Life Imprisonment for Rapist Eases Victim’s Pain

One 10-minute phone call paroled me from 14 years of hard labor in a prison of fear.

The caller was Brad Russ, commander of detectives for the Portsmouth, N.H., police.

“I have good news about our nemesis,” he said. “He’ll never see the light of day.”

Nemesis doesn’t come close to describing the man who raped me.

Evil is a better name for the monster who bound and gagged me at knifepoint, who murdered a woman the year before he attacked me, and who, despite years in prison, has never left me.

A young piano teacher who was sexually assaulted and savagely beaten in Central Park in June is making what doctors say is a remarkable physical recovery from her injuries. I was even more fortunate: But for bite marks and bruises, I escaped physically unscathed.

It is the psychological wound that still bleeds after all these years, the irrational fear that continues to distort my reason: I see his sneer in the gaze of city construction workers; his leer distorts the smiles of commuters clutching adjacent subway straps.

At night sometimes, when I glance through the iron bars covering my kitchen window, I expect to see him standing on the fire escape.

Fear invades my sleep as well: In one recurring dream, I am in a house with many doors, all unlocked or ajar. I run from one to another, locking or slamming them shut just before his hand can turn the knob.

Or I am alone at night in a house with 20 rooms, each of which harbors an enemy, and the basement door has no lock. I am paralyzed with dread and guilt because I don’t know how to protect myself.

Daylight offers scant relief: I still jump when toast pops, shriek if someone comes up behind me unannounced.

The rape happened in late June. I was minding half a dozen children at my sister’s home day-care center while she was on a field trip with her son.

Sitting on the porch in the sun, I was busy reattaching dolls’ heads, untangling Big Wheel collisions and allowing a toddler to click toy handcuffs around my wrists, a game that when recollected later would make me shudder.

The man appeared suddenly at the porch steps. He asked if I knew where “Tom Lane” lived. I didn’t, but offered to go inside for a telephone directory.

Before I could return to the porch, he was striding through the living room, a knife in his hand, contempt in his eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m only here to rob.”

Then he spun me around and locked a forearm at my throat. In seconds, I was on the bedroom floor pleading for my life. He slapped me. Later, he bit me.

He wrapped something around my eyes, stuffed a piece of clothing in my mouth and secured both with surgical tape.

I don’t remember how long he was there--20 minutes? an hour? Just before he left, he turned me over on my back and taped my ankles together, next my wrists.

And then he was gone.

I struggled uselessly against the tape, pounded my head against the door and tried to scream. The children, perhaps thinking the noises were part of a new game, echoed my cries back to me from the porch.

The oldest, a 5-year-old, finally pushed open the door and found me on the floor, naked, bound and blindfolded. Without a word, he peeled the tape from my mouth and eyes then followed my instructions to get a kitchen knife to cut the rest off my wrists.

Later that summer, I identified my attacker from a photo lineup. The following year, I testified against him in court and sent him to jail. I didn’t know then that he had murdered a woman a year before he got to me, and my throat tightens every time I think how easily he could have killed me.

I cling to one consolation: It was my cooperation and testimony that finally halted a 12-year string of rapes, robberies and assaults in four states. In California, he’d been dubbed the “want-ad rapist” because he picked victims from newspaper ads listing household items for sale.

After his conviction for my rape, I was told he would be tried for the other crimes and be sent away for a long time. But for some reason--perhaps the need to block the terror--I never tracked what happened.

Last year, I called the New Hampshire prison where he’s still serving time for my attack and was told that he would be eligible for parole in January 1998. The parole board director said I could testify against his release; I assured him I would. But I was terrified.

I telephoned Brad Russ, the Portsmouth detective commander, to see if he could find some answers. On April 2, he called back with the good news: My attacker had indeed been convicted of rape in Massachusetts and of murder in Maine. Even if he were paroled in New Hampshire, he would face a minimum life sentence without parole in Maine and other sentences in Massachusetts and California.

Hearing the news felt as if a sealed window in my head had been thrown open, allowing a cloud of anxiety and fear to escape. It meant others had come forward to testify despite traumatic memories and potential embarrassment.

In the 14 years since the attack, I never once considered hiding. I have spoken publicly about the assault, signed my name to newspaper articles, and allowed my face to appear on television and in photographs.

I have spoken openly and at length about the ordeal with family and friends, using them as my sounding board and my refuge.

I am not to blame for what happened, so I have never felt shame; what sometimes silences me is the mixed reaction others have to my openness.

Hours after the rape, I drove five hours to meet college friends in Upstate New York. Sticking with previous plans seemed important, a way to regain some measure of control.

Upon my arrival, one friend asked me not to mention the rape when we visited her parents that night--she thought it might upset them.

I felt like crawling into a closet. Instead, I tucked my bruised wrists under the dinner table and tried to smile pleasantly with a mouth that had been gagged just hours before.

Had I been robbed or seen a shooting, talk of the crime would have dominated our dinner conversation. But I had been raped, so my friends and I pretended nothing had happened.

Years later, an editor at a newspaper where I worked looked quizzically at me when I told him I wanted to write a column on violence that would refer to my rape.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked, as if I had proposed posing nude for Sunday’s front page.

Recently, a friend suggested I write this piece anonymously, perhaps thinking she could spare me national shame.

But it’s not shame that dogs me. It’s fear.

When I settled into a cab late one night last week, I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw his eyes. In a moment of panic, I thought he’d escaped and tracked me down. And now he was going to kill me for sending him to prison.

It wasn’t him. The cabby was a friendly, talkative man who thanked me for his tip and promised not to drive off until I got inside my apartment building.

He wanted me to feel safe.