It was August 29, 1980. Renee-who talked to Scene on the condition that her last name not be used-was a petite but tomboyish eighteen-year-old working at a McDonald's in Akron. At 2:00 a.m., she was closing up the restaurant alone.
As she turned off the parking-lot floodlights and walked toward her '69 Pontiac, a man sneaked up behind her. He held a kitchen knife to her throat."Get in and drive," he said in a thick Asian accent.
The man guided Renee into a sparsely furnished studio apartment in a house on a hidden alley. "I'm not going to hurt you; I just want to talk," he said.
Keeping the knife at her back, he politely introduced himself as Hy Doan. He told her he was fromVietnam and that he was a math student at the University of Akron. "He just kept talking off-the-wall, like we were friends or something," Renee says.
They spoke for several hours, before Doan asked Renee about her sexual history. She didn't have one."I'm a virgin," she said.
Doan didn't believe her. His small talk became aggressive.At five foot five and 120 pounds, he was almost as tiny as his victim. Renee figured she could take him.
Suddenly, she jumped on his back and wrestled him to the floor. She got her hands around his slender neck and choked him until he appeared to pass out.
Renee jumped up and ran for the door. As she fiddled with the lock, Doan got up. Just before Renee could open the door, he grabbed her long ponytail and yanked her to his bedroom, ordering her to undress.
Afraid for her life, she sacrificed her virginity.
As Doan raped her, Renee stared through the doorway at the kitchen cupboards, which were filled with shiny packs of ramen noodles. "To this day, I can't eat the stuff," she says. "I can't even look at it."
When he was finished, Doan made her lie in bed and cuddle. He asked if she enjoyed herself. "He was talking to me like I was his girlfriend," she says. "I think he really believed it was consensual."
The sun was already peeking through the blinds when he allowed her to get dressed. He said he'd let her go home if she promised to keep seeing him. She gave him a fake phone number and left.
Renee went to a friend's house. The girl talked Renee into going to Akron City Hospital. Police were notified. Doan was charged with rape and kidnapping.
Two months later, the case went before a grand jury. But Doan, who maintained the sex was consensual, wasn't indicted. The jury didn't buy Renee's story. She knew too much about Doan's home to have been there only once, jurors believed. They assumed the two were friends. "I was there for seven hours, memorizing everything in that house, to make sure I could prove to police that I was there and that this happened to me," Renee says. "The legal system did nothing more for me, other than rub salt in my wound."
It wouldn't be the last time Doan wriggled his way out of a rape case because of a discredited victim. In the past twenty-five years, he has beaten at least six.
Detectives, prosecutors, and judges say Doan has developed the perfect M.O. for stealing sex. "It's not rape," says his lawyer, Jonathan Sinn. "It's theft."
Sinn describes his client as a "walking stereotype."
"In court, he bows, talks about honor and family, and comes off as a naive immigrant," Sinn says. "In reality, he's very intelligent and understands everything."
Doan's victims all describe him as a petite, polite man, with rotting teeth and foul breath. Though his accent is heavy, making him hard to understand, he has no problem with English.
He was born in Saigon in 1959. It's unclear when he immigrated to the United States. Doan did not respond to Scene's numerous interview requests, though an anonymous man claiming to be a relative called on his behalf. "Hy does not want to talk to you, because he feels he paid for his mistake and has forgotten the past," the man said.
A 1998 incident report states that he has a sister, Nicole, living in Fairlawn, Ohio. But when Scene contacted Nicole, she had trouble deciding whether she knew Doan or not. She also denied being related to him.
"Doan is like the last name Smith," she says. "Just because we have the same last name don't mean we are related. Maybe I helped him once. I help a lot of Vietnamese people. I've lived in Akron for a long time, and we are a small community."
Still, amid her denials, Nicole was able to confirm that Doan graduated from the University of Akron in the early 1980s. He then moved to DeKalb, Illinois, where he earned a Ph.D. in math at Northern Illinois University. "He's not a stupid guy," Nicole says. "He has tutored manyVietnamese in math.There's just a lot of stupid people who say stupid things about him."
Despite his academic achievements, Doan returned to Akron only to work a string of low-wage restaurant jobs while tutoring math on the side. Though he refers to himself as a full-time University of Akron tutor, the school has no record of his employment. But former employees of various Akron restaurants remember him.
In the late nineties, Greg Madonia worked at Papa Joe's, an Italian place popular with the elderly. Doan worked the salad-and-dessert line. He told Madonia he had a Ph.D. in math, but couldn't find work in the United States, which was why he was dressing lettuce for six bucks an hour. His much younger coworkers referred to him as "Mr. Hy." Madonia never noticed anything unusual about him.
Tom Feltner, who washed dishes with Doan at the Mustard Seed, an upscale health-food market and restaurant in Montrose, recalls a slightly more offbeat Mr. Hy.
"He was a weird guy," Feltner says. "He didn't say much, but he'd fly off the handle a lot."
Feltner, sixteen at the time, was under the impression that Doan didn't speak much English. He also remembers Doan boasting of his math credentials and marveled at Doan's dishwashing skills."He could do the work of two people," Feltner says.
"He was like the kung fu master of dishwashing," says the restaurant's owner, Philip Neighbors.
Coworkers pegged Doan for a harmless oddball. Little did they know they were in the presence of Akron 's best sex thief.
After the jury let D oan off the hook in 1980, Renee would see him around town.
He'd show up at McDonald's, stand in a corner, and watch her for hours. She told a security guard, who warned Doan to get lost.
But Akron isn't a big town. Once, while waiting at a red light, Doan crossed in front of her car. "If I knew what I know now, I would have run him over," Renee says.
After all, less than a year after her case, Doan was standing trial for attempted rape.
Nineteen-year-old Lauren Crouser said that she went to a college house party with several friends, according to the police report. She claimed Doan dragged her into a bedroom, choked her, and told her he'd kill her if she didn't do what he wanted. He tried to take her pants off, but she broke away and ran to a nearby Holiday Inn.
Once again, however, the jury apparently didn't buy the victim's story, though records from that time are too sparse to explain why. Common Pleas Judge Patricia Cosgrove, then a notoriously tough prosecutor, handled both cases. She doesn't remember either.
Yet Cosgrove understands how a man could escape two seemingly straightforward rape cases in less than a year, especially in such he-said, she-said situations, in which victims can be easily discredited. "Sometimes people are good at picking their victims," she says.
Shortly after the trial, Doan disappeared. Renee thought he'd finally been deported, but he'd actually gone to DeKalb, Illinois. It would be fifteen years before police encountered him again.
In 1996, Doan was back in Akron and up to his old tricks.This time, he'd added a new twist to his hunt for women.