Through the Pouring Rain

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Speaker 8 It was the year the rain changed.

Speaker 11 The year the rain in the dark, in the woods, became a thing to fear.

Speaker 16 The year a visitor came to call in a privileged green suburb called Forest Hills, and a Nashville lawyer learned about her security.

Speaker 6 Or rather, that she was not secure at all.

Speaker 19 We're all safe, you know, a man's home is his castle, we're safe at home. Well, you're not always safe at home.

Speaker 12 It was March 1994. That's when the terror began.
It was the middle of the night.

Speaker 21 Pat Young, accomplished, gutsy woman, successful lawyer, engaged to be married, alone, asleep in her house, heard something, felt something, opened her eyes.

Speaker 19 It was a stranger

Speaker 19 in my home.

Speaker 24 How terrifying is that?

Speaker 19 That's a life-altering event.

Speaker 17 Somehow, some way, a man had broken into Pat's house.

Speaker 25 Now he loomed above her, anonymous, a stocking over his face, his hands on her.

Speaker 26 No question what he was there for.

Speaker 19 You're at home asleep in your bed and you wake up with a stranger telling you to do what I tell you,

Speaker 19 I don't think anybody would doubt what's getting ready to happen.

Speaker 19 But the only doubt is you wonder, are you going to be killed?

Speaker 8 She struggled.

Speaker 6 He was much larger, aggressive, powerful.

Speaker 19 You're reduced to nothing so fast

Speaker 19 that everything,

Speaker 19 every ounce of power is taken away from you. You can have a weapon.
I had a weapon. If you reach for the weapon, it's probably going to be used against you.
So

Speaker 19 everything everything at your disposal is taken away.

Speaker 4 He pinned her down.

Speaker 26 She felt she would die.

Speaker 20 And then she did the one thing she thought might survive her, to let someone know what had happened.

Speaker 19 I bit a piece out of his hand, which is why they had DNA in my case.

Speaker 17 And what, you

Speaker 17 held on to it, hid it?

Speaker 19 I put it under the bed.

Speaker 27 And were able to retrieve it later?

Speaker 19 The police found it later.

Speaker 8 Courageous.

Speaker 28 The man had a gun on her, could have killed killed her any second. But at that moment, Pat Young made a decision.

Speaker 29 She would not be, refused to be, a passive victim, a sentiment she was going to share with other women yet to come.

Speaker 28 Pat Young risked her life and bit the man.

Speaker 11 Eventually, he fled into the woods behind her house.

Speaker 12 Then the police came, the questions began, the evidence searched.

Speaker 22 They found that bit of skin from the rapist's hand, that precious little piece of DNA.

Speaker 18 And Pat, the tough, independent lawyer, got up the next day and went to work.

Speaker 19 My receptionist didn't recognize me. I was so swollen and beaten.
And passed a lawyer downstairs. He told me later, he said, it looked a lot like Pat's hair.

Speaker 19 But I wonder if that was a car wreck or what. They did not know who I was.

Speaker 34 Nashville DA Roger Moore heard about the vicious attacker, the violence of his assault, and was alarmed.

Speaker 35 We knew this was a person that needed to be found, and the sooner the better. And in 1994 we had the DNA.

Speaker 36 We had

Speaker 35 what it took to identify the person.

Speaker 26 And of course had the DNA found its match in some database somewhere back then, back in 1994, what followed might never have happened.

Speaker 37 But there was no match, nothing in the file at least, and so the evidence, useful though it was, sat, filed away, waiting for a suspect against which it could be compared.

Speaker 7 And years passed by in which this horrible but apparently solitary crime went on doing its corrosive work in the life of lawyer Pat Young.

Speaker 17 And she left her home in that leafy neighborhood, though there were other reasons too.

Speaker 12 But mostly she left behind her sense of personal safety.

Speaker 19 I would sit in a house. Every door was locked.

Speaker 19 I would check with a handgun every door, every room, under every bed, and every closet, even though there was an alarm on where I went after I left my house.

Speaker 19 But I'd get in the car and know I've got to get out of the car and go in the house. What if he's here? What if someone's here? What if someone's between me and the house?

Speaker 19 And I did that for a long, long time. You tell yourself that you're being ridiculous, but it does.
It alters you.

Speaker 38 So it did.

Speaker 34 And Pat began to realize that she was in many ways alone.

Speaker 19 One of the worst remarks that got made to me was at a Christmas party. And a woman said, oh, well, was it good for you? And I stood there and looked at her and said,

Speaker 19 oh my God.

