I was given a box of material that was cleaned out of the old press room at the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters, sometimes called “the cop shop.” The box was a jumble of press releases, photographs, artists’ sketches and other items dating from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

This fellow is DR-66-543-860, otherwise known as the Freeway Rapist.

I wasn’t able to determine this man’s name, but there’s information about him in Ector Garcia’s “Portraits of Crime.” He used to pull alongside attractive women on the freeway late at night or early in the morning and claim that their car was on fire or that fire was coming from the exhaust. Once the victims pulled over, he would offer to examine the car, disable the distributor and offer to give them a ride. Once he got them in his car, it was all over. “As big as the guy was, the women didn’t have a chance,” Garcia says.

Eventually, a CHP officer noticed two cars pulled over on the Hollywood Freeway near the interchange with the Ventura Freeway: a woman, with a man matching the description of the Freeway Rapist. The officer investigated and the man claimed to have seen sparks coming from the woman’s vehicle. He was eventually identified by three victims and sentenced to prison.