A Rape Victim Does More Than Survive

To know Kelly St. John is to have a little more faith in the future. Kelly is a 21-year-old college senior, a superb scholar who is energetic, cheerful, kind. She is also brave.

But one recent evening, Kelly saw the film “Strange Days,” and, during a rape scene, she couldn’t hold back the tears. And then there was the moment in her self-defense class. Overpowered by her “attacker,” Kelly felt the urge to give up, to not fight back. She sobbed uncontrollably.

Kelly knows something about rape. “I know I can survive,” she says.

Kelly was 14 years old that summer when a man who had been sitting on the gymnasium steps at Fullerton High School approached her. He reached his left arm around her neck and threatened her with a nine-inch knife. Don’t scream. Just get in the car. He drove Kelly into a remote canyon and raped her. If you tell anybody, he said, I’ll kill you. Then he drove away.

Kelly had the presence of mind to memorize his license plate. That night, Raymond Jay Barthlett was arrested and confessed. Before long he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Now DNA evidence has linked Barthlett to another crime: murder. One year before the attack on Kelly, Wendy Osborn, another 14-year-old girl from Orange County, was kidnaped, raped and killed.

And Kelly, for the first time, will be asked to testify in court against her rapist.

*

“Really, I’m not that traumatized.”

Kelly says this with a smile and a laugh. More than three years had passed since we’d last spoken, and more than four since I’d last seen her. In the summer of ‘91, Kelly St. John was the tall, friendly girl who sat in the back of the class at the California Scholastic Press Assn.’s annual workshop at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She was our top student that summer, one of the most talented young writers I’ve ever seen. When she was applying for college, she asked me to write a letter of recommendation. It was an honor.

We workshop instructors all knew Kelly would make us proud, but we never counted on anything like this. We never expected to read an Orange County Register story about “rape survivor Kelly St. John” and how authorities believe they’d solved a 1987 murder case.

It wasn’t as if Kelly had kept her experience a secret. She confided in close friends. For a class I taught on personal essays, Kelly had described a traumatic experience, though not in much detail. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I believe she mentioned a man with a knife. I was taken aback. But to see Kelly laughing in the classroom was to be assured that, well, some creep scared her, but she must have gotten away.

Now here was Kelly St. John, rape survivor, telling the rest of the story. Kelly St. John, the writer, could not have anticipated this denouement.

She doesn’t want the name of her college revealed. It’s fine if people know her story, but she doesn’t want to be contacted by strangers. She’s too busy with class. Suffice it to say she is living the life of the overachieving young scholar; she’s a candidate for a prestigious overseas fellowship and has applied for grad school at Yale and UC Berkeley. A political science major, Kelly did an internship with Congressional Quarterly and spent time studying in Zimbabwe.

She was still in Africa last summer when authorities told her parents, Bob and Sandy St. John, that Barthlett had been linked to a murder. Wendy Osborn’s body had been found in Carbon Canyon, the same region where Barthlett had taken Kelly.

Kelly’s parents waited for her to come home before telling her the news. It is a strange feeling, Kelly says, to know there was this other girl. “She’s dead and I’m not.”

Two oversights--one in a crime lab, another within the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department--had resulted in the long delay in linking Barthlett to the Osborn murder, says Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael McDowell.

This time, Barthlett has shown no inclination toward confession and plea bargain.

*

These are strange days for Kelly. In the movie, the rape victim had been tied up. So was Wendy Osborn. Kelly feels she wept for Wendy. In her self-defense class, Kelly felt overwhelmed by a dilemma: Is it better, smarter, to resist? Do you want to make him angry?

“I don’t know. It boggles the mind to think about it.” She knows better than to dwell on questions that have no clear answer.

“I’ve always been a real lucky person,” she adds. “Bad stuff happens, but it’s not as bad as it could have been.”

Kelly figures she’s luckier than a lot of women she’s met. She’s the only rape survivor she knows who is certain her attacker is behind bars. Unlike many rape victims, Kelly was never doubted by authorities. A defense attorney never tried to put her on trial.

And Kelly figures she’s luckier than some women who’ve been raped by friends and relatives--men they trusted. There’s no betrayal if the rapist is a stranger.

And she feels fortunate that it took so long for authorities to connect Barthlett to Wendy’s murder. For Wendy’s family, this was tragic. But the St. Johns feel grateful that Kelly didn’t have to appear in court as a teen-ager. Now they know she has the emotional strength.

Not that it will be easy. Kelly says she had succeeded in putting the trauma behind her. Her parents may have paid more attention to Barthlett’s release date, expected in 1998, than she did. But now Kelly feels a duty to tell the story in court and to share it publicly. She wants to do her part to help erase the stigma associated with rape. It’s something she’s doing for Wendy, for Wendy’s family, for herself--for all of us.

Readers shouldn’t get the impression that this is all Kelly and I had to talk about. We gave each other updates on students and instructors who spent time together four summers ago. Kelly smiled and laughed and didn’t seem much different from the girl who wrote that essay that had me wondering.

No, Kelly doesn’t seem all that traumatized. Her emotional health is just fine. She’s trying to focus on her studies.

What would be strange is if she never felt the need to cry.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.