Unfinished Murder
The Pursuit of a Serial Rapist
For the survivors
Note
Many of the rape survivors of Ronnie Shelton wanted me to use their real names in this book, saying they had nothing to be ashamed of. Other survivors (and two of Shelton’s former girlfriends) wanted their privacy protected; to them I assigned pseudonyms, which are footnoted in the text at first reference.
Every other detail in this book is true, based on more than one hundred and fifty interviews. Among those interviewed were most of the rape suriviors, their spouses, boyfriends, and family members. Four women had kept journals before or after being raped and shared them with me. In addition, prosecutor Tim McGinty and defense lawyer Jerry Milano cooperated fully; they let me read their trial notes and files. Maria Shelton showed me the diary she kept during the trial and allowed me full access to her brother’s papers and memorabilia. Ronnie Shelton gave me a series of signed releases, which I used to pry lose school, medical, psychiatric, juvenile, and nearly every other private and public record pertaining to his life. In all I compiled a seven-foot stack of records, including jail visiting logs, emergency room records, nurses’ notes, IQ tests, probation reports, incident reports, confessions, victim statements, letters, photographs, psychiatric evaluations, trial transcripts, even grade school report cards.
With these records and interviews I was able to reconstruct key scenes and conversations, taking into account individual speech patterns, which made the direct quotes more accurate than anything paraphrasing could ever accomplish.
Neither Ronnie Shelton nor anyone else in this book was paid for their cooperation.
Thin Ice
Mommy I’m sorry
I know I’m your baby
I’m not what you wanted, Dad
I could never amount to anything
I may look normal
but look harder (something’s wrong)
Can’t you see it?
I live my life on thin ice
Someday I know the ice will break
but when?
—Ronnie Shelton
Cleveland, Ohio
April 13, 1983
He turned back the covers and sat for a moment on the edge of a well-pounded mattress.
The young woman beside him stirred under the rumpled sheets. “What’re you doing?” she asked sleepily.
It was four in the morning. From the corner of his eye he watched her stretch, her toned muscles loose and relaxed from a night of lovemaking. He had gone out of his way to satisfy her and could tell from her responses that her previous lovers had not been very skilled in bed.
He lighted a cigarette and pulled black jeans over his slim hips.
“Come back here,” she said. “I need you.” She was blond, nineteen, with the look of a soap opera nymphet.
“Gotta get some air. I’ll be back.” He knew she was annoyed at being turned down, but fuck it. He believed in playing hard to get. In his experience it made the girls want him all the more.
Besides, he had things to do before daybreak.
In the predawn dark he drove his car down West 117th Street, Cleveland’s most heavily traveled thoroughfare. He welcomed the sprinkling of traffic; it made him less conspicuous.
He told himself he was driving aimlessly, but in fact he was drawn to a block on Marne Avenue, a narrow residential street of identical bungalows.
He parked one street away and sat for a minute. He retrieved a handgun from under the front seat, tucked it in his waist, and pulled on a yellow baseball cap. He left the car and slipped down a driveway into the backyards of a group of one-story frame houses. Light-headed, staying close to shadows cast by trees against streetlights, he crept toward one of the houses.
Once there he crouched near a rear window, his mind ablaze. He had seen her before through this lighted window, tall, slim, with a strong chin and cheekbones, blond-streaked brown hair down to her shoulders. He had watched her long enough to know her patterns and those of her housemates. Now he imagined her in her bed, sleeping on her back, naked, her breasts spread across her chest. He decided to go in.
Until this moment, it had been a typical week night for Kathy Bond. She waitressed until ten at Casey’s Family Restaurant on West 117th, made about $30 in tips—more than the other waitresses, as usual—and hurried home. Her roommate, Michelle, who was divorced and owned the tiny house, had to leave soon for her midnight shift at Tony’s Diner. Kathy was going to watch Michelle’s six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son.
Kathy wanted to get married and have children someday. Over the past six months she had become close to Michelle’s kids and loved them as if they were her own. Tonight both were asleep when she arrived—Michael in the lower bunk in the children’s bedroom, and Missy, as was usual lately, in Kathy’s double bed.
After Michelle left for work, Kathy drank a beer in front of the TV, stripped to panties and a T-shirt, then moved Missy to one side of the double bed and climbed in. She fell asleep quickly and woke only when Missy began crying that her leg was asleep. Half-asleep, Kathy carried the child to her mother’s bed, where a heating pad was plugged in. She tucked in the girl, kissed her softly, and turned on the pad. Missy had only recently started complaining about her leg, and Kathy wondered whether the heating pad really helped or if Missy was simply comforted by the attention.
Kathy had been back in her own bed for a few minutes when she heard the kitchen window rattle. She listened for a minute. Silence. Must be the wind, she decided as she drifted off.
He had pulled off the screen and jimmied the window as quietly as he could. He climbed inside and froze for a minute, listening in case anyone had heard him. All right, he thought, not a peep.
This was his favorite part. The buildup. He was inside and no one knew. He took his time, wanting to figure out her life, studying the furniture and decorations and dishes in the sink. He wanted to connect with this woman he had never met.
