No Regrets (42 page)

“Shelly,” Kari pleaded,
“please
don’t call anyone.”

“I won’t,” Shelly said. “I promise.”

“I don’t want you to call anybody, or answer the phone, or wake anyone up until after seven o’clock,” John said again, more forcefully this time.
“Or Kari will be dead. I’ll kill her for sure!”

And then the two men and Kari were gone, and Shelly was alone in the silent office, tied up so tightly that it felt as if her hands and feet were going numb. Her attempts at getting free only sent her muscles into spasms.

Outside, Kari unlocked her four-year-old Ford Granada with shaking hands. John forced her into the backseat, and then crawled in beside her. Mike got behind the wheel of her car.

“You know we’re going to kill you,” John said flatly. “But first, we need three hundred dollars.”

Kari believed him. She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. But she saw that her captors were extremely nervous, too, and suspected they were under the influence of some kind of drug. She had to go along with them while she figured out a way to survive.

Now John asked her more questions about the shift changes and residents at Sancho Panza. “How many residents live there? What time do they get up? Are your conversations in the office automatically recorded? When does the morning shift come to work?”

She told him the truth—that there were five residents and they didn’t usually wake up until after eight. The day shift counselor, Gracie,* came to work at 7:00
A.M.

“And the recorder in the office?” John pushed.

“There is no recorder in the office,” she said. “That would be illegal, don’t you think?”

Kari sensed that her best approach would be to let John think she was on his side, or at least that she was treating him with respect. If anything, Mike was more nervous than John. Or maybe he was just a lousy driver. He swerved, driving so erratically that they either were going to end up in a ditch or, blessedly, would attract the eye of a cop in a squad car.

John told her that they wanted to head for Reno, by way of Sacramento. “What’s the quickest way to get on the freeway?”

For the life of her, Kari couldn’t visualize the roads nearby. She was still so frightened. They had turned left on West Texas from Ohio Street, and then right on Beck Avenue at her suggestion. But she’d made a mistake, and they couldn’t find an eastbound freeway entrance.

“You’d better think quick,” John warned her again, “or you are dead.”

Kari was too scared to think, her mind frozen with fear, and they got on the wrong side of the freeway—onto the lanes heading west toward Vallejo and San Francisco,
away
from Sacramento. Finally, Mike said he was going to get off the freeway and take surface roads. At least they would be heading east again toward Reno. Their trip was a comedy of errors, or would have been if it weren’t so menacing.

Kari’s job and training demanded that she be competent about assessing people in a short time. Gradually, she found herself moving into her social-worker mode, still a victim certainly, but a woman who knew that her own survival depended on reading John and Mike correctly.

“I quickly assessed John as emotionally unpredictable,
emotionally unstable, and insecure about his own masculinity,” she says. She knew she had to avoid startling or frightening him, and, above all, should do nothing to undercut his tenuous grasp of his masculinity. That was easy in group therapy sessions—but infinitely more difficult when she herself was his captive.

As they hurtled, willy-nilly, along the dark, almost deserted freeway, Kari tried to think. If they got her to a field, she was pretty sure they weren’t going to just let her out there. Alive, she would be a danger to them and their freedom.

Back at Sancho Panza, Shelly Corelli worked desperately to get out of the twists and turns of the lamp cord and the drape sash that bound her. By wiggling and twisting, she managed to slip one wrist out, and then was able to use that hand to pull the cord off her foot. Kari and the men had been gone for about twenty minutes, and Shelly wasn’t sure where they were. For all she knew, they might still be out in front of Sancho Panza. She didn’t dare risk going out that way. And she didn’t want to stay around to use the phone. Instead, she crawled along the floor toward the rear of the building. She exited through a patio door and crept toward the fence. She pulled enough boards out so she could slide through. One of the counselors lived nearby, and Shelly ran to pound on Jack Owens’s* door.

Woken from a sound sleep, Owens opened his door to see Shelly standing there, disheveled from crawling through the fence, the severed electric cord still hanging from one wrist.