Speaker 19 oh i went to the host party and so i have to go he said why i said because

Speaker 19 i'm gonna i'm gonna hit somebody i have to go home now

Speaker 14 and then it was november 1998 it wasn't very far away another of nashville's green wooded suburbs it happened again

Speaker 17 and then again and then again

Speaker 39 he shows up and he shows up big reporter dennis ferrier these are upscale neighborhoods very upscale neighborhoods very nice neighborhoods it was in 1998 it probably happened four times, but it happened the exact same way.

Speaker 39 Rainy night, wooded area, someone is attacked in their own home, and the guy's got a mask, he's got gloves, he's got rope, he's got a condom. It's like the same MO.
It's very meticulous.

Speaker 41 That was when people started talking about it.

Speaker 39 That's when people started talking about it because you have someone in a very affluent part of town breaking in and raping people in a very brazen way.

Speaker 39 It's going to get attention.

Speaker 16 The rapes were always vicious, accompanied by brutal beatings, threats to kill the victims and their families, who were often asleep in the same house.

Speaker 39 You have a husband upstairs and a woman downstairs, and he goes in and effectively rapes the woman downstairs while the husband is upstairs asleep.

Speaker 39 Just think how long he watched to understand that this was okay.

Speaker 24 Because he'd been watching them for some time.

Speaker 42 Who knows how long?

Speaker 21 And soon, a long creeping terror wound its way around and through the leafy precincts of some of Nashville's most affluent citizens.

Speaker 39 You start to hear about this, and you're a woman living in that area, and it starts to rain, and you're afraid.

Speaker 43 You don't think you're gonna live. I was convinced I was gonna die.
That was it.

Speaker 43 I was not going to see my birthday.

Speaker 14 They were still gracious, the tree-studded lawns around Nashville, Tennessee.

Speaker 7 Gracious, lovely, but something else now, too.

Speaker 34 In the last years of the 20th century, an unknown rapist invaded the very places the women of Nashville had once felt most secure, their homes.

Speaker 39 He had a knife for a gun, big athletic guy, powerful build, physically imposing, you know, ski mask, and said, I'll kill you if you don't do this.

Speaker 39 If you don't keep quiet and do this, I'll go upstairs and kill your sleeping husband or other family members. There was always the threat.

Speaker 6 Only the ages of his victims varied much. His methods rarely did.

Speaker 21 He operated at night.

Speaker 18 He seemed to appear from the woods, then vanished back into them.

Speaker 16 And he attacked

Speaker 17 when it rained.

Speaker 8 He became known as the wooded rapist of the public.

Speaker 9 Why that?

Speaker 35 A number of the incidents occurred during rainy nights where the

Speaker 35 victims lived in wooded lots or where there were houses not really one on top of another.

Speaker 30 After each incident, the police searched the crime scene meticulously, but there were no telltale clothing fibers, no hairs, only the DNA that had no face.

Speaker 17 Like a ghost, the rapist left behind no trace that could readily identify him.

Speaker 39 They immediately knew they had a real smart guy, and that always bothers them.

Speaker 14 As the number of attacks grew, the rapist seemed to redouble his efforts to hide his identity.

Speaker 41 You said they never saw his face, so they couldn't describe a face, but what else did they say about it?

Speaker 39 He made some of them take showers. You know, once DNA came on the scene, then he would like

Speaker 39 try to make them go take a shower so that he could get rid of the evidence.

Speaker 27 So a clever man in the dark, but maybe not as thorough as he imagined.

Speaker 44 Yes, he used a condom. He had the women shower,

Speaker 28 but he wasn't able to remove every vestige of a link to him.

Speaker 27 Any more than he could stop the determination of many of his victims to save some piece of evidence that might someday be used against their

Speaker 39 The one thing he couldn't really control, which was DNA. You know, you're going to physically assault someone, it's going to be hard to make sure you have no DNA on them.

Speaker 39 That's probably his only mistake.

Speaker 21 The only problem was, of course, they couldn't locate a match. And as one attack turned into five and the terror spread on dark and rainy nights, police were reduced to issuing warnings.

Speaker 39 They told people that, you know, if you live in a wooded area, you know, keep your doors locked, you know,

Speaker 39 look out for anything suspicious

Speaker 14 and then for a while about a year the attack seemed to stop residents began to breathe a little easier

Speaker 18 now it was November 1999 a 16-year-old named Zaya Miller moved with her parents to a suburb called Brentwood and she was far more concerned about making friends at her new school than with looking over her shoulder.

