Keen to his method, a serial rapist, and former military man, on the loose in the Denver area hunts for his victims as investigators start hunting for him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the warning for this podcast episode?
Warning, this program contains graphic material including disturbing descriptions and language. Listener discretion is advised.
What has turned me on is fear. You know, I basically feed off of it.
Chapter 2: Who is Marc O'Leary and what were his actions?
It is one of the scariest cases ever to come before this judicial district. What was done to these women is absolutely unconscionable. This is an individual who led, in essence, a double life, who had a lot going for him. Apparently, he had a loving family. He served time in the military, was given the opportunity to go to school, but he sought out evil like a wolf. He was a predator.
He was a sexually violent predator. He preyed upon these women at the most vulnerable time, and that is when they were sleeping in their home.
It's described as pure evil. That's a good description.
For a span of three years, the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, and Denver, Colorado were plagued by a sexual predator. Beginning in 2008, police received reports of a serial rapist who would break into women's homes, bind his victims, and rape them for hours on end.
The violent perpetrator was meticulous about not leaving any evidence behind at the crime scene, making the hunt for the expert criminal all the more difficult. This is Evil Next Door, Episode 2, Mark O'Leary.
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Chapter 3: How did the attacks unfold in Golden, Colorado?
Golden, Colorado. A former gold rush town, this scenic area sits in the rolling hills of the Rockies. In January of 2011, this quaint neighborhood became a hunting ground for a serial sexual predator who was stalking unsuspecting single women in the Denver area, spending weeks learning their schedules and waiting for the perfect moment to creep into their homes.
If you want to find targets,
a disturbing call to 911 would reveal just how ruthless he was the call came in from a woman who had said that someone had entered her home and raped her
There was still some snow on the ground. We were able to see some shoe prints all over the place, and there was one that was pretty consistent all around the victim's apartment. Stacy Galbraith, Jefferson County DA investigator. The victim was in her 20s, a college student. She was composed, calm, cool, collected, ready to tell her story.
A real-life horror story unlike any that Detective Stacy Galbraith had ever heard before.
It was 7.50 in the morning. She was awoken to a man who came in to her bedroom, and he had a mask on, had a gun, and told her not to scream or he would shoot her.
The masked assailant held her down, bound her, and sexually assaulted her for four hours. Somehow, she managed to keep her wits about her, hoping to get information on her attacker.
Everyone, hello. She realized at some point in this assault that she was not going to be able to stop it.
Robert Weiner, senior deputy DA in Golden, Colorado.
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Chapter 4: How did the investigation link multiple cases?
Before he left, he had her shower. He had her do things to remove any type of evidence, DNA and prints, things that were looking for to identify somebody.
In other words, he was good at it. And that had police very worried.
Based off of his attention to removal of evidence, I had a strong feeling that this particular perpetrator had offended before.
Detective Galbraith was right, but she had no idea just how big this case was going to become.
At the time, my husband was working at Westminster Police Department. When I got home, I told him about the case, and he told me that they had had a similar case. And I'm just like, no way. You know, that can't even be possible.
What started as a discussion about work led the two to believe this assault may have been linked to other attacks in the area.
We were advised that there may be a linkage between sexual assault in Golan and potentially other sexual assaults in surrounding jurisdictions.
There's definitely a rhythm. There's definitely a time pattern of when I'm normal and when I'm a rape guy.
I sent out this kind of blast to a group of investigators to see, hey, can you guys check all of your cases? Is there anything that is somewhat similar to what we have? And I gave some details as far as MO and someone had said, hey, you need to talk to Detective Hendershot because she has one similar to that.
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Chapter 5: What mistakes did the assailant make?
The criminalist for Westminster reached out to somebody at Lakewood, kind of the next city over. Hey, you know, can you guys check your records or anything? This is, you know, what we're dealing with in Golden, Aurora, and Westminster. Well, Lakewood came back with a case.
It was the fourth case Detective Galbraith learned about. But this one had a very different outcome. Just one month before the Westminster attack, a woman who lived alone was startled awake by a noise in her hallway. A masked intruder holding a knife entered the room and straddled her. He attempted to bind her wrists, but she refused to go down without a fight.
