“Pretty much the entire time he was there, I thought I was going to die. This was going to be it.”
“Both of them had a ski mask, dark clothing, shined a flashlight at him and bound them in some fashion.”
“My response to that was, ‘Absolutely not, you’re not putting that around my neck. I don’t care if you kill me, you’re going to have to do it right now.'”
“For these offenders, the hunt is more stimulating than the actual assault itself. He’s doing things to prevent us finding physical evidence, which tells us possibly he has some knowledge of how sexual assaults are investigated. And one thing I’ll never forget that the FBI told us about: when we find our suspect, it’s going to be somebody that they’re all going to say it couldn’t possibly be.”
Halfway between Chicago and St. Louis, Bloomington, Illinois, is the classic Midwestern town. Bloomington and her sister city, Normal, are home to two thriving universities and a number of cultural attractions, offering a cosmopolitan feel with small-town friendliness. But all are not so friendly, and as Bloomington residents will soon discover, one of their own is on the hunt for victims.
It’s 3:00 a.m., and 25-year-old Christy Hasty is startled from a sound sleep.
“The first thing I remember that night, I woke up and there was a light in the doorway. I looked at the doorway and I saw a silhouette, and the first thing I did, I said, ‘Who’s there?’ I’m thinking I’m maybe dreaming, not quite fully awake, and the next thing I know, he’s on top of me, his hands on my mouth, flashlight in my face. Don’t move, don’t scream. I don’t want to hurt you; I’m only here to burglarize you. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I’m positive it’s not going to be good.”
“I actually laid there, kind of frozen, going, ‘This isn’t real, this is a nightmare, and I’m going to wake up. I’m going to wake up and this is all going to be gone.’ Except my eyes were open, and I knew it wasn’t.”
Christy’s attacker immediately begins to restrain her with what seems like well-practiced skill.
“He got back up on the bed, rolled me over, had me do the—put your hands behind your head—and then took them one by one down behind my back and put, like, a zip tie around my wrist.”
He then places duct tape over Christy’s eyes and mouth, making sure that she’s unable to see or scream.
“He actually taped around my head with the duct tape, rolled me back over, and I jerked because the shooting pain went up my arm. It was too tight in the way he laid me back, so he rolled me back over, cut the cable tie off, and used duct tape on my arms. And I kind of screamed, not that you can scream much with your mouth duct tape shut.”
“Don’t make any noises, or I will shoot you. Your neighbors are all sleeping; they won’t hear anything. I will shoot you if you make another noise.”
With her eyes taped shut and a pillowcase over her head, Christy is terrified.
“And then I heard his clothes moving, and I knew at that point in time that he wasn’t just going to rob me; he was going to rape me.”
“Felt like forever; it could have been hours, it could have been minutes. It felt like my whole life, right there. Pretty much the entire time he was there, I thought I was going to die. All the different things that I always wanted to do with my life, this was it, this was going to be it.”
And if things aren’t horrifying enough, Christy is further taken aback by her assailant’s incessant questioning.
“I don’t know if he was trying to keep me calm, but things like, ‘Do you have a boyfriend? Where’s your boyfriend live? Do you live alone?’ It almost seemed like he already knew what the answers were going to be, you know, to especially ask me while my mouth is taped shut.”
The attacker then goes on to tell Christy unnerving things that make her suspect that he’s been watching her.
“I didn’t notice that I was being watched specifically, but you kind of get that feel, that tickle on the back of your neck, that somebody’s looking, somebody’s watching. But I always tried to play it off that you’re being, you know, you’re being a girl, you’re overanalyzing things, you’re trying to make up things that aren’t there. Relax, don’t be paranoid.”
After almost 45 minutes, Christy believes the worst is over. Then her attacker says the words she’s been dreading all along.
“We’re going to, we’re going to go in the other room.”
And he led me by the arm into the bathroom, and I heard the water running.
“This is it, I’m going to die. He’s going to kill me in here.”
And not knowing where he was, not knowing what he was doing, just made it that much harder, because then I didn’t know it was going to come, but I really thought he was capable of doing it.
Sexually assaulted, threatened with a gun, and now faced with drowning, Christy is beyond terrified.
“I start panicking, I start crying, you know, and he’s like, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m not going to do anything, I’m not going to hurt you. You’re going to be fine. I’m just going to have you sit in the bathtub for a minute.'”
And he cut my arms loose.
He then orders Christy to scrub her body clean.
“I’m sitting here in the bathtub, no idea what’s going on. I’m terrified. I don’t know if he’s going to come back; I don’t know if he’s, you know, planning to kill me. I don’t know at this point in time what he’s going to do.”