He tiptoed to the narrow hallway, his brain awash in pleasure. She would wake up, her eyes wide, terrified, and beg him not to hurt her. She would do what he said—they always did. And she could not hurt him or his feelings, not in any way.
He checked a bedroom and saw bunk beds with rumpled covers. Kids. Good, he thought. That would make things easier. He found a little girl in another bed in another room. Then he crept into the woman’s bedroom and watched her sleep, her breathing quiet, her hair fanned on the pillow like flower petals.
Blood flooded his groin, tightening his crotch. He picked up the purse from the dresser and delicately rummaged for money. He found her tip money in a cigarette case, which also held an empty pack and her driver’s license. He turned the laminated license to catch a sliver of light from the window: Kathleen Bond, twenty years old, five-foot-eight, 124 pounds. Great face, he observed.
He pulled out the gun and moved in. “Kathy,” he said softly. “Kathy.”
She opened her eyes and an icy terror constricted her chest. She heard herself scream.
A hand was clamped over her mouth and a gun thrust in her face. “Do what I say,” a voice said softly, “and the kids won’t get hurt. Don’t look at me.”
The house was silent. Kathy nodded that she understood. She felt as if she was about to vomit.
“Take off your clothes.”
Trembling, her skin prickling, afraid she had only seconds left to live, she stripped. Suddenly she thought of the little girl, forgetting she had moved her. “Where’s Missy? What’ve you done to her?” She started to look up.
The intruder drew the brim of his baseball cap down over his face. “Don’t look at me,” he ordered.
“The little girl was in my bed!”
“There’s no kid. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Please, where is she?”
“There’s one kid in one bedroom and another in another. Now shut up and they won’t get hurt.”
He pushed down his pants and immediately forced his way into her mouth. A few minutes later, he stretched out on the bed, the gun in his hand, and made her get on top. “Don’t look at me!” he said as he bucked between her legs.
She felt him ejaculate. She wanted to kill him but was too afraid to move.
“Okay, you can get dressed. But stay in the bed and don’t move. Now, where is your money?”
“In my cigarette case.”
“I already got that.”
“That’s it. That’s all I got.”
She listened as he walked from room to room, then heard him stop at the refrigerator, open it, and pop the top of a can of beer. Oh my God, she thought, he’s not leaving. He’s going to stay until he kills us all.
He took a swig of the beer. He couldn’t believe how calm he was. He was taking his time, dallying deliberately. He liked her.
A storm window rattled somewhere and, worried that she was making an escape, he ran back to the bedroom, the gun held clamped in both hands, arms out straight.
“I said don’t move,” he hissed.
She was still under the covers. “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, I didn’t move, I didn’t.” He could hear panic in her voice.
He lowered the gun and continued his search, opening drawers and cupboards, looking for cash. So far all he had found were two Mickey Mouse piggy banks full of change. But a desk drawer in the other bedroom was locked and he couldn’t snap it open. He came back and pointed his gun at the woman.
“Where’s your friend’s money? Don’t lie.”
“I don’t know.
He decided to take her word for it. “I need a suitcase to carry things with,” he told her.
“Up in the attic.”
She heard him shuffling around upstairs but couldn’t force herself to run. She was pinned there by the children. He had said he’d hurt them if she screamed. Imagine what he’d do to them if she ran.
Suddenly he was in the bedroom again, pointing the gun at her from a crouching position like a cop in a television drama. Kathy put up her hands. “I didn’t move,” she said, shaking.
He unzipped his pants. “Don’t look at me,” he commanded, and climbed on the bed and forced oral sex again, then a few minutes later pushed her legs apart and raped her.
“I need to get a drink of water,” she said when it was over. What Kathy really wanted was an excuse to get out of bed. Anything would be better than the hopeless feeling of lying flat on her back.
“I’ll get it for you,” he said brightly. When he came back the baseball cap was low over his face. He handed her the glass. “Okay, go in the bathroom and put your hand on the window. I’m going outside and if I don’t see your hand there I’m coming back in. And don’t call the cops. I know every car in this neighborhood. If there’s a strange car here, I’ll be back, and the two kids will get it first. Then you.”
Terrified, Kathy nodded, afraid to look at him. Before he left, he lighted a Marlboro cigarette, then as an afterthought tapped out a few more from his pack onto the counter for her. “Here,” he said, his tone friendly. “I know you’re out.”
With his dark jeans and jacket, he knew he blended into the night, and he forced himself to walk slowly to his car. He was slick with a fine sheen of sweat, slightly shaky, drifting down from an intense, pulse-pounding high. He sauntered with exaggerated casualness.
He hoped no one had seen him. He had taken another big chance tonight. The police might even be on their way here now, sirens off, a husky V-8 roaring. That would be exciting. They’d screech up, doors slamming. Then they’d brace him, screaming, shoving their silly police-issue .38s in his face.
Moments later the thrill faded. He lighted another cigarette and rehearsed a cover story in case the police stopped him. Fat chance in Cleveland, he thought. All these times stalking, breaking in, and it hadn’t happened yet. He got in his car, slid his handgun under the front seat, and drove off.
KATHY BOND
For a few minutes after being raped, Kathy Bond thought of keeping it all a horrible secret, as the rapist wanted—of carrying on her life as if nothing had happened. But the idea made her gag. She had to do something.
