RandyTravis' Blog

We still don't know her name. Back in 2006, someone dropped off a box of home videotapes here at the Fox5 Studios. When members of the I-Team watched the tapes, we discovered it was actually a collection of sex tapes, showing unconscious women being assaulted by the same man. One of the tapes had a sticky note on it saying "watch first." That tape showed a woman so out of it one of us openly wondered whether she might be dead.

Some documentation inside the box indicated the man was from Douglas County. So we brought the tapes to the district attorney's office there. They turned it over the Douglas County Sheriff's Department. Investigator Rodney Hendrix and Sgt. Jesse Hambrick spent months searching for the women on the tape, ultimately identifying one of them by a tattoo they spotted on the videotape.

They also identified the man on the tape: John Schuehrer, a former nightclub bouncer. They accused him of using GHB, the so-called date rape drug, to make his victims lose consciousness. The tapes show him repeatedly sexually assaulting these women, sometimes with a stick, a beer bottle... even a can of Red Bull. All three women had previously been involved in a relationship with Mr. Schuehrer, but they had no memory of these things happening to them. They also say they didn't know Mr. Schuehrer was videotaping them.

Two years later, Mr. Schuehrer pled guilty to some of the 28 counts of sexual assault. He got a 30-year sentence, with a guarantee of spending at least 15 years behind bars. He could have received several life sentences if convicted on all counts, but prosecutors decided to spare the victims the pain of having the videotapes played before a jury in open court.

After the plea, assistant DA Eddie Barker told me who dropped the tapes off here at Fox5. He didn't name her, but he said it was one of the three victims. Turns out she found the tapes after deciding to move out of the house she shared with Mr. Schuehrer. That's when she discovered what happened to her... and the other women. Mr. Barker says she hoped Fox5 would track down the other women and urge them to come forward.

If there had been more information on the tapes, we might have been able to find these women. But with little else to go on, we made the call to turn over the tapes to the authorities.

When it was all over, our anonymous source got exactly what she wanted. And a serial rapist will be gone for a long time.