Faces of Evil Page 5

  I got out of the car and, like a zombie or some extra from the movie Night of the Living Dead, walked into the store. There, hanging on a rack in front of me, was a splendid full-length purple velvet skirt that had been marked down to less than twenty dollars.

  Maybe I’m supposed to buy this, I thought, but I was still confused. Why had I driven here? What weird thing was happening? I paid for the skirt and got back into my car, determined to drive home this time.

  But my car seemed to have a mind of its own and without my consciously doing so, I found myself turning the car up a steep, winding, two-lane street next to the parking lot.

  I couldn’t turn around, I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where I was going and my eyes welled up with tears because I was beginning to think I’d entered the Twilight Zone.

  It was one of those times when I was truly afraid that I might be losing my mind.

  After all, I was terribly scared of everything after my traumatic attack. The last thing I ever wanted to do was find myself in unfamiliar territory. All I’d done for two months was go to work, buy groceries and stay cloistered in my apartment. Why was I doing this? I didn’t want to be here!

  I just wanted to go home. Yet I couldn’t.

  Finally, the road leveled off and I spotted a graveled area where I would be able to turn my car around and get the hell out of this place. I pulled into the small area and glanced up—

  Right into the face of my attacker.

  He was just emerging from the second-floor doorway of a shabby, rundown apartment complex and seemed to be heading straight for my car.

  A soul-chilling scream gathered at the back of my throat, but before I could open my mouth, two other men appeared in the doorway, one on each side of the man who had tried to kill me.

  Police officers.

  The man who had forced his way into my apartment, tortured and raped me was being led out of the building in handcuffs!

  His thin, pale face was twisted, enraged and desperate. He was fighting and struggling against the cops the same way I had fought with him.

  I stared in profound shock as the police dragged him down the stairs and slammed him face-down onto the hood of the police cruiser. My mind was so stupefied at the sight that I don’t think I even breathed.

  Something about this strange, horrified woman sitting staring from her car at the scene must have caught the attention of one of the officers, because I was startled from my stunned disbelief by a cop banging his hand down on the hood of my car.

  I fumbled to roll down the window.

  “Do you know this man?” he asked.

  Now, I’m a very honest person normally and I felt like every thought I had in my mind at that very moment was plastered all over my face, so I tried to tell myself that, actually, I didn’t know the man since, obviously, we had never been formally introduced.

  “N-no,” I stammered.

  Of course the cop knew I was lying, because they get lied to all day long and they know a liar when they see one, so he asked me to get out of my car and requested permission to search the vehicle. Naturally I said yes and when he had satisfied himself that I didn’t even have a pack of cigarettes, much less contraband, he relaxed a little.

  “Why has this man been arrested?” I asked breathlessly, my heart hammering in my chest so hard I thought it would jump out of my mouth. My knees were so weak I had to lean against the car for support.

  He said, “Six keys of cocaine.”

  I didn’t know what a “key” of cocaine was. In many ways, I was still an innocent little girl from Kansas City and I struggled to get my mind around a picture that flashed into my head of a piece of cocaine, shaped like a key.

  With a little smile, he added, “That’s six kilos of coke.”

  Timidly, I said, “Is that a lot?”

  “Yes,” he said and to his credit, he didn’t laugh at the question. I guess he’d figured out by then that I wasn’t one of this guy’s drug customers or something.

  “He’ll get a lot of jail time,” he added kindly.

  Numbly, I crawled back into my car, turned on the ignition, stepped lightly on the gas pedal and somehow managed to steer to the bottom of the hill, where I pulled into the first parking lot I could find, stopped and burst into jagged, tearing sobs. For a while I wept and then suddenly, I broke out laughing. Then I cried some more. And laughed some more.

  It was so incredible. So unbelievable. My bruised and battered heart had cried out for justice, just simple, sweet justice and it had all seemed so impossible. I had never reported the crime and I didn’t see how this guy would ever get caught.

  Los Angeles is an enormous, sprawling city with millions of people. The way I see it, there is no other explanation for what happened to me other than a miracle and, as I mentioned before, my faith has always played a powerful role in my life. What else could it be? What are the odds that I would be driving down that unfamiliar road at just that time, when I would usually be at work, but that day I would leave early and would happen upon the evil man who had attacked me being taken into police custody right in front of me?

  As long as I draw breath, I will never forget that sight: that twisted, angry, wicked face emerging from the dark doorway into the light, followed by two big strapping cops.

  That feeling, that amazing, jubilant, triumphant feeling I had at that moment—the relief and joy that, at long last, justice had indeed been found…is a feeling that I want to give to every victim of violent crime.

  I know now that the way I behaved after my attack is perfectly normal for anyone who has been the victim of a violent crime; however, I also know that if it happened to me now, or to someone I love, I would encourage completely different steps following an attack.