She began to scream for a spiritual leader in a way that he believed there was someone else in the house. He went to check the house in fear that maybe there was someone else in there. At that point, she saw the opportunity and dove out of a window and was severely injured. Broken ribs and some back injuries.
He didn't sexually assault her because she escaped. But everything leading up to that was consistent with what we knew to have happened in all three of the cases that we knew about already.
Four violent attacks over two years all led to one unknown suspect. Although he was good at covering his tracks, investigators were a formidable foe, and the hunter was now the hunted.
There wasn't any DNA found in the house. As I recall, there was some foot impressions that were outside the house where he had fled.
There were a lot of shoe prints in the Lakewood case. We immediately noted that the shoe print was consistent with the Golden shoe print. So we had DNA in Aurora and Westminster. We had shoe prints in Golden and Lakewood, and we had the glove prints in Lakewood and Westminster as well.
Fox News Audio presents the Fox Nation Investigates podcast, Evil Next Door. Exploring the life and crimes of five serial predators from across the United States. It's a very disturbing case. Never before heard interviews and firsthand perspectives.
Described as pure evil. That's a good description.
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Chapter 6: How did a nearby jurisdiction solve a related case?
My first impression of Mark O'Leary was he was extremely intelligent. He was my student for one semester in Introduction to Philosophy. He's probably about six foot one, I would guess, and he was blonde, and he was, I think, early 30s at the time. So his appearance was college student, T-shirts, jeans.
His appearance may have been right out of college central casting, but Professor Melinda Wilding says his schoolwork was not.
Kind of a reflective journal is what this was, asking students to address something they felt that is repressed. And I usually always say, share as you will. Most people answered things like, oh, I'm shy, or I have certain things in my family history. Mark's essay was more revealing, but not, by saying he wouldn't tell me what it was.
I don't believe that a person can fully extinguish their own shadows. Instead, it is best to take 100% responsibility for who we are and to integrate our shadows into our conscious awareness. So the inner shadow is obviously his alter ego. And the essay absolutely reveals the psyche of somebody in our midst who was dangerous. The essay was in his belongings.
belongings that police were anxious to look through. But to get a warrant, they needed more evidence. So they put his home under surveillance.
Some investigators believed that they had seen Mark leave the house in the white truck. So they followed it to a diner and it was a guy matching the description of Mark O'Leary and also matching the description given by the assault victims. They went in after he left and they were able to collect some items to get that guy's DNA.
Turns out that guy was the wrong guy. Investigators back at the house learned that when they knocked on the door.
Two agents knocked on the door and lo and behold, it was actually Mark O'Leary that came to the door and he identified that his brother had taken his truck and that he lived there with his brother. So that kind of threw us for a bit of a loop in that the DNA that we had, if those two brothers share the same father, it could be either one of them.
The DNA investigators pulled from the diner was a match to the crime scenes.
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Chapter 7: What evidence was found at the crime scenes?
This happened very quickly. We got the DNA match on Saturday, and early Sunday morning, I think we met at 6 a.m., we knocked and announced at the house for the search warrant.
Police had just one last piece to complete the puzzle, to make sure Mark was the O'Leary they were looking for.
The DNA came from the male lineage of the family and we knew he had a brother. So one of the things that we had to do was to make sure that he wasn't, in fact, the individual who was responsible for these crimes.
When I knocked on the door, it was Mark O'Leary that came to the door. The first thing I said to him was to come out with his hands up. I identified myself as law enforcement, and he opened the door and stepped out with me. I just saw all the blood in his face drain. It went white, pale, and then kind of came a blue color. You could tell the world as he knew it was not going to be the same.
I patted him down. That's when I was able to see the mark on his leg.
We determined that the birthmark was in fact the same birthmark as described by the victim in Golden.
That's when I had him put his hands behind his back and arrested him.
I got the warrant, so they're going to be executing it today and searching for a lot of evidentiary items in our case. It's going to be involving stuff that may belong to my victim, stuff that will identify you.
It took all day to search the house.
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