Читать книгу Faces of Evil - Lois Gibson - Страница 13
ОглавлениеNever in my life had I looked into the face of evil until the day I found myself being killed.
There are some crime victims in this world to whom violence comes as no surprise. They’ve grown up with it, both at home and in their neighborhoods, in so many ways that they don’t know anything different. I once heard an account of a woman who was kidnapped by a brutal serial murderer who had killed all his other victims, but when he put the gun to her head, she simply nodded in weary recognition and said, “Go ahead. Pull the trigger. You’d be doing me a favor.” He was so surprised that he actually spared her life and let her go free.
I wasn’t like that.
The picturesque, homey setting of the old television series, The Waltons, starring Richard Thomas, would, if you’ve ever seen it, give you a pretty good idea of what my childhood was like. It’s the kind of lifestyle seen in nostalgic Hallmark Christmas specials and I’ve got a lot of brothers and sisters who could back me up. I was born on a farm in Missouri on February 25, 1950, to Eva and Don Herbert, the second of five kids. When it came time for Mama to go to the hospital, they took her in a horse and carriage. Mama was college educated. She had been a school teacher before she got married and Daddy had a gift for carpentry, so they moved their growing family to Kansas City, to a house with only one bedroom, where he soon found all the work he could handle. All my growing-up years, Daddy was building on to that house. The sounds of hammering, sawing and Daddy whistling Tennessee Waltz was the soundtrack of my childhood.
We lived at the top of a hill on a dead-end street and in wintertime, Daddy climbed onto a big sled he’d fashioned and piled as many kids on his lap as he could fit and down the hills we went, screaming with glee in the sun-sparkled cold.
There was so much love everywhere I looked. Artistically gifted and (like most creative types) a very sensitive child, I was what you might call a “goody two-shoes,” always trying to please, doing well in school, making my parents proud. My sister Adonna was two years older than me and, like Mama, a born teacher. From the time I was a toddler, Adonna made it her business to teach me whatever she had learned that day. When I started school, everyone thought I was precocious because I seemed to know my lessons before they were taught. But for years, I suffered from bouts of self-doubt, fearing that the only smart one in the family was my older sister. I didn’t know if I was really intelligent or just well-trained, like a good dog.
In high school I twirled baton with the marching band, but I wasn’t what you would call “popular.” I tended to rely on my sisters to be my girlfriends and, though I dated boys, I wasn’t really aware of the fact that others felt I was turning into something of a beauty.
I wanted to go to college, but there was no way my parents could afford it, especially since they still had three young children at home. After struggling to take classes at Wichita State University and Kansas University while working part-time, I decided that there had to be a better way. Even though I’m an artist, I have a very practical nature and I knew that even entry-level jobs in a city like Los Angeles paid a great deal more than those same jobs did in Kansas City. I figured I could find work out there and, if I lived very frugally and saved my money—something all us Herbert kids knew how to do—I could come back to Kansas after a year or so and be able to afford at least a year or two of college without having to work part-time while going to school.
It was a good plan, actually. I got a job fairly quickly working for Prudential Insurance Company on Wilshire Boulevard and found a nice apartment near the UCLA campus. It was a secure building; you had to have a card to get your car into the garage, a key to get into the front door of the building and then a separate key to get into your own apartment. Young professionals and college professors lived there and I felt very safe.
Of course, I knew that if I ever forgot my key to the building, I could just slip in behind someone else who had just entered, but it never occurred to me that so could anyone else who wanted to get in. As I said, I didn’t know evil. Not then.
A guy I dated suggested I apply at a modeling agency in town, but I didn’t take him very seriously. I’d been to “Career Days” back in high school and modeling representatives there had always said you had to be tall—at least 5’7”—and I was only 5’5”. But I took the dare and gave it a shot and before I knew it I was going out on all kinds of jobs during my off hours from the insurance agency.
I worked part-time as a model and made quite a bit of money doing it. If people don’t know me very well, they assume I was one of those proverbial starry-eyed milk-fed Midwestern girls who get off the bus, big-headed with dreams of fame and fortune on the silver screen. The truth is, I was paid $100 an hour—which, at that time, was real money—and although the guy who ran the agency thought I’d have a big career because of my looks, I was never swayed by that kind of talk. To stake an entire career on looks that were doomed to fade eventually made no sense to me at all. Even worse, I found modeling to be a mind-numbing occupation and I wanted a career that was more challenging than standing in front of a camera all day long. Still, I got to pose for Playboy and that was fun.
