[obvious content warning]

One can imagine a certain rhythm to the process, as police hoist kit after kit onto the metal shelves, not knowing that they hold in their hands the identity of a serial rapist. Here’s the evidence box from a deaf woman Wilkes assaulted in June 2006. There’s one from a woman he raped in May 2007. The kit from his sixth victim arrived in June 2010. Another a month later. Two more in August 2011. His 10th victim, four months after that. Not until he raped his 11th victim, in January 2012, did the sequence end, because that woman saw Eric Wilkes two days after the assault and called the police, who arrested him. Eleven years, 11 violent rapes—all while Wilkes’s identity was preserved in sealed containers that no one had bothered to open.