force the female to tie up the male and to create the appearance of a robbery, with the rape almost incidental to it. They thought this method had a fundamental psychological purpose: taking pleasure in terrorizing his victims.
In the early hours of another summer morning, two men and a woman, all in their twenties, went for a swim at Torrey Pines State
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Beach, near San Diego. Although they had heard about a rapist, they did not let the stories deter them from their fun. As they emerged from the water, they were accosted by a man wearing a nylon stocking to conceal his face, dressed in dark clothes, and carrying a pistol. He ordered the woman to tie up the men. When she hesitated, he rammed the pistol against her head. As she began to cry, the attacker handed her his heavy-duty flashlight so he could tie up the second man himself. The man being tied up lunged at the attacker and was shot in the chest. During the scuffle that ensued, the second man was shot in the abdomen. The attacker also received a bullet wound and a bite before running off. The three victims made their way to a convenience store and called for help.
A few hours later, a man and his wife arrived at the emergency room of a university hospital in San Diego, seeking help. The man’s hand was injured, he told the emergency room doctors, when he was jumped by some men after his car had broken down. He was treated but was also investigated. When sand was found on his clothes, the investigators became suspicious. Next, they turned to the bite marks on his back and ear: those were found to match the teeth of one of the male victims of the dawn rape attempt, who was still undergoing surgery at a nearby hospital. The final piece of evidence sealing the case was the heavy-duty flashlight that the female victim had brought to the convenience store. On it was engraved the name of the man with the injured hand, Henry Hubbard. He was the last man the police would have suspected as the predawn rapist: a 30-year-old, model police officer with numerous commendations.
As the case readied for trial, facts came out about Hubbard. A few years earlier, he had starred in a local television documentary, The Making of a Cop. Hubbard had even once played baseball in the San Diego Padres minor league system. Fellow police officers who worked with him were shocked to learn that he had been the vicious rapist responsible for attacking not only the three people on the Torrey Pines Beach but also the victims in the earlier incidents. To his fellow officers, he had always seemed “normal.”
However, a psychological evaluation revealed that Hubbard’s father had regularly humiliated and abused him. On weekends, the father would slip into drunken rages and hit the boy and his mother, sometimes while brandishing a gun. During the week, the father was a sober, respected school administrator and teacher, but as the week ended, he became a monster. Hubbard, too, followed this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde behavior pattern. In his model police officer character, he was very kind and caring toward women, whereas as a rapist he turned cruel and vicious, lacking any sense of compassion or empathy. To Hubbard’s friends and fellow officers, the scariest aspect of the entire affair was his ability to function in an apparently normal way in society by day, yet become a violent rapist at night. He pleaded either guilty or no contest to numerous counts of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and attempted murder and received a prison sentence of 56 years.