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Yesterday I wrote about this case in which a 26-year-old CEO, Pava LaPere, was murdered in her own building by a 32-year-old man with a long, violent history. As Ed pointed out in the headlines, Jacob Billingsley was arrested last night, which is good news.
However, reading over some of the news stories today, I really wonder if police aren’t partly to blame for what happened here. It turns out that Billingsley was already wanted for a violent rape which happened on Sep. 19, just three days before the murder of LaPere. But police decided not to inform the public about that crime.
Billingsley was also suspected of raping a woman days before LaPere’s death and was already under police surveillance, authorities said Thursday. Police, however, declined to tell the public about the incident because they believed it was “targeted,” stirring up criticism that LaPere’s death might have been avoided.
In that incident, Billingsley is accused of slitting a woman’s throat and raping her “several times during the night” before tying her up with duct tape and lighting her on fire, court documents show. Billingsley is also alleged to have handcuffed the woman’s boyfriend and set him ablaze.
The woman told authorities she heard a loud banging at the door on Sept. 19 by a man who said he worked for the building’s maintenance department. (Billingsley was a maintenance worker in the building.