Speaker 18 She was asleep. Her parents and her dog were nearby.

Speaker 26 And it was raining.

Speaker 43 It was a day before my 17th birthday.

Speaker 43 I was home in bed asleep. It was two in the morning

Speaker 43 and to be woken up in your own home

Speaker 43 at gunpoint.

Speaker 22 Totally shocking.

Speaker 43 I was convinced I was going to die. That was it.
I was not going to see my birthday. I was not going to direct the school play two nights later.

Speaker 43 I was not going to see my parents again.

Speaker 43 I was, there were a lot of things I wasn't going to do because that was it. I was dead.

Speaker 6 And now the attacker's method changed a little.

Speaker 34 Most of the women he'd assaulted in their houses, their bedrooms.

Speaker 11 But for Zaya, he had other plans.

Speaker 43 I was taken to a second location. I was forcibly stripped.
I was still at gunpoint. I was raped.
I have no idea what strange world circumstances allowed it to happen, but I talked my way out of it.

Speaker 43 And I ran home

Speaker 43 thinking the whole time there is a man with a gun and he is probably pointing it straight at me as I am running home.

Speaker 34 Through the pouring rain she ran, ran back to the same house which had once sheltered her, ran back to a different life.

Speaker 43 My life changed and my parents' lives changed. Everything changed.

Speaker 43 It's like I lost my ability to love who I was. My sense of self was so completely destroyed.

Speaker 14 Again, the police came.

Speaker 22 Again, the questions, the trip to the hospital, the search for evidence.

Speaker 33 And there was that telltale DNA.

Speaker 3 Otherwise, nothing.

Speaker 29 How was he different than a regular criminal?

Speaker 39 Most criminals are really dumb. You know, they make mistakes.
They're thinking about what they want and not the result. So they make a mistake and they get caught.

Speaker 39 Well, this guy, no, it wasn't like that. It was like this was his hobby and he was really, really good at it.

Speaker 22 There were three more rapes in 1999 and 2000, then nothing for two years, then more, one in 2004, two in 2005, two in 2006, all confined to those wooded Nashville suburbs on rainy nights.

Speaker 34 But while the crimes were eerily similar, the victims were vastly different.

Speaker 23 A woman seven months pregnant was raped.

Speaker 17 No one was safe. The rapists seemed to get more brazen as time went on.

Speaker 39 This single-minded guy that just was going to hurt women of any age, any circumstance, you know, raping a daughter in front of a mother, a mother in front of a daughter, but yet like wearing a condom, just really weird and methodical.

Speaker 34 Still, his victims did what they could to identify the man or ghost or whatever he was, often managing to somehow preserve at least a vestige of their attacker's DNA.

Speaker 34 So in 2006, the district attorney's office brought an indictment that seemed to some, frankly, odd.

Speaker 3 An indictment against a phantom called the wooded rapist.

Speaker 39 The grand jury indicts this silhouette, you know, this invisible person.

Speaker 39 We have a five-count indictment and he did five rapes and he's this and you know we know his DNA, but they didn't know who he was.

Speaker 39 They had no idea.

Speaker 18 So why the indictment?

Speaker 8 Because for for those five early cases of rape, the statute of limitations was running out.

Speaker 29 So, that was why you had a grand jury with the name John Doe and somebody to indict, not so much for the theater, but to preserve the legality.

Speaker 22 And then it was 2008.

Speaker 16 14 years had elapsed.

Speaker 41 13 Nashville women had been attacked.

Speaker 6 Some thought he would never slip up.

Speaker 10 But not everyone.

Speaker 44 What did you think?

Speaker 19 That sooner or later

Speaker 19 there will be a mistake.

Speaker 19 He needs to be found. He's continuing to do horrible things to women.

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Speaker 16 It was the rain that brought it on.

Speaker 17 The rain in the dark.

Speaker 13 They call him the wooded rapist for the way he emerged from the trees, then vanished again for 14 years.

Speaker 23 13 attacks, 13 lifetimes of post-traumatic flashbacks.

Speaker 19 And I looked at every man. I could look at your arm and say you could be him or you are not him.

Speaker 43 And it was one of the first rainstorms of the fall.

Speaker 43 And something about the way rain sounds outside of a glass door triggered some tiny little part of me that had that body memory of that exact same sound nine years before.

