Girl Blinded, Disfigured by Rapist Details Attack for Jury

Cheryl Bess, the 16-year-old who was blinded and disfigured nine months ago when an assailant poured industrial drain cleaner on her head, testified on Monday that her attacker “told me to stop crying or he’d throw acid on me (that) would make my hair fall out and make my head swell up.”

In her first court appearance since the Oct. 24, 1984, attack, Cheryl told the jurors in the trial of Jack Oscar King that her attacker tried unsuccessfully to rape her and then attempted to choke her “with his thumbs on my throat,” because he feared she would “turn him in.”

“But I started to fight back,” she said firmly to a Superior Court here filled with news media representatives, former San Bernardino High School classmates and curious spectators.

The man then sat on her stomach, she said, and emptied the bottle of acid on her.

“It felt like water,” she said.

“He looked at me for a while, then he left,” she said quietly, adding, “. . . I pretended I was dead.”

Described Attacker

Speaking softly but clearly, the teen-ager, who wore a flesh-colored bandage on her face and head, mirrored sunglasses and a white racer cap, described her attacker, the white van in which she was abducted, the home the man first took her to and the violent desert attack that left her virtually without a face.

As she spoke, jurors also faced a blow-up of a yearbook portrait taken before the attack that prosecutors had propped up a few feet from the witness stand.

Cheryl never identified her attacker by name. Authorities arrested King, 65, hours after the attack based on the victim’s description of her assailant and the van and the fact that King worked as a maintenance man at the housing project in which Cheryl and her mother lived.

Some in the eight-woman, four-man jury winced and wiped away tears during the 1 1/2-hour testimony of Cheryl, who recalled the ordeal in often graphic terms. At one point, however, she shyly quoted her attacker as saying he wanted to perform “the F-word.”

At another point, the jurors chuckled and smiled broadly when Cheryl, with clear distaste, described the back of the van as “splotched with paint” and “unkempt.”

It was the third day of testimony by prosecution witnesses. King has been charged with attempted murder, kidnaping, assault with a caustic chemical, assault with a deadly weapon (sulfuric acid), assault with intent to commit rape, mayhem, attempted rape and forcible oral copulation.

A former painter employed by the San Bernardino County Housing Authority, King has remained at the San Bernardino County Jail in lieu of $500,000 bail since his arrest. He served 14 years of a 16-year state prison sentence for a 1961 rape attempt on a 3-year-old Irvine girl.

If convicted of each felony count, San Bernardino County Deputy Dist. Atty. Dwight Moore said, King could be sentenced to a maximum of “about 32 years” in prison.

King’s attorney, William Dole of the San Bernardino County public defender’s office, said in his opening statements last Wednesday that authorities arrested the wrong man. The real culprit “is still out in the community,” Dole told the jurors, adding, “Mr. King is not the man who took Cheryl Bess out to the desert.”

On Monday, Dole’s cross-examination of the disfigured teen-ager was brief and low-key. He asked her about the bandages on her hands and face (“they smooth my skin out, increase circulation” and prevent scar tissue from overgrowing,” Cheryl answered) and the plastic tube inserted in her throat.

Most of the morning, however, Cheryl, who now lives in Orange and is undergoing skin graft surgery to rebuild her face at University of California, Irvine, Medical Center, answered the questions of prosecutor Moore.

Accepted Ride to School

Dressed in blue jeans, purple high-top sneakers and a tan jacket and T-shirt, she recalled that on the morning of the attack, she left the San Bernardino housing project where she and her mother lived and was walking to school because her mother did not have the exact change required to ride the bus.

Moments later, at a nearby fast-food restaurant, she said, she accepted a ride to school from a man she recognized as a maintenance worker at the project. He had given her a ride to school the week before without incident, she said.

The man steered the van in the wrong direction and explained he had to go by his house, because he forgot to shut off the lights, Cheryl told the jury. However, she said, when they got to the home, he removed a “rusty screwdriver” from beneath the van’s passenger seat and, when she began to cry, held it to her neck.

“He said he was going to kill me,” she said.

“Did that frighten you?” Moore asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

After she refused to enter the house, she said, she was driven to the desert, where her assailant tried unsuccessfully to rape her and then poured the acid on her head.

Dole is expected to focus on discrepancies in Cheryl’s description of her assailant and his clothing when the defense presents its case, probably next week. The trial is expected to last about three weeks.