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'That's him!' Mother raped by stranger in home gets closure 37 years later

Content warning: This story includes details about rape cases. If you experienced these crimes and need support, contact the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network at 1-800-656-HOPE or https://rainn.org.

When Vicki Farinacci read a story in August about Thomas Collier Jordan being responsible for a teen’s rape and a woman’s murder in 1987, details about both crimes seemed eerily familiar.

The attacker had a knife. He bound their hands and feet. He took their car keys.

Vicki was a 31-year-old mother of three when she was raped in April 1987, one month before 17-year-old Michelle Pruett was raped and four months before 31-year-old Janice Christensen was raped and murdered.

Vicki, now 68, reached out to Lt. Dave Whiddon of the Akron, Ohio, Police Department, who showed her a mug shot of Jordan from 1972.

“That’s him!” Vicki said, pointing out features she recalled, like an angular chin and the shape of his nose.

Whiddon asked Vicki how sure she was.

“99%,” she responded.

With Vicki’s positive identification, along with the many similarities to Jordan’s other crimes, Whiddon said he is confident that Jordan was her attacker.

“If we had this case today under the same circumstances, I’m almost certain that most prosecutors would authorize charges against this man,” Whiddon said.

Jordan died in 2009 at the age of 83, so prosecuting him for any of the crimes he’s newly accused of won’t be possible.

But Whiddon and other investigators hope additional police departments will explore whether Jordan can be linked to any more cold cases. State investigators recently sent a bulletin about Jordan to departments across the country.

“I would bet my salary he’s done this way more than we know,” Whiddon said.

Vicki also is convinced Jordan had more victims during the 55 years he lived in five states across the country. She hopes hearing what happened to her will encourage other potential victims to come forward.

Vicki Farinacci pauses during a recent interview about her rape in April 1987. Farinacci agreed to talk about what happened to her in the hopes that it might spur other victims to come forward.

“Just look into it like we did,” Vicki said during a recent interview at her daughter’s home in Hudson, Ohio. “There’s so many other priorities, so you almost have to just go find it for yourself and reach out and like, you know, try to solve your own in a way.”

Intruder breaks into Vicki’s home in April 1987

Vicki, whose last name was then Miller-Cobb, was at her new Akron home with her three young children on the afternoon of April 24, 1987.

Vicki Miller-Cobb holds her daughter Tiffany in this family snapshot from the early 1980s.

Vicki Miller-Cobb (left) and her then-husband Stephen and their three children in the summer of 1987.

Tiffany was 5, while Tyler was 3 and Trevor was just 6 months. Stephen Cobb, Vicki’s then-husband, was at work.

Vicki was on the phone talking to a friend named Cindy when she heard someone repeatedly ringing the doorbell. She peered through the peephole and saw a man she didn’t know holding a white bucket. He told her he was there to look at the deck.

Vicki, who was holding Trevor, handed the phone to Tiffany and went to the first floor, where she was startled to see the man coming through the back door. He had a knife and ran after her.

“I screamed really loud so Cindy could hear me,” Vicki said.

The man held a finger to his lips, indicating that Vicki should be quiet.

Tiffany is 43 now, but clearly recalls how the man tied her mother’s wrists while she still held Trevor to her chest. She whispered to her mother’s friend on the phone, “Somebody’s hurting my mommy.”

Vicki Farinacci, who was raped in 1987, and her daughter Tiffany Miller-Cobb talk about Vicki's rape during a recent interview at Tiffany's home. Tiffany was 5 when her mother was raped but remembers the traumatic incident well.

Cindy told Tiffany to hang up the phone so she could call the police. At that time, phones didn't disconnect until both parties hung up. The young girl did as she was instructed.

Just then, the man and her mother and brothers appeared at the top of the stairs, in time to see Tiffany hang up the phone. Vicki worried that the intruder might react violently if he thought Tiffany had talked to someone.

“She’s only 4 and doesn’t know how to use the phone,” Vicki told the intruder, fibbing about her daughter’s age.

Intruder rapes Vicki, then steals her money and car

The man led the family to the bedroom and tied up Vicki’s ankles. He began to undress her.

“Please don’t do this in front of my kids,” Vicki begged him.

He told Tiffany and Tyler to get into the closet.

While Vicki continued to hold Trevor, the man began raping her. She asked him questions, hoping to appeal to his conscience.

"Do you have a wife?"

"Do you have kids?"

"Would you want them to go through this?"

Her attacker responded to each question, though he was undeterred. When he was done, he found Vicki's purse and took her checkbook, credit cards, driver's license and $200 in cash.

When the phone started ringing, he cut the line.

He walked up and down the hallway, returning to the bedroom.

Vicki, who figured the man likely was looking to see if police had arrived, studied him, trying to memorize his features.

“I knew at the time when something happens like that, if their face isn’t covered, they’re going to kill you,” she said. “So, I remember thinking, ‘I’m just going to look at him and get as much information in my mind — just in case.’”

When the house grew quiet, Vicki slipped Trevor from the binds on her wrist and laid the sleeping baby on the bed. She told her older children to remain in the closet, then — unable to free her binds — slid down the steps and made it outside.

Her attacker was gone, as was her maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera.

Akron police investigate but are unable to find Vicki’s attacker

Police were slow to arrive. Vicki’s friend had called them but didn't know her house number, and being on the border of Akron and Cuyahoga Falls, they weren't sure what jurisdiction she was in.

