Interview with informant:

“Well there’s a crazy guy in our town, supposedly. In the mall in Sterling, Virginia there was this guy who would apparently walk around with a box cutter, and he would just—walk around with a box cutter—with the blade in so you couldn’t really tell that it was a weapon. And when he walked past women he would open up the blade and slice their butt. He would just cut their butt. He would just cut their butt and keep walking. And no one ever found out where, like, does he exist? Where he is? He just cut peoples’ butts. So. And that’s about as interesting as it ever got.”

This is a pretty disturbing piece about what might just be a violent sexual deviant. If something like this happened even once, no question it would get spread around to everyone who would listen. It’s got sex, violence, a strange and menacing pervert; the whole package. It’s also possible a woman was cut in some other way and blamed a person, or someone just made it up as a joke. Whatever the case, I doubt this rumor actually stopped anyone from going to any malls. Cautionary tales don’t quite outweigh the consumer impulse.