Sobbing, she called Michelle at Tony’s Diner and choked out what had happened, assuring her the kids were okay. Michelle called the police, then raced home.
It didn’t take long for two officers to get to Marne Avenue. Behind them came a police beat reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer; he had overheard the radioed assignment on the scanner in the newspaper’s tiny office at police headquarters.
“This isn’t going in the paper, is it?” Kathy said, her voice cracking with fear. “The guy who did this told me not to call the Kathy Bond cops. For sure he’ll know if you do a write-up.” The reporter mumbled and moved to another room.
After hearing Kathy’s account, one of the cops carefully dusted for fingerprints on the beer can and water glass handled by the rapist.
Later, Kathy called an old friend, told him what happened, and asked for protection. He said he would drive right over. That evening she felt completely out of control. She couldn’t sit still. When Michelle or the kids said something to her, she didn’t hear or couldn’t hold the thought. She struggled to keep from crying. By midnight she had drunk enough beer to dull her shattered nerves and fall asleep. Her friend sat up in the living room, watching TV with a shotgun resting on his thighs.
Kathy woke up crying a few times and came out to talk. “I can’t stay in that bedroom. I think I’ll have to move out.”
Good idea, he said.
“I feel bad leaving Michelle and the kids. I’m abandoning her, and that guy might come back.”
The next day, she saw a headline on page 10 of the newspaper: “West Side Woman Raped.” That decided it. “Oh my God, he’s going to come back and kill me,” Kathy said. She packed and moved out a few hours later.
Until the rape, Kathy had been full of energy, quick to laugh, a fun companion for a night of club hopping as well as a devoted surrogate mother to Michelle’s kids. She lived on coffee and cigarettes, and maybe a quick sandwich at work, sitting in the kitchen, chatting with the cooks.
But now that someone had raped her, she lived in fear in her own apartment, afraid to be alone at night. She couldn’t sleep. Nor could she explain her fears—she thought they made her sound crazy—to the young man she was dating. She was not ready to have sex, and manufactured excuses when he made overtures. It was just too painful to explain.
She felt herself growing apart from her family. When one of her younger brother’s friends insensitively kidded her that she’d probably enjoyed sex with the rapist, she punched him in the face, then burst into tears. She was surprised at how easily her rage flashed into violence. She never had been like that before, and had hated that quality in her first husband, who she’d left two years earlier at eighteen, after seven months of marriage, when he had hit her for a second time. She had told herself long ago that she would never stay with a wife beater. Watching her mom put up with being a punching bag had been torment enough.
Along with the rage came moments of panic. Not long after Kathy moved to a new apartment, her boss mentioned that a Cleveland detective named Miller had called the restaurant, wanting to know where she had moved, explaining that he had to talk to her about the case.
Kathy screamed at her boss, convinced that the caller was really the rapist trying to find her to kill her for calling the cops, as he had promised. That night she stayed with a friend, and the next day she moved out of her new apartment. She would have to find another one.
Back at work, Kathy was like a raw nerve ending. Before the rape, she had been Casey’s best waitress, a natural with customers. She had built up a loyal crew of regulars: a handful of older couples, truck drivers, workers from the nearby discount stores and factories, and several Cleveland cops from the First District station house.
But now everything seemed to spook her. One evening, she noticed a shadowy figure pass by the restaurant’s front window, and instinctively she dropped to the floor, trying to make herself as tiny a target as possible for what she was sure was a gunman.
Moments later, she stood up, sweating, shaky, embarrassed. “I can’t believe I did this,” she said. By then the figure passing the window had walked in and asked for a table; he was just a hungry older man.
Over the next week, whenever someone outside passed the restaurant windows in a certain way, Kathy dove to the floor in fear. Unaware of why she was doing it, other waitresses also dropped to the floor, thinking they too were in danger. Then Kathy would apologize and reveal she had been raped, explaining, “He said he’d come back and kill me.”
Her erratic behavior began to hurt business and her manager insisted that she get help at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, a nonprofit social services agency.
There she met with a counselor, an older woman, who explained that her behavior and her feeling of rage were normal responses for women who had been raped. There was, in fact, no “normal response” to the trauma of being raped, but she was not crazy if she had flashbacks, couldn’t sleep, got depressed, suffered panic attacks, or felt guilt, shame, and self-loathing. Some rape victims mutilate themselves, Kathy was told. Others go on crash diets or binge on drugs or food. Whatever the response to being raped, the counselor explained, it was okay to feel that way. Kathy learned that anywhere from one in ten to one in four women end up being victims of sexual violence, and that a lot of women who have survived rape are out there to talk about it.
The counselor, worried that Kathy did not have a healthy release for her anger, brought out foam rubber paddles and told her to bash whatever she wanted to in the office. At home, she suggested pillow fights to get out anger.
A pillow fight? Kathy wondered what the hell good a pillow fight was when what she really wanted was to tear off the guy’s face.
THE RAPIST
He parked his motorcycle on a hill perched above the Flats, Cleveland’s industrial zone flanking the Cuyahoga River as it snaked south from downtown. Here the black sky covered him like a quilt. In the distance, forges and foundries cast an orange glow, softened by a haze of steam and smoke that was barely discernible at night. The exhale of steel mills.