  In order to understand why I behaved the way I did after my attack, it is necessary to turn back the clock more than thirty years. Before the women’s movement. Before rape crises counselors. Before victim’s advocates. Before sensitivity seminars and modern laws and DNA evidence analysis and “post-traumatic stress disorder” counselors and even before women law enforcement officers (other than meter maids and undercover prostitutes). It was a different world back then for women who were victims of violent crime.

  I have a friend who is a fine law enforcement officer now for a major metropolitan police force. When she was nineteen, she was attacked and raped by a stranger while walking to class on her college campus one night. She called the police and the male detectives who interviewed her not only acted as if she had somehow invited the attack or was otherwise being untruthful about it, but actually snickered and told jokes at her expense.

  She vowed from that day that she would become a cop, “Because I knew then,” she told me, “that I could do a better job than that.”

  Even if a woman showed clear signs of a beating or knifing when she reported the rape, she was very likely to be brutalized all over again when called upon to testify in court. Her past sexual history could be brought up and used against her, as well as whatever clothing she might have been wearing that could be construed as “seductive.”

  For these reasons and many more, only one rape in ten was even reported and very few actually went to court.

  Nowadays, thank God, the public is much better informed and educated about sexual assault. We know now that this is not a crime about sex at all, but about power and dominance and humiliation. If it were a crime that had anything to do with sexual attraction, then eighty-year old women and five-year-old children would not be raped.

  A woman who is sexually assaulted now—especially in a major metropolitan area—is more than likely interviewed by a sympathetic detective (a female, if possible) and at the hospital during her examination will usually be accompanied by a rape crisis counselor, who will walk her through most of the judicial process. Her sexual history is off-limits to defense attorneys and she is treated with far more respect, in most cases, than could be expected thirty years ago.

  At the very le
ast, even if she chooses not to report the rape, she will have crisis hot lines she can call and someone to talk to, anonymously and free of charge, from anywhere in the country, at any time, day or night.

  But none of those resources was available to the young Lois.

  Over the years, I have since interviewed hundreds of rape victims and have found that certain things I did during the attack may have saved my life. For instance, moving my hips to force his ejaculation. This is not an unusual tactic for a victim to use in order to survive. It can cause unnecessary guilt later, making them fear that somehow they were encouraging the attack, but rest assured, it’s nothing like that. It’s pure survival, nothing less.

  Some of the other things I’ve learned through the years of working with rape victims have, when I think about my own attack, made my blood run cold. Like significance of the fact that the whites of my eyes turned red.

  I’ve now seen this several times in strangulation victims. I have to add—some of those victims were dead. (I’m sometimes called to the morgue to do sketches of unknown crime victims.) Whenever I see some poor girl who didn’t make it out alive, stark-staring eyes blood red, it just brings home to me all over again how very close I once came to death.

  I now know the phenomenon is called petechial bleeding and what it means is that the force of the pressure on the veins and arteries in the throat is so powerful that the tiny blood vessels in the eyeball actually burst.

  I didn’t know any of this, of course, back in 1972.

  I also made plenty of mistakes following my attack. The first was not reporting the assault to the police. The second was the fact that I bathed away all the evidence of the crime.

  Nowadays, of course, victims are urged not to bathe until they have had a chance to be examined by a doctor, so that semen and other evidence can be collected in a “rape kit” and saved for trial. So valuable is this evidence that it is crucial that a victim go to the hospital even before being interviewed—preferably in the company of a police officer who can secure the evidence and preserve the chain of evidence for trial.

  But what I did is a very common reaction. The first thing most rape victims report is feeling “dirty.” But what they don’t realize is that the stain is not on their bodies but in their souls. This is a violation of the most private, most personal, most essential part of what gives a woman her sense of identity and once that secure wall has been breached, she can never again feel safe.

  The man who attacked me in my home may not have killed my body, but he killed me, all right. He killed the me that I was and for the next couple of months, I was a dead woman walking. Now that we understand so much more about post-traumatic stress, my behavior was understandable. But of course, I didn’t know that then. In fact, even the term “post-traumatic stress” was not coined until a few years after my attack, by psychologists working with Vietnam veterans.

  Still, my healing started on the day I saw justice done. That day, I came alive again.

  This is what I want to give my witnesses: new life.

  It would be a while, though, before I would be able to find my life’s work.

  First I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And then…I had to come out of hiding.

  But before I could do that, I had to do some hand-to-hand combat with my own demons.

  Chapter Three:

  “If I Can Just Get off That L.A. Freeway without Getting Killed or Caught”

  I owe my career path as an artist to an obscure seventeenth-century Dutch master painter by the name of Johannes Vermeer.

  I say “obscure,” because the name “Vermeer” is not usually the one mentioned by most people as the Dutch artist with whom they are most familiar. They’re more likely to say “Rembrandt,” for instance. Art lovers, of course, are well aware of the artist who brought to light everyday life in the city of Delft in the Netherlands in the 1600s. Thirty-six masterpieces of his work survive today.

  After the rape I was still living in Los Angeles but growing increasingly disgruntled with it. I had begun dating Mark, an attorney who loved Vermeer and had a book of his paintings.