But they eventually arrived, and Vicki provided a description of her rapist. She told them he was a light-skinned Black man with graying hair and brown tinted glasses. She said he was 45 to 50 years old, 5 foot 8 inches tall and 145 pounds.

Vicki went to the hospital, where a rape kit was done.

Police found her car a few miles away in north Akron.

Akron Police Lt. Dave Whiddon looks through a file on a cold case.

Whiddon said the viciousness of Vicki’s rape was unusual for then or now.

“This is probably everyone’s worst nightmare to be at home alone — let alone with three young children — and have an intruder come into your house,” he said. “I can’t think of anything more terrifying.”

Whiddon said detectives found no fingerprints in Vicki’s house or her car. He said detectives tried to track down the plastic wire that was used to bind Vicki’s arms and legs. They even visited a tennis racket manufacturer to compare material made there to what Vicki’s rapist had used.

“It doesn’t look like they came to a definite conclusion on what it was,” Whiddon said.

After the rape, Vicki was scared to go outside. She thought she saw her rapist at the grocery store a few months later but police questioned the man and determined it wasn’t him.

Vicki got counseling for her children and went to a few therapists herself. She said none of them helped her until she saw a therapist who did.

“Either you want to get over this or you don’t,” he told Vicki.

“I don’t want to be on Oprah 20 years from now,” Vicki told him.

With his help, she learned to cope, though her marriage ended in divorce. She moved and never remarried.

Vicki didn’t hear about Michelle Puett being raped on May 25, 1987, at a Hampton Hills Metro Park in Cuyahoga Falls but did learn about Janice Christensen being raped and murdered on Aug. 10, 1987, on the Hike and Bike Path in Hudson. She said it didn’t occur to her that her rape could be connected.

More than three decades passed before the man behind the crimes — and the links among them — was uncovered.

Jordan is linked to two cases through DNA testing

The Ohio Attorney General’s Office announced in early August that DNA testing had tied Jordan to Puett’s rape and Christensen’s murder.

The state’s Cold Case Unit had worked with Cuyahoga Falls and Hudson detectives to take a fresh look at the case. They exhumed Jordan's remains from a pauper’s cemetery in Yuma, Arizona, and matched his DNA to evidence in the Puett and Christensen cases.

Vicki hoped that same DNA could be used to identify her assailant, but as it turned out, her rape kit had been destroyed in 1993. The statute of limitations for rape at the time was six years, so the evidence was purged.

Thomas Collier Jordan in a prison mug shot in 1972.

Whiddon showed Vicki the mug shot of Jordan taken when he was 46 years old, which he figured wasn’t that far off from what Jordan would have looked like in 1987. The mug shot showed both front and side views of Jordan.

With Vicki’s positive identification, Whiddon said he was confident Jordan was her rapist. After all, the attack happened the same year, in the same general area, and at or near a park. Vicki’s house was close to a trail that led to the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail.

“Even without DNA, I’m pretty solid on this,” Whiddon said.

Whiddon and other Akron detectives are researching whether Jordan can be tied to any of the department’s other cold cases. He said Jordan’s DNA isn’t a match with evidence in two other women’s unsolved homicides in 1987 — JoAnn Bartholomew and Marcia Piotter.

“Well, I’m not of course 100% certain that it’s not him, but I know that the DNA evidence does not match,” he said.

Vicki was upset that the department no longer had the evidence from her case.

“I was like, ‘Why? Why wouldn’t they tell me they were going to destroy it?” she said.

Still, she and Whiddon are convinced her rapist was Jordan, and Vicki takes some comfort in knowing that he's dead.

“I think it’s freeing,” Vicki said. “It’s very freeing to know that he did it.”

Vicki Farinacci hopes that other victims across the country who may also have been victimized by Thomas Collier Jordan will come forward after hearing what happened to her. Investigators have provided a national bulletin to law enforcement about Jordan, who was tied through DNA to a teen's rape and a woman's rape and murder in 1987.

Vicki and Tiffany have been doing research on Jordan.

“I’m just curious about his background — what he did, how many?” Vicki said. “You know there’s other rapes. I wasn’t the first or — obviously — the last. This guy’s probably been doing it in different cities … I would like to know and have other people have closure.”

Tiffany has many questions about Jordan, including some that may never be answered.

“What happened to him in his life that changed his trajectory to just have a life of crime, murdering, raping, robbing?” she asked. “How does he get away with it?”

Tiffany Miller-Cobb has many questions about Thomas Collier Jordan, whom her mother has identified as the man who raped her in 1987. Jordan is dead, so many of her questions may never be answered.

Tiffany also doesn’t understand why Jordan was released on parole in 1985 after serving only nine years of a sentence of 16 to 82 years for raping, stabbing and robbing a Geauga County woman. That was just two years before her mother and Puett were raped and Christensen was killed.

“You know, he’s just set free,” Tiffany said.

Keep reading: Treat rape like murder: Should statutes of limitations be eliminated?

Resolved: The trail of a serial rapist. How many more victims are there?

Resolved is a collaboration of the Akron Beacon Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, and the Ohio Mysteries podcast. Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com. Paula Schleis can be reached at feedback@ohiomysteries.com.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Mother raped by intruder in her Ohio home gets closure 37 years later

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