Chapter 13: Captivity
After the assault by Ana, I found myself in jail. I had mentioned that initially I claimed to be suicidal as a cry for help. I was humiliated by being stripped down into a suicide safety outfit with padding. After seeing the social worker and the nurse, this was removed and I was put into the normal outfit worn by inmates.
It was early October and right after I had arrived at the jail. I received the "discovery" material which was nothing other than a "statement" that Ana the perpetrator who was perceived by the detectives with whom she met as the "victim." These were her lies.
I had no one else to talk to and so I had to talk to other inmates. I was also working on letters to my lawyer if I would ever get a chance to see the lawyer.
I mentioned my effort to contact the lawyer for the defendants during the arraignment. This literally felt insane. I believed, no matter how strange it may seem, that I could just explain to her, a lawyer that a grave mistake was made because I was the victim... saying "I was all covered in blood as the detectives questioned me..." She had just told me to wait for the lawyer that would be assigned.
In covnersations with other inmates and in my letters to my lawyer, I explained how impossible her story (from her "statement") was. It seemed evident to anyone. This is important because the news would wrongly describe her as a girl and it would appear that I had sexually harmed a "girl" which would put me in danger.
She, Ana, the actual perpetrator, was 26. In her claim she was going to collect rent from me. This implied that she would be in the habit of doing something like that. Here are a number of problems with this.
If she had ever shown up previously to collect rent from anyone at that residence, if she had been in the habit of doing that, someone would have recognized her. No one had a clue as to who she was. In fact, I had given the phone that she dropped to the police officers who responded to my 911 call and told them that maybe this would help them find out who attacked me.
As stated, this was a drug-infested crime-ridden part of town. It was an all male boarding house. I don't know how normal it is to call a rental property something like this is but that is what it was. It was hard to get pizza delivery or other deliveries because the neighborhood was bad. I felt bad for Grace, the friend of the family of Jimmy, to show up there, my girlfriend to show up or other friends.
I had been mugged on more than one occasion walking from the bus stop or from the convenient store, or at other times walking outside near the residence. Needles were seen on the street in the area.
We paid our rent to Scott who lived in the apartment around the back. Jimmy might show up to stock the vending machines in the building but Ana, his wife, NEVER showed up to collect rent. We were not that far from the police station and so they should have known that her claim that she was there to collect rent was not credible.
If the detectives in Durham had listened or been aware that a 911 call had been made and their fellow police officers were just out there, they did not indicate this at all when they questioned me. I assumed they would have been aware of this and so I assumed this would come up in our discussion. I had been waiting for the discussion with the detectives to get around to the facts, the evidence, and things that one could discover from the scene. I also thought they would want to know who they were questioning.
I thought they wanted to know the truth.
The idea that you should NOT EVER speak to the police during ANY investigation is good but extremely unfortunate advice. Our respect for authority and the false belief that the police care about the truth and detecting and determining the truth is clearly undermined by the facts of this case and so many others.
However, I had needed to hope that something good would come from cooperating with the police. What else could I do?
So, Ana, the landlord's wife, had never been there alone to collect rent. She was not recognized by any of the tenants who had seen her.
I also hoped her story would fall apart when one considers the fact that I was bleeding profusely and yet she did not have a scratch on her nor did she have much of my blood on her. Only my true account of what happened inside the room made any sense. . She could strike out and slice open my face and conceiveably not get much of my blood on her.
If I had been standing over her as she claimed, when and how did she get a chance to cause me to bleed so badly without her getting my blood all over her? If she was so terrified of me, wouldn't she just run away as soon as possible and not stick around to hurt me? How is there a realistic scenario where a person gets free and then decides to damage the attacker?
If she was not the perpetrator and her story was remotely accurate, she would only be focused on escaping.
Then she goes on to state that "he kept switching." I mentioned how the detectives asked to speak to "Brucie." Her statement doesn't reference "Brucie" just that "he kept switching."
What would that look like? How would someone recognize this? The answer is that even when a person has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), most people are not aware that a person has switched to a different personality. They also do not engage in "switching" which implies going from one personality being in control to another and then another. One, this doesn't happen with people who have DID and two, no one would recognize it.
I decided that I didn't want to be brought to a psychiatric hospital to determine that I did NOT have different personalities, that I didn't have DID. I saw the shame of claiming to be suicidal. I saw the shame of being transported to the hospital as a prisoner falsely accused of a crime.
I didn't want to claim that what she said was true and to use a defense that I had a mental illness that explains what happened. I told my lawyer that I neither had the mental illness that Ana claimed, nor did I do anything that Ana claimed occured. I was completely innocent, I stated and a victim.
I kept thinking about the fact that unless they gathered they gathered and saved evidence from the room where I was brutally attacked what could be used to prove my innocence? Sometimes I would speak more about my innocence than my own victimization which I fully and totally embrace today.
Looking back over the years, I have seen how lawyers that we hire respond and handle things radically different than when one is forced to rely on a public defender. The public defender's office sent representatives to meet me in the jail and not my actual lawyer. During the entire time I was in jail - 7 months - I may have seen my lawyer's office, the public defender's office 3 times including the time in court when I had already been in jail for 7 months.
At that time, my public defender got the bail down to zero so that I could be free to work on my defense - finally.
Money is what describes and characterizes the experience of those who are accused. If you have the financial means, you walk into a courtroom or some other location, post your bail and leave. You also see your lawyer immediately and not their representative.
I know this from the experiences of a family member who will remain anonymous for this book.
Threats to my safety
It's also important to note that my safety was in danger. The news had reported - on TV and in the paper - that the alleged victim (who was actually the perpetrator) - was a girl. There was a mention of a sexual element to the crime.
Soon after my arrival, I met someone who had been on death row and shared a cell with Johnny Street Parker. The name of Johnny stood out because when I worked as a social worker/therapist, in Clinton, NC, I was assigned his sister.
She had worn dark glasses and tried to hide her identity. Johnny Street Parker was sent to death row following his involvement in a grisly murder in the area. In these small towns, word gets around. So, his sister had to disguise her identity in public.
His cellmate had been brought to the jail on appeal and for a new trial. There seemed to be no parallel to my own charges. This individual with his girlfriend had kidnapped someone in the way that one typically thinks of kidnapping. They put the person in a car and travelled to another physical location miles away. Then his girlfriend killed the victim with a rock to impress him.
He and perhaps others had intervened when it appeared that I might have harmed a girl. Being accused of murder and put on death row is one thing that doesn't put an inmate at risk in jail. However, being believed to have harmed a "girl" could have gotten me hurt by other inmates.
Years later, instead of my sister just saying what I would have said, "I am so sorry that I left you in such a dangerous situation. I wish I had done more." Instead, she got all defensive and said that I guess I think she is just a bad sister.
What I would have expected, as I just said, was a natural response of shame... just saying that one feels ashamed that they didn't try to do more to protect a family member that they knew was innocent and not capable of hurting anyone.