In the dark the hum of tow motors and the low-gear rumble of semitrailers tumbled up the brush-covered slopes, the constant, purposeful sound of men at work, a reassuring lullaby. Some nights, if the wind was right, he could taste chalky soot on his teeth.
It seemed as if it had taken him forever to learn to sit in the dark on this hill. As a boy, he used to feel terrified at night, when a sudden clank or shop whistle or a rat rustling in the scraggly sumac bushes would detonate a terror that pounded across his chest. Even tonight he felt vulnerable, as if he had been swallowed by a hulking mechanical beast.
Opposite his perch, across a tangle of freight tracks and up the brambles to the north, were the housing projects, a foreign land. He imagined their residents as people with shiny skin and the blackest faces, their looks as angry as his father’s. He had been taught to hate them.
The projects made him think of one warm summer night when his mother and he were driving in their old car, windows down. They were going to the mill to pick up his father after shift change at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, in the Flats, where his father had worked as an electrician since 1964. On the way there, at a stoplight on Broadway Avenue, a black man jumped into the car. He was young and didn’t know what rape was, but somehow he knew how the man was going to hurt his mother. She shrieked, a sound more piercing than a whistle at shift change. His ears rang now just thinking about it. Panicked, the man bolted from the car and ran across two lanes of traffic.
The recurring nightmare came when he was older: He walks alone at night up Broadway Avenue and climbs the porch stairs to a nondescript house. He steps inside a smoky living room packed with sweaty black men, and there on the floor, her skirt up to her waist, thrashing, her wrists pinned, is his mother. They are raping her, repeatedly, and she screams, screams, screams.… And then he wakes up.
But now the dark had finally become his friend. It had stopped re-creating the terror of his childhood on War Avenue, just off Broadway, a narrow street of small frame houses crowded together like cartons in a storeroom, where, trying to sleep in his attic bedroom, he would hear his parents fighting below him.
Tonight, out on the hill, he thought about how he had hated the War Avenue house. Painted two dull tones of green, it sagged behind a grass patch the size of a truck bed. He wanted to burn down the place, to watch the fire rage, a dirty orange flame-ball on a dead-end street.
He hated that house, yet here he was at twenty-two living in it by himself. His father had kept it as a rental property after moving the family to suburban Brunswick Hills. His sister, Maria, two years younger, lived there with their parents.
It was close to ten o’clock. He went inside the War Avenue house and began the nightly ritual: getting showered and dressed to go out to the nightclubs. He toweled dry, shaved carefully, and splashed on cologne. He pulled on tight jeans and snapped them over his tiny waist, then climbed into western boots that boosted his five-foot-seven height a couple of inches. He put on an expensive casual shirt, leaving the top few buttons unfastened. He was a wiry 135 pounds; no amount of weight lifting or diet supplements could bulk him up.
He looked into the mirror and smiled. He knew he was handsome—long rock-star hair, dark-lashed eyes, cleft chin. His girlfriends loved his hair: thick, dark brown, with body and wave that responded like modeling clay to the touch of a blow-dryer. He would take forever in carefully styling it to frame his face perfectly, puffing it up on the crown to make himself appear taller. A girlfriend once hid his hair dryer as a joke. Wet from a shower, his hair starting to dry untamed, he demanded it back with a terrifying fury.
He slipped on a faded blue jean jacket, left the house, and climbed on his motorcycle, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He felt he looked perfect: the Marlboro man meets Richard Gere. First impressions were vital when meeting a good-looking woman in a nightclub, he believed. He liked to practice glances and smiles and low-key pickup patter. But first he was meeting his best friend, Danny, a handsome male stripper. They needed each other at the nightclubs, since nearly all single, unattached women went to bars in pairs. Pickup etiquette required that you didn’t leave a girlfriend alone if you met someone you liked. So men, even loners like himself, traveled in pairs as well. He and Danny were a team.
Tonight the two young men made an entrance at the Mining Company: pounding music, clouds of cigarette smoke, teenaged women in tank tops and tight jeans and young men in cowboy boots and muscle T-shirts, playing a nightly mating game. The Mining Company featured male go-go dancers one night, cheap drinks for women the next. The nightclub was a runaway success, always crowded and loud, patrolled out of necessity by off-duty Cleveland policemen. He loved the place, and tonight dozens of pretty young women were on the prowl.
He noticed an attractive woman being pulled outside by her enraged boyfriend and knew from experience that the woman was going to get hit. She seemed to sense his concern and gave him a look that he felt said, “Save me.”
He ran after them to the parking lot and dove headfirst at the woman’s boyfriend, knocked him down, and repeatedly smashed the man’s head into the wheel rim of a car. One of the off-duty policemen broke up the fight.
He was scratched and bruised, but didn’t care. He felt he had protected a woman, just as his father had always instructed him, and he went back inside the nightclub to take a victory lap around the bar. He would actually make a pretty good cop, he decided. Maybe he should apply. That would make his father respect him.
As a small boy he had been driven to earn his father’s approval. He remembered the thrill of once being lifted high by his dad to unscrew a burned-out lightbulb in a ceiling fixture, his tiny hands unsteady from the rare excitement of his father’s touch. He had even thought later of breaking the lights somehow so he could be close to his father again, but he realized he would get a whipping instead.