Little does she know her assailant is busy covering his tracks, gathering all of Christy’s bed sheets and blankets to take with him.
“When I finally think that he’s gone, I get up, step out of the bathtub, rip the pillowcase off my head, rip the tape off my eyes. I’m shaking, I’m terrified. I’m afraid he’s still there somewhere and he’s going to come back in the room and find me. I couldn’t get the tape off from around my head, so my mouth is still taped shut. I run in the kitchen, I find some scissors, trying not to stab myself in the chin as I cut the tape off, hair and all, and I grabbed the phone and called 911.”
“911.”
Christy is then faced with the difficult task of replaying the entire incident for police and doing her best to provide a description of the attacker.
“The victim is the key to profiling an offender because the victim is our only conduit of information. She’s the only one who knows exactly what happened, so we need to get every single detail from her, and that includes the verbal behavior of the offender—what he said, and if he forced her to say anything—the physical behavior, which is the amount of force used against the victim, and the sexual behavior, which will be the type and sequence of sexual acts forced upon the victim.”
“Well, I can’t really describe how it can just rip at your heart when you’re listening to a victim tell a story about what happened to them, how in the middle of the night a stranger came in and stole their innocence. I mean, and just to see how it was that devastated her and how you knew it was going to affect the rest of her life; it was horrible.”
Despite some gaps in Christy’s memory, one detail about the attack is burned into her mind.
“I noticed his eyes when he was first on top of me. That’s all I could really see were his eyes, because he’s telling me that he’ll shoot me, and they stuck with me; they always stuck with me.”
“He left my apartment, went to work. He was the sergeant on duty when I went in to report my rape. That couldn’t be more of a slap in the face to everyone involved.”
“Anything on July 14th?”
With positive identifications from three of the four victims, the veteran officer is arrested again, this time for rape, including 25 counts of aggravated criminal assault.
“I didn’t do anything to anyone, period. Period. I’m done. I’m not talking to nobody about nothing else. If I’m under Miranda, which apparently since you read it to me, I’ve been accused of a crime, I’d like to know what the crime is. All right, too pissed off to talk to you. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Pilo denies any involvement, but during a search of his home, investigators find the crucial evidence they’ve been seeking for almost 3 years.
“One interesting thing we found was in the garage: there was a length of rope, a ski mask, and this piece of metal kind of shaped like a pry bar. You know, like he had his own little kit right there.”
His computer is also filled with pornography depicting the very acts he forced his victims to endure. Police even find internet searches for “uniform rape.”
“Uniform rape is typically the sort of rape fantasy that involves someone in an authority position in a uniform, so it’s this sort of pathological use of authority, not to protect or serve, but to dominate and exploit.”
Ultimately, FBI forensic examiners at Quantico are able to link Pilo to the assault on Christy Hasty by matching trace evidence.
“In this case, I started with the stereo microscope and examining the duct tape, and then I removed fibers from this duct tape, and they were placed on glass microscope slides. There were two black polyester fibers that were hollow that were consistent with originating from a ski mask from Mr. Pilo’s residence.”
“It was shock, that, ‘Oh my gosh, this is one of our own guys. How could this be?’ At that point, anger, because it was one of our guys, and you know, being a cop is more than a job. It’s your way of life. And to see him, you know, one of these guys doing this, because we sit in these interview rooms with these women, and we’re there as they’re describing the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. And sorry, but just the anger that you feel that someone that you trusted, someone that you worked alongside, could possibly do that.”
Jeffrey Pilo goes on trial in May of 2008. Just five weeks later, a jury of six men and six women convict Jeff Pilo on 35 charges, including 25 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault. He is sentenced to 440 years for his crimes.
“I can’t even process how good this feels right now. I think I’m still a little overwhelmed that we just don’t have to worry about this person devastating any more lives.”
“It truly is such a personal violation, and it’s still kind of that silent epidemic, is that we still just don’t have a public dialogue about the fact that 1.5% of men rape a third of women. And that to me says that we have multiple serial rapists that never go punished. And it’s important, I think, for people to know that no matter what happened, there’s no shame in being a rape victim. There’s nothing that you can do that makes it okay for somebody to do that, and that we can make it past, we can make it through.”
“One of the great attributes in this case is we had some strong women that were his victims in this case, and they were astute. They were willing to come forward, they made the complaint, and they were fearless in doing that. And they were the ones who really led to his identification, and ultimately, this is how law enforcement works best.”
