Terror Trek

Probing a rape spree

He was the ringleader of a cross-country crime wave. Police believe the suspect, sometimes with accomplices, was responsible for as many as 130 cases of rape and robbery in twelve states. He usually wore a ski mask. Sometimes he and his confederates tied up the victim’s boyfriend or husband and left him within earshot while they committed the assault. As the toll mounted, no fewer than 26 law enforcement agencies from Florida to California joined in the investigation.

The breakthrough came last month when an off-duty Louisiana state trooper spotted a red Pontiac Trans Am in the town of Lake Charles that matched the description of a car sighted near the scene of a number of the attacks. The owner, John Simonis, 30, was placed under surveillance for five days until authorities were confident that he was the “ski-mask rapist.” Once in custody, police said, he confessed involvement in 77 assaults.

Simonis was indicted last Monday by a La Salle Parish grand jury on charges stemming from the sexual assault of a Jena, La., woman last September. Anxious to avoid a trial and the embarrassment it would cause his family, he pleaded guilty to armed robbery, aggravated burglary and unauthorized use of a stolen vehicle; he was sentenced to 231 years in prison without parole. Simonis and two other Lake Charles men, John Glass Dickinson III, 26, a pharmacist, and Frederick A. Boerman Jr., 27, a waiter and musician, were also indicted on charges connected with the double rapes of a mother and her 14-year-old daughter last June. Charges are expected to be filed against Simonis and Dickinson in at least seven other cities. Says Photographic Assistant Judy Christman, 23, a former girlfriend of both men: “They loved the thrill of meanness, to have their adrenaline running so fast.”