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Edward Lee King - Predator: Rape, Madness, and Injustice in Seattle

Jack Olsen (1925-2002)

Predator: Rape, Madness, and Injustice in Seattle is a true crime story of the life and crimes of psychopath Edward Lee King. The Seattle police were eager to make an arrest in the murders of the city's women and arrested the wrong man, Steve Titus, for Smith's crimes. Paul Henderson, a journalist, risked his career at the Seattle Times to prove Titus's innocence.

On Oct. 14, 1980, the Seattle Police arrested Steve Titus in the rape of a seventeen-year-old  girl.  In the meantime, the actual criminal, a serial rapist, was on the loose, committing further sexual assaults. Edward Lee King aka "Mac Smith", as Olsen referred to him, committed, by his own admission, more than 50 rapes and yet managed for more than a decade to avoid detection.

While working in the newsroom as an investigative reporter at The Seattle Times in 1981, Henderson took a call from a man named Steve Titus. Titus explained to Henderson that he was about to be sentenced for a sexual assault he did not commit. Henderson looked into the case and wrote a series of three stories challenging the circumstantial evidence against Titus. When officials followed up on Henderson's leads, they found a man who resembled Titus and who eventually confessed to the crime. The report convinced a judge to reverse Titus' conviction. Henderson won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for his series. However, Titus, who had been an up-and-coming executive with a fast-food franchise with no more than a parking ticket on his record, had his career destroyed, and he died of a heart attack at age 36, just as he was on the verge of winning a major wrongful-conviction settlement.

In October 1981, Edward Lee King was convicted on four counts of rape. The judge sentenced him to twenty years but suspended the prison term contingent on his successful completion of the sexual-psychopath treatment program at the Steilacoom hospital.

In early 1986, state officials declared King, 39, no longer treatable and that  he was "not safe to be at large." King then received a sentence of almost 31 years.

Other best selling books by Jack Olsen:

• The Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders (1974) - A brilliant, investigative, journalist's story of the mass murder of almost 30 young boys in Houston by Dean Corll, a homosexual owner of a candy factory, and his two teen-aged accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., and David Brooks.

• SON: A Psychopath and His Victims (1983) is the story of Kevin Coe, Spokane's South Hill rapist whose rich and influential mother was sent to prison after trying to hire a hit man to kill the judge and prosecutor who convicted her son.

• Give a Boy a Gun: The True Story of Law and Disorder in the American West (1985)- "Give a boy a gun and you're makin' a man," Claude Dallas, Sr., said this about his son, Claude Jr., a self-made cowboy, trapper, and "mountain man'' who was convicted of manslaughter in the shooting deaths of two Idaho game wardens.  Was this a case of self-defense or outright murder?

• Cold Kill: The True Story of a Murderous Love (1987) - A double murder of Texas lawyer James Campbell and his wife Virginia by their daughter Cindy and her lover, David West.

• Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (1989) is an incredible account of a rural Wyoming doctor who relied on his patients' naiveté and Mormon female submissiveness to rape generations of women on his examining table.

• The Misbegotten Son: A Serial Killer and His Victims (1993)- An account of the life and crimes of convicted killer Arthur Shawcross describes how Shawcross, after being found guilty of the murders of two children, was released only to murder eleven prostitutes.

• Charmer: A Ladies' Man and his Victims (1994) - A true crime story of George Russell, Jr., a charismatic young African American from an affluent Seattle suburb who targeted and killed three beautiful women and whose charming outward appearance kept him from suspicion.

• Salt of the Earth: A Mother, A Daughter, A Murder (1996) - Joe Gere said he died on the afternoon his twelve-year-old daughter Brenda disappeared. It was left to Brenda's mother Elaine to sustain her stricken family, search for her missing child, and pressure the authorities for justice. From the first minutes of the investigation, suspicion fell on Michael Kay Green, a steroid-abusing "Mr. Universe" hopeful, but there was no proof of a crime, leaving police and prosecutors stymied.

• Hastened to the Grave: The Gypsy Murder Investigation (1998) - This true crime features a delightful hero: a female private investigator who calls herself "Rat Dog Dick." Rat Dog relies on an ancient Everex 286 computer (Evil Evie), a Toyota Tercel (The Frog Prince) that is so outrageously green it's useless for surveillance, and a big, funny-looking dog (Beans). Once she gets her teeth into the "Foxglove" case in which several old people have dwindled and died quickly after being "befriended" by a local Gypsy family, Rat Dog is outraged that the police are ignoring clear evidence of elder abuse.

• Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt (2000) - This is a story of true crime American injustice. Pratt, a war hero and leader of the Black Panther Party, was convicted of murder based on the perjured testimony of a paid FBI informant. After spending twenty-seven years in prison, he was finally declared innocent and released.

• I: The Creation of a Serial Killer (2002) - In February 1990, Oregon State Police arrested John Sosnovke and Laverne Pavlinac for the vicious rape and murder of 23-year-old Taunja Bennet. Pavlinac had come forth and confessed, implicating her boyfriend and producing physical evidence that linked them to the crime. Authorities closed the case. There was just one problem. They had the wrong people...

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