To this day his father thought of him as a mama’s boy, with a girlish preoccupation with his looks. To please his burly, hot-tempered dad, he became a fighter, starting as a boy on War Avenue in their deteriorating neighborhood close to the mills.
As a junior high school student, he had been beaten up by an older bully on the block, and he ran home crying to his father. His dad hired a tougher, bigger boy from outside the neighborhood to come in and thrash the bully.
But two weeks later, the bully of War Avenue again beat up his younger neighbor. This time when he ran home crying, his father pulled him outside and said, “Let’s go.” He never forgot his father’s next words. “You hit, you kick, you bite, you find a place on his body and you don’t let go. Whatever it takes.”
He walked with his dad to a baseball field at the end of the street and felt ice in his chest when he saw the bully with his back to them, watching the game through the fence.
“Do it!” his father told him, and he sucker-punched the bigger boy. They grappled and went down in the grass, rolling, grunting, while his father yelled, “You better whip him or you’ll get it from me.” Then he told his son to bite. The boy clamped his teeth on the bully’s wrist, and a shriek was heard down War Avenue.
His father yelled to let go, but he wouldn’t; he had something to prove. When the bully finally pulled loose he had to be treated at the emergency room of nearby St. Alexis Hospital.
With this encounter he broke through his fear of getting hurt and became a fighter. He felt himself turn around, walking to school confidently, even though biting wasn’t the traditional manly way to settle disputes. In his eyes, he had shown his father that he could fight, that he wouldn’t back down, that despite being small he would tackle a good-sized opponent.
Weeks later at school, knowing his father’s dislike of blacks, he took on a black student during music class. He broke his hand during the fight and had it splinted and bandaged. He counted on his father being proud of him, but lost confidence on the way home. So instead he told his sister Maria to tell their mother that he had tripped on a curb and fallen against a fire hydrant outside school.
But his father didn’t believe the story. He was taken to school, where he and his father met with the principal and the truth came out. “Swats or detentions,” the principal offered. He chose the detentions, but his father said give him the swats. And then his father took the paddle and, with the window blinds open, spanked him in full view of his junior high friends, who were watching through the glass.
That night his father cut off his hair, shaving his head into a burr cut. He felt humiliated. He wished his father would be run over by a truck.
KATHY BOND
Not long after she was raped, Kathy Bond and a girlfriend visited Michelle on Marne Avenue. Kathy had felt terrible about moving out so abruptly, but was unable to explain to Michelle why she just could not live there another instant.
During the visit, Kathy’s friend thought she recognized a young man a few houses down the street. “Let’s go and see him,” she said. “He’s a nice guy.” Kathy agreed.
But when the young man came to the door, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, a tattoo on his biceps, Kathy froze. It was the man who had raped her! She was sure. Same size, same look, and from the way he gazed at her, he seemed to know who she was. Trying to hide her panic, Kathy tugged on her friend’s arm. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Her friend said no, but Kathy was firm. She sprinted back to Michelle’s home. “Call the police, Michelle!” she yelled. “It’s the guy that raped me!”
Within a half hour, uniformed police and detectives stationed themselves at the doors of the man’s house while a detective walked Kathy to the front yard. There they had the suspect on the porch. His name was Larry McCormick and the police were running a criminal-records check on him.
“Is this the guy who raped you?” an officer asked.
“Hey, I don’t know her, I never saw her!” the man shouted.
Kathy looked him over—the small build, the handsome face, the tattoo on his arm, the skinny legs, the longish brown hair. She nodded. “He did it.”
“This is bullshit!”
“Look, Mr. McCormick,” one policeman said. “We might be able to clear you if you let us search your house and don’t find anything. Otherwise we’ll have to arrest you.” The police hoped to find the piggy banks that had been stolen from Michelle’s house.
“I’m not letting you search it,” McCormick retorted.
With that the police arrested him, handcuffed him, and transported him in a squad car to the city jail.
Kathy felt relieved by McCormick’s capture. Now she wouldn’t have to look over her shoulder for the rest of her life waiting for some rapist to come back and terrorize her because she had called the police. She went out with her pals that night to celebrate and got deliciously drunk.
Two days after the police arrested Larry McCormick, Kathy Bond returned to her old house to visit Michelle and the kids, only to spot McCormick in front of his house. “What the hell is he doing out!” she said. “I’m calling the police.”
She remembers a detective explaining: It was her word against his, and that doesn’t make for a very good case. The detective said he was sorry, but nine times out of ten at trial you get dragged through the mud and lose the case because the defense creates a reasonable doubt.
Kathy slammed down the phone. She did not think to ask if McCormick’s fingerprints matched those on the beer can police dusted the night of the rape. In fact, they did not.
Late that night at a popular bar, she told some friends what had happened. As the drinking and the hour progressed they all grew furious. The system had cut loose a rapist, and it wasn’t fair. It was time for frontier justice. Near closing time, Kathy, two guys, and a girlfriend were breathing fire and, pumped up for revenge, drove to McCormick’s house.
Kathy clomped up onto the porch in her platform clogs and banged on the door. Lights flicked on. “Hi,” she told Larry, “would you step outside, please?”
“I was told not to talk to you,” he said through the screen door.
“How do you know who I am, you coward?” she replied. “You told the cops you didn’t know me.”
She saw him peer out. He must have figured out that she had some young guys as her backup, hiding to the side. “Get off the property,” he said. He and his roommate picked up softball bats.
“C’mon out here.”
“Hey, I didn’t touch you.”
“Just come out,” she said. “Why aren’t you coming out? Afraid you’ll get beat up by a girl?”
“Get off the property or we’re calling the police,” he said.
“Go ahead, call ’em, you little chickenshit. You’re really bad when you got a gun on somebody, aren’t you.”
McCormick stayed inside, looking like he was afraid she and her friends would storm the house. A minute later, Kathy kicked the door and yelled loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear, “Chickenshit! Rapist!” She stomped off the porch and drove off with her friends.
Only later did she realize what had driven her that night: She wanted to handle McCormick herself in order to take back her life, to establish control, to restore what she felt he had taken from her. She wished she could go back to the way she had been before she was raped, when life seemed so carefree. Now she was a tangle of nerves. Many days she felt she could not last another hour. The only thing that made her feel better about herself was simply talking about being raped with her friends.
For the next several months, Kathy drove herself crazy thinking of McCormick walking free, with his cocky smile and skinny ass, making himself out to be the innocent victim of her accusations. The only time she wasn’t tormented by thoughts of the rape was after downing half a dozen drinks; then she could fall into a soggy sleep. But sleep did little to refresh her. She suffered nightmares, flashbacks to the attack. She bolted awake at the slightest sound, sweating, pulse racing, wondering if she should get out of bed to check the house.
When this happened, she reached under her pillow for the tiny .22-caliber handgun given to her by one of the cop regulars at Casey’s Restaurant, then checked around her apartment. Although she was nervous about not having a permit, she carried the gun everywhere—to work, in the car, even taking a bath.
A gun really wasn’t the answer, Kathy realized. She didn’t know if she had the guts to fire it. She hoped no one ever put her in that position.
September 1983
RADA STOVICH*
He had seen her in the clubs before: an attractive twenty-year-old woman whose dark looks came alive on the dance floor. Fast or slow, she danced with passion, laughing, spinning, not afraid to work up a sweat. Three or four nights a week she frequented West Side nightclubs.
One night at the Rampant Lion, a bar near the Baldwin-Wallace College campus in suburban Berea, a friend introduced them. Her name was Rada Stovich, and she was a second-generation Serb. He could tell she was not particularly impressed with him as she checked out his long hair and thin mustache. He was disappointed, because he felt he looked pretty hot, with a white Spanish-style shirt that bloused open to show off his deeply tanned chest.
He liked what he saw. Rada didn’t wear a lot of makeup. Her outfit was modest, not the tight miniskirts and revealing halter tops worn by many of the women—“sluts,” he called them, muttering the insult as the young women passed him in the bar or on the dance floor. He was searching for a “good girl,” someone to impress his parents and maybe even marry. At least that’s what he told himself. He saw no contradiction in sleeping with women from both categories, but only if he approached them first. He had standards. No woman was going to pick him up. He was the man and he had to make the first move.
Just before closing time at the Rampant Lion, he asked Rada to drive him to his parents’ home in Brunswick Hills. “It’s storming and I’ve got my bike,” he said. He couldn’t ride his motorcycle in the rain he explained; he’d leave it and come back for it later.
She had known him all of two hours and was a cautious woman. He struck her as the Latin lover type, not her taste in men. But he came on soft and low-key, with almost exaggerated politeness, casting himself as a victim of forces beyond his control, the weather. He was totally disarming, a polite young man. She took pity and said yes.
In the parking lot, Rada unlocked her car and he opened the driver’s side door for her with a courtly flourish. “What do you do?” he asked her on the drive to his parents’ home.
“I’m a bill collector; I call people on the phone for an agency,” she said.
“You’re kidding. Maybe you’ve been calling me,” he said. “I’ve got lots of bills I can’t pay.”
He told her about undergoing ten thousand dollars’ worth of emergency surgery the past summer after falling off a ladder at a temporary construction job. He was helping to build a garage and had fallen from a joist beam, perhaps nine feet up, and had landed forehead first. The fall punched out a piece of frontal skull bone, knocking him unconscious for three days. Doctors performed emergency surgery to remove a blood clot inside the skull that was creating life-threatening pressure.
It sounded awful. Rada gave him some ideas on how to deal with the bill collectors. They turned to other topics, moving smoothly from work to pop music to family, and suddenly it was three in the morning. By now Rada was impressed with him.
Over the next week, he made a point of running into her at the Mining Company and at her other haunts. Soon he asked her for a date. She was flattered by his attention, because by now she realized he had dated many women more beautiful than she. In the nightclubs, many women stared at him with either desire or contempt. Of the ones who shot him dagger eyes, he explained, “I used to go out with her.” To Rada, barely twenty years old, his honesty seemed charming, even mature.
