It was a chilly Sunday, and a suburban mother was jogging through a Liberty Township subdivision listening to the Bengals' season finale on her Walkman.
A car approached from behind. When it didn't roll past her, she glanced back. ''He (the driver) was looking straight at me, and I knew.''
Afraid and with a heightened sense of her surroundings - she was in a remote part of a developing subdivision - the 41-year-old Butler Township woman turned to run. The driver blocked her path.
''Before I knew it, he was out, grabbing at me. He pulled my arm, my hand. Anything, he wanted to get me in that car,'' she said. ''There was no way I was going with him.''
The jogger escaped the Dec. 21 assault unscathed. But like many other women, she's afraid. Lately she has felt a disturbing kinship with the faces of eight Tristate women who have disappeared in the last two years. Four have been found dead; the others are missing.
''It's bugging me because every time it happens, I know what these women might have gone through, at least at the beginning. It's terrifying,'' she said.
The unlinked series of disappearances has elevated public awareness about women's safety and jet-propelled speculation that a serial killer is lurking in the Tristate.
''There is a message in all this, and that is that you need to be safe,'' said Assistant Covington Police Chief Bill Dorsey. ''You need to pay attention to your intuition. This is evidence that bad things are happening to women and that women are vulnerable. That's something we need to pay attention to as a society.''
Detectives working the cases of Shirley Vaughn, Regina Cox and Lora Stubbs, all of Cincinnati, Carrie Culberson of Blanchester, Ohio, Erica Fraysure of Somerset, Ky., Kelly Ekhart of Franklin, Ind., Alana Gwinner of Fairfield, and Kimberly Sue Sipe of Newport have dismissed the serial killer angle, saying there are no distinct similarities in the cases.
But the coincidence alone has upset the apple cart. Women not too dissimilar from the faces flashed on the television screen are wondering whether it could happen to them.
Is violence on the rise?
National statistics show that from 1973 to 1994, violence against women remained stable or increased slightly, while crimes against men declined.
Barring domestic violence, local police do not think violence against women has risen appreciably. ''I can't see a marked change,'' Butler County Lt. Anthony Dwyer said.
Because most police departmentstrack cases on types of crime, not gender, local statistics on female crime victims do not exist.
Ms. Vaughn, Ms. Eckhart, Ms. Gwinner and Ms. Sipe have been found dead. Ms. Culberson is presumed dead, and her boyfriend, Vincent Doan, was convicted last summer of kidnapping and murdering her.
Domestic-violence cases have nudged up since 1995, when Ohio lawmakers passed a law giving cops authority to press charges when victims would not.
In Kentucky, there has been more focus on the issue since Gov. Paul Patton's creation in 1996 of the Office of Child Abuse and Domestic Violence Services. The numbers of domestic-violence protective orders issued across the commonwealth rose 15 percent from fiscal year 1994 to 1995, to more than 41,000.
Violence against women differs from violence against men.
Women are six times more likely than men to experience violence at the hands of someone they know intimately, according to the National Crime Victims Survey. In working the local cases, police have questioned boyfriends or men close to Ms. Sipe, Ms. Fraysure, Ms. Gwinner, Ms. Vaughn, Ms. Cox and Ms. Stubbs. None has been charged.
But the rule of thumb that women usually know their assailants did not apply in the jogger's case. She had never seen her attacker before.
During a 90-second acrobatic brawl in the middle of the street, the woman chomped on her assailant's finger.
''I was thinking all kinds of tactics, go for the groin . . . go for his throat,'' she said. ''When he went to cover my mouth, I bit as hard as I could.''
Her attacker fled when neighbors intervened, but 36-year-old Danny Warman of Fairfield has since been charged with abduction and assault.
Where to find support
Nikki, a 28-year-old woman who was raped in June 1995, credits Women Helping Women with helping her recover from her attack.
Alone in her Norwood apartment waiting for a friend to stop by, Nikki opened her door when the bell rang. Two men with guns stormed inside.
They stole $14, forced her in a closet and jammed her friend in there, too, when he arrived. One man raped her on his way out the door.
''My mind was racing. I left my body,'' said Nikki, now a middle-school teacher in Norwood.
When Ann MacDonald started working at Women Helping Women in 1982, the FBI reported a woman was beaten every 18 seconds and raped every six minutes. Today, a woman is a victim of domestic violence every 9 seconds, and 1.3 women are sexually assaulted every minute, she said.
''It's happening more, and it's being reported more,'' Ms. MacDonald said.
The good news, however, is more safety nets have been established for female victims. Locally, the YWCA shelters 700 women and children annually who are victims of domestic violence. The Women's Crisis Center in Covington provides similar assistance in Northern Kentucky.
Nikki's attackers, both 18 at the time of the assault, are in jail. The man who raped her got 13 years; the other is serving eight years.
''I think it happens a lot more than people think,'' she said. ''Not everyone comes forward.''
Is the worry warranted?
Women should be aware of violence against women in the news but keep in perspective that only a small percentage of women are targets of random violence, said Dean Kilpatrick, a professor at the National Crime Victims Treatment and Research Center in Charleston, S.C.
''Criminals win when we're so terrified in fear that it paralyzes us,'' he said. ''Any particular person's risk of being abducted or murdered is relatively low.''
The idea that strangers are lurking ready to pounce on victims is more of a myth than reality, said Lt. David Ratliff, commander of the Cincinnati Police Division's personal crimes unit and acting captain of the criminal investigation section.
''It's not somebody who jumps out of a bush,'' he said. ''In the majority of cases, it's someone they know.''
Tanya Bricking and Jane Prendergast contributed to this report.
Federal money aids area agencies
