Faces of Evil Page 4

  It was a good plan, actually. I got a job fairly quickly working for Prudential Insurance Company on Wilshire Boulevard and found a nice apartment near the UCLA campus. It was a secure building; you had to have a card to get your car into the garage, a key to get into the front door of the building and then a separate key to get into your own apartment. Young professionals and college professors lived there and I felt very safe.

  Of course, I knew that if I ever forgot my key to the building, I could just slip in behind someone else who had just entered, but it never occurred to me that so could anyone else who wanted to get in. As I said, I didn’t know evil. Not then.

  A guy I dated suggested I apply at a modeling agency in town, but I didn’t take him very seriously. I’d been to “Career Days” back in high school and modeling representatives there had always said you had to be tall—at least 5’7”—and I was only 5’5”. But I took the dare and gave it a shot and before I knew it I was going out on all kinds of jobs during my off hours from the insurance agency.

  I worked part-time as a model and made quite a bit of money doing it. If people don’t know me very well, they assume I was one of those proverbial starry-eyed milk-fed Midwestern girls who get off the bus, big-headed with dreams of fame and fortune on the silver screen. The truth is, I was paid $100 an hour—which, at that time, was real money—and although the guy who ran the agency thought I’d have a big career because of my looks, I was never swayed by that kind of talk. To stake an entire career on looks that were doomed to fade eventually made no sense to me at all. Even worse, I found modeling to be a mind-numbing occupation and I wanted a career that was more challenging than standing in front of a camera all day long. Still, I got to pose for Playboy and that was fun.

  The modeling led to a stint as a “go-go girl” on one of the popular L.A. television shows of the day, The Real Don Steal Show. Don Steal was a popular disc jockey who based his show on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. At the beginning of the show, he introduced one other girl and me as “The Real Don Stealers” and we came running out in our hot pants and knee-high go-go boots looking all jazzed and excited to be there. We climbed up on raised platforms above the crowd of mostly high-schoolers and we danced for an hour and a half.

  It was like jogging in high heels for an hour and a half, but it was fun. I loved to dance and, I must admit, I loved the attention. The show was filmed at the old Fox studios on Beverly Boulevard, where I met and dated a few celebrities of the time, including the handsome Max Baer, who played “Jethro” on the popular TV show, The Beverly Hillbillies.

  With all the fun, there was also an undercurrent of violence. The Vietnam War still raged out of control on the TV evening news and movie heroes like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry and Al Pacino in The Godfather glorified macho, violent manhood. At the Olympic games in Munich, terrorists turned a sporting event into a bloodbath when they murdered eleven Israeli athletes.

  I was aware of all those things, of course, but they seemed far away, in places that didn’t affect me. I was having the time of my life, a single girl in L.A., making money, dating successful, good-looking guys and being told all the time how beautiful I was. My life was full and busy and I was saving money to go to college. I missed my family terribly, but I was home (at my apartment) so seldom that I didn’t even own a television set.

  The thing is, when you are raised surrounded by love and security, you assume that the world is a good place, full of good people. I always expected the best out of people and I had a loving nature. When I met someone, I usually liked him or her; when I loved, I loved unconditionally. It was what I had known and it was what I expected.

  And then one day, my calm, happy life exploded.

  Anyone who has ever experienced a tragedy knows that nothing will ever be quite the same again.

  It was about six in the evening and I was in my peaceful apartment, lounging around in jeans and a T-shirt. I’d quit my job at the insurance company and had not found a new one yet, but I had plenty of money in savings and was glad to be able to relax at home for a while.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  I heard a man’s soft-spoken voice, “Uh, hi. You don’t know me—my name is Jim Hutchinson. I live right down the hall and I’ve seen you come and go and I thought, hey, we’re neighbors, why don’t we get acquainted?”

  As I said, when you’re brought up loved and safe, you expect the best in people. I didn’t know anyone named Jim Hutchinson, but I had met so many nice people in the building. Right away, I trusted him.

  I opened the door to see a thin white man with a goatee.

  In a heartbeat, powerful hands closed around my throat, thumbs pressing against my larynx and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door to my apartment being kicked closed.

  In that one moment, my own home became a torture chamber.

  The chokehold on my throat was so tight that I literally went blind. As I was shoved backward onto my sofa, I struggled to breathe.

  Did you ever have a nightmare where you strive with all your might to scream, but no sound comes out and you wake up heaving and sweating, too scared to close your eyes again from fear the nightmare will return?

  This was my nightmare, only there was no waking up.

  He ripped at my jeans with such violence that it felt as if my leg was being torn off. The pain was so intense that, in my oxygen-deprived panic, I thought I might really lose my leg, so I twisted my body to enable the pants to come off and, in so doing, managed to free my throat just enough from his death-grip that I was able to gasp for air. I felt like I was in a swimming pool or lake, under water for far too long and, finally breaking to the surface, I gulped for life. At least I tried to, but as soon as he noticed, he squeezed more tightly again.

  Air. Sweet, blessed air. How we take it for granted. How we breathe, in and out, in and out, without giving it a thought.