He courted her with romance-novel manners—opening car doors, pantomiming to radio love songs. Within a week, he took her to his parents’ home for dinner. His parents seemed nice enough to her. His father, Rodney, was a millworker, built like a stump, handsome in a beefy way. But he rarely met her eyes; he ate silently, then went off to smoke cigarettes in the living room. Katy, his mother, was one of fifteen children of a Mexican migrant worker, Rada learned that evening. With long black hair and electric brown eyes, it was clear she had once been a beautiful girl, but now her nervous smile showed silver-filled teeth in an aging face. She skittered through the kitchen nervously, speaking broken English.
When dinner was over, he took Rada home. After a month of courtship, she still couldn’t believe he hadn’t tried to sleep with her. She said to a girlfriend: “His name is Ronnie Shelton and he’s perfect. He’s honest. He’s straight. He talks about his feelings.”
“You’re kidding. Like what?”
“You know how guys don’t show feelings about their family,” Rada said. “He told me he loves his sister. He’s concerned. Very protective.”
“I’ve got to meet this man,” said her friend.
After their first or second date, Ronnie gave Rada a key to the house he rented from his parents on War Avenue and insisted that she drop in whenever she wanted. Soon Rada made a practice of stopping in after night classes at Cleveland State University. If Ronnie wasn’t around, she studied her premed courses, then fell asleep. If he was home, they’d talk.
“I like to listen to you talk,” he would say.
“Why?”
“Because you’re smart. You’re interesting.”
She was captivated, and he could tell no man had ever flattered her for her brains.
“You’re too nice,” he said.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. You’re just a nice girl.”
From their soul-searching talks, Ronnie learned that Rada was straight as far as sex went. Most guys at the Rampant Lion or the Mining Company or the other clubs expected sex after a first date, and many women as well were disappointed when things didn’t progress that fast. He decided Rada was a “good girl,” and he was glad. She was the kind of woman his father would approve of.
Without directly saying anything about it, Ronnie encouraged her to be as attractive as possible, and she lost the last few pounds that had kept her from having a perfect figure. He knew she was hooked on him, but Ronnie felt they didn’t have a future together. They were too different. He was more comfortable taking Rada one block down on War Avenue to Mike and Gloria’s, a shot-and-a-beer bar with country music on the jukebox. But she had higher aspirations: a college degree. Ronnie, who had dropped out of high school, hated it when she decided to pledge at a Cleveland State University sorority. He knew all about frats and sororities from television, he told her, and didn’t like them. People in them were stuck-up and probably thought they were better than he was (which he secretly felt they were). One night he saw Rada costumed for a Halloween frat party to which he was not invited. She was going as a flapper, sheathed in a red dress with a tassled hem, wearing sexy black stockings. Ronnie hated it. “It makes you look like a whore,” he told her.
Weeks later, after a night of barhopping, Ronnie arrived at the War Avenue house and found Rada asleep in his double bed. They had dated for two months and he was tired of her. Now he told himself it was okay to fuck her. He woke her up and in ten minutes it was over. Then he fell asleep. He didn’t know that Rada stayed awake for hours, upset about the encounter.
Within days, Ronnie picked a fight with her, their first, over something insignificant. But Ronnie wouldn’t let it drop, escalating the disagreement into an ugly scene. They never dated again.
Rada had seen a dark side to him, and it scared her.
*Not her real name.
April 1984
RONNIE
In the hour before dawn, Ronnie drove along residential West Side streets, swiveling his head, scanning the first floors of houses for lighted windows. From inside one, a light was turned on, near the back. Good. He parked his car around the corner and slipped over on foot.
He made a pass by the house on foot. It was a two-family home, an up-and-down, with a few shrubs. He crept around the back in the dark, listening for dogs, then pushed up against the side of the house and crouched.
Tingling with excitement, he slowly raised his face inches from the kitchen window, giving him a clear view through a thin space along the bottom edge of a shade. Perfect. A woman stood at an ironing board, wearing a bathrobe. She had it loosely cinched to cover her panties and bra. She was ironing a blue postal carrier’s uniform, and from her movements Ronnie could catch a glimpse of her body inside the robe.
He fired up a Marlboro, cupping it with his left hand to hide the ember, then unzipped his pants and worked on himself, gazing intently. She had a lush body and straight black hair that fell to her waist. She was quite a find, and he memorized every detail, adding her to his mental list of anonymous targets.
For more than a decade, well before his first orgasm, Ronnie had been creeping along the backs of houses in the dark and peering inside. He would never forget the first time. He was still a boy, maybe twelve, living on War Avenue, when he slipped out of the house early one night. He hid next to a nearby home where a young woman rented the bottom half of a tiny two-family house. Through a first-floor window covered by cheap curtains came the soft flickering light from a television screen. It drew him like a beacon. He peeked inside and saw her stretched on a wide couch. She was naked, watching TV, the glow of the screen illuminating her skin. Snuggled behind her, facing the television, was the man who lived upstairs. He appeared to be naked too.
Ronnie stared at her breasts and her black tangled patch and her blue-white skin. He was frozen for what seemed like forever. Oh, so this is what it’s all about, he said to himself. He could not remember ever feeling so wonderful, his crotch warm and tight. At that moment, he felt closer to this stranger than to anyone else in the world. He had seen her exposed, vulnerable, and it seemed a perfect relationship: He knew her and her secrets but she did not see him and could not hurt him. As often as he could, he crept in the dark to his neighbor’s window, but it was never as gratifying as that first time.
