The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals.
“If I will shoot in Denver, a serial rapist holds young women in the grip of fear.”
“It sent chills down my back. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
The bureau mobilizes. But can they catch an elusive rapist who strikes with cruel precision and leaves no trace behind?
“He spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours watching women and trying to pick a good target for himself. This was planned, and it was done before. If it was done before, means it’s going to happen again.”
“I’m scared to death. It made me think, ‘Is he going to come after one of us?'”
Once a bustling hub for gold rush prospectors, Golden, Colorado is a scenic small town in the foothills of the Rockies, 15 miles from Denver. Its residents usually feel safe and secure, but all that changes in the winter of 2011. On the morning of January 5th, a frantic call comes into the 911 dispatch center.
“Golden 911, what’s the emergency?”
“A guy into—in my house and he raped me.”
“Is this someone you know?”
“I don’t know. We wear a mask.”
Minutes later, Golden Police arrive at the home of the distraught caller. The 26-year-old college student recounts her harrowing ordeal to Detective Stacy Galbreth.
“She’s actually kind of a night owl. She goes to bed about 7:15-ish. Next thing you know, there’s a man, a masked man who comes in. I mean, he has a backpack, he has a gun.”
“He tells her, you know, ‘Don’t—don’t scream or I’ll shoot.'”
“Get off me!”
“I will shoot you if you move.”
“He pulled all her bed covers off of her then got onto her back to gain compliance.”
“Get up now. Move. Put these on.”
The attacker forces her to dress up in stockings and heels that he brought with him in a large backpack.
“That’s right, hurry up, and around all day.”
Then instructs her on how to fix her makeup.
“He was very specific. He wanted her eyeshadow to be kind of a brown. Wanted her lips to be much pinker. He even, um, had her put pony—like pigtails in the sides of her hair, which she did.”
“Look at me.”
He then directs the victim to pose provocatively while he takes pictures with a pink digital camera.
“That’s right. Look at me. Look at me and smile.”
“This assault started with the photography, the posing.”
“Blow me a kiss.”
“Then there were multiple phases where he actually sexually assaulted her, different ways, photographing the whole time.”
“He made it clear to her that if she reported to the police he would post her pictures. He was taken online or on the internet to humiliate her basically. He took her to the hallway bathroom and, um, told her to brush her teeth like a—”
“He even asked her, you know, ‘Why aren’t you using your electric one?’ Indicating, you know, ‘I’ve seen you use your—you have another toothbrush.'”
Unbelievably, the rapist tells her how to better secure her patio door by putting a wooden stick in the track.
“I’m thinking, how could you care about an individual after you do this to them for three or four hours enough to help them secure their property so that no one else comes to do it? It made me think he was going to come back.”
Finally, he orders her to take a shower to wash away all traces of the sexual assault.
“He goes in and tells her, ‘Stay in the shower 10 more minutes and, um, I’ll be gone.'”
Terrified, the young woman follows her attacker’s instructions to the letter.
“When she got out of the shower, she saw her room, um… he had taken all her bed covers, taken, um, some of her panties, taken some of her, you know, personal things.”
Now free from the masked intruder, she desperately searches for her cell phone to call for help.
“She went over to her laptop, used a laptop application to dial her cell phone, and it was located in her couch.”
She first calls her boyfriend, then dials 911.
“Call the 911.”
Even after four hours of unrelenting abuse, the woman remains remarkably poised under questioning.
“Thank you so much.”
She paints a detailed picture of her attacker: White, about 35 years old. He wore a black, wrap-like mask that only exposed his eyes, which she identified as hazel or brownish-green. She also noticed a small but telling detail.
“She describes like an egg-shaped birthmark. Um, she drew it on a piece of paper for me. It’s about two-inch by three-inch oval-shaped birthmark.”
The victim tells police she got her attacker to open up and admit he’d been stalking her for more than three months, and she remembers the very moment she knew he was telling the truth.
“Whenever he bound her, she visually identified, um, a black satin sash as being hers. Her own sash. A sash she thought she had lost or misplaced three weeks earlier.”
“She never knew anyone had been in her apartment. She didn’t get any weird… somethings out of place, um, none of that, nothing.”
She also says the assailant knew the most intimate details of her life.
“She said he—he knew everything about me. He knew what school I attended. He knew what my, uh, major was. He knew my name. He knew my roommate’s name. He knew what vehicle she drove, her, her plate.”
“You have to be conducting surveillance on—on somebody to know the information that—that he had on her.”
The victim is able to obtain key information about the suspect that gives detectives insight into the rapist’s twisted mind.
