BELLINGHAM — A man Bellingham police said may be a serial rapist will be held in the Whatcom County Jail on a million-dollar bond. Police believe DNA evidence will connect the Sumas man -- arrested Wednesday -- to at least four rapes.
Police said two teen girls were at a Bellingham bus stop last month when they were approached by a stranger. He said he was from out of town and needed directions, but he ended up kidnapping and raping them. Now police say they’re convinced he’s done this before.
Edmund Olivas, 36, hung his head as the Whatcom County prosecutor read a graphic and disturbing account of what police said Olivas did, most of which is too graphic and too disturbing to share with readers.
“He actually poked the knife into the girls’ heads, which were down as he was driving so he wouldn’t look at him or look where they were,” the Whatcom County prosecutor said in court.
Police said the victims were driven in the man’s minivan to an unknown barn near Sumas, where both girls were sexually assaulted. After he took their cellphones, shoes and IDs, he dumped them near Lynden.
“It’s a horrific event,” said Lieutenant Mike Johnston with the Bellingham Police Department.
But Johnston said there is more. DNA evidence from the girls connects Olivas to two other rapes, one in Whatcom County a year and a half ago, and the rape of an 11-year-old girl in California in 2003 -- both in the national crime database and both unsolved.
“When they approached the house, they had their weapons drawn, yes,” said Olivas’ neighbor Mike Tyrell, who was home next door when police served a search warrant on Olivas’ house Wednesday. They found him by matching a minivan in his driveway and him to the victims’ descriptions and the surveillance footage.
“Eventually the guy that lives there come out and they hauled him,” Tyrell told us, talking about Olivas’ arrest.
Thursday people were inside the home but didn’t want to talk to us.
Olivas’ DNA is being tested right now to see if it matches the DNA from all of the rape cases.
Cox Media Group
