"Aspen Hill Rapist" Charged Again With More Crimes

Timothy Joseph Buzbee is name that struck terror into the hearts of Aspen Hill residents some 30 years ago.

A convicted serial rapist, Buzbee was finally arrested in November 1982 and was eventually convicted of three felonies. The first conviction was for a the kidnapping and rape of 15-year-old girl who he kidnapped on July 30, 1981. He attacked her from behind, within her own home, and overpowered her. He blindfolded, gagged, and transported her, to his parents' Aspen Hill home, and raped her there.

A string of at least 16 rapes was attributed to him in the time frame of the 1981-1982. He was convicted of only three, the 15-year-old, a 39-year-old District woman abducted and raped on an Aspen Hill street March 9 1982, and an 18-year-old community college student raped in the dining room of her own home on September 18, 1982. To this last act, Buzbee plead guilty in a plea-bargain deal ("Aspen Hill rapist’ Buzbee postpones parole hearing", Parish, Warren, Montgomery Gazette, November 9 2005, downloaded 2009 October 21).

Buzbee's reign of terror has widely been believed to have covered only the time-frame from roughly the beginning of 1981 until November of 1982 when he was arrested and charged.

This would be consistent with the so-called "organized type" of serial rapist, and Buzbee was nothing if not "organized". A surveyor by trade, and raised in Aspen Hill, this Frederick County resident allegedly studied his victims and circumstances for weeks in advance of each attack, and was consistently cautious about concealing his identity.

The organized-type serial rapist shares a pattern with the organized-type of serial killer, and in fact many serial killers started out as serial rapists, and some suggest that serial killing is a nearly inevitable status resulting from escalation from the violence and degradation of mere rape into something even more degrading and violent. In Buzbee's case, the elements of planning and control were prominent.

Every journey, however long or short, has a beginning, and it was widely believed that Buzbee's crimes were all known and already associated to him. Apparently, even two decades out from the time of his first conviction and incarceration, nobody had ever thought to compare the DNA of a convicted serial rapist to cold-case files in and around central Montgomery County.

It had widely been presumed that Buzbee's string of serial-rapist violations had begun in early 1981, and apparently nobody had ever tried to associate hiom with any crimes prior to his "known" crimes.

Cold case detectives in Montgomery have been engaged, in recent years, in a process of checking all DNA traces against all available samples. In practice, this means checking against all persons entered in a variety of databases.

Crimes dating back to 1977 -- far earlier than Buzbee was believed to have operated -- have turned up as a positive DNA match. On October 15, 2009, a grand jury returned 10 counts relating to 4 rapes taking place between 1977 and 1980 ("New charges against rapist remind Aspen Hill residents of intense fear", Brachfeld, Melissa and Carrick, Nathan, Montgomery Gazette, October 21, 2009, downloaded 2009, October 21).

Buzbee, 52, would have been 19 or 20 years old at the time of the 1977 alleged rape, and likely would have graduated high school in the class of 1975. It is unknown to this writer from which highschool he graduated, although references from 1982 indicate that his parents lived in Aspen Hill, and one may reasonably presume that if he was educated in the Montgomery County public schools, he would have graduated from Robert E Peary HS, or possibly from Kennedy HS or even Wheaton HS.

Inquiring minds want to know from which highschool he graduated, or which he attended, if he didn't graduate.

Previously, the idea had been that Buzbee started his career of serial rape in 1981, but now it appears that the start of his career was at least as early as 1977 and could possibly have been earlier.

Considering that Buzbee was from Aspen Hill, and is now suspected of rapes in and around Aspen Hill much earlier than previously thought possible or likely, we suggest that Cold Case officers should immediately do DNA comparisons of Buzbee and other convicted sex offenders in the DNA database who could have been in Maryland at the time, in an effort to resolve the July 1975 case of Kathy Lynn Beatty, who was sexually assaulted, brutally beaten, and left to die behind the K-Mart on Connecticut Avenue in Aspen Hill. At that time, the area was relatively undeveloped and covered with second-growth forest in parts, and lots of local teens and some young adults used to party in the woods with drugs and beer. Whether or not Tim Buzbee did in fact know of the "party place" is unknown to this writer, however "the Rocks" as a party place was very widely known. The case remains open, of course, and recently efforts have been escalated towards final solution of this Cold Case.

There is already a very old and well-developed "suspects list" in that case, but it seems reasonable to believe that through oversight -- probably based on a mistaken belief that Tim Buzbee wasn't raping anytime before 1981 -- Buzbee was never on the suspects-list for the Beatty case. If he was not, it's time to add him, due to the new information of a DNA match to rapes in the area just 2 years after the Beatty case struck fear into the neighborhood.

Montgomery's Cold Case Squad has been hard at work in recent years, even solving a murder from 1982, linking the Wendy Stark cold case to deceased kidnapper and murdering "lifer" Gerald A. Abernathy, a North Carolina prison inmate.

This is how a lot of DNA comparison cases are starting to work: people already caught for other crimes are being caught for additional ones, while already behind bars.

The best thing about this, since they can't generally be given additional punishments above and beyond either life in prison or a place on Death Row, is that closure comes, and people know that a crime has been solved. Otherwise you have to wonder: are they still out there, the people who did that? And with knowledge of the perpetrator and of justice being served, comes a freedom from apprehension of an known quality of evil attached to an unknown character who is perhaps still at-large.

Let's run those tests, folks. For the Kathy Beatty case, Tim Buzbee won't just be in jail and eligible for parole for previous convictions as at present (though held for trial, of course), he'd be locked up forever or until he dies, or waiting on Death Row.