The modeling led to a stint as a “go-go girl” on one of the popular L.A. television shows of the day, The Real Don Steal Show. Don Steal was a popular disc jockey who based his show on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. At the beginning of the show, he introduced one other girl and me as “The Real Don Stealers” and we came running out in our hot pants and knee-high go-go boots looking all jazzed and excited to be there. We climbed up on raised platforms above the crowd of mostly high-schoolers and we danced for an hour and a half.
It was like jogging in high heels for an hour and a half, but it was fun. I loved to dance and, I must admit, I loved the attention. The show was filmed at the old Fox studios on Beverly Boulevard, where I met and dated a few celebrities of the time, including the handsome Max Baer, who played “Jethro” on the popular TV show, The Beverly Hillbillies.
With all the fun, there was also an undercurrent of violence. The Vietnam War still raged out of control on the TV evening news and movie heroes like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry and Al Pacino in The Godfather glorified macho, violent manhood. At the Olympic games in Munich, terrorists turned a sporting event into a bloodbath when they murdered eleven Israeli athletes.
I was aware of all those things, of course, but they seemed far away, in places that didn’t affect me. I was having the time of my life, a single girl in L.A., making money, dating successful, good-looking guys and being told all the time how beautiful I was. My life was full and busy and I was saving money to go to college. I missed my family terribly, but I was home (at my apartment) so seldom that I didn’t even own a television set.
The thing is, when you are raised surrounded by love and security, you assume that the world is a good place, full of good people. I always expected the best out of people and I had a loving nature. When I met someone, I usually liked him or her; when I loved, I loved unconditionally. It was what I had known and it was what I expected.
And then one day, my calm, happy life exploded.
Anyone who has ever experienced a tragedy knows that nothing will ever be quite the same again.
It was about six in the evening and I was in my peaceful apartment, lounging around in jeans and a T-shirt. I’d quit my job at the insurance company and had not found a new one yet, but I had plenty of money in savings and was glad to be able to relax at home for a while.
There was a knock at the door.
“Who’s there?” I called.
I heard a man’s soft-spoken voice, “Uh, hi. You don’t know me—my name is Jim Hutchinson. I live right down the hall and I’ve seen you come and go and I thought, hey, we’re neighbors, why don’t we get acquainted?”
As I said, when you’re brought up loved and safe, you expect the best in people. I didn’t know anyone named Jim Hutchinson, but I had met so many nice people in the building. Right away, I trusted him.
I opened the door to see a thin white man with a goatee.
In a heartbeat, powerful hands closed around my throat, thumbs pressing against my larynx and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door to my apartment being kicked closed.
In that one moment, my own home became a torture chamber.
The chokehold on my throat was so tight that I literally went blind. As I was shoved backward onto my sofa, I struggled to breathe.
Did you ever have a nightmare where you strive with all your might to scream, but no sound comes out and you wake up heaving and sweating, too scared to close your eyes again from fear the nightmare will return?
This was my nightmare, only there was no waking up.
He ripped at my jeans with such violence that it felt as if my leg was being torn off. The pain was so intense that, in my oxygen-deprived panic, I thought I might really lose my leg, so I twisted my body to enable the pants to come off and, in so doing, managed to free my throat just enough from his death-grip that I was able to gasp for air. I felt like I was in a swimming pool or lake, under water for far too long and, finally breaking to the surface, I gulped for life. At least I tried to, but as soon as he noticed, he squeezed more tightly again.
Air. Sweet, blessed air. How we take it for granted. How we breathe, in and out, in and out, without giving it a thought.
Air was all I could think about as I fought and pushed against his chest, his arms, his face, fighting for my life, but it was all in vain, because the harder I fought, the tighter he squeezed until finally, I blacked out.
But that was all part of the game. He’d been waiting for me to black out, so that he could loosen his grip and watch for me to regain consciousness. When I came to, I took a couple of ragged gasps for air and as I did he began to choke me again.
Again I fought. Again he squeezed the life out of me. Again I blacked out.
This time, when I came around again, I was weaker and for the first time, the clear thought came to me: He’ll never let me get out of here alive.
When you’re facing death, I learned, time doesn’t have the same properties. A second no longer feels like a second, because seconds are all you have left. So a second seems to last more like a half-hour—everything slows way, way down, as if you are moving through water or slogging through a swamp. I felt myself detach from myself and stand aside, like an observer, watching myself being strangled.
Then I blacked out a third time.
