Predator

Winner of the American Mystery Award for Best True Crime, from two-time Edgar Award winner Jack Olsen, known as “the dean of true crime.”

For more than a decade, a serial rapist moved through the suburbs of Seattle. He was outwardly ordinary: steady job, regular churchgoer, polite and unremarkable to everyone around him. He would eventually confess to more than fifty rapes. Police departments, working in isolation, never connected the pattern. Every attack was treated as a standalone incident. Every victim faced disbelief. The predator kept hunting.

Then Steve Titus was arrested.

Titus was thirty years old, a respectable seafood sales executive with no criminal record. He bore a passing resemblance to the rapist, drove a vaguely similar car, and that was enough. A Port of Seattle detective saw a career opportunity in the case and manipulated evidence to secure a conviction. The real rapist was still out there. Titus was found guilty and faced life in prison.

He was certain the system would correct itself. It didn’t.

It was only when a Seattle Times reporter named Paul Henderson took up Titus’s case that the truth began to emerge. Henderson’s relentless investigation won him the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and ultimately freed an innocent man. But the victory came too late. The years of wrongful conviction had destroyed Titus’s career, his relationships, and his health. Before his civil lawsuit against the police could reach trial, Steve Titus died of a heart attack. He was thirty-five years old.

Jack Olsen reconstructs both stories with his signature precision and compassion: the predator who was enabled by institutional failure and a culture that dismissed women’s testimony, and the innocent man ground up by a system that couldn’t admit its mistake.

Predator is a searing account of two injustices committed in the same city, at the same time, by the same broken system.