My Fight For Justice

My Fight for Justice
The day began like any other—but this day would change my life. My four-year-old son and I were headed down the porch steps for work and preschool when a shadowy man passed by our condominium with the collar of his jacket turned high and his dirty-white cowboy hat pulled low. He looked toward us, and in that solitary moment, I saw his sinister face. A shiver of dread ricocheted through me. Why? I didn’t know. Within seconds, he was gone. Relieved, I held my son’s hand tighter and hurried to my car.
Anticipating an evening alone, I returned home around five. My son was at his dad’s, and the night was mine. Moments after sitting and closing my eyes to relax, a knife blade edged against my throat.
“Don’t make a sound and you won’t get hurt.” A voice was low in my ear. I sat rigid with fear.
“Okay, lady. Stand up, nice and slow. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Terror raced through me. I felt lightheaded, yet heavy. The roar of racing blood pounded
in my ears. My heart slammed. Nothing in the room registered as familiar. I stood up slowly. As
he tied my hands behind my back, I stole a glance at him. In a cowboy hat and a stocking mask,
he was taller than me, maybe five-eleven. His brown jacket was tattered, his jeans worn. Wirerimmed
glasses balanced awkwardly on his stocking-distorted nose.
With the knife at my back, he pushed me upstairs to my bedroom. He made me undress—
making things clear, I was about to be raped. I felt numb yet hyper-alert, simultaneously.
My mind screamed, Oh, God. Oh, God. But the room remained quiet. Without planning
my words, I spoke. Maybe I could make a connection; make him change his mind.
“Do you want to make love?” I asked as if oblivious to the gravity of the circumstances.
“Because if you want to make love, we need to talk first. I can’t have sex without a conversation.”
He hesitated, leaving me unsure if he would snap and kill me just to shut me up. Finally,
he spoke as if annoyed. “So, what kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a dental hygienist.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “What do you do?”
Could this work?
“I’m a—” His manner abruptly changed. He shoved me onto the bed face-up. I could see a
long, curved, boning knife in his hand and tried not to panic. Then he jammed his fingers into my
anus. Pain and fear ate through my seemingly calm exterior. I seemed to float from my body to
the ceiling, where I watched myself plead with him.
“Please, don’t. I just had surgery there, and it hurts.” A lie.
Would it matter to him?
Remarkably, he removed his fingers and stuffed them into my vagina. I tried to distract
myself by memorizing his features, his glasses, his clothing — anything that would help identify him
later. The brown jacket, the dirty-white cowboy hat — the man from this morning. I had seen him
without the mask! