Jane Doe No More (3 page)

Words were all she had left.

From him, however, utter silence.

Her heart pounded with anxiety. Without warning he placed the barrel of his gun up to Donna’s mouth through the pillowcase. The steel was hard on her teeth. With the chamber of the pistol butted up against her lips, Donna and her attacker were at an impasse. This moment—when she believed he was going to fire that weapon into her mouth and blow the back of her head against the wall—made Donna’s mind burn as though on fire, a throbbing that grew as she waited for the end of her life.

I could feel the anticipation of death growing, a slow and agonizing approach. It was paralyzing. He was finished with what he had come for. He didn’t need me any longer. I expected death to be quick and painless, though the fear of not knowing when made me shiver and sweat. This is it . . . I’m thirty-six years old, and I am going to die. My kids are going to wake up and find my bloodied body on this bed.

I needed to prepare myself for death.

After he took the barrel of the gun away from the area near Donna’s mouth, she spoke again: “Please, God, absolve me of all my sins.” The words came out shaky but swift. Donna desperately wanted to, but could not, cross herself, as she would when walking into a Catholic church, dipping a finger in the holy water font.

Her attacker had other plans. Without warning he placed the gun against her left temple. Then he snarled, “If you call the pigs, I will come back here and
kill
you.”

It was the first time Donna believed she might survive.

Later Donna said that at this point she felt she needed to “
will
” him down the stairs and out of her house. “That sounds crazy, I know,” she would later say. “But it had worked so far. I was disoriented, however. I had no idea where he was at any given moment. He was off the bed—that much I knew.”

Yet something told her he was still standing at her bedside, staring, his gun pointed at her head, debating whether to pull the trigger or flee the scene. What could she say to this man who had just raped and threatened to kill her that would comfort him enough to leave?

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for not hurting me,” Donna said, certain again that the words were not her own. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

She was sure the words sounded too desperate, shallow.

The most horrifying period of silence she would ever know settled over the room. Just silence and the subtle hum of the house pulsating and the whisper of the New England night outside her open window.

As Donna considered her options, and perhaps again prepared for death, she heard something.

Footsteps.

This time they headed down the stairs.

Then the front door of her house whined open.

He’s leaving,
she thought.

An immense sense of gratitude washed over Donna. A moment ago she had believed death was her destiny. But she had survived.

The kids?

The front door shut. He was out of the house. Donna was overcome with a sense of relief, yes, but more than anything,
gratitude
.

This man had allowed me to live. This was all I needed. I could overcome the rape and heal. I had my life, which was enough to convince me that I had decades ahead of me to live. Minutes before, I didn’t think I was going to have a life. What will I do with this life now? I was transformed then and there. Every day, I knew, would be a gift I could not ignore.

Quickly I broke free from the nylons by stretching and slipping one hand out, leaving them on the other hand like a wristband. I pulled down the nylons covering my eyes and my mouth over the top of the pillowcase and let them slip onto my neck like a handkerchief or scarf. Only then was I able to take the pillowcase off my head.

I ran down the hall to check on the kids.

They were both still sound asleep. I knelt down beside my daughter’s bed as her boney chest moved slowly up and down—a metronome to the faint whistle coming from her nose. I dropped my head, closed my eyes, sobbed, and thanked God my children were untouched.

I wondered if he was outside, waiting to see what I was going to do. I needed to call for help.

Family, I thought. Call someone from the family . . . he told you not to call the police.

Donna went back to her bedroom and picked up the telephone.

No dial tone.

She rushed downstairs.

The phone line in the kitchen, like the one upstairs in Donna’s room—the only two phone lines in the house—was also out of service.

In an age without cell phones, Donna felt trapped inside her house with her kids, with no way to communicate with the outside world and no idea if her attacker was outside waiting for her to emerge.

CHAPTER
TWO

Blindfolded

Donna had been bound, gagged, and sexually assaulted. A gun had been placed to her mouth by her attacker, but she had somehow talked him out of killing her. Throughout the entire ordeal, Donna’s children slept like angels just down the hallway. Now, though, she was downstairs in that same house, roaming around, certainly in shock, her adrenaline pumping, finally realizing that the phone lines to the house had been cut. She had no way to call out. Her attacker, Donna thought, could be just outside the door, maybe reconsidering having left her alive.

What now?

There was only one thing Donna felt she could do: run like hell out of the house to a neighbor’s. After contemplating her options for about ten minutes, Donna slipped into a bathrobe, checked on the kids one last time (they were still sleeping), locked the door behind her, and took off.

Running west on Leffingwell Avenue, Donna stopped at the first house with lights on. It was the home of her husband John’s third cousin, Cliff Warner, a man Donna knew only in passing, a friendly hello in the neighborhood.

Donna banged as loudly as she could on Cliff’s back door while peering into the house, trying to spot someone.

“Come on . . . someone answer,” she whispered.

Overwhelming anxiety. There she stood on Cliff’s back porch, knowing that her sleeping children were home alone (five houses away) while her attacker was on the loose. Donna kept looking back toward her house, that chilling warning he had given her echoing . . .

If you call the pigs, I will kill you.

Donna later said that Cliff came to the door, recognized her, took one look, and immediately knew something was wrong.

Donna explained the situation as best as she could: “Someone broke in . . . attacked me . . . I was raped. My God, the kids, Cliff. The kids are still there.”

Donna ran into the house behind Cliff as he picked up the phone and dialed 911.

“I’m calling from 500 Farmington Avenue,” Cliff said hurriedly after a dispatcher from the Waterbury Police Department (WPD) answered. (In Waterbury 911 calls went directly to the police department.) “We have an assault—a sexual assault, on Leffingwell Ave, um . . .”

In the background Donna yelled, “A burglary!”

The dispatcher asked where the sexual assault had taken place.

Cliff didn’t know Donna’s address off the top of his head. His voice was broken. He sounded nervous, shaken.

Donna grabbed the telephone from Cliff’s hand: “I’m the victim . . .” She came across as fairly calm at first—maybe even in control. But she had been frightened to her core, unsure whether she was even doing the right thing by talking to the police. She added, “Listen, he told me if I called the police he would be back to kill me. He cut my phone lines, so I’m at a neighbor’s. My children are okay, but they’re in the house by themselves.”

The mere mention of her children sent Donna into hysterical crying.

“Where?” dispatch asked.

Donna gave her address.

Dispatch asked her to spell out the name of her street.

She did that, adding, “But please . . . he told me—”

Dispatch interrupted, “What apartment?”

“What?”

“
What
apartment?”

“. . . It’s a home.”

“Okay. How old are the kids?”

“Seven and five.” By now Donna sounded as though she was out of breath. She was hyperventilating. Her voice carried one message: Get someone over there to protect her children, fast.

“Seven and five?” dispatch confirmed.

“Please, I don’t want to leave them alone . . . what . . .
what
should I do?”

“Okay,” dispatch said. “You were sexually assaulted?”

Donna was speaking so fast—in a manic state of panic—it was hard to follow, but she said quite clearly at one point: “It was an attempted rape . . . and . . . and . . . he burgled . . . I don’t even care . . . I just want my children safe from him.”

Why “attempted rape,” and not “he raped me,” would become an issue in the months that followed. Later Donna explained the rationale behind the ostensibly odd choice of words: “I believe part of the reason is because he prematurely ejaculated even though he penetrated me with a finger, and the other part is probably because I couldn’t bring myself to say or believe that I had been raped at that point.” And indeed, coming up with the correct words—
any
coherent words, for that matter—or an explanation for what had just taken place would have been nearly impossible for anyone in this same situation.