About this ebook
For more than a decade, a serial rapist moved through the suburbs of Seattle. He was outwardly ordinary: steady job, regular churchgoer, polite and unremarkable to everyone around him. He would eventually confess to more than fifty rapes. Police departments, working in isolation, never connected the pattern. Every attack was treated as a standalone incident. Every victim faced disbelief. The predator kept hunting.
Then Steve Titus was arrested.
Titus was thirty years old, a respectable seafood sales executive with no criminal record. He bore a passing resemblance to the rapist, drove a vaguely similar car, and that was enough. A Port of Seattle detective saw a career opportunity in the case and manipulated evidence to secure a conviction. The real rapist was still out there. Titus was found guilty and faced life in prison.
He was certain the system would correct itself. It didn't.
It was only when a Seattle Times reporter named Paul Henderson took up Titus's case that the truth began to emerge. Henderson's relentless investigation won him the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and ultimately freed an innocent man. But the victory came too late. The years of wrongful conviction had destroyed Titus's career, his relationships, and his health. Before his civil lawsuit against the police could reach trial, Steve Titus died of a heart attack. He was thirty-five years old.
Jack Olsen reconstructs both stories with his signature precision and compassion: the predator who was enabled by institutional failure and a culture that dismissed women's testimony, and the innocent man ground up by a system that couldn't admit its mistake.
Predator is a searing account of two injustices committed in the same city, at the same time, by the same broken system.
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About the author
Jack Olsen is the award-winning author of thirty-three books, which have been published in fifteen countries and eleven languages. Olsen’s journalism earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Scripps-Howard Award and other honors. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as “an American treasure.”
Olsen was described as “the dean of true crime authors” by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News and “the master of true crime” by the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him “the best true crime writer around.” His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. In a page-one review, the Times described his work as “a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike.”
Olsen is a two-time winner in the Best Fact Crime category of the Mystery Writers of America, Edgar award.
