Victim Tells of Being Raped, Beaten and Dumped in Bay

A woman who was bound, raped, bludgeoned and dumped into San Francisco Bay gave a matter-of-fact account of how she survived the attack when she testified against a plumber who police believe is a serial rapist.

“For a while, I was holding my head. It felt like there was nothing back there. It felt like it was just skin,” the 21-year-old woman recalled Thursday, the scars from the October 1997 attack still visible through her long, thick hair.

The woman, identified only as Amber M., was working as a prostitute at the time. She said Jack Bokin fractured her skull with what seemed like a hammer during a four-hour ordeal that began when he offered to pay her $150 for sex.

Defense attorney Michael Gaines said Amber M.’s memory was clouded by painkillers when she identified his client as the man who tried to kill her.

Bokin, 56, faces 40 felony counts in attacks on four women. Three were prostitutes. One was Bokin’s former sex partner. If he is convicted, he faces up to life in prison under the state’s three-strikes law because he has a lengthy felony record, including a sex assault conviction in 1965.

Bokin, who has a wife and two children, pleaded not guilty. Gaines conceded that Bokin assaulted his former sex partner, but said that attack was not sexual.

Amber M. recounted how her attacker solicited her and drove her to an isolated spot. He tied her hands with telephone cord and sexually assaulted her repeatedly, she said.

At one point, he turned gentle, behavior he allegedly showed in other attacks. “He was holding me like a little baby, rocking me, saying everything was going to be OK,” she said.

Then he struck her repeatedly, she said, so hard that even now, after two surgeries, she has indentations in her head.

Finally during the attack, she pretended to be dead. Bokin put her in his trunk “like a sack of potatoes” and wrapped her in a plastic garbage bag, she testified.

She bit through the bag to breathe, untied herself and smeared her blood on the inside of the trunk to identify her attacker. At one point, he stopped at a carwash, opened the trunk and doused it with water.

Then he drove to a pier and pushed her into the bay, she said.

She came to the surface and saw the car drive away. Then she pulled herself onto a dock, climbed over a barbed wire fence, and, naked but for her socks, flagged down a motorist.

Authorities say traces of blood and DNA that match Amber M.’s were found in Bokin’s car.