Speaker 43 And I lost it. I was curled up in a ball on the floor, crying and screaming before I knew what was going on.

Speaker 31 For all their trying over a decade and a half, and though they kept a bulging file full of cases, each with a sample of the rapist's DNA, they could not find him, could not figure out who he was.

Speaker 28 There may have been some who felt the police weren't trying hard enough, but not the women.

Speaker 28 They had already done what they could to identify the man, and they seemed to feel the police were doing their best to.

Speaker 19 There was never a change in personnel that somebody didn't call me to say,

Speaker 19 this officer, this detective's out, has moved to here. I've got your case.
Can I come talk to you?

Speaker 43 And over the years, he kept in touch with me. He said, Zay, I haven't forgotten about your case.
We're still working on it. We're still looking for this guy.
We're going to find him.

Speaker 24 Must have been enormous amounts of pressure, I mean, on both the investigators and on your office to get something done.

Speaker 35 The pressure on them to avoid another victim was tremendous. And I know one of the detectives who worked on the case for years

Speaker 35 who has now gone to law school and is an attorney still said that was one of his his biggest regrets upon leaving the police department was that that was still an open case.

Speaker 18 The rain, the dark,

Speaker 18 the woods.

Speaker 33 Now it was April 29th, 2008.

Speaker 14 The evening patrol shift had gathered for nightly briefing.

Speaker 35 Police department here had done at roll call, the sergeant before sending them out, he remembered had said now fellas it's a rainy night keep an eye out for the wooded rapist

Speaker 23 same night a few miles away in a suburb called Brentwood a favorite haunt of the rapist a visiting couple from Michigan bedded down in their camper in a relative's driveway their dog slept on the floor beside them the hours ticked past midnight and suddenly Dog starts barking, yapping.

Speaker 39 Woman looks out the window of her camper, and there's this ski mask right in her face

Speaker 39 and he growls at her.

Speaker 39 And she says it was a really mean growl. Well, she gets on the phone and says, hey, I've got it.
There's a man in a mask in this neighborhood.

Speaker 11 One of the officers who attended the briefing earlier that evening responded to the call.

Speaker 17 Not far from the visiting camper, he spotted a Jeep driving down the dark street.

Speaker 39 Pulls him over, ends up having to let him go.

Speaker 39 You know, can't hold him, but now they've got him. You know, they have a face and a name.

Speaker 24 And what was his reason for being around there and for wearing this mask?

Speaker 39 He said he was going to a party.

Speaker 39 A party?

Speaker 16 Officers checked with neighbors.

Speaker 21 There was no party anywhere nearby.

Speaker 39 Certainly suspected that this guy might be a prowler, but they let him go that day. They didn't have it, but they notified everyone, and that, of course, started the 24-7 surveillance of him.

Speaker 26 What they needed desperately, the only thing that might link this suspect to the string of horrific rapes was a sample of his DNA.

Speaker 18 But how to get it?

Speaker 41 Quietly, carefully, they went about the business of tracking their suspect.

Speaker 18 They watched his house.

Speaker 45 They followed his jeep.

Speaker 17 They waited for an opening.

Speaker 5 And finally it came.

Speaker 23 The man walked into a restaurant, ordered lunch, ate it, and left.

Speaker 35 The officers in Brentwood collected his utensils from a meal that he'd eaten eaten and had left without clearing his tray and submitted those to our TBI crime lab.

Speaker 3 So as long as the person has thrown it away, doesn't want it anymore, you can go in and scoop it up.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's,

Speaker 35 I suppose, DNA dumpster diving.

Speaker 33 The results were back within 48 hours.

Speaker 32 The man's DNA matched DNA found on victims of the wooded rapist.

Speaker 8 Within hours, he was arrested.

Speaker 33 And Zaya Miller, now 24 years old, answered her phone and found herself talking to one of the police officers who had been working her case for almost a decade.

Speaker 43 And he says, we got him.

Speaker 43 That's it, we got him. Did it register? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 43 I was crying and laughing and screaming and calmed down enough for about 20 seconds to say how and who.

Speaker 37 And the answer to that question was about as remarkable as any answer could be.

Speaker 14 It was May 1st, 2008, and finally there he was, the name and face behind the DNA.

Speaker 46 Suspected of at least 13 attacks in three counties.

Speaker 18 Robert Jason Burdick, 38 years old.

Speaker 16 Record as clean as a whistle.

Speaker 14 This police decided had to be the man they called the wooded rapist, the man who'd kept his identity a secret through 14 years of terror.

