Attacker left victim with endless search.

Byline: Dianne Williamson

COLUMN: DIANNE WILLIAMSON

Shawna Callahan calls him the "invisible man."

She's searched for him in crowds, convenience stores and bars. She's driven to the area he took her to one early April morning, after she believes she was given a date rape drug in a Bud Light. She wants to find him, because she's tired of feeling afraid.

"Whoever he is, he needs to be taken off the street," she said, sitting on a picnic table in her backyard on Vernon Street. "I don't want this to happen to anyone else. And I don't want him to think he got away with it."

On April 28, Ms. Callahan said, she was violently raped by a man she had met in a bar. For more than a month she kept mostly silent, consumed with guilt and shame. Finally she decided to go to the police. Then she called a newspaper columnist. And she declined the offer to keep her name confidential, because she realizes that she has nothing to hide.

She's a pretty young woman, blond and thin, with startling blue eyes. She has a troubled and turbulent past, the details of which are not germane to what happened to her. A single mother at 27, she lives in a first-floor apartment with her aunt, a 4-year-old son and her mother, who is dying of AIDS.

That night in April, she said, she walked from her apartment to a bar at Kelley Square to look for her ex-boyfriend. She didn't find him and continued to walk along Water Street, she said. In front of Jose Murphy's bar, she struck up a conversation with a woman. The woman invited her inside for a beer; Shawna accepted.

The woman appeared to know four men sitting at the bar. One of the men looked familiar, Shawna said, and she asked him if he was a Worcester cop. The man said he was, as were two of the other men, Shawna said he told her. She said the woman also told her that the men were cops.

The group walked to the Blarney Stone for another beer, then Shawna and the woman drove to Ralph's Tavern on Shrewsbury Street. When they got there, the men were waiting at the bar, with two open Bud Lights. One of them handed her a beer and she drank it. Within moments, she said, she began to feel strange. "I felt really nauseous, and my brain didn't feel like mine. I'd never felt like that before. I started to feel sick, and I told my friend I wanted to go home."

She said the man who gave her the beer offered to drive her home. Instead, he drove to an apartment building in the Elm Street area, one she is now unable to identify. By this time, she said, she couldn't walk and could barely speak. She said the man carried her to an upstairs apartment and pushed her onto a bare bedspring, where she passed out. When she awoke, she was naked and the man was raping her, she said.

"I used all the strength I had and I pushed him off of me," she said, her eyes filled with tears. "Then I must have passed out again. When I woke up, he was putting on my socks and shoes."

She said she was still groggy when he carried her back to his truck and drove her home. That night, she confided in her aunt, who urged her to go to the hospital for a rape kit.

"I didn't do it," said Shawna, whose family is known to police. "I didn't feel like I had a chance. If he was a cop, who would believe my word against his?"

Police are by no means convinced that the rapist is a Worcester cop, and with good reason. More than a month after the rape, Shawna told her story to an assistant Worcester district attorney and provided a nine-hour statement to a state police investigator, who referred the case back to Worcester. Lt. William O'Connor of Worcester's special crimes division oversaw a photo lineup that included every member of the Worcester P.D. While two of the men "looked similar" to her assailant, she was unable to pick him out of the photos, she said.

Also noteworthy is Shawna's recollection that, while at the Blarney Stone, another man approached the group and was introduced as the Worcester police chief. The man looked nothing like Police Chief Gary Gemme, who was not in the bar that night. Shawna said police have posed the possibility that the man was a correction officer or had some other link to law enforcement.

Lt. O'Connor declined to comment when contacted this week, and Chief Gemme said he was limited by rape shield laws.

"We investigate all complaints against police officers," Chief Gemme said. "If a Worcester police officer committed the crime of rape, we would prosecute that individual and we would terminate that individual." A spokesman for District Attorney Joseph Early said that office is treating the case as "a serious charge we're investigating."

Shawna said she decided to come forward partly because the state police investigator told her that, based on the details Shawna provided, there was a good chance that the rapist has attacked other women. She described him as a white man, 32 to 37 years old, about 5-feet, 8-inches tall and weighing between 150 and 160 pounds. She said he had cropped dirty blond or light brown hair and was wearing tight jeans and a golf shirt.

She said she's returned to Jose Murphy's and spoken to bartenders there. She's driven the Elm Street area in an unsuccessful effort to pinpoint the building where he took her. Sometimes, she stares out her window and watches cars as they pass.

"Every time I leave my house I look for him," she said. "To me, he's like the invisible man. But he's out there somewhere. He can hide, but I shouldn't have to. I just want him to know that he picked the wrong woman that night."

Contact Dianne Williamson by e-mail at [e-mail].