Some, while husbands, were just at the store, and children were sleeping upstairs.
We're gonna meet three of his victims today.
But first, we sent Detective J.J. Bittenbinder to a typical family home,
probably a lot like the one you're living in,
to show us how to see a home through a criminal's eyes.
Take a look.
I'm Detective J.J. Bittenbinder.
When a home invader walks down a neighborhood street, how does he pick his target?
How does he select his victim?
I'm gonna show you right now.
All right, he's got three ways to go.
He can come in through this door.
He can come in through one of these windows.
Or he could step up on this thing and come in through that window.
Often, also, windows on the second floor or on the higher elevations are not locked.
This motion detector is a good idea.
It's placed wrong. It should be placed higher, or he can't get to it,
because he can disable this, either break it, or with this one here,
it's a little easier, because we've got unprotected wires here.
So he comes by on Monday, cuts this wire,
and on Tuesday, he comes back at night, and the thing is completely unprotected.
If the bad guy approaches his house,
and he wanted to do some harm to the person that's in this house,
he'd cut the phone line, and he would come either over the top or through this door,
and he would boot the door and run in.
Or he would break this window, open the lock, and go in quietly,
and he could actually be in her bedroom before she wakes up.
When he pops that door down there, he's going to come running up the stairs.
What you've got to do is have a door that will give you at least one minute's worth of time.
Now, I don't know if this door will do that. I don't think it will.
I think it's a very nice door, but it won't give you one minute of privacy.
You can walk into the bathroom, and the bathroom should give you a little time.
But not this time, because this one has a glass window on it,
and he can break this window and reach in and open the door.
Now, during that one minute, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to pick up this phone,
and you have to call the police.
But if he's cut the phone lines, then this telephone is not going to work at all.
So here's your cellular phone. You always keep the charger in your bedroom.
This is a real smart deal you did here.
Even at night, you can see the lights are out.
You can see the little red dot, and you know that this is where the phone is.
So you can call the police, and if you have to, you can get under the bed with it.
You only have a very short period of time, and your options decrease.
You pick up the phone, the phone doesn't work.
The door's only going to give you a minute.
You don't have a lot of time to do this. You've got to be ready.
You pick up this chair, and you throw it through the window.
Or you run out there, and you start yelling for help, but you yell, fire.
If you sit on that balcony and yell, fire, you're going to concern your whole community,
and you're going to get a quicker response.
And if the firetrucks come, that's okay, too. The first guy off the truck has got an axe in his hand.
So are you surprised by this, Carla?
A little bit, yeah.
Yeah. Was it scary?
It is, because I'm home alone a lot.
Yeah, and it's scary to think about.
Well, home invasion rape is the kind of thing that you hear about,
but you never expected to happen to you.
That's what Annette Day and her family also thought.
Annette and Mike Day were high school sweethearts.
They married after college and started their family.
Brittany was born in 1986, and three years later, Stephen was born.
They moved into their first home in Lancaster, Texas.
It was a nice home in a very nice neighborhood,
the kind of neighborhood where bad things just don't happen.
It was a typical Friday night for the Day family three years ago.
Six-year-old Brittany and three-year-old Stephen were watching their favorite television show.
Their dad had just built their mom a fire
and decided to make hot fudge sundaes for everybody.
Mike left to buy the ice cream.
What happened during the next 20 minutes would forever change their lives.
I heard my sliding glass door open.
In split seconds, an intruder who had been watching the house burst into their home
grabbed Annette and put a switchblade to her throat.
He immediately ripped my clothing off, the bottom part of my clothing, my pants, my underwear,
and then just violently, violently began to hit and punch my face and the side of my head.
I saw him here and I saw him, I saw him like throw on the ground.
I fell back and hit my head and almost started to black out
and I remember telling myself I cannot black out, my children are here.
It was so scary that I didn't really know what to do.
I didn't know what was going to happen.
I got scared. I had to keep my brother calm. He was crying.
So he locked me and my sister in the bathroom.
The attacker brutally raped Annette and then demanded money and her jewelry.
I let my wedding ring drop in between my legs and I gave him the other two rings
because I thought he had taken everything from me,
but he couldn't have that because that was the most important thing to me.
As the rapist made his escape, Mike returned home to the sound of his wife's screaming.
First of all, she's saying that she's been raped, she's been attacked,
and I'm thinking where are my babies?
I saw the kids were walking, I saw they were talking, and I saw they weren't bleeding.
So at the time I didn't think that the kids would have seen anything horrific or anything.
I asked what had happened and here's your little three-year-old son says,
some man broke in the house and pulled your mom's pants down.
The family is still healing from the horror of that night.
Annette says she would have never made it without the strength and support of her husband.
But nobody can forgive or forget the loss of innocence.
I sent him to have a nightmare about that time,
and I never want that to happen again to my mom or my sister.
I'll never forget this. It'll always be somewhere inside me.
I'll never forget what happened to my mom. He did such bad things to my mom.
You don't think anything like this is going to happen to you.
You see it on the news, you see the anguish in the world,
but you never think it's going to happen to you. Never. Not like this.
