Second victim comes forward

Danielle Tudor doesn't believe rapist has changed

By Mara Stine

The Gresham Outlook, Jul 3, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (11 Reader comments)

Shanda Tice / Gresham Outlook

DanielleTudor speaks to KATU reporter Angelica Thorton on Thursday at the Channel 2 television studios in Northeast Portland.

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Danielle Tudor didn’t want to reveal herself as another victim of serial rapist Richard T. Gillmore.

She grew up in East Multnomah County, still lives in the area and knows a lot of people who, quite frankly, she isn’t wild about being privy to such personal information about her.

Not even her two grown sons knew that as a teenager, a man broke into her East County home and tried to rape her on the floor of her parents’ bedroom.

That seven years later, the same man ambushed a 13-year-old girl named Tiffany Edens in her Troutdale home and raped her.

That when police arrested Edens’ rapist they discovered he was the notorious “jogger rapist,” who later admitted to sexually assaulting seven other women — including Tudor — in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

The other rapes were not prosecuted because the statute of limitations had passed.

But a judge took into account Gillmore’s prior victims and sentenced him to 60 years with a minimum of 30 years in prison for Edens’ rape. He could be held as late as Aug. 11, 2024, but with good behavior could be released earlier.

So when Multnomah County District Attorney Russ Ratto invited Tudor on Saturday, June 21, to testify before the parole board at Gillmore’s parole hearing, Tudor instinctively said no.

“I don’t think I need to get involved,” she said.

At Gillmore’s hearing on Tuesday, June 24, Edens made an emotional plea to keep Gillmore, now 48, in prison. Ratto told the board he’d managed to contact two of Gillmore’s other victims, but neither would testify.

That evening, Tudor saw Edens’ weary face on the television news. Now 35, Edens was the only woman with enough courage to face her attacker.

“It just pulled something in my heart,” Tudor, 45, says. “I thought, ‘Gosh, she’s out there on her own and she has the courage to put herself out there.’ ”

Why should Edens have to bear the burden of representing all eight women Gillmore sexually assaulted for the greater good of protecting the community? Tudor thought.

So Tudor picked up the phone and called the district attorney’s office. “What can I do to help?” she asked and agreed to go public.

This is her story.

Nov. 11, 1979

It was 7 p.m. when Tudor, a 17-year-old senior at David Douglas High School, was in the den watching “The King and I” on television. Her parents had just left the house near Powell Butte to visit a friend, and her four older brothers and sisters also were out for the evening.

She heard a noise, but dismissed it as the East County wind.

Suddenly, a man kicked in the door to the den from the garage and barged into her home.

“We both froze,” she says, adding that at first she thought the man was a friend of one of her brothers. They looked a lot alike. But after getting a closer look at his uncovered face, she realized he was a stranger.

Just as that realization set in, the man turned and ran away.

Tudor ran upstairs to her parent’s bedroom and dialed 9-1-1. While on the phone, she heard the family poodle growl. The man had returned, this time with a bandana covering his face. He was armed with a 3-and-a-half-foot stick he’d grabbed from the garage.

Seeing her on the phone, Gillmore yanked it out of the wall, kicked over a lamp and demanded to know who she was talking to.

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