“They’ve got Kari,” she said. “We’ve got to call the sheriff!”

Owens ran back to Sancho Panza and called the Solano County sheriff and Fairfield Police Department’s emergency lines.

Along with Fairfield officer Fred Jones, the same trio of officers who had responded to the call for help with the suicidal resident only about an hour earlier were back. They had the advantage of having seen the men who had abducted Kari. But there was no sign of them or of Kari or her car now.

An all-points bulletin was issued for the Ford Granada and its occupants. They all hoped that there were still
three
people in the car.

The taller man—John Martin—
was
familiar to some of the counseling staff at Sancho Panza, and police learned that he had walked away from the Delancey Street facility in San Francisco without authorization only the night before. A look at his rap sheet was not encouraging: John Martin had a number of aliases, including “Butch Martin” and “Leroi Martin.” He had previously been arrested for rape, grand theft, and some lesser crimes. Martin had been charged under California statute 261.3 P.C.—“Rape by Force.” Deemed a candidate for rehabilitation, he had been placed in the Delancey Street offenders’ program in lieu of state prison.

The investigators also called Ben Lindholm,
^*
Kari’s husband, and told him that his wife was missing—missing under highly disturbing circumstances. He threw on his clothes and drove to Sancho Panza. He made up his mind that he would not tell Kari’s mother—who lived hundreds of miles away, just north of Los Angeles—that her daughter had been kidnapped. If they could find Kari quickly, her mother might never have to know. Why put her through the anxiety if he didn’t have to?

If the news wasn’t good, Kari’s mother would have to know soon enough.

Sergeant Jim Bridewell went into the living room to gather up whatever evidence the kidnappers might have left. He carefully bagged their coffee cups into evidence, along with the cord from around Shelly’s wrist and a pile of cigarette butts. Then he asked that an ID technician be dispatched to the abduction scene to dust for fingerprints.

The counselor due to come on duty for the morning shift, Gracie Phelps,* was notified, and she came to work early so that, if Kari somehow managed to call, she could be told that everything was normal and the police had not been called. Moreover,
someone
had to be on duty at San-cho Panza to oversee the residents and the clients who would be coming in for counseling.

Kari was still alive. It was probably lucky that she didn’t know about John Martin’s criminal background, and yet she dreaded the possibility that either he or the man behind the wheel might have more than kidnapping in mind.

Unfortunately, she was right. Once they appeared to be heading in the right direction, John turned toward Kari and applied more pressure with the knife that he continued to hold against the skin of her throat, stopping just short of drawing blood. He traced an invisible pattern in her flesh, enjoying the way she involuntarily cringed.

“Take off your pants,” he ordered, adding, “I’m sure you knew this was going to happen.”

Kari had made up her mind to do whatever she had to do to live, and she had known all along that a sexual attack was a very real danger. She had to disassociate her body from her mind. If she fought John, as unstable as he
seemed to be, it might well set him off. She had no hope of escape at this point. She had to do what he ordered.

“I took off my shoes first, and then my pants. John said, ‘Keep going,’ so I took off my nylons, which left me completely exposed from the waist down...”

“Lay down [sic],” John directed. “No—lay down on top of me.” He didn’t remove his trousers but unzipped his fly as he rested on his back in the backseat. Kari obeyed his order and moved on top of him.

“He then started kissing me, thrusting his tongue in my mouth. He started rubbing his penis mechanically against my pubic area until he started to get an erection. John also put his finger up my vagina and began to probe, hurtfully.”

She tried not to think about his body odor, or what sexually transmitted diseases he might have. She knew how insecure he was, and that showing distaste or revulsion toward him would surely make him angry.

“I didn’t fight or struggle or protest while John was raping me,” she recalls. “I had decided that my best bet was to go along with him. The knife was ever present. He told me to get on the bottom. I was so frightened that when he was through—if he was
ever
through—that would be when he would kill me, and dump me off on some deserted road. If he didn’t have an orgasm, he would be so angry that he would probably kill me.”

