35 years

I am steadfast in my admiration for Don Geronimo, the Washington DC DJ who is one of the last remaining shock jocks from the golden age of radio, which has been sadly replaced by podcasts and streaming services and music saved on telephones, for crying out loud.

During his glory days as (the better) half of the "Don And Mike (O'Meara) Show," Don frequently played a clip of Bart Simpson saying, "Country music sucks! All it does is take precious air space away from shock DJs whose cruelty and profanity amuse us all!"

Don will be the first to tell you now that things have changed on the radio landscape, not that he really dealt in cruelty, but yes, he danced around the edges of propriety back when we all were more nimble. His kind of fun was having people send their cell phone in the tube at the drive-thru bank to see if he could get the teller to come on the air with him. 

He's alive and well, doing mornings on Big 100 in Washington, playing classic rock hits that were Top 40 hits when he played them originally.

And on the sad side of those Top 40 days...it was in 1987, when Don was doing the Morning Zoo show on WAVA, a man claiming to be Don Geronimo called a 14-year-old girl on the phone, telling her that she had won a trip to Hawaii and a thousand dollars.

Another radio station was running that contest at the time, but the man was able to fool the teenager into thinking he was, indeed, Donnie G.  And he told her that all she needed to do to claim her prizes was to meet him at yet another radio station.

She went to that station. The man abducted her, took her to a desolate dirt road, and raped her.

That was 1987, a day Geronimo calls "the worst day of (his) life." Imagine, having his name involved in perpetrating this heinous unspeakable crime. And after all these years, thank Heaven, science apparently has solved the crime.

Last week, Fairfax County police arrested and charged a 59-year-old Ashburn (VA) man for that terrible crime. They used the same genetic technique that California detectives employed to get the Golden State Killer.

The guy's name was William Clark (no relation!) and he will face counts of rape, abduction with intent to defile, and attempted forcible sodomy, according to the  police, who are holding him at the Fairfax County jail without bond. Clark was 24 at the time of the assault and living in Herndon, police said.  

Geronimo!

At a news conference, Fairfax County PD Maj. Ed O’Carroll said that police had investigated more than 70 suspects over the years. Clark was not an original suspect at the time, however, nor did he even come to the attention of the police until this past January, when genetic genealogy revealed what police call enough clues to charge him. 

Genetic genealogy investigators take DNA samples from a crime scene and upload them to a database of genetic profiles, painstakingly building a family tree of people who might be connected. O’Carroll said it was just this type of crime-solving that led his agency to Clark. In mid-February Fairfax County police collected a DNA sample from him, a sample which matched DNA from the original crime scene, according to O’Carroll.

Geronimo, clearly pleased by the arrest, devoted about 20 minutes of his show the day after last week's arrest to discussing the matter. No matter how great it feels to have the ALLEGED perpetrator behind bars awaiting trial, one cannot forget the victim, then 14, now 49. Geronimo says the police told him she is in shock over all this. That's easy to see.

After all these years, my hope is that the young victim will take solace in the case being closed, and that Clark will be behind bars forever, if he is indeed guilty. But I wonder how he lived for these 35 years. Every time someone knocked on his door, rang his phone, followed him down the road in his car, did he think "this is finally it, and the cops figured out I did it"? Or was he able to forget it?

Geronimo related the details the other day, saying that the vile rapist got the victim's home phone number, spoke to her mother, and laid his evil trap by telling the mom her daughter had won the prize. Don remembered being broken-hearted by all this, then and now, but did add that somehow he has been able to compartmentalize the events in his mind, in order to live as his alter ego on the radio.

And just why did the police never once suspect that he might be involved? That's the most shock-jock part of the whole story.

Back in the day, there was an Oklahoma televangelist named Oral Roberts, one of the first specious sinbusters to have sick people troop up to his altar, where we would smite them a good one and bellow "Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaal!" and then turn to the camera and remind the good folks at home to keep those five and ten dollar bills coming in. 

In 1987, when the money must not have been coming fast enough, Oral went on TV and said that if he didn't raise 8 million dollars by a certain date, the Lord was going to call him home.

Don and Mike went to Tulsa, to Oral's home, to cover his funeral, but Roberts was not called home! He lived another 22 years, for heaven's sake. Don and Mike were there on deadline day, and did their show from there. The fact that he and his crew were flying home to DC from Tulsa afterwards, while the sick creep brutalized that young lady, cleared Don.

And now the cops have the bad guy. "There's nothing bad enough that could happen to him," as Don said on the radio the other morning.