Speaker 23 And in a small town not far from Nashville, that news was about as shocking as a thing could be.

Speaker 7 There, Jason Burdick?

Speaker 18 Was that even remotely possible?

Speaker 50 I mean, it was all anybody was talking about.

Speaker 50 That, uh, can you believe it was Jason? Can you believe that he did that?

Speaker 9 Angela Greer, a nurse, happily married two children when we met.

Speaker 29 But once upon a time time in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Speaker 50 He was probably my first true love. My first love.

Speaker 18 They were both sophomores, both 16.

Speaker 50 Everybody knew him. Everybody liked him.
He had a wonderful family. He came from a wonderful family.
They went to church on Sundays. They were members of all the organizations.
He was an athlete.

Speaker 12 An alpha male in training.

Speaker 17 Someone men wanted to be like. and women wanted to be with.

Speaker 39 He was popular,

Speaker 39 attractive. Girls liked him, women liked him.

Speaker 21 In fact, Robert Jason Burdick had been a local football hero and something of a big man on campus.

Speaker 34 When Angela Greer moved to Clarksville as a teen, she felt privileged that he chose her as his girlfriend.

Speaker 50 He could smooth talk anybody.

Speaker 39 Especially you.

Speaker 50 Yes, any of the girls. He had a way with the girls, that's for sure.

Speaker 25 After high school, Burdick tried a career as a prison corrections officer, but his success with women got him into trouble.

Speaker 30 There was a story, I think, about him leaving the prison system after having an affair.

Speaker 39 Apparently, he left because he had an affair with somebody, and that person's husband attacked him, and there was a fight.

Speaker 21 And so Burdick built a new career in security systems, learning the trade partially under the tutelage of former boss Howard Constam.

Speaker 46 A very good employee. He was at work on time.
He was always neatly groomed.

Speaker 18 And his luck with the ladies was always in play.

Speaker 46 I know that he dated several employees. The only feedback I got from one of the dates was the fact that he was just way too polite.
He was just way too nice, made her uncomfortable.

Speaker 18 Too polite?

Speaker 38 Too nice?

Speaker 6 Could the police have made a mistake?

Speaker 41 As the media dug, they discovered that Jason Burdick seemed to live an exemplary life.

Speaker 34 After a brief marriage, he became active on the charity circuit, once helping Habitat for Humanity by offering himself as a date for a charity auction prize, even dressing up as a mascot for a zoo benefit.

Speaker 39 I mean, this whole time he's either married or dating or

Speaker 39 bachelor, auction, you know, he's out there in the community doing things.

Speaker 8 As news of Burdick's arrest spread, the shock spread with it.

Speaker 16 Among women in particular, one woman called him, quote, the best guy I ever dated.

Speaker 7 Jason's family stood up for him, of course, insisting there must be some mistake.

Speaker 50 But back in Clarksville, angela greer and a few others whose memories stretch back to those high school days began to reflect on a darker side of their old friend and another memory came bubbling up he had this reputation i know that he did actually get in trouble for vandalism a childish prank angela says she never did find out exactly what got jason accused of vandalism but There was nothing at all childish about an incident at the mall after Angela discovered he'd been two-timing her.

Speaker 50 And I noticed he was with the girl that he was dating and I turned to her and I said, if you're smart, you'll run.

Speaker 50 And I just turned to walk away and that's when he grabbed me and he assaulted me in the mall right there in front of everybody. What happened?

Speaker 50 He grabbed me by my hair and spun me around and he hit me. You mean he punched you? Punched me in the face.

Speaker 24 You don't punch a girl.

Speaker 50 He punched you. He punched me.
But I fought back. And he had a scratch that kind of ran down the whole side of his face here.

Speaker 41 How badly did he hurt you when he hit you?

Speaker 37 Like, did he bruise your face or anything?

Speaker 50 Yeah, I was all bruised up on one side of my face. Yeah, we had to take pictures and.

Speaker 10 Angela pressed charges.

Speaker 7 And Jason Burdick, pride of his town and his family, was sent to a youth detention center.

Speaker 3 For how long?

Speaker 50 I'm not sure exactly how long he went. I know he missed Christmas and that upset his family very much.

Speaker 33 The family, said Angela, was not at all prepared to accept the proposition that Jason was anything other than a gentleman wrongly accused.

Speaker 50 They blamed me. They brought every gift I ever bought them.
Anything that had anything to do with me that was in that house, they brought and dropped on my doorstep.