  Air was all I could think about as I fought and pushed against his chest, his arms, his face, fighting for my life, but it was all in vain, because the harder I fought, the tighter he squeezed until finally, I blacked out.

  But that was all part of the game. He’d been waiting for me to black out, so that he could loosen his grip and watch for me to regain consciousness. When I came to, I took a couple of ragged gasps for air and as I did he began to choke me again.

  Again I fought. Again he squeezed the life out of me. Again I blacked out.

  This time, when I came around again, I was weaker and for the first time, the clear thought came to me: He’ll never let me get out of here alive.

  When you’re facing death, I learned, time doesn’t have the same properties. A second no longer feels like a second, because seconds are all you have left. So a second seems to last more like a half-hour—everything slows way, way down, as if you are moving through water or slogging through a swamp. I felt myself detach from myself and stand aside, like an observer, watching myself being strangled.

  Then I blacked out a third time.

  When I woke up, I actually flashed on that old cartoon image of a drowning man going under water; he puts up one finger, comes up for air, goes under again, then puts up two fingers, comes up a second time, but then, when he goes under and holds up three fingers, you know that he’s not going to come up again. I had been strangled unconscious three times and I didn’t know how long I’d been under each time, but I knew my brain had been seriously deprived of oxygen. I wondered how much brain damage I could stand before it would be better if I didn’t wake up at all.

  He choked me unconscious again. This time, when I came to and saw him glaring over me with a strange smile on his face, I thought, I’m going to die! I’m not ready! I haven’t had children yet! I didn’t get to go to college! I haven’t LIVED!

  And my next thought was of love, of those I loved and I only had time to think about my favorite person—my baby brother, Brent, who was about fourteen, when “Jim Hutchinson” starte
d to kill me for real.

  When the life is being choked out of you and you feel you only have seconds to live, all you have left in the world are your thoughts. In many ways, it’s like being instantly paralyzed—all you have is your intellect, your mind. You are trapped. All you have is NOW, this moment, and suddenly, everything in life becomes relative to that one fact.

  There is something else both shocking and surprising. In an act of violent crime, when your life is literally held in the hands of another, you have, during those brief but seemingly endless seconds, a relationship with your attacker. And as death narrows the perimeters of your existence and you begin to detach and look at the situation from the distance of approaching annihilation, it all becomes relative.

  Now, I looked straight into his face—really looked. After all, I was going to die anyway, I reasoned and I wanted to look my killer in the eye. His complexion was pasty white. He had a bluish five o’clock shadow around his goatee and dark eyebrows. His expression was amazing to me, because he appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself.

  What I actually saw was a pitiful, awful, monstrous man who had taken what should be a supreme act of love and tenderness between two people who care deeply for one another and had twisted and perverted it into an act of hatred and violence and death.

  What kind of person needs to watch someone die to have fun? I thought.

  I’ve always been a spiritual person and my faith has always had a powerful impact on my life. I believed that I was probably bound for heaven in the next few moments and I also believed that, when his own time came to die, this man was going straight to hell.

  And something about that thought struck me as funny. Not that I could have laughed, if I’d wanted to, because his chokehold on me was tightening again, but I felt my body relax and I guess I laughed in my eyes because whatever he saw drove him into a rage. He grew more vicious. Still holding me by the neck, he began to shake me like a rag doll, my head snapping back and forth.

  “Say you love me!” he growled, his voice angry, agitated and demanding.

  How stupid, I thought. How the hell am I supposed to say anything when my throat is completely closed?

  I guess my expression was defiant, because he yanked me back and forth by the throat again, my head flopping like a balloon.

  “SAY ‘I LOVE YOU!’” he shouted, his voice almost inhuman in its fury.

  Death was there, right there and it drove me to panic. Somehow, some way, I managed to squeeze out something that sounded like, “dgll LLODSOVE DGOO.”

  My compliance seemed to calm him a little, but it wasn’t enough. A few moments later he started to choke me even more violently and I knew that this time, I would not wake up. In a raw terror, my instincts took over, pure animal fight-for-survival instincts that were telling me to act as if I was enjoying it.

  So I moved my hips, trying to get him to climax so he would be done, so he would get off me, so he would go away, so I could live.

  It worked. He ejaculated and immediately rolled off me, pulled up his pants and headed for the door. I got up too and tried to get there first so that I could run, but he anticipated that and hurried to block the way, walking backwards toward the door.

  Suddenly, he put his hands up in front of him, almost in a pleading gesture and said, incredibly, impossibly, “We’ll have to date again.”

  We’ll have to date again. The words resounded in my ears.

  But he wasn’t finished. Reaching into his pants pocket, he withdrew a little silver and tiger’s eye jeweled, oval pillbox and handed it to me.

  A gift, a present…from our “date.”

  Still moving as if in a nightmare, I put my hand to my throat and realized that I was actually bleeding inside my throat. I stood there shaking in front of him, still naked from the waist down, bleeding inside, holding the pill box. In the next moment, he was gone.

  It took one rapist less than half an hour to rip apart my life.