“He would talk about his world, and her recall of it was that he would talk about a ‘society of wolves and bravos.’ ‘There’s wolves in society that basically will prey on anyone,’ and he talked about ‘bravos,’ and that they wouldn’t hurt women and children.”
“It really made me think military, that we had to be dealing with someone who was military trained.”
The victim claims the assailant seemed to be educated and said he spoke four languages and traveled extensively. The victim provided police with what leads she could gather. Now, it’s their turn to take those leads and find the rapist. Detective Galbreth and a team of investigators search the victim’s apartment but find next to no physical evidence that might tie the rapist to the scene of the crime.
“And typically, when you go into a scene of a sex assault, um, you’re looking for bed covers. You’re looking for sheets. You’re looking for pillowcases. You’re looking for things that are usually left behind where we would have a, a forensic-type evidence. Um, some DNA. None of that stuff’s there. It’s all gone.”
Detective Galbreth has only two viable forensic leads: a swab of the suspect’s DNA taken from the victim’s face and a shoe print found on her snow-covered patio. Surveillance cameras from a nearby business captured a suspicious white truck seen driving in the neighborhood around the time of the attack. The footage reveals the white vehicle has a broken passenger-side mirror but fails to show a plate number. For now, it seems the rapist has successfully covered his tracks and concealed his identity.
That night, Detective Galbreth shares details of the crime with her husband, an officer from the nearby Westminster Police Department.
“I started telling him just about all the details of this assault. He immediately said, ‘Stacy, we have—we have had a couple just like that. I know one for sure.'”
The following morning, she phones Detective Edna Hendershot with the Westminster PD and is struck by the similarities between the recent rapes.
“I’m—”
“Suspect Marco Oliri and his brother. We had a DNA hit, so we knew it had to be either him or his brother at that point. So that next morning, we had enough information, enough probable cause to get a search warrant on the house.”
Later that day, investigators approach Oliri’s house. Marco Oliri seems surprised to find police at his door. He looks completely dumbfounded, absolutely shocked.
“I—I don’t think he had any idea it was coming.”
FBI and police enter the property while Oliri steps outside. Investigators are anxious to see if Oliri has the oval-shaped birthmark seen by the Golden victim. Detective Stacy Galbreth asks Oliri to raise the baggy legs of his sweatpants.
“And I kind of lifted both up, and there was a huge, uh, birthmark on his leg just as our victim had described. And everyone standing at the house saw that. We knew we had the right guy.”
Now that they’re face-to-face with Oliri, investigators realize the person they had followed to the restaurant was, in fact, Oliri’s brother. Marco Oliri asks for a lawyer as police cuff him and take him into custody.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Took a real big breath, and I just knew… I just knew that he wasn’t going to hurt another woman. I just knew it.”
“And that all the work that we had put in had come together, and all the pain that those women had gone through came together right then.”
“Blow me a kiss.”
“Smile.”
“The devastating thing for me… it took other victims to make our case and to have him arrested and—and held for them, uh, and that’s—that’s hard. That’s hard to live with.”
“I called my victim and told her that he was in custody, that she needn’t worry anymore, that he wasn’t going to hurt her or anybody else ever again, was the most important moment of that day for me, personally.”
Evidence collected at Oliri’s house is damning, including the pink Sony camera reported by victims, a pair of Under Armour gloves with the unique honeycomb pattern print, and a Ziploc bag full of women’s underwear.
“It’s almost like every room you went to, there were more evidence was—was, um, stacking up.”
But the most telling find of all is more than 400 photos of the rapes in question, plus photos of multiple unknown victims.
“And it was something that I think will forever haunt me, personally, having to view those photographs.”
Several are particularly troubling. There’s also some images of a younger girl, um, bound, gagged, photographed with her driver’s license on her—on her chest. And zooming in, I could read it.
Detective Galbreth notices it’s a Washington state license and contacts police.
“I finally got a copy of the report, and across the front of it, it read, ‘Victim was charged with false reporting.’ When I saw those words, I—my heart about broke.”
During the course of the 4-hour interrogation, Oliri is all too eager to reveal what motivates the monster inside him.
“He, uh, described himself as a sexually violent predator. He talked about his pendulum. It would swing, swing, swing, swing, and then he would have to carry out an attack so that it could swing back and he could live normal in society. You know, he was feeding this monster inside him; he couldn’t stop it.”
On October 13th, 2011, Marco Oliri pleads guilty and is sentenced to 327 and a half years in prison.
“He absolutely got what he deserves, and he absolutely would have done it over and over and over until he got caught.”
“I—I think he absolutely deserves every single minute he spends in jail. Every single minute.”
“I felt like my life would always be different, but I didn’t want this person to dictate my life, and I didn’t want him taking anything away from me anymore than he already had.”