Speaker 24 So they couldn't believe that their son had actually done anything bad to you?

Speaker 50 No, no, they couldn't. They never,

Speaker 50 they could never see

Speaker 50 anything that he did was wrong.

Speaker 12 And neither, apparently, could much of the rest of Clarksville.

Speaker 50 I can't tell you who it was. Somebody set my yard on fire.
I became an outcast when I sent the Golden Boy to Spencer.

Speaker 41 Did you ever feel guilty about the fact that

Speaker 42 you turned him in?

Speaker 19 Yes, I did.

Speaker 50 I carried a lot of guilt for a long time.

Speaker 18 But now, that same golden boy was about to go on trial for brutalizing more than a dozen women.

Speaker 34 Many of whom had stood up to their attacker in ways that would finally make it possible to try Jason Burdick.

Speaker 18 Rape.

Speaker 39 Even as they were being victimized, they kept a cool head and the 61-year-old woman who was forced to take a shower was moving but leaving certain areas covered at all times in the shower.

Speaker 39 So that she didn't wash it away. Right.
So even after being terrorized like that, she keeps her wits and preserves this DNA.

Speaker 33 But did the police have the right man? On April 27, 2009, Burdick was headed to court for the first of what could be as many as 13 trials.

Speaker 34 One victim, the eldest of them, would have her day in court, but of course, a dozen others had a very personal stake in the outcome.

Speaker 3 They'd already fought back by collecting those crucial bits of DNA.

Speaker 42 And now the very first of the wooded rapists' victims decided to continue that fight by keeping a silent vigil in court as the trial phase began.

Speaker 19 I asked the victim if it would bother her if I stayed.

Speaker 19 And she said, no, please stay. And we sat back there watching for a while and I finally turned risky, do you think he even knows who I am? I said, do you think he knows I'm even back here?

Speaker 19 And we just, we pondered that for a while and I don't know the answer to it.

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Speaker 31 Are you Robert Burdick?

Speaker 46 Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 16 A man known as the Wooded Rapist had attacked 13 women.

Speaker 34 Now, Robert Jason Burdick, a well-liked Nashville bachelor, would stand trial for, one by one, each of the crimes.

Speaker 54 Do you understand the charges, or do you want me to read the indictments?

Speaker 39 I understand the charges.

Speaker 18 The victims?

Speaker 13 A grandmother, a teenager, a mother-to-be, seven months pregnant, and more.

Speaker 12 He was even accused of raping a friend's niece and then calmly taking that same niece and her family out to dinner weeks later without being recognized.

Speaker 6 And now the prosecutor set out to link him to his vicious work with a strand of evidence unlike any other, his own DNA.

Speaker 16 Tiny amounts, yes, a few cells, little more, but enough?

Speaker 15 Oh yes, said the prosecutor.

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Speaker 35 I think drawers have just, and the public have come to see it as,

Speaker 35 if not foolproof, but something that they can believe in.

Speaker 6 A terrible kind of sorority of alleged victims had a special stake in the outcome of the trial.

Speaker 21 At least one of them, Pat Young, the wooded rapist's first first known victim, a lawyer, was determined to be in court every day.

Speaker 19 For years I've wondered who he is. I mean just who is this guy? It's sort of like going to the zoo.
I wanted to see him.

Speaker 35 Do you recall the events of the evening of November the 18th?

Speaker 32 The first case was the newest crime and the eldest victim, a 61-year-old woman, who might quite reasonably have found it very painful to get up in court and reveal what her attacker did to her.

Speaker 16 But when the trial began, it was she the prosecutor called upon.

Speaker 22 And so she took the stand and told her story.

Speaker 8 As horrifying and humiliating as it was, in court she did not waver, though the judge granted her at least a sliver of privacy by ordering the courtroom cameras to turn away from her face.

Speaker 55 It was like a fog of him saying it twice,

Speaker 55 very

Speaker 19 strongly.

Speaker 46 Get up, get up.

Speaker 17 She recalled how she'd been awoken on the night of her attack by an intruder wearing a ski mask.

Speaker 35 What happened from that point on?

Speaker 41 You've gotten a person that's there.

Speaker 55 He immediately put duct tape across my eyes,

Speaker 55 told me to take off my clothes, and put duct tape on my wrist.

Speaker 31 Are you at that time nude?

Speaker 54 Yes, sir.

Speaker 46 That's correct.

