Just before midnight, Paul Harell drove to a stranger’s home near a riverside town in Maryland. He found the basement door unlocked and, taking a paring knife from the kitchen, entered the bedroom. A 74-year- old woman awoke with Harell’s hands constricting her throat and the weight of his body on top of her.
It was a crime that echoed how Harell had raped women and girls decades earlier on Washington’s Whidbey Island. And one that Washington spent years, and millions of dollars, to prevent.
It was not an anomaly.
One in 4 people the state has committed and released from the nation’s first program to rehabilitate so-called “sexually violent predators” have been arrested for new crimes, a Seattle Times investigation found. One in 7 — like Harell — reoffended in a serious manner; half involved sexual violence.