It was the summer of 1987. Raleigh police were hunting a rapist.

A man had already attacked a handful of women in apartments near NCSU. Police suspected the rapist spied on the women before the attacks. They staked out the wooded areas behind apartments filled with NCSU students.

On June 4, a Raleigh officer saw something in the bushes; he found a man staring into a girl's apartment window. It wasn't their guy. All the victims had described a black attacker; this guy was white.

An officer hauled William Jackson Neal Jr. downtown while others kept looking for the real assailant.

At Raleigh police headquarters, an officer summoned Detective J.K. Harrison, a rape investigator who dealt with many of the city's sexual deviants.

Neal was quiet when Harrison settled into a chair across a table from him.

Neal told Harrison he painted houses for a living. He stayed in Goldsboro. Neal wouldn't give a home address.

An officer booked Neal on peeping charges. Neal unsettled Harrison.

He wondered: "What's a guy doing driving all the way from Goldsboro to look at girls through windows?"

Months later, on Aug. 21, an NCSU senior climbed into bed for the night at her apartment at Ivy Commons, a complex just off Avent Ferry Road behind the university. A few of her roommates had gone out to the bars; she had hit them the night before and wanted to get a good night's rest.

A rattling in the room jolted her awake; she watched a skinny young man crawl toward her. He put a knife to her neck and promised he wouldn't hurt her if she stayed still and quiet. The young woman sobbed as he pulled out a bottle of lotion and lathered her belly. She begged him to leave.

Moments that felt like years passed and he eventually climbed off her bed and grabbed his bottle of lotion. He ordered the woman to give him a 10-minute head start before she called police. She counted, fearing he was somehow testing to see if she was obeying his order. She pulled the phone into the closet with her and crawled into a ball. Through muffled sobs, she told an emergency dispatcher that a stranger had just attacked her.

A supervisor handed Harrison the rape report when he got to work that morning.

The woman, who asked not to be identified for this report, described her attacker for Harrison. Small. Light hair. Scruffy beard.

A sketch artist drew a composite.

Harrison studied the drawing. Something about the man seemed familiar.

He reached for a stack of mug shots of all the peeping toms Raleigh police had rounded up that year.

Harrison stopped at William Neal Jr.'s photo.

He flipped the picture over. Age 32. Painter. Goldsboro. Address unknown.

Weeks after the Raleigh assault, 12-year-old Tomeshia Lasha Artis went to bed in her family's Goldsboro apartment.

Earlier that evening, Artis' mother had redecorated her daughter's bedroom, switching around the bed and the dresser and a lamp. She slid back the window, trying to catch a breeze the warm night of Sept. 3.

The girl didn't think to shut the window. In the dark of morning, as Artis slumbered, a man pulled her window back and slipped inside. Artis ran toward her door. The intruder yanked her back, threatened her with a knife and told her to stay still.

He told her how pretty she was, that he'd seen her around and admired her. The man, slight and blond, tried to push himself inside her. Artis whimpered.

The intruder then sat on her bed and bragged about how "he'd just made her a woman."

"He talked to me like I was his wife and we were grown," she said.

Then, he bid her good night, telling her not to peek as he slipped back out the window and ran away.

He promised he'd see her around.

Within the month, Artis had pointed out an attacker. She spotted Dwayne Dail, small and thin with bleach-blond hair, chatting with some buddies in a yard near Artis' apartment. Artis tensed up when she saw him. She told her mother that he was the man who hurt her.

Seventy miles away, trouble mounted for Neal. Harrison, the Raleigh detective, asked the NCSU victim to study a row of seven mug shots and see whether her rapist was among them. Instantly, she pointed to Neal, then paused. She reminded Harrison it had been dark, she had been terrified.

Harrison wanted to chat with Neal again, but had no address. He canvassed paint stores in Raleigh, showing Neal's mug shot and asking shopkeepers whether they knew how to reach him. Harrison hit pay dirt in a Southeast Raleigh paint store. They had an address on file, a house on Robin Place in Goldsboro.

Neal was standing in his mother's yard when Harrison and another detective pulled up one morning in December 1987.

Harrison had an arrest warrant for Neal: first-degree rape. A grand jury had returned it that month based on the woman's testimony and a hair left behind on her bed that an investigator at the state crime lab had deemed "consistent" with Neal.

Neal didn't look surprised to see the Raleigh detective again, Harrison recalls.

Harrison explained why he was there anyway. A young woman in Raleigh was raped Aug. 21. She identified you as her attacker, Harrison told him.

Neal shrugged and said he thought he was pretty sure he was home in Goldsboro that night, asleep in his mother's house.

A Goldsboro officer who had accompanied the Raleigh detectives handcuffed Neal and drove him to the Wayne County jail. They turned onto Jefferson Street, past the apartment where officers had spent the fall looking for a skinny, blond man who had raped a 12-year-old girl.

In March 1989, Dwayne Dail stared at Artis, a shy 14-year-old, small inside a wooden witness box.

Dail rubbed his smooth chin as she described for jurors the scruffy beard of her rapist. He figured he'd be home in a day or so, putting this whole mess behind him.

He wasn't the only one who felt the case against him collapsing as the girl spoke. The judge felt uneasy, too. He pulled Wayne County prosecutor Don Strickland into his chambers after Artis testified.

Offer this guy a deal, Strickland remembers the judge saying. You don't want to take this further, he advised.

Strickland tried. He offered Dail a deal that would spare him prison. The catch: Dail must plead guilty to a low-level sex offense.

Dail balked. He refused to plead guilty to something he didn't do. He'd take his chances with the jury.

The stakes were high, and Dail bet wrong.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Two life sentences. Plus another 18 years.

Dail screamed as deputies dragged him from the courtroom.

By 1989, the NCSU victim had moved to South Carolina to take a job. She had finally stopped looking over her shoulder, stopped worrying about tugging her skirt hem down in case the wrong man cast a glance her way.

A Wake County prosecutor called in early 1990 and said the case against Neal was weak. It turned on her identification, and she had wavered. He asked whether she would object to letting Neal walk away. She sighed.

She was in love. She'd be married that fall. Raleigh felt a million miles away. The last thing she wanted to do was look Neal in the eye and tell a jury of strangers how he violated her.

Plus, there'd always been that doubt that crept into her mind when she tried to picture the face.

Now and again she had asked herself: What if I get it wrong and send an innocent man to prison?

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