Questions

What has Cheri been up to? I found some answers about the woman who was brutally murdered. She was from Northern California, and had a lot of friends and family who miss her terribly. It helps a lot to know that.

It was this horrible incident, along with my sexual abuse of humans class, that spurred me on a three week rollercoaster ride with serial killers. I suppose I have some coming clean to do here. I have actually had an experience with someone who became a horrible murderer.


I wrote about a time when I was held down by boys in the school yard . I re-read it, and the boy who had the crush on me was actually my age. It was his brother and his brother’s friends who were a couple of years older. They held me down so the boy could kiss me.

His father was an extremely abusive individual. He got blamed for everything that went wrong at home. When he got to school, he undoubtedly displayed symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder. I remember he was disliked by other kids. I’m sure he had teachers who felt any and all beatings he received at recess were deserved.

When I was raped, I honestly didn’t know who the man was. The police determined it was someone I knew, not just because the way my mother insisted it, but because he kept asking me during and after the rape if I knew who he was. He insisted I not look at him, and I complied. I wonder, sometimes, if that is the ONLY reason I survived. If he thought I knew him, would he have killed me? I've often felt he wanted to kill me, he planned to kill me. I think I threw off the plan when I bent his fingers back.

I moved to Boise six months later, where I met my now ex-husband. I got pregnant with my daughter in July. Later that summer, my mother came to visit, and informed me that the detectives in Twin wanted me to come in and try to identify the guy who did it.

She said that a 12 year old girl had been raped at a park, and had been strangled and beaten, and the police were sure that he was the same guy who attacked me. She suffered brain damage, and couldn’t remember anything at all about that night.

All I could think about was the day they hauled me in to listen to tape recordings of guys they had questioned. The detective said I need to listen carefully. The first voice I heard, I thought for sure was him, so I said so. The detective looked at me and said, “No, that’s me instructing the person what to say.” I knew right then, I would never make a credible witness. By November, I knew no one would ever be brought to justice for attacking me.

After my divorce, I was sitting alone one night, watching tv – at night. The FBI Files came on, and the whole show was about a horrid triple homicide that had occurred in Alaska. The man convicted was the boy who kissed me in the schoolyard, so I thought, interesting! I’ll watch it. When they went through his list of previous crimes, they included a crime in Twin that he was THE suspect in. It was the rape, beating and strangulation of a 12 year old girl in the park.

Chills went down my spine. That was really the first moment when I was certain who had attacked me. It all made sense. Everything came together in my mind, and I didn’t sleep that night.

So the class and the recent murder really affected me. It affected me a lot more than it should have. At the end of class last week, I asked if the teacher knew about that case. He hadn’t (I don’t know how he didn’t) so I decided to try to do some research on it. I found a couple of books that talked about the case. One had just a small excerpt, and was not entirely accurate. The other was all about the murders, the trial, and the man who committed such an atrocity. I read it in a day, didn’t sleep last night, and am beginning to put things right in my mind again.

As I read the book, I kept trying to convince myself it probably wasn’t him. But I made timelines, noted his mo and there just isn’t any way it wasn’t him. Even his closing argument speech was convincing. The same kind of speech, the same ranting, the same stupid sounding crap. So, that’s where I’ve been for the past few weeks.

But I must move on. I will write my term paper, feel comfort in the fact that he is in prison for the rest of his life, with no option for parole. I will remove his image from my memory, just like I removed the song playing on mtv that morning. I will turn my thoughts to happier things.

My heart and thoughts go out to Kim’s family. Their love will hold her immortal. I didn’t know her, but I feel a kind of kinship with her. I don’t know why I got to survive and not her. I'm glad the guy who killed her won't go on to commit more crimes, but I don't know why he should get such an easy way out of it. I don’t know what the answers are, but I do know what questions need to be asked. A very wise person once said, sometimes the question is the answer! (I wonder if he ever wrote it down)