  I remember looking at the clock because I was worried about how many minutes my brain had been deprived of oxygen. He knocked on my door at 6 P.M. and was gone by 6:25.

  In that brief time frame, everything that had made me, me, had been crushed; I was consumed by fear and traumatized.

  My family was a couple of thousand miles away and I was alone.

  The first thing I did after he left my apartment was bolt for the bathroom, where I took a glance at my reflection in the mirror and almost fainted again.

  The whites of my eyes were no longer white. They were blood red.

  Gagging, I staggered backward. I no longer recognized myself. I was so shocked that I did not look into a mirror again for days.

  Then I crawled into the shower and scrubbed my whole body with vinegar and then shampoo and then soap and other stuff. Scrubbed until my skin nearly bled.

  I thought about calling the police, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What if they said that, by opening my door, I had willingly let the guy in? Plus, I’d modeled for Playboy and I’d danced on television in hot pants and go-go boots—what if they said I had somehow brought this on myself?

  If any cop says anything like that to me, I caught myself thinking, I’ll kill the son of a bitch.

  The state of mind I was in, I could easily picture myself lunging across the desk of some smart-ass cop and bodily attacking him.

  Gone was the sweetly trusting, loving, naive little Lois from Kansas City. In her place was this raging, filled-with-frustration, devastated and distrustful…thing.

  I just wasn’t me anymore and I wasn’t sure what the new me would be capable of.

  I slept.

  For twelve hours, I slept.

  And then I realized I needed food. I was out of almost everything.

  But I looked like a monster, bloody-eyed and fierce. And I didn’t even own a pair of sunglasses to help me hide.

  So I hid in my apartment.

  In the kitchen were one egg, one piece of bacon, one limp stalk of celery and half a bag of flour.

  I lived on that. I cut the bacon into eight little slices. Once a day, I fried up one of the small pieces with a handful of flour and ate it.

  Otherwise, I slept and waited for the blood to drain out of my eyeballs so that I could look human again before venturing forth into polite society. I lived like that for two weeks.

  Starvation finally drove me out. I deliberately planned my visit to the grocery store less than a block away. I would go at 2 P.M., which I deemed to be the safest time of day and also the least crowded.

  When I finally skulked into the market, I refused to get a cart and start down the aisles until I looked around and could be reasonably certain that there were no men in the store.

  Once I had done this I rushed to grab a few modest but necessary purchases. Gratefully I found a female checker.

  So far, so good.

  I paused at the magazine rack in front of the store, bag of groceries in hand and was browsing the periodicals when a little boy—no more than six or seven—came over and stood beside me.

  ATTACK HIM! screamed a voice inside my incredulous brain. KILL HIM STRIKE HIM SMASH HIM HURT HIM!!

  Blinking in shock at the savagery of my own thoughts, I forced myself to breathe deeply, told myself, For heaven’s sake, he’s just a little boy! while I broke out in a sweat and began to back away.

  From some dim distance I heard a man’s voice say, “Come on, son. It’s time to go,” and it was all I could do not to whirl around and scream, You idiot! He could have been hurt!

  With that, I rushed out of the store, my vision so blurred with tears I could barely find my car.

  It was then that I realized just how messed up I really was.

  In the blur that passed for the next few weeks, I spiraled downward and downward into a depression so severe I began to question my own sanity.

  When I had to go back to work, I chose to work for a temp agency, because it allowed me to be basically anonymous, as the jobs afforded little time
to make friends. Somehow I managed to function, more or less, in a way that didn’t arouse any suspicions from anyone around me, but inside, I was screaming.

  “Justice” isn’t a word that we normally think about in our day to day lives, but it preoccupied me to the point of obsession. More than anything in the world, I wanted that awful pervert to be caught and made to pay for what he had done to me, but how could that possibly happen if I wouldn’t go to the police?

  So then I obsessed about making a police report, but my thoughts kept swirling round and round themselves and always came out the same: They’ll take one look at me, find out I’m a model and a dancer and blame me.

  And I still had all this rage inside me, this wild animal clawing against the cage and howling at the moon. I was truly afraid of what I might do if I did talk to the police and they did doubt my story in any way. I actually worried that I would attack somebody at the police department and they would arrest me and put me in jail.

  I was terrified and filled with fury and I wanted to die.

  In all fairness to the Los Angeles police, I have to say that since I didn’t make a report, I really have no way of knowing what they would have said or how they would have reacted—these were fears, among the many terrors that roamed around the black desperate corners of my mind—and nobody ever said there was anything logical about fear. So I never did go to the police, but that didn’t stop my own unreasonable obsession that the guy who had raped me somehow, some way had to be punished for his crime.

  Six weeks or so after the rape I left work early one day so that I could beat the traffic. I got in my car and was traveling down a busy boulevard, not thinking anything in particular, when suddenly, as if driving itself, my car turned into a parking lot. I sat, somewhat befuddled and stared at the shop in front of me. It was a high-priced clothing boutique where I never shopped because it was far too expensive for me, but there I was, for some reason.