  One day he proclaimed, “Vermeer is the best artist ever!”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know about that. Van Eck is probably better technically,” I said, “and anyway, I prefer Rembrandt.”

  Surprised at my argument, he attempted to convince me of the error of my ways. Suddenly I said, “Shoot, I could paint as good as Vermeer.”

  “Oh don’t be ridiculous!” he scorned. “There’s no way in the world you could paint that well. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You wouldn’t even know where to start.” Calmly, I persisted in my assertion that I could paint every bit as well as Vermeer and he grew so incredulous and insulting that he threw a dare at me that was intended to shut me up for good (and prove his superior knowledge).

  “You think you can paint as well?” he demanded. “Okay, fine. I’ll take you to an art supply store, buy you whatever you need and you do a reproduction of one of the paintings in this book.”

  So I did.

  I spent hours in my apartment, painting a copy of “Girl With Pearl Eardrops and Turban.” While I painted, I listened to my tapes of George Harrison’s Everything Must Pass, Sly and the Family Stone and Cheap Thrills by Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

  And I loved it. Loved every minute of it. And I realized that listening to music and painting was as close to bliss as I was ever likely to get in this life, that I loved doing it so much more than I had enjoyed going to discos, L.A. parties and all the rest of the Hollywood scene.

  This is what I want to do, I decided. For the rest of my life.

  The rape was never very far from my mind and I remembered well those terror-driven moments and my thoughts, when I’d despaired that I was going to die before I finished college. I made up my mind right then that I would find a way to go to college and major in art.

  Eventually, I finished the painting and called up Mark to come and pass judgment.

  He was astounded, incredulous.

  Of course, he couldn’t just compliment my work and let it go. This was the 1970s and like many men he believed that most women should be at home keeping house and making babies. He kept saying things like, “Did you really paint that?”

  As my cheeks began a slow burn, I said, “What do you think? That I had some guy come in here and paint it for me?”

  And he said, “Maybe.”

  I was furious, but it was only the beginning. He insisted that I paint in front of him so that he could be reassured that I had indeed done the work.

  So he watched me and I painted, thinking, I will never see this ego-maniac jerk again EVER.

  When he was satisfied that I had indeed done the work, he then demanded that I give him the painting.

  “Are you kidding?” Now I was incredulous. “There’s no way I’m giving you this painting.”

  “But I bought the art supplies,” he replied, as if that was all there was to it.

  I didn’t know if he was ignorant that good replicas of Vermeer paintings could go for $6,000 to $8,000 on the open market or if he was that big of a jerk—that sixty-five dollars’ worth of art supplies was somehow an even trade for my talent and my labor.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and stood in front of my picture. “I’m not giving you this painting,” I said.

  Sputtering, near apoplectic, he left, slamming the door so hard that it rattled things on the walls.

  As soon as he got home, he called and screamed at me for more than twenty minutes, because I wouldn’t give him that painting.

  I set the receiver down on the bed and sat there, listening from a distance while he ranted and raved and screamed.

  And I thought, I want a man like my daddy. A man who’s not afraid to work hard, get his hands dirty, stay the course and take care of his family.

  While this jerk kept screaming, I contemplated the men I’d known in the Midwest
. A real man, I thought, or at least the kinds of men I grew up with, would call you up and let you know that he was angry in deep, calm tones.

  And so I hung up and started making plans.

  My decision to leave Los Angeles didn’t happen right away. I talked to some people, although not about the attack, which I still kept locked inside, and while I thought more about things, I continued to date men who neither were sensitive nor had deep values. I certainly do not mean to imply that all California men have something wrong with them, but, still slowly recovering from my rape and growing more homesick all the time, I began feeling that the lifestyle I was seeing was patently phony. Ambitious men on the fast track to make it in Hollywood cared deeply for superficial things that I didn’t care about at all and seemed to think that projecting an image was more important than being real.

  Even so, I wasn’t ready to go back home to Kansas. I would have felt too defeated, too much like I had failed at something and I wasn’t even sure what. So one day I sat down and drew myself a map of the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas.

  Then I stood up, closed my eyes, twirled around and put my finger on the map. I opened my eyes and saw it landed on Texas.

  I did the exercise again. And again. In all, I twirled around blindly seven times. Five out of those seven times my finger landed on Texas.

  It seemed to me a sign. Everyone I had spoken to who came from Texas loved it. I’d heard stories about riding down rivers on inner tubes, taking trail rides, exploring mountains and caves, deserts and forests and the Gulf of Mexico.

  One way or the other, I was being guided to Texas.

  Later I looked at a real map. Dallas appeared to be a sprawling metroplex where I figured jobs would be plentiful and I knew the University of Texas had a branch campus in the Dallas suburb of Arlington. I called the Dallas Chamber of Commerce for information and the woman who answered the phone was warm, friendly and sweet; she even offered to send me brochures on all the college campuses in the area. The brochures arrived, as promised, within two days and I was sold.