Part of his attraction was wanting to know how other people lived. Did they live as he did at his home, with screaming fights and family secrets and strict rules? Or did they live like the families he saw on TV shows, or in some entirely different way? He wondered especially about women and what they did at night when they thought no one was watching.
Now, like a hawk swooping and snatching whatever caught its eye, the grown-up Ronnie hunted through backyards nearly every night, addicted to the voyeuristic thrill of secretly knowing a woman. With favorite targets he acted out a pathological form of foreplay. He broke in when his surveillance told him the woman was at work or on a date. He fondled her slips and bras. He opened closets and stared at her clothes and imagined what she would look like in them. Would I like to go out with her if I saw her in a nightclub? he wondered. He studied snapshots tucked around mirrors or pinned with magnets to the refrigerator. He noticed how clean she kept the place. He took his time after he broke in, because he was getting to know her; he wanted to connect. Would she like me if we met? he always asked himself.
Sometimes he unlocked a window before he left. Later, when the unsuspecting woman was asleep, he would break in. He would find her wallet to learn her name and stare at the photo on her driver’s license, checking the license for height and weight. If it indicated he made a mistake, that she was heavy, he would think “fat bitch,” steal her money, and sneak out. Sometimes he would just lightly touch the sleeping woman and leave.
The black-haired woman who carried the mail intrigued him, and he began watching her regularly. She kept the house neat and left for work punctually. He liked that. And she loved her little boy. Ronnie never saw her spank him. She seemed like a perfect mother.
One morning, while spying on her through the kitchen window, Ronnie watched and stroked himself as she finished ironing her uniform. Then she took off her robe. He caught his breath. It seemed like he could feel blood pumping to his muscles, making him powerful, a superman. Like the times he had been whacked on coke, only ten times as intense.
Should I go inside?
Ronnie was still amazed that many women didn’t take even the simplest precautions. They left windows and doors unlocked. They left first-floor windows open. In warm weather all he had to do was make a hand-sized slit in a screen with his knife and open the window.
Outside the kitchen window he stood in a trancelike high. His penis stung from a friction burn that would raise a scab. Should I do it?
A moment later, the woman pulled on the crisp blue uniform and went into another room. Ronnie zipped up and left. At the sidewalk he whispered to himself, as he always did when nothing terrible happened, “Thank you, God.”
BETTY OCILKA
Betty Ocilka heard the clunk and figured it was the paperboy throwing the Plain Dealer up against the screen door on her back porch. It was about 5:40 A.M., April 13, 1984, and she came downstairs to the kitchen in a fluffy terry cloth robe and started ironing her mail carrier’s uniform. Some mail carriers didn’t care how their uniforms looked, but Betty always wanted to look sharp. She had started delivering mail at nineteen, trudging twelve miles a day, shouldering a sack that might weigh forty-five pounds at the start of her route. Few women carried mail then, and now, more than a decade later, she still took pride in her job.
She turned off the hot steam iron and stepped away from the board. As she pulled up the uniform pants under her bathrobe, a man with a pink and blue stocking cap pulled over his face rushed from the tiny pantry and put a choke lock around her neck with his left arm. His right hand pointed a knife at her neck. Betty screamed, and instantly he clamped her windpipe tight.
“I’ll kill you if you make any noise,” he said.
She gasped for air, shaking, the knife now at her sternum. This can’t be happening, she thought. He walked her into the living room in what seemed to be slow motion. She felt wiry hands push her to the couch, fondle her breasts, and yank down her pants.
She had to do something. “I’m having my period.” She squirmed, then went limp, and tried again to break free.
“Don’t move,” he hissed. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”
Betty tried not to cry. She didn’t want her three-year-old son to hear her. Whenever he heard her cry, he ran up and hugged her and tried to make her feel better. If her boy toddled downstairs and the attacker moved to him, Betty knew she would try to kill the bastard. It would be his body or hers when the police arrived.
Now she felt the edge of the blade press into her neck, pulling the skin tight across her voice box. She trembled and prayed, God, I want to see my baby grow up. She wasn’t ready to die, and she found herself submitting. He forced her head down, his touch making her flesh crawl, then a moment later told her to swallow.
“I need money,” he said as he let her up. She left and went in the kitchen and found all her cash—$21. He was behind her with the knife.
“I’ll write you a blank check,” she said. She just wanted him to go. She would do anything, as long as it did not wake up her son.
He shut her in the bathroom. “Don’t come out and don’t call the police. If you do, I’ll know and I’ll come back.”
She heard steps, a door being opened, then silence. She felt vulnerable standing there, but it was a couple of minutes before she ran out and called the Cleveland police. She vaulted the stairs, looking for her son. He was not in his crib, and she panicked. The bastard kidnapped him!
She ran frantically from room to room. The second time through her room she threw aside the bunched-up quilt on her bed, and there was her boy, asleep. He had never before climbed out of his crib and into her empty bed. Now she was even more devastated. He must have heard something frightening and sought comfort. Thank God he didn’t come downstairs.