Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [138]
Yet Moneypenny soon uncovered the fiction in Doan’s tale. Earlier that day, Doan phoned an escort service, requesting two dates. He met Taryn Chojnowski and Teresa Richard at the Days Inn bar.
He told the women he was a doctor and offered them four thousand dollars for a private dance. The women agreed. Doan got a room.
Afterward, Doan said he had to go to the ATM at Akron General Hospital—where he claimed to work—to get their money. He drove toward Market Street, passing numerous cash machines on the way. Chojnowski and Richard never seemed suspicious.
When they got to the hospital, the women waited in the car as Doan disappeared into the building.
When he returned, he claimed the ATM wasn’t working; he’d pay them later. Then he drove the women back to the Days Inn.
At the front desk, the three argued over payment. Chojnowski and Richard threatened to say that Doan had raped them if they didn’t get their money. The hotel clerk told them to settle it with Fairlawn police.
Doan’s claims of extortion and the dancers’ accusations of rape were dismissed as nothing more than a failure-to-pay case. “The girls he preys on aren’t exactly in a legal line of work,” Moneypenny says. “I’d say he’s safe.”
That was the end of it, as far as Fairlawn police were concerned. For Doan, however, it was the beginning of something big. He seemed to realize that his rich-doctor shtick worked on women—and that his claims of extortion got him off with cops.
All Doan had to do was con women in shady occupations into having sex with him, then skip out on the bill. Even if they cried rape, their backgrounds would discredit their allegations. And he was right.
IN 2000, DOAN WENT FOR a late-night snack at the Eat ’n Park on Cuyahoga Falls Avenue. There he noticed eighteen-year-old Colleen Imes.
“By the state’s standards, she was an adult, but really, she was still a kid,” says Summit County Detective Patrick Hunt. “She was so petite, she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds wet.”
Imes was just Doan’s type—tiny and troubled. He approached her with a polite bow and offered to buy her food. Imes agreed.
Doan claimed to be a Dr. Chang. He said he worked at Akron City Hospital.
She told him that she was a dancer at Lisa’s Cabaret, a strip joint on Exchange Street. She’d had a troubled childhood, she revealed, and recently moved out of her mom’s place.
Doan made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, she later told police: He’d pay her six thousand dollars to be his date to various professional dinners and events. No sex, just companionship, he promised. Imes accepted.
Maybe it was his rotten teeth or his too-good-to-be-true offer, but something told Imes to be leery. She had three friends follow her on their first date.
Imes met Doan for drinks before he drove her to Steve’s Motel, a by-the-hour roadhouse in Green.
As Imes sat on the bed watching TV, Doan excused himself to go to the restroom. When he returned, his pants were down to his ankles, his penis erect. Imes told him to pull his pants up.
At first, Doan complied, saying it was just a joke. But within minutes, he pushed her onto the bed and raped her, she said.
Imes would’ve done better to flee at first chance. Instead, she stayed by Doan’s side, pressing him for payment.
He drove her to the Fifth Third Bank on Tallmadge Road. But when he couldn’t get cash from the ATM, Imes’s friends surrounded him. Doan called 911 and claimed he was being robbed.
When police arrived, Imes cried rape. Detective Hunt investigated, but prosecutors ultimately told him to drop the case. Imes died in a car crash less than a year later.
“It was the saddest sight,” he said. “She was a cute girl with the lowest self-esteem. She was just desperate. He picked a perfect victim.”
It’s the same way Summit County Detective Mike Coghenour speaks of Amanda Stamps. She was twenty-one, “ninety pounds soaking wet,” he says, a troubled single mother into drugs and dangerous men.
In 2002, Stamps said, a friend set her up with Doan on a blind date. He was