The Collegetown Creeper didn’t take a summer vacation.
The thin, white male, measuring in at somewhere between 5’8″ and 6’0″, continued to tiptoe around Collegetown this summer, hiding outside female students’ residences during the nighttime hours.
The Ithaca Journal reported that in the early morning of Tuesday, August 10, two female students separately reported a man meeting the Creeper’s description sneaking around their bedroom windows.
These reports bring the total number of reports since September 2003 to 15. In the first reported incident, the student said that friends called her to tell her there was someone looking in her bedroom window.
In the second report, which occurred at 2:42 a.m., the student reported that a man began to knock on her bedroom window, waking her up. She said the knocking became louder until she screamed that she was going to call the police and, as a result, he ran away.
Other incidents have allegedly included the Creeper attempting to steal a woman’s blanket through her window as she napped on a couch as well as another incident which ended with the perpetrator being chased away by the victim’s boyfriend.
The man has been prowling the streets in Collegetown since the first incidents in September, 2003, however Sun archives show similar events leading back to 1999.
Last Spring, a victim advised that Collegetown residents to have locks on their room doors, and to keep their blinds shut if the room sits empty.
“I thought nothing of sleeping with my window open because it was hot out — but what I didn’t realize was that my window screen doesn’t have those slidey-click things on them,” she told The Sun. “It just completely slides up and down with nothing in it’s way. I would check out the window, and if they have a screen like mine, ask your landlord to switch it.” The Cornell Police do not have jurisdiction over Collegetown and therefore have no jurisdiction over events that occur in the Creeper’s prowling grounds. However, the Ithaca Police department continues to investigate the incidents.
Archived article by Eric Finkelstein
Sun News Editor