Speaker 35 Tell the jury, what happened to you?

Speaker 55 At that time, he French kissed me, and then he kissed my breast.

Speaker 10 And then the nightmare got worse.

Speaker 35 Were these acts with or against your consent?

Speaker 55 Well, I would have chosen for him not to.

Speaker 35 Why did you allow him to do this?

Speaker 54 Because I want to stay alive.

Speaker 31 After he finished, the attacker made her shower. His intention that she wash away his telltale DNA.

Speaker 31 But she did not, did not wash it away. She did the only thing she knew how to do, she said, in effect, to fight back.

Speaker 55 I didn't get under the water when I got in the shower.

Speaker 43 I stood next to the glass.

Speaker 19 And why did you do that?

Speaker 55 Just to preserve any evidence that there was any.

Speaker 18 And then, after her attacker left, she called police.

Speaker 55 I took two cotton swabs from Q-tips from my cabinet and swabbed my mouth out,

Speaker 55 put it in Ziploc bag.

Speaker 26 At the hospital, a nurse took more samples from her body, samples analyzed by experts who matched them against the unique DNA profile of the defendant.

Speaker 35 What were your findings, if any, with respect to a comparison of the known DNA profile, excuse me, of Robert Jason Burdick with the perpetrator DNA?

Speaker 56 I found that the profiles did match, and the probability of finding

Speaker 56 an unrelated individual having the same DNA profile exceeded the world population.

Speaker 17 The possibility it was someone else's DNA?

Speaker 18 Billions and billions to one against.

Speaker 35 So Mr. Burdick's DNA matches the perpetrator DNA from her body, correct?

Speaker 37 Yes, sir.

Speaker 47 There was more traditional evidence, too, against Burdick, circumstantial stuff, in his Jeep, for example.

Speaker 40 This is one roll green duct tape and 13 condoms.

Speaker 12 Not so unusual, perhaps, to find condoms in a bachelor's car.

Speaker 16 But then a search of Burdick's home revealed more items that could have been tools of a very nasty trade.

Speaker 40 There were quite a few black clothes that were located in the far end of a dresser and I mean there were quite a few other things. There were obviously a few handguns that we recovered.

Speaker 31 And anything dealing with nighttime activities?

Speaker 40 There were some night vision goggles that were recovered.

Speaker 40 I recall some like anti-dog barking devices.

Speaker 13 But no testimony was as damning as the DNA evidence.

Speaker 21 After all, no no one on earth could have the same DNA as Robert Jason Burdick.

Speaker 18 Unless,

Speaker 21 unless he had an identical twin and Burdick was adopted, was there an unknown twin somewhere?

Speaker 32 Somebody with Burdick's identical DNA, someone else committing these horrific crimes?

Speaker 9 Could the DNA be pointing to the wrong man?

Speaker 9 All right, we can bring the carrier in.

Speaker 6 Robert Jason Burdick was on trial for the first of 13 rape charges, but no victim had ever seen his face.

Speaker 28 He left no visible evidence except prosecutors claimed his DNA.

Speaker 6 Fletcher Long, the lead defense attorney, maintained that wasn't enough.

Speaker 57 They don't have anything from inside the house that ties them to Mr. Burdick.
They don't have anything they retrieved from the yard that ties them to Mr.

Speaker 39 Burdick.

Speaker 39 They have nothing but DNA evidence.

Speaker 12 That DNA evidence had tagged Jason Burdick as its owner, but the defense made the jury aware that in rare cases, two people could share the same DNA.

Speaker 36 And the probability increases as the degree of kinship to the defendant gets greater. Would you agree?

Speaker 56 Yes, starting with identical twins, they have identical DNA.

Speaker 11 Did you have any hope that you might be able to use the evil twin defense?

Speaker 39 No. They sure thought we were going to say that, didn't they?

Speaker 39 No. One thing you have to do is you have to shake the science.

Speaker 23 A long shot, of course.

Speaker 12 And in the end, the defense did not use it.

Speaker 26 Because

Speaker 16 the prosecution was ready.

Speaker 35 Identical twins may share the same DNA.

Speaker 35 But they don't share the same fingerprints.

Speaker 29 And you had fingerprints from some of the other cases.

Speaker 35 Yes, that was what the defense would have been confronted with had they gone any further.

Speaker 58 Ladies and gentlemen, the stipulation is the fact that Mr. Robin Jason Burdick does not have a twin.

Speaker 12 The only hope for the defense was to prove that the DNA found on the victim had been tainted somehow during the investigation.

