Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - M. William Phelps - Страница 28

I

Mary Ellen was able to stand and grab the doorknob to her landlady’s apartment and rattle it. Her hand, however, kept slipping off the handle because they were “all wet.”

Full of blood.

I really must have gotten his eyes good, she thought.

Then, standing there, with only a door to safety between her and the landlady, everything went quiet. Mary Ellen didn’t hear the landlady and realized that Ned was gone. An eerie silence. It was just Mary Ellen. Alone. She could feel herself getting weaker and her body drooping. She looked down. Her dress was all “crumpled around her waist and full of blood.” She then saw the holes in her body once again with “blood [still] spurting out of them.” Her legs started to give out. Her knees buckled. She began to slide down against the door.

This is really crazy, she thought. This only happens in movies. I’m inches away from safety and I’m going to die right here.

Her life had come down to a door. A woman scared of letting her in. She was going to die because she couldn’t get through a damn wooden door.

II

The landlady must have seen the cops pull up, because she finally opened the door as two cruisers arrived out front. When she heard the door open, Mary Ellen pushed her way inside and said, “Call the police. Close the door right away. He’s still up there.”

When the landlady didn’t respond, Mary Ellen closed and locked the door.

“The police are coming,” the landlady said as Mary Ellen, bloodied, topless, and hysterical, fell into the landlady’s apartment and started stumbling around from room to room. Dizzy and unsteady. Totally out of it. Fading in and out.

Pulling herself up off the floor, Mary Ellen found her way into her landlady’s kitchen and collapsed on the linoleum floor. What seemed like only moments later, a policeman appeared over Mary Ellen and began asking questions. Seeing a silhouette of the policeman standing over her, Mary Ellen later recalled, was a relief. She had won.

She survived.

III

Just before police arrived, Ned ran back upstairs and grabbed Mary Ellen’s keys—a souvenir, perhaps, which was something he had done in the past—pushed a window open and, swinging from the upper windowsill like a monkey, jumped from the roof, over the asphalt walkway. He landed on his feet, like a cat, on the grass out front—as luck would have it, right near his car. Within a few moments, Ned was on his way out of the neighborhood as more police were arriving from the opposite direction.

IV

Mary Ellen was hurt more severely than she knew. Survival wasn’t a given. When Officer Gary Van Loon approached her as she lay on her landlady’s kitchen floor, he and his partner noticed that her dress, “laying across her genital area,” was covered with blood. The area of the floor around Mary Ellen was one large pool. There was also a great deal of blood on her hands, Van Loon later wrote in his report.

Noticing the two puncture wounds below her breasts, Van Loon immediately applied pressure in order to stop the bleeding.

Van Loon’s partner, Officer Kayne, came into the kitchen with a first-aid kit and wrapped the wounds until an ambulance arrived. Another officer dashed upstairs to see if Mary Ellen’s attacker was still inside the apartment. After a careful, gun-drawn search, it was clear he had slipped out a window and taken off. The drifting curtain in the open window was the only sign of his departure.

Mary Ellen was transported to Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Saddle Brook. Upstairs, inside her apartment, detectives working the scene noticed several things that caught their attention immediately. Mary Ellen’s black bra was on the floor, but it was unknown, Van Loon wrote, if it was torn off or taken off. The telephone jack in the kitchen was ripped from the wall. Mary Ellen’s bed was “open,” the bedspread on the floor. The nightstand and lamp Mary Ellen had next to her bed had been knocked over, as other pieces of furniture were spewn [sic] around.

And no weapon was located.