He slipped into her DeKalb apartment through a sliding glass door. She was tucked away in bed, asleep.
That summer night back in 1994, one of the greatest fears of a young woman living alone in a big city became a brutal reality. The 28-year-old Emory University seminary student was raped by a faceless intruder.
Eventually, she put the trauma of that night behind her.
Then she got a call last year from investigators who said that, using DNA evidence, they had identified a suspect in her attack.
“I did a really good job of pushing this back and down and moving on,” said the victim, who is now 45 and living in her native California where she is a hospice chaplain. “Then all that stirs up (with the identification of a suspect). It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was so unreal to me after so many years of silence.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does not name victims of sexual assaults. The woman in this case agreed to be identified by her initials, L.L.
Investigators say L.L. was one of eight victims of Daniel Wade, now 62.
Wade, nicknamed the “maintenance man rapist” because he sometimes allegedly got into apartments by pretending he needed to make a repair, was identified using a DNA sample collected by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Wade is serving a 20-year sentence for a 2004 conviction on a drug conspiracy charge.
A Fulton County grand jury returned a 16-count indictment against Wade last month, charging him with raping four women and a girl younger than 14 in 1987 and 1986.
There are three other rapes linked to Wade, including L.L’s case, which has yet to be presented to the grand jury. Gwinnett County detectives also are still building a case against him for allegedly raping a woman in 1994. And investigators say another woman in DeKalb County was allegedly raped by Wade in 1994, but they have been unable to locate the victim, then 42 years old.
L.L. said it was “so strange to have some details after years of no details.”
Wade was released from federal prison, where he served time for racketeering, one year before he allegedly raped L.L. In 1973, Wade, then 22, was charged with murdering Lloyd Henry Jones, but he walked away and disappeared when officers left him alone in a room where he was to have taken a polygraph; that case is still open. In 1975, Wade was again charged with murder in the death of a bail bondsman who tried to bring him in for absconding on the 1973 case, but the murder charge was reduced to manslaughter. Wade went to prison for a year.
“I live with the thing that survivors live with (like thinking) I should have fought harder. He said he had a gun, but I didn’t see a gun. But this guy is a legitimate, violent criminal. He wasn’t some kid off the street,” L.L. said.
L.L. remembers her attacker telling her not to move out of her apartment, which she did the next day, but his face remains a mystery.
“All I saw was his feet and shoes,” L.L. said.
For weeks after the attack, she said, “I was looking at people’s feet and shoes. I was so traumatized at the time.”
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