Sara James Correspondent • Profile

SPOKANE - Today, it seems like a dream. Did it really happen here?  A specter haunting the shadows --hunting victims?  Here? In Spokane..?

President Nixon: It is my high honor and privilege to proclaim Expo '74 ....officially open.

Back in the 1970s, this quiet town by the river -- if only briefly -- was the center of the world when the World's Fair came to town.

But despite those images evoking memories of times so idyllic, so innocent, Spokane, Wash., was soon after under siege with a series of violent sexual attacks of a scope never-before-seen. Attacks that nearly 30 years later had the town in a frantic race to try to stop the specter from returning, and others waiting, wondering if new evidence could somehow provide a final answer to the questions that all started in 1978.

Shelly Monahan: The best way to describe it, is this is something that you hear about elsewhere.

Shelly Monahan is a TV news anchor, who back then was a radio reporter known as "Sunshine Shelly."

Monahan: It's not something that could possibly happen to us, could not possibly happen here!

Sara James: Not in Spokane!

Monahan: Not in Spokane. And it was.

"It" was a string of daring, devastating attacks which seemed to start, almost out of nowhere, near the very spot where the president had launched the World's Fair.

One woman was raped, right here in Riverfront Park.

Then, over the next year, five more rapes. One more attempt.

And the epicenter was Spokane's tony South Hill, the affluent part of town, filled with block after block of handsome homes, manicured parks, and majestic spires.

Monahan: People were absolutely terrified. Women were told not to go out alone. Even during the day. Don't go to the bus stop alone. Don't go jogging alone.

Women armed themselves, with mace and self defense courses.

The whole city seemed to be on edge. As the months passed, Spokane police officers, like now-retired Lt. Gene McGougan (MUH-goo-gun) got a taste of just how paranoid the public was.

Lt. Gene McGougan: I'm hearing a woman on the telephone just going haywire. She's screaming and yelling, she says, "He's here. He's here now." So finally I said, kick the door down. There was nobody in the house! She was hallucinating, I think based upon fear.

But those fears suddenly became all too real for radio personality Shelly Monahan when she walked out of the station late one evening in the fall of 1979.

Monahan: I had my regular show and got off the air, walked out of the building to get into my car. From out of nowhere somebody grabbed me. And then just took his fist and proceed to immediately just start beating the daylights out of my face. At one point he stuck his hand down my throat. And I bit his hand hard enough to draw blood.

Sara James: You must've thought you were gonna die!

Monahan: Well he told me he was going to kill me.

Beaten nearly senseless, Shelly was then raped.

Monahan: And it was the strangest thing after all of this. He said, "Now before I go I have a couple questions I want to ask you. How do you plan to further your radio career?"

Sara James: How bizarre!

Monahan: Yeah and at that point I couldn't even talk.

And what happened to Shelly Monahan kept happening in Spokane.

Was this one demon who struck, then vanished? Or was there more than one rapist at work? Detectives weren't certain.

Then, in June 1980, two years after the first rape, a new unit chief took over the investigation: Gene McGougan.

McGougan: I read every report that went through that department. And that's when I started noting that we had some one particular individual involved.

Former assistant prosecutor Pat Thompson also remembers her first clue to the fact that the rapes were the work of one man:  A distinctive 'signature.' A gloved fist or fingers rammed in the mouth of his victims.

Thompson: I remember one of the doctors telling me that the injuries that he was seeing in the mouth and the throat were the same on so many of the victims that he was seeing, that he knew that it had to be the same person.

By the fall of 1980, authorities were now certain they were searching for one man, a villain the media dubbed "The South Hill Rapist."  But who was he? How was he able to move in the shadows, late at night, or early morning? And what did he look like? Attacking, as he so often did, from behind, few women got a good look at his face.

That is, until this woman...

Julie Harmia (HAR-mee-uh) was 27-years-old when she moved to the South Hill, an area on the verge of panic.

Harmia: Mace was sold out of all the stores. Men just automatically moved to the other side of the street if women were jogging.

Sara James: So the level of terror is hard to imagine!

Harmia: Right...

And yet, preoccupied by all she had to do after her recent move, the attacks were the last thing on Julie Harmia's mind when she took the bus home from her very first day of work in Spokane. She got off just blocks from home when a man jogged past her, then turned, and hid behind a car.

Harmia: I thought, well, what's he doing?

Sara James: What did you think he was doing?

Harmia: He must have a buddy and he's jogged ahead of him and he's hiding. And then when his friend comes jogging by he's gonna jump out and scare him and about that time I'd completed my thought he just came up behind me and just grabbed me and drug me into a lot.

The man known as the South Hill Rapist would savagely beat and rape the young mother, and with that 'signature' move: A fist in the mouth.

Harmia: He shoved his hand down my throat and was pinning me to the ground with my tonsils.

Sara James: Did you think you were going to survive it?

Harmia: I didn't know if I was going to live through this. And I played dead for just a minute. Y'know, it was like I just went limp.

Sara James: After he raped you, what did he do then?

Harmia: He said lay here and count to 50 or something. If you look up ahead of time, I'll kill you. I'll come back and I'll kill you.

But Julie Harmia managed to get something something few other victims had: During the attack, she'd gotten a good look at the rapist's face.

Harmia: I was bound and determined, I was going to study his face. And I was gonna memorize it cause I didn't want this to happen to another person if I could stop it.

Here it is: The sketch Julie helped draw of her attacker. Some two-and-a-half years after police believed the South Hill Rapist first struck Spokane, they now had a clearer picture to go with their profile. The suspect was a white male, 5-feet-11-inches, 170 pounds with brown, wavy hair. And Julie offered detectives one more important detail.

Harmia: I remember his voice.

It was very well bred, very educated. Trained like he was a radio announcer or something like that.

After the attack on Julie Harmia, the rapist would strike again: Six more rapes before there'd be a break in the case.

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