Girl Blinded, Disfigured in Attack Tells Story to 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 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, 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.”

Speaking softly but clearly, the teen-ager--who wore a flesh-colored bandage on her face and head, mirrored sunglasses and a white, short-billed 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 of the eight women and four men on the 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.” 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, kidnap, 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 in this trial, said San Bernardino County Deputy Dist. Atty. Dwight Moore, 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 statement 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 UCI Medical Center, answered the questions of prosecutor Moore.

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. But 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, she said.

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

“Did that frighten you?” Moore asked. “Yes,” she replied.

She said she followed the man’s orders to get out of the van but refused to enter his home. And though she said she had an opportunity to flee when the man entered the home and flicked the lights off and on, she did not because “I was scared . . . . I was afraid he might let his dogs (in the front yard) out on me . . . . They were barking at me. Also, I was afraid he might turn the van around and run over me.”

The man ordered her back in the van, she told the jury, and they drove for 30 to 45 minutes. Five or six times, she said, the man told her to stop crying.

“He told me to stop crying or he’d throw acid on me,” she testified. “It (the acid) was between his seat and my seat . . . . It was in a plastic bottle with red writing” and a “red cap . . . . He said he’d been wanting to (perform) the F-word with me for a long time.”

When they arrived in what law enforcement authorities later determined was high desert off Interstate 15 in Hesperia, the man was “reaching for the acid bottle and he was putting it in his (jacket) pocket,” Cheryl said.

She described the man as being black and in his 60s, standing 5-feet-5 (“I was a little taller”) with black hair graying at the temples.

“He took the acid out of his pocket and put it on the ground and he told me to undo my pants,” she said. “. . . He showed me the acid . . . I saw the skull and crossbones (on the bottle) and at the bottom it said poison.”

Cheryl then described how the man tried unsuccessfully to rape her and then forced her to perform oral copulation. She said he paced around for a time, worrying aloud that she would identify him to authorities as she assured him she wouldn’t. She said her attacker then picked her up by the collar, laid her on the dirt and lay on top of her, placing his thumbs on her throat trying to choke her. She threw dirt in his face, and he then straddled her stomach and “started calling me names,” Cheryl told the jury.

‘Kicked Me Under a Tree’

She then watched him pour the acid over her, she said. “He got up and kicked me under a tree.”

The man stared at her for a while, then left, Cheryl said.

“Did you see anything?” Moore asked.

“No, I pretended I was dead.”

Before she began wandering for help, Cheryl said, she removed her jacket “because it felt like it was falling off. I took my vest off to wipe the acid off and that disintegrated partially. It got burnt up.”

She said she remembered walking “a long time” before succumbing to what she called extreme heat. She lay down beside a dirt road, she said, and eventually was picked up by a worker for the nearby California Aqueduct. He took her to a Hesperia 7-Eleven store, to which paramedics were summoned.

“Are you going to need more operations?” Moore asked Cheryl at the end of his questioning.

“Yes,” she said softly.

When the defense presents its case, Dole is expected to focus on discrepancies between King’s appearance and Cheryl’s description of her assailant and his clothing. The trial is expected to last about three weeks.

No Fingerprints Found

On Monday, Dole questioned Cheryl about the size of her assailant. “He weighed about 200 pounds?” Dole asked. “Yes,” Cheryl replied. King is a small man, weighing perhaps 140 or 150 pounds.

He questioned her about parts of the van she might have touched during the drive out to the desert, such as the door handle or perhaps the dashboard. (Prosecutor Moore has said outside court that investigators did not find Cheryl’s fingerprints inside the van, nor King’s fingerprints on the acid bottle or other pieces of evidence taken from the scene.)

The third day of the trial opened with testimony from Cheryl’s mother, Norma Bess, who gazed straight ahead as she answered questions from both the prosecutor and the defense attorney about what her daughter was wearing and what time she left home the day of the attack. She was on the witness stand only 10 minutes.

By lunchtime Monday, both mother and daughter were dismissed from the court and driven back to their apartment in Orange.

“I think I did a good job,” Cheryl said of her testimony in a phone interview Monday afternoon. “All I heard was the clicking, clicking (of journalists’ cameras) but it didn’t bother me that much.”

Did it bother her to think she was sitting in the same room with a man accused of disfiguring her?

“I just tried not to think about it.”