NORTON SHORES, Mich. (WOOD) -- More than two years after Jessica Heeringa disappeared from a Norton Shores gas station, one name keeps popping up: Brad Mason.
Kalamazoo police were arresting the 42-year-old Kalamazoo man for a brutal abduction and rape in that city when they shot him to death last year -- an apparent "suicide by cop."
But even in death, some persons of interest are more interesting than others.
His first known abduction and rape victim said she doesn't doubt he's capable of abducting Heeringa.
"I thought I was going to die for sure," the woman, now 39, said of her attack in 2004 in the Galesburg area. "100 percent sure."
"He's capable of probably anything," she continued.
A detective who investigated Mason's 2014 attack of a woman in Kalamazoo was the first to suggest a possible link.
"It certainly seemed that Brad Mason could have been responsible for Jessica Heeringa's disappearance," Detective Kristin Cole said.
Even Mason's own father wouldn't be surprised if he was.
"It's a possibility, yeah," Roger Mason said. "The killing of a person, I have a little doubt about that, but he did threaten the last girl in Kalamazoo with death. She was crying and saying I've got a mom and a dad and all that stuff, and he stopped. He wouldn't do it."
Police also point out Mason's connection to Muskegon: In 2011, he was paroled to a halfway house a few miles down the highway from the Exxon Mobil gas station where Heeringa worked and was last seen on the night of April 26, 2013.
"Maybe he was here that night, saw Jessica outside and he took an opportunity," Norton Shores Police Lt. Michael Kasher said. "Obviously, he had an impulse he couldn't control, and he was a brutal, brutal individual, rapist."
FIRST VICTIM FEARED DEATH
Mason's first known opportunity was just outside Galesburg in May 2004.
A 28-year-old woman was returning to her home at Galesburg Village Apartments with groceries.
"I was going to get my baby out of the car seat," the woman told Target 8. "This guy just grabbed me and choked me unconscious and kidnapped me for a couple hours and drove me way out in the middle of nowhere."
He took her into a cornfield a few miles away, where he raped her repeatedly.
"I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, he's going to cut me into little pieces now," the woman said. "I didn't know what was going to happen."
She said he acted as if he had done it before.
"He was really weird about wiping all the fingerprints out of the whole inside of the truck," she said.
She feared he would kill her if she looked at his face.
"He said if I told anyone, he was going to come back and kill me and my daughter," she said.
Then, she said, he cried.
"I said, 'What's wrong with you? What would make you do something like this?' I was just trying to say anything to get him to let me go," she said.
And he did -- near her car, where her baby was still sleeping.
Kalamazoo County sheriff's detectives identified Mason as a suspect early on, but he denied it, the victim couldn't identify him in a lineup and he left no DNA, according to a police report obtained by Target 8 through the Freedom of Information Act. Mason was never charged.
SECOND KNOWN RAPE: 'IT WAS VERY BRUTAL'
A decade later, a 24-year-old woman was walking to her boyfriend's house near South Westnedge in Kalamazoo early in the morning on Feb. 5, 2014, when she rebuffed a stranger's offer for a ride.
Minutes later, he was back, punching her in the face, driving her away, choking her with his hands and with a strap, threatening to kill her.
"She was held for several hours, repeatedly sexually assaulted, tortured. It was very brutal," Detective Kristin Cole said. "It was the most violent that I had ever seen in my career here."
"He was kind of flipping, personality-wise, during the ordeal" between choking, raping and threatening, then asking questions about the victim's life, the detective said.
The rapist then dropped her off not far from where he had grabbed her.
Kalamazoo detectives later learned that a man matching the rapist's description had exposed himself to another woman in the city that same evening. That helped them quickly zero in on Mason, who had a history of indecent exposure.
They also found the case from Galesburg in 2004.
"Once we had reviewed the 2004 Kalamazoo County case, we felt pretty confident that he was a serial abductor rapist," Cole said.
Mason already was on the sex offender registry for a 2006 conviction of accosting a child for immoral purposes. His father said the victim was an 8-year-old girl and that he had exposed himself to her. His record also included convictions for burglary and operating a chop shop.
SUSPECT TO DAD: 'I'M SLICK'
Police were trying to arrest Mason at his Kalamazoo apartment on Feb. 7, 2014 -- two days after the South Westnedge abduction -- when he came down with a realistic toy gun. Police shot him dead.
"They had him dead to rights," Mason's father said, referring to the South Westnedge attack. "They had the truck that had her blood in it, his DNA in it; she had his DNA on her. They had him."
Days later, Mason's father told police that his son had confessed the 2004 rape to him.
"I asked him why he keeps doing it, you know, and he said, 'Because I'm slick, Dad. I think I'm smarter than they are,'" his father told Target 8.
The father told police that his son gave him details of the 2004 abduction and rape sometime in the spring of 2004, including "picking the girl up and driving out into the country where he raped her several times and then dropped her back off near hear apartment," the report states.
He also recalled what seems to be an earlier incident, possibly in 2001.
He "recalls Brad coming home and saying that he had done something 'really, really bad,' and that Brad needed to go hide out in the woods for a while. He recalls Brad living in the woods behind his residence in a vehicle for at least a week," the report reads in part.
"Brad would call each day on his cell phone to see if anyone had been to the residence looking for him," the father told police.
It was Cole, the Kalamazoo detective, who later noticed similarities between Mason's attacks and the Heeringa abduction.
"Both victims were petite white females, both victims had glasses," she said.
Mason had punched his Kalamazoo victim in the face, causing her to bleed. Police found traces of Heeringa's blood outside the gas station.
Then there was the composite sketch of the Heeringa suspect.
"It looked to me like it could be a possibility that it was Brad Mason," Cole said.
CELLPHONE TURNED OFF AT 9 P.M.
Norton Shores detectives took it from there and worked it hard, but the lead went nowhere.
They hoped he'd left a trail of credit card receipts, maybe even at the Norton Shores Exxon, but found he used only cash. Searches turned up nothing at his Kalamazoo apartment or in his vehicles.
They hoped his phone had left pings on cellphone towers around Norton Shores the day Jessica disappeared. But he had turned off his phone at 9 that night.
"He also did it those nights he abducted those other women," NSPD Lt. Kasher said. "I find that really intriguing. I never turn my cellphone off."
Kasher said phone records obtained by police showed Mason turned off his cellphone on other nights. He wonders if those were the nights he was on the prowl.
"He was out searching, he was an animalist type person going out looking for a victim," Kasher said.
The bottom line though: No direct links to Heeringa, but no alibis, either.
Kasher said he fears that if it was Mason, police may never find out what happened to Heeringa.
"That would be one fear that I'm hoping against, that it is somehow linked to him, that he took it to his grave and only he knew where Jessica is at and only he knew what happened that night," Kasher said. "I'm hoping it doesn't work out that way."
Police said they've identified other persons of interest as well. They hope somebody who knew Mason will come forward with either a link to Heeringa, or with an alibi so they can move on with the case.
"He still sits on top of the list, and we're hoping that maybe some information comes out," Kasher said. "I'm hoping that the secret, if that's his secret and he has that secret, that he has revealed it or he has left something behind that will lead us to him, and lead us to where Jessica's at."
Anyone with information about Heeringa’s disappearance is asked to call the Norton Shores Police Department at 231.733.2691 or Muskegon County Silent Observer at 231.72.CRIME (27463).
There is a $26,000 reward for information leading to the resolution of the case.