Nobody ever does. That's why we're trying to do this show today to get you to think about it
so that there's a plan for your family or for you when something like this happens.
And so it happened in the 20 minutes that Mike had gone to the store to get ice cream for the Sundays.
So somebody was watching your house, obviously.
We're most definite that he was watching.
Because he entered just a few minutes after he had left for the store.
Wow. Mike, when you walk back into that kind of scene, is it like something that's completely surreal?
Well, you're in shock for the first few hours.
You have a lot of things to take care of at first.
You don't get to really realize until you sit that night and then you think about it.
Well, when we come back, could this happen to you and your family?
J.J. Bittenbinder shares the amazing tricks these crooks use to track you down
and to do just what happened to the Day family.
Plus we'll hear serial rapist Ronnie Shelton's chilling details of how he brutally raped 29 separate women.
It will be the first time three of his victims will hear him describe their attacks when we come back.
When I open the door, even when the steam hit me, it's like drums are pounding.
You feel your heartbeat up here.
I mean everything just like the movies, but it's real.
And my adrenaline is pumping.
You are moving on a crowded street.
Various shades of people in the summer's harshest heat.
A story in your eye will speed until your mind's at ease.
Ten years come and gone so fast, I might as well be dreaming.
Sunny days have burned the path across another season.
You know, time has a way of changing things.
But the one thing time hasn't changed is the way we feel about circus.
Next time you need tires, keep us in mind.
So you ask yourself, isn't there a Visa card with a consistent low interest rate?
Yes, and it's from the Yakima Valley Credit Union.
You can benefit from low 11.8% interest on Visa Classic Card and an even lower 11.5% with Visa Gold.
If you've been burdened by high interest rates of other cards, apply now at the Yakima Valley Credit Union and start saving money on your purchases.
Take advantage of this great value in Visa cards today and you may be asking yourself, why didn't I do this sooner?
We invest in people.
May is a great month to buy a new Contour Taurus from Valley Ford Nissan and here's why.
Ford is now offering 2.9% financing or a $600 rebate on both models.
96 Contour is as low as $11,990. 96 Taurus is as low as $15,990.
If you haven't been considering a Taurus, check out the May edition of Motor Trend Magazine.
It just named the Ford Taurus the best family sedan value in America under $20,000.
And that includes domestic and import sedans.
The Valley Ford Nissan Car Center, 910 South 1st Street, Yakima's number one car dealership.
K105.7 is Continuous Soft Favorites.
Continuous Soft Favorites from Kenny Loggins.
Continuous Soft Favorites from Gloria Estefan.
And Continuous Soft Favorites from Richard Marks.
We're talking today about home intruders, burglars, and rapists who avoid the alarms and break in when you're home.
It may be difficult for you to hear or watch, but something you hear or see here today
could perhaps save your life or a member of your family's.
Coming up, we're going to show you their methods for getting into your house or apartment and even your hotel room.
Ronnie Shelton was one of the most notorious and sadistic kind of intruders.
For five years, he made suburban Cleveland his hunting ground,
breaking into quiet homes and apartments and raping a total of 29 women we know of in their own homes.
And like most intruders, they were not random break-ins.
He hand-picked his prey by spying on them and their families.
Three of his victims are here today, and they have never heard him talk about what happened in their homes.
Here are some of the chilling details of the day he broke into Rebecca's home.
I was just watching her.
And then she got up and went into her bedroom.
I think she got a robe or something, so I realized she was going to take a shower.
And then she went to the bathroom.
And then just like that, I just, I had a knife and I opened up her back door.
I mean, it was like nothing. It was just, and it was open.
I knew that she was a few steps away and totally naked.
And then I thought, I got to see her in person.
And I tried to open up the bathroom door.
I think I covered my face prior to going in there, though. I do that.
I got to see her. The look was surprised when she came out of the shower.
I seen, for some reason, different than other victims, the fight she was in.
I mean, her fright really hit me.
I mean, it was like I was the devil.
Ronnie Shelton was talking just then about Rebecca, who he raped in her own shower
at 7.30 in the morning after her husband had left for work.
What's it like for you to hear him tell that story?
It's hard. It's hard.
But he's also one of Ronnie's rape victims.
And what's frightening, he watched her for months before
and knew she took out the garbage on Fridays.
So he waited for her to do just that and then snuck in her unlocked back door
and raped her while her young son slept upstairs.
Here is an audio-taped interview of Ronnie's grisly recount of that day.
She doesn't know. For 15, 20 minutes before that, her door was open again.
That's how I got in her house. How about dinner house?
When she went upstairs. And then when she came back down, I was waiting.
She was ironing.
Yeah.
And then you waited until she put the iron down?
Yes.
And then she walked away from the table?
And we went and did it in the living room.
This is a month later. I told you I did come back.
She's the only one that went back.
I went back and I couldn't believe what she was wearing.
I was in the neighborhood and I looked and I couldn't not believe.
I looked in the kitchen and this time she was smart. She had a gun.
How many times did she fire?
I believe, I don't know. I heard her yell and I heard the shot.
I jumped from the shot.