UNM student chased off Ether Man rapist

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - Mandra Ryan doesn't live in New Mexico anymore, but what happened to her in Albuquerque in 2000 is something she carries wherever she goes.

"I walked up to my window," Ryan told us in 2001 shortly after she said encountered a serial rapist known only as Ether Man. "There was a man standing outside my window."

She was a student the University of New Mexico when she said the Ether Man showed up at her window, broke into her home and even took pictures.

"He would unscrew the sensor lights in our backyard," Ryan said. "He would oil all of the doors; break in."

Ether Man was given the name because he would sedate his victims with a chemically soaked rag and then rape them. He victimized 11 women in Albuquerque from 1991 to 2000 and then disappeared.

But police in Austin, Texas, said he never went away. His DNA showed up in a 2006 rape case of a University of Texas student who recounted the same eerie story of an attacker with a chemically charge cloth.

Ryan believes, just like he'd done to his 11 rape victims, he was planning his final return.

"I was lucky that he never came back and attacked, because I caught him prior to going through with everything," she said.

Ryan had yelled at the man who ran away from outside her window. She said he kept coming back to peer inside her home but never had the chance to attack her.

Nearly 10 years after Ryan's encounter with Ether Man she said his face still haunts her and that it's one she'll never forget even though the latest sketch of the man shows what he'd look like today.

"We're hoping that someone here will recognize the person," Austin Police Department Detective Scott Stanfield told KRQE News 13 Wednesday.

The sketch is an age-progression of a composite given by one of his Albuquerque victim's.

Ryan said she still often wonders, "Is somebody going to be in my backyard? Is someone trying to break in?"

Ryan said the rapist attacked two of her friends soon after he stopped stalking her.

Investigators in Austin said they're also looking into whether an attempted rape at the UT campus in 2006 may be the work of Ether Man.

Although police don't have his real identity, prosecutors in Albuquerque have indicted him under the name John Doe to prevent the statute of limitations from expiring when they finally catch him.

"It is alarming that we're going to continue to add numbers, and he's still not caught," Ryan said.