Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [137]
Despite his academic achievements, Doan returned to Akron only to work a string of low-wage restaurant jobs while tutoring math on the side. Though he refers to himself as a full-time University of Akron tutor, the school has no record of his employment. But former employees of various Akron restaurants remember him.
In the late nineties, Greg Madonia worked at Papa Joe’s, an Italian place popular with the elderly. Doan worked the salad-and-dessert line. He told Madonia he had a Ph.D. in math, but couldn’t find work in the United States, which was why he was dressing lettuce for six bucks an hour. His much younger coworkers referred to him as “Mr. Hy.” Madonia never noticed anything unusual about him.
Tom Feltner, who washed dishes with Doan at the Mustard Seed, an upscale health-food market and restaurant in Montrose, recalls a slightly more offbeat Mr. Hy.
“He was a weird guy,” Feltner says. “He didn’t say much, but he’d fly off the handle a lot.”
Feltner, sixteen at the time, was under the impression that Doan didn’t speak much English. He also remembers Doan boasting of his math credentials and marveled at Doan’s dishwashing skills. “He could do the work of two people,” Feltner says.
“He was like the kung fu master of dishwashing,” says the restaurant’s owner, Philip Neighbors.
Coworkers pegged Doan for a harmless oddball. Little did they know they were in the presence of Akron’s best sex thief.
AFTER THE JURY LET DOAN off the hook in 1980, Renee would see him around town.
He’d show up at McDonald’s, stand in a corner, and watch her for hours. She told a security guard, who warned Doan to get lost.
But Akron isn’t a big town. Once, while waiting at a red light, Doan crossed in front of her car. “If I knew what I know now, I would have run him over,” Renee says.
After all, less than a year after her case, Doan was standing trial for attempted rape.
Nineteen-year-old Lauren Crouser said that she went to a college house party with several friends, according to the police report. She claimed Doan dragged her into a bedroom, choked her, and told her he’d kill her if she didn’t do what he wanted. He tried to take her pants off, but she broke away and ran to a nearby Holiday Inn.
Once again, however, the jury apparently didn’t buy the victim’s story, though records from that time are too sparse to explain why. Common Pleas Judge Patricia Cosgrove, then a notoriously tough prosecutor, handled both cases. She doesn’t remember either.
Yet Cosgrove understands how a man could escape two seemingly straightforward rape cases in less than a year, especially in such he-said, she-said situations, in which victims can be easily discredited. “Sometimes people are good at picking their victims,” she says.
Shortly after the trial, Doan disappeared. Renee thought he’d finally been deported, but he’d actually gone to DeKalb, Illinois. It would be fifteen years before police encountered him again.
In 1996, Doan was back in Akron and up to his old tricks. This time, he’d added a new twist to his hunt for women.
Though records are scarce, Fairlawn Sergeant Richard Moneypenny has little trouble remembering July 31 of that year. He was called to the front desk to deal with a trio of oddballs—Doan and two exotic dancers. “We’d already gotten a call earlier that morning from a hotel clerk who said an unusual Oriental man checked into a room with two girls,” Moneypenny says.
But this time, Doan was the one demanding to file a report.
He said he met the two women at the downtown Akron Hilton. They asked him for a ride to a less expensive hotel. He took them to the Days Inn in Fairlawn, according to the police report.
Somehow, Doan ended up in their room, where the women tried to blackmail him: Hand over four thousand dollars, or they’d claim they were raped. He said he’d take them