It seemed to Kari that, either way, she didn’t have much of a chance.

“John thrust his penis up my vagina so violently that it hurt and he started pumping. I thought he was going to knock the wind out of me,” she remembers. “After what seemed like an eternity, he had what
seemed
like an orgasm. His body sort of ‘tremored’ and he seemed to lose
his erection. He got off me, and told me to get my clothes back on.”

Kari dressed, all but her shoes. Satiated, John appeared to feel some regret for raping her.

“I’m not proud of what I just did,” he said, “but I’m a sicko person, and I haven’t had a woman in a long time.”

Kari would never remember just when they had finally gotten on the freeway headed toward Reno. Her captors had a plan of sorts. Their main concern was to get as far from Fairfield and Sancho Panza as they could before 7
A.M.
when the day shift showed up for work. They would find Shelly tied up on the floor of the office, and would surely call the police and report her kidnapping. They planned to ditch Kari’s car before then, and obtain a rental car. They had expected to find enough money in the two women’s purses to pay for the rental car, but they still needed three hundred dollars—whatever that was for.

John now pawed through the two purses, looking for cash and credit cards. But Shelly had only fifteen dollars in hers, and Kari had nothing but change.

“I have my paycheck,” Kari offered. “It’s for $306.50. I can probably cash it at an Albertson’s store because I have a check guarantee card with them.”

“We’re not going back to Fairfield,” John argued.

“No—no,” Kari soothed. “There are some Albertson’s stores in Sacramento. I think they’ll honor my guarantee card.”

Although she had convinced John and Mike that they needed her alive in order to get cash, she was very careful not to say much to either of them. “They were very jumpy,
nervous, and seemed like they could blow it at any moment.”

As they hurtled east on the freeway, John told Kari that the two of them had been planning to assault her and Shelly as they sat in the living room of Sancho Panza. “At first, we were going to kill both of you, steal your purses, and take one of your cars,” he said, as easily as if he were talking about the weather.

It chilled her blood to think that the two men had been sitting near them for hours, calmly planning their murders when, all the while, she and Shelly had been completely unaware of the danger.

“For some reason,” Kari remembers, “they didn’t kill us. It might have been because we had to call the sheriff for the resident and the deputies arrived so quickly. Maybe they figured it would be too risky to hang around there.”

John kept telling Kari that they were “totally desperate men. We don’t have a goddammed thing going for us. We don’t give a fuck what happens.”

And then, with what seemed to be flawed reasoning, John explained that it would be better for them when they were captured to be facing murder charges as well as kidnapping, auto theft, and any other charges. He said that would get them fewer years in the penitentiary. Kari didn’t dare ask them how it could possibly work out that way. Murder charges certainly didn’t add any stars to felons’ crowns.

But she didn’t argue with them. Any criticism on her part would, she knew, be like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

The two men spoke of how they had never had a chance in their miserable lives. “Nobody never gave us no breaks,” Mike whined.

Kari realized now that John must have been treated at Sancho Panza, because he knew the names of several counselors who worked there. While he and Mike bemoaned their unhappy past, Kari also detected anger, hostility, and fear.

“This hostility was precariously maintained and controlled,” she says. “They needed constant reassurance that we weren’t being followed by the California Highway Patrol or the Solano County sheriff’s deputies. I kept telling them that Shelly wouldn’t call the police, and that she was tied up, anyway, so she
couldn’t
call anyone. Mike, John, and I agreed that I should call Sancho Panza right at 7:00
A.M.
so I could catch Gracie before
she
called anyone.”

Even though Kari was cooperating with her kidnappers and subtly giving them the sense that the three of them were in this dilemma together and they seemed to trust her, she still believed that they intended to kill her.

“I just didn’t know when...”

If she had any chance of escape, Kari knew that she had to get to a place where there were other people around. She didn’t want anyone else to get hurt, but she hoped she could let someone know where she was. She thought about how she might alert a clerk or manager at an Albertson’s store. But if John caught her signaling, she had no doubt he would dispose of her as soon as possible.