Speaker 46 The victim had some swabs

Speaker 39 that she brought to General Hospital.

Speaker 57 that were taken from inside her mouths.

Speaker 23 Is that right?

Speaker 54 She said it was around her mouth, in her mouth.

Speaker 57 Can you tell us who all had handled those?

Speaker 54 She had, I think they were in a plastic bag. I think it was only her.

Speaker 39 We felt like that we put on a contamination case.

Speaker 39 The lead detective admitted that the DNA that the victim took herself was put in a plastic bag and that was the worst place in which it could have been put.

Speaker 17 But there had been other DNA samples taken at the hospital, samples that could not have been tainted, and each one pointed to Burdick.

Speaker 12 There wasn't much the defense could do to combat the science.

Speaker 39 They had nothing. These DNA cases are slamming shut pretty fast.
I mean, the defense did not have a single witness.

Speaker 12 Now, have you discussed. The defense decided not to put Jason Burdick on the stand.

Speaker 58 Have you made the decision to choose to testify or not to testify?

Speaker 28 Not to testify.

Speaker 39 All right, thank you, sir.

Speaker 30 All right, we can bring the jury in.

Speaker 34 And that was his right, of course, not to testify.

Speaker 41 The trial was brief, lasted just three days.

Speaker 35 The DNA in and on her body

Speaker 35 is his

Speaker 14 to the exclusion of everyone in the world.

Speaker 29 Is he the man who committed these crimes?

Speaker 35 And I submit to you in closing beyond any reasonable doubt,

Speaker 35 he is that man. I would ask you to so find.

Speaker 39 Thank you.

Speaker 57 None of it. connects at all

Speaker 42 with Mr. Burden.

Speaker 29 Not a thing.

Speaker 29 I mean, this case is a DNA case.

Speaker 52 That's it.

Speaker 37 That's all they've got.

Speaker 58 In the case of the state of Tennessee versus Robert Jason Burdick, I'm in.

Speaker 12 And the verdict came quickly.

Speaker 13 Two hours later, the jury returned.

Speaker 58 Wherein the charged offense is aggravated rape. Has the jury arrived at a verdict? Yes, sir.
What is the verdict, sir?

Speaker 56 Guilty.

Speaker 18 out of here.

Speaker 26 Burdick's family was obviously distraught.

Speaker 6 His father in particular.

Speaker 18 No, no, yes, you did. He did not.

Speaker 12 A very different kind of moment for the victim in the case and the women who had shared her horror.

Speaker 24 At the end of that first trial, you found yourself in tears.

Speaker 39 Tough lawyer like you.

Speaker 19 Here I am, squatting in the back of the courtroom.

Speaker 19 And it

Speaker 19 does, it comes out of nowhere. It has since 1994.

Speaker 30 Jason Burdick was sentenced to 32 years in prison.

Speaker 45 But even with that guilty verdict, there were questions still unanswered.

Speaker 7 If Burdick was the wooded rapist, how did he choose his victims?

Speaker 30 How did he keep his identity so well hidden from those women?

Speaker 45 And how did he avoid detection for all those years?

Speaker 59 The trial didn't really answer those questions fully, but as it ended, there were more charges, more cases to come.

Speaker 30 In October 2009, Pat Young, Robert Burdick's first known victim, had her case heard.

Speaker 2 In that trial, Burdick was convicted of attempted rape.

Speaker 30 Zaya Miller's case went to trial in 2010, and Burdick was found guilty of aggravated rape and aggravated kidnapping. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Speaker 30 Since then, prosecutors have dismissed several other charges against him, saying the victims in those cases were satisfied satisfied with the prison sentences Burdick was already serving.

Speaker 59 Though he's behind bars, the damage Burdick did lingers on.

Speaker 30 Is Zaya Miller told us when we spoke to her for this report.

Speaker 43 There are things that are gone in my life that I will never get back. Rain, which used to be my favorite thing, in fall, which is my favorite season, will always make me just a little bit on edge.

Speaker 43 I will not sleep with the lights off. I'm terrified of the dark.
I hate being near woods at night. In some sense, all of us died.
A part of every single one of us died

Speaker 43 the moment that he took us.

Speaker 10 And now, on the nights when the rain begins in the wooded suburbs around Nashville, Tennessee, there are some who hear not just the sound of drops on darkened roofs and windows, but an echo of the women with the courage and presence of mind to cleanse the terror from the rain.

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