Dennis Rabbitt was raping women for 25 years before he was caught--and for almost 20 years before anybody even started looking for him. But when the St. Louis Police Department started its hunt, it looked as if he'd begun in and raped six women on the South Side. Figuring he was driven by some specific vendetta or fetish, they combed through old unsolved rape cases and searched desperately for a pattern in the new ones, some common denominator linking the victims.
Rabbitt started raping in the early s, as a teenager, and is estimated to have raped more than women across Missouri and Illinois and, at the end, in New Mexico. The victims' ages 14 to 82 , traits and appearance were irrelevant--he says he thought them all beautiful and performed oral sex to bring them pleasure. On a few occasions he turned explosively violent; most of the time he menaced the women into submission and then acted like a rough, awkward but eager suitor.
He boasts, face flushed, about what he took to be orgasms, dismissing any suggestion that fear might make a woman tremble and breathe hard. He says it wasn't until he talked with police, after a four-month nationwide manhunt finally brought him back to St. Louis in handcuffs, that he realized he'd done damage. During the investigation, the police hotline rang off the hook, but of perhaps 2, clues, not one pointed to Rabbitt. He had been married, had a daughter and son, ran a successful bar at Fourth and Washington, came from a family with political connections.
He was rumored to be Stan Musial's godson, which was perhaps his father's wishful thinking; he'd hung photos in the family tavern of Musial presenting young Dennis with bowling trophies at Redbird Lanes. John the Baptist in ' I was riding with police officers who'd grown up with him. He was an Irish Catholic kid from the South Side who hung out at his dad's tavern and played softball--just an everyday guy, nothing extraordinary about him.
Except for the fact that he was the most notorious serial rapist of all time. Just happened to be where I was at," says Rabbitt with a shrug. What the profiler actually said was that the rapist was probably living south of the St. Rabbitt was then living in the block of Winona.
