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."

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