When I woke up, I actually flashed on that old cartoon image of a drowning man going under water; he puts up one finger, comes up for air, goes under again, then puts up two fingers, comes up a second time, but then, when he goes under and holds up three fingers, you know that he’s not going to come up again. I had been strangled unconscious three times and I didn’t know how long I’d been under each time, but I knew my brain had been seriously deprived of oxygen. I wondered how much brain damage I could stand before it would be better if I didn’t wake up at all.
He choked me unconscious again. This time, when I came to and saw him glaring over me with a strange smile on his face, I thought, I’m going to die! I’m not ready! I haven’t had children yet! I didn’t get to go to college! I haven’t LIVED!
And my next thought was of love, of those I loved and I only had time to think about my favorite person—my baby brother, Brent, who was about fourteen, when “Jim Hutchinson” started to kill me for real.
When the life is being choked out of you and you feel you only have seconds to live, all you have left in the world are your thoughts. In many ways, it’s like being instantly paralyzed—all you have is your intellect, your mind. You are trapped. All you have is NOW, this moment, and suddenly, everything in life becomes relative to that one fact.
There is something else both shocking and surprising. In an act of violent crime, when your life is literally held in the hands of another, you have, during those brief but seemingly endless seconds, a relationship with your attacker. And as death narrows the perimeters of your existence and you begin to detach and look at the situation from the distance of approaching annihilation, it all becomes relative.
Now, I looked straight into his face—really looked. After all, I was going to die anyway, I reasoned and I wanted to look my killer in the eye. His complexion was pasty white. He had a bluish five o’clock shadow around his goatee and dark eyebrows. His expression was amazing to me, because he appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself.
What I actually saw was a pitiful, awful, monstrous man who had taken what should be a supreme act of love and tenderness between two people who care deeply for one another and had twisted and perverted it into an act of hatred and violence and death.
What kind of person needs to watch someone die to have fun? I thought.
I’ve always been a spiritual person and my faith has always had a powerful impact on my life. I believed that I was probably bound for heaven in the next few moments and I also believed that, when his own time came to die, this man was going straight to hell.
And something about that thought struck me as funny. Not that I could have laughed, if I’d wanted to, because his chokehold on me was tightening again, but I felt my body relax and I guess I laughed in my eyes because whatever he saw drove him into a rage. He grew more vicious. Still holding me by the neck, he began to shake me like a rag doll, my head snapping back and forth.
“Say you love me!” he growled, his voice angry, agitated and demanding.
How stupid, I thought. How the hell am I supposed to say anything when my throat is completely closed?
I guess my expression was defiant, because he yanked me back and forth by the throat again, my head flopping like a balloon.
“SAY ‘I LOVE YOU!’” he shouted, his voice almost inhuman in its fury.
Death was there, right there and it drove me to panic. Somehow, some way, I managed to squeeze out something that sounded like, “dgll LLODSOVE DGOO.”
My compliance seemed to calm him a little, but it wasn’t enough. A few moments later he started to choke me even more violently and I knew that this time, I would not wake up. In a raw terror, my instincts took over, pure animal fight-for-survival instincts that were telling me to act as if I was enjoying it.
So I moved my hips, trying to get him to climax so he would be done, so he would get off me, so he would go away, so I could live.
It worked. He ejaculated and immediately rolled off me, pulled up his pants and headed for the door. I got up too and tried to get there first so that I could run, but he anticipated that and hurried to block the way, walking backwards toward the door.
Suddenly, he put his hands up in front of him, almost in a pleading gesture and said, incredibly, impossibly, “We’ll have to date again.”
We’ll have to date again. The words resounded in my ears.
But he wasn’t finished. Reaching into his pants pocket, he withdrew a little silver and tiger’s eye jeweled, oval pillbox and handed it to me.
A gift, a present...from our “date.”
Still moving as if in a nightmare, I put my hand to my throat and realized that I was actually bleeding inside my throat. I stood there shaking in front of him, still naked from the waist down, bleeding inside, holding the pill box. In the next moment, he was gone.
It took one rapist less than half an hour to rip apart my life.
I remember looking at the clock because I was worried about how many minutes my brain had been deprived of oxygen. He knocked on my door at 6 P.M. and was gone by 6:25.
In that brief time frame, everything that had made me, me, had been crushed; I was consumed by fear and traumatized.
My family was a couple of thousand miles away and I was alone.
The first thing I did after he left my apartment was bolt for the bathroom, where I took a glance at my reflection in the mirror and almost fainted again.
The whites of my eyes were no longer white. They were blood red.
Gagging, I staggered backward. I no longer recognized myself. I was so shocked that I did not look into a mirror again for days.
Then I crawled into the shower and scrubbed my whole body with vinegar and then shampoo and then soap and other stuff. Scrubbed until my skin nearly bled.
I thought about calling the police, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What if they said that, by opening my door, I had willingly let the guy in? Plus, I’d modeled for Playboy and I’d danced on television in hot pants and go-go boots—what if they said I had somehow brought this on myself?
If any cop says anything like that to me, I caught myself thinking, I’ll kill the son of a bitch.
The state of mind I was in, I could easily picture myself lunging across the desk of some smart-ass cop and bodily attacking him.
Gone was the sweetly trusting, loving, naive little Lois from Kansas City. In her place was this raging, filled-with-frustration, devastated and distrustful…thing.
I just wasn’t me anymore and I wasn’t sure what the new me would be capable of.
I slept.
For twelve hours, I slept.
And then I realized I needed food. I was out of almost everything.
But I looked like a monster, bloody-eyed and fierce. And I didn’t even own a pair of sunglasses to help me hide.
So I hid in my apartment.
In the kitchen were one egg, one piece of bacon, one limp stalk of celery and half a bag of flour.
I lived on that. I cut the bacon into eight little slices. Once a day, I fried up one of the small pieces with a handful of flour and ate it.
Otherwise, I slept and waited for the blood to drain out of my eyeballs so that I could look human again before venturing forth into polite society. I lived like that for two weeks.
Starvation finally drove me out. I deliberately planned my visit to the grocery store less than a block away. I would go at 2 P.M., which I deemed to be the safest time of day and also the least crowded.
When I finally skulked into the market, I refused to get a cart and start down the aisles until I looked around and could be reasonably certain that there were no men in the store.
Once I had done this I rushed to grab a few modest but necessary purchases. Gratefully I found a female checker.
So far, so good.
I paused at the magazine rack in front of the store, bag of groceries in hand and was browsing the periodicals when a little boy—no more than six or seven—came over and stood beside me.
ATTACK HIM! screamed a voice inside my incredulous brain. KILL HIM STRIKE HIM SMASH HIM HURT HIM!!
Blinking in shock at the savagery of my own thoughts, I forced myself to breathe deeply, told myself, For heaven’s sake, he’s just a little boy! while I broke out in a sweat and began to back away.
From some dim distance I heard a man’s voice say, “Come on, son. It’s time to go,” and it was all I could do not to whirl around and scream, You idiot! He could have been hurt!
With that, I rushed out of the store, my vision so blurred with tears I could barely find my car.
It was then that I realized just how messed up I really was.
In the blur that passed for the next few weeks, I spiraled downward and downward into a depression so severe I began to question my own sanity.
When I had to go back to work, I chose to work for a temp agency, because it allowed me to be basically anonymous, as the jobs afforded little time to make friends. Somehow I managed to function, more or less, in a way that didn’t arouse any suspicions from anyone around me, but inside, I was screaming.
“Justice” isn’t a word that we normally think about in our day to day lives, but it preoccupied me to the point of obsession. More than anything in the world, I wanted that awful pervert to be caught and made to pay for what he had done to me, but how could that possibly happen if I wouldn’t go to the police?
So then I obsessed about making a police report, but my thoughts kept swirling round and round themselves and always came out the same: They’ll take one look at me, find out I’m a model and a dancer and blame me.
And I still had all this rage inside me, this wild animal clawing against the cage and howling at the moon. I was truly afraid of what I might do if I did talk to the police and they did doubt my story in any way. I actually worried that I would attack somebody at the police department and they would arrest me and put me in jail.
I was terrified and filled with fury and I wanted to die.
In all fairness to the Los Angeles police, I have to say that since I didn’t make a report, I really have no way of knowing what they would have said or how they would have reacted—these were fears, among the many terrors that roamed around the black desperate corners of my mind—and nobody ever said there was anything logical about fear. So I never did go to the police, but that didn’t stop my own unreasonable obsession that the guy who had raped me somehow, some way had to be punished for his crime.
Six weeks or so after the rape I left work early one day so that I could beat the traffic. I got in my car and was traveling down a busy boulevard, not thinking anything in particular, when suddenly, as if driving itself, my car turned into a parking lot. I sat, somewhat befuddled and stared at the shop in front of me. It was a high-priced clothing boutique where I never shopped because it was far too expensive for me, but there I was, for some reason.
I got out of the car and, like a zombie or some extra from the movie Night of the Living Dead, walked into the store. There, hanging on a rack in front of me, was a splendid full-length purple velvet skirt that had been marked down to less than twenty dollars.
Maybe I’m supposed to buy this, I thought, but I was still confused. Why had I driven here? What weird thing was happening? I paid for the skirt and got back into my car, determined to drive home this time.
But my car seemed to have a mind of its own and without my consciously doing so, I found myself turning the car up a steep, winding, two-lane street next to the parking lot.
I couldn’t turn around, I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where I was going and my eyes welled up with tears because I was beginning to think I’d entered the Twilight Zone.
It was one of those times when I was truly afraid that I might be losing my mind.
After all, I was terribly scared of everything after my traumatic attack. The last thing I ever wanted to do was find myself in unfamiliar territory. All I’d done for two months was go to work, buy groceries and stay cloistered in my apartment. Why was I doing this? I didn’t want to be here!
I just wanted to go home. Yet I couldn’t.
Finally, the road leveled off and I spotted a graveled area where I would be able to turn my car around and get the hell out of this place. I pulled into the small area and glanced up—
Right into the face of my attacker.
He was just emerging from the second-floor doorway of a shabby, rundown apartment complex and seemed to be heading straight for my car.
A soul-chilling scream gathered at the back of my throat, but before I could open my mouth, two other men appeared in the doorway, one on each side of the man who had tried to kill me.
Police officers.
The man who had forced his way into my apartment, tortured and raped me was being led out of the building in handcuffs!
His thin, pale face was twisted, enraged and desperate. He was fighting and struggling against the cops the same way I had fought with him.
I stared in profound shock as the police dragged him down the stairs and slammed him face-down onto the hood of the police cruiser. My mind was so stupefied at the sight that I don’t think I even breathed.
Something about this strange, horrified woman sitting staring from her car at the scene must have caught the attention of one of the officers, because I was startled from my stunned disbelief by a cop banging his hand down on the hood of my car.
I fumbled to roll down the window.
“Do you know this man?” he asked.
Now, I’m a very honest person normally and I felt like every thought I had in my mind at that very moment was plastered all over my face, so I tried to tell myself that, actually, I didn’t know the man since, obviously, we had never been formally introduced.
“N-no,” I stammered.
Of course the cop knew I was lying, because they get lied to all day long and they know a liar when they see one, so he asked me to get out of my car and requested permission to search the vehicle. Naturally I said yes and when he had satisfied himself that I didn’t even have a pack of cigarettes, much less contraband, he relaxed a little.
“Why has this man been arrested?” I asked breathlessly, my heart hammering in my chest so hard I thought it would jump out of my mouth. My knees were so weak I had to lean against the car for support.
He said, “Six keys of cocaine.”
I didn’t know what a “key” of cocaine was. In many ways, I was still an innocent little girl from Kansas City and I struggled to get my mind around a picture that flashed into my head of a piece of cocaine, shaped like a key.
With a little smile, he added, “That’s six kilos of coke.”
Timidly, I said, “Is that a lot?”
“Yes,” he said and to his credit, he didn’t laugh at the question. I guess he’d figured out by then that I wasn’t one of this guy’s drug customers or something.
“He’ll get a lot of jail time,” he added kindly.
Numbly, I crawled back into my car, turned on the ignition, stepped lightly on the gas pedal and somehow managed to steer to the bottom of the hill, where I pulled into the first parking lot I could find, stopped and burst into jagged, tearing sobs. For a while I wept and then suddenly, I broke out laughing. Then I cried some more. And laughed some more.
It was so incredible. So unbelievable. My bruised and battered heart had cried out for justice, just simple, sweet justice and it had all seemed so impossible. I had never reported the crime and I didn’t see how this guy would ever get caught.
Los Angeles is an enormous, sprawling city with millions of people. The way I see it, there is no other explanation for what happened to me other than a miracle and, as I mentioned before, my faith has always played a powerful role in my life. What else could it be? What are the odds that I would be driving down that unfamiliar road at just that time, when I would usually be at work, but that day I would leave early and would happen upon the evil man who had attacked me being taken into police custody right in front of me?
As long as I draw breath, I will never forget that sight: that twisted, angry, wicked face emerging from the dark doorway into the light, followed by two big strapping cops.
That feeling, that amazing, jubilant, triumphant feeling I had at that moment—the relief and joy that, at long last, justice had indeed been found...is a feeling that I want to give to every victim of violent crime.
I know now that the way I behaved after my attack is perfectly normal for anyone who has been the victim of a violent crime; however, I also know that if it happened to me now, or to someone I love, I would encourage completely different steps following an attack.
In order to understand why I behaved the way I did after my attack, it is necessary to turn back the clock more than thirty years. Before the women’s movement. Before rape crises counselors. Before victim’s advocates. Before sensitivity seminars and modern laws and DNA evidence analysis and “post-traumatic stress disorder” counselors and even before women law enforcement officers (other than meter maids and undercover prostitutes). It was a different world back then for women who were victims of violent crime.
I have a friend who is a fine law enforcement officer now for a major metropolitan police force. When she was nineteen, she was attacked and raped by a stranger while walking to class on her college campus one night. She called the police and the male detectives who interviewed her not only acted as if she had somehow invited the attack or was otherwise being untruthful about it, but actually snickered and told jokes at her expense.
She vowed from that day that she would become a cop, “Because I knew then,” she told me, “that I could do a better job than that.”
Even if a woman showed clear signs of a beating or knifing when she reported the rape, she was very likely to be brutalized all over again when called upon to testify in court. Her past sexual history could be brought up and used against her, as well as whatever clothing she might have been wearing that could be construed as “seductive.”
For these reasons and many more, only one rape in ten was even reported and very few actually went to court.
Nowadays, thank God, the public is much better informed and educated about sexual assault. We know now that this is not a crime about sex at all, but about power and dominance and humiliation. If it were a crime that had anything to do with sexual attraction, then eighty-year old women and five-year-old children would not be raped.
A woman who is sexually assaulted now—especially in a major metropolitan area—is more than likely interviewed by a sympathetic detective (a female, if possible) and at the hospital during her examination will usually be accompanied by a rape crisis counselor, who will walk her through most of the judicial process. Her sexual history is off-limits to defense attorneys and she is treated with far more respect, in most cases, than could be expected thirty years ago.
At the very least, even if she chooses not to report the rape, she will have crisis hot lines she can call and someone to talk to, anonymously and free of charge, from anywhere in the country, at any time, day or night.
But none of those resources was available to the young Lois.
Over the years, I have since interviewed hundreds of rape victims and have found that certain things I did during the attack may have saved my life. For instance, moving my hips to force his ejaculation. This is not an unusual tactic for a victim to use in order to survive. It can cause unnecessary guilt later, making them fear that somehow they were encouraging the attack, but rest assured, it’s nothing like that. It’s pure survival, nothing less.
Some of the other things I’ve learned through the years of working with rape victims have, when I think about my own attack, made my blood run cold. Like significance of the fact that the whites of my eyes turned red.
I’ve now seen this several times in strangulation victims. I have to add—some of those victims were dead. (I’m sometimes called to the morgue to do sketches of unknown crime victims.) Whenever I see some poor girl who didn’t make it out alive, stark-staring eyes blood red, it just brings home to me all over again how very close I once came to death.
I now know the phenomenon is called petechial bleeding and what it means is that the force of the pressure on the veins and arteries in the throat is so powerful that the tiny blood vessels in the eyeball actually burst.
I didn’t know any of this, of course, back in 1972.
I also made plenty of mistakes following my attack. The first was not reporting the assault to the police. The second was the fact that I bathed away all the evidence of the crime.
Nowadays, of course, victims are urged not to bathe until they have had a chance to be examined by a doctor, so that semen and other evidence can be collected in a “rape kit” and saved for trial. So valuable is this evidence that it is crucial that a victim go to the hospital even before being interviewed—preferably in the company of a police officer who can secure the evidence and preserve the chain of evidence for trial.
But what I did is a very common reaction. The first thing most rape victims report is feeling “dirty.” But what they don’t realize is that the stain is not on their bodies but in their souls. This is a violation of the most private, most personal, most essential part of what gives a woman her sense of identity and once that secure wall has been breached, she can never again feel safe.
The man who attacked me in my home may not have killed my body, but he killed me, all right. He killed the me that I was and for the next couple of months, I was a dead woman walking. Now that we understand so much more about post-traumatic stress, my behavior was understandable. But of course, I didn’t know that then. In fact, even the term “post-traumatic stress” was not coined until a few years after my attack, by psychologists working with Vietnam veterans.
Still, my healing started on the day I saw justice done. That day, I came alive again.
This is what I want to give my witnesses: new life.
It would be a while, though, before I would be able to find my life’s work.
First I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And then...I had to come out of hiding.
But before I could do that, I had to do some hand-to-hand combat with my own demons.
