I was living pretty close to their house during the time of the murders and I never heard about any rapist. I'm not saying that it didn't happen, but there was no big fear about some serial rapist in the area. IF it happened, it didn't happen too many times. The sock found with the boys' blood and Darlie's DNA came from their own home. If this so-called rapist had entered their home, I would think that he would have brought his own sock with him and wouldn't have relied on the Routiers just so happening to have a pile of laundry nearly (he most likely would have brought his own knife too, thereby making it completely unnecessary to use Darlie's own knife to rape her). Moreover, the only view anyone would have had of Darlie on the sofa would have been from the backyard. Since the gate on the fence in the backyard was broken, the guy would have had to have scaled the fence. There was no evidence whatsoever that anyone had done that. More importantly, I'm not sure why someone would scale the fence of someone's backyard just so they could peek into a window that they had no idea would even give them a few of the inside of the home when there would have been absolutely no way to know beforehand that (a) anyone was sleeping on the couch; or (b) that one of the window blinds was bend backward giving the person a tiny glimpse of the inside of the home. And, most people know that in a two-story house, most of the bedrooms would be on the second story. Unless someone knew that the woman of the house would be sleeping on the sofa, they'd have to be one pretty lucky rapist to just happen upon a house where the woman was sleeping. Lastly, if this was a rapist, the moment that he saw two little boys sleeping on the floor, I would think the instinct would be to get the hell out of there as fast as possible -- NOT to murder the boys and then rape the mother. AND let's not forget that there wasn't one thing that could be found to indicate that anyone besides the family had been in the home that evening.
