East Coast Rapist suspect acknowledges attacks in several states

[Jeebus]

Aaron Thomas would go for walks that had almost a scripted ending. He’d see a woman. His heart would race. His hands would shake. He’d approach her. He’d scare her into submission.

Then he would rape her.

Thomas says he is the East Coast Rapist: the man who terrorized women in the Washington area and New England beginning in the early 1990s, culminating in an attack on three trick-or-treating teenagers in Prince William County in 2009. His crimes, which spanned nearly half his life, gripped the region with the kind of fear that comes from an unknown man, lurking in the darkness, attacking strangers who were doing such everyday tasks as walking home from work, waiting for a bus, moving out of an apartment or even sleeping in their own bed.

In hours of telephone interviews with The Washington Post from his jail cell in Prince William County, Thomas for the first time publicly acknowledged that he attacked women in several states. He said he has struggled to understand why he did it, and why he did it so many times — more than a dozen rapes by his count, although police think there were probably many more.

Now, Thomas is poised to accept responsibility for his crimes. He is scheduled to plead guilty on rape and abduction charges in Prince William County on Tuesday for the Halloween attacks and in Loudoun County on Nov. 30 for a 2001 rape in Leesburg, law enforcement officials said. Thomas faces the possibility of several life terms in prison.

He admits to over a dozen rapes. And police think he committed more than that.

Animal.

[Jeebus]

UPDATE --

On Friday, the judge sentenced this violent rapist thug to 3 life sentences.

Aaron Thomas, who admitted that he raped numerous women in several states over two decades, will remain in prison for the rest of his life after a Prince William County judge on Friday sentenced him to more than three life terms for a Halloween 2009 attack on three teenage trick-or-treaters.

Circuit Court Judge Mary Grace O’Brien gave Thomas, 41, the maximum sentence on several of the charges, which included rape and abduction, telling him that he “took a lot more than sex from those girls,” causing them to lose their innocence, their sense of security and their ability to trust.

The sentence was the first handed down in the East Coast Rapist case — a series of more than a dozen rapes and other attacks dating to the early 1990s — and it effectively makes any future sentences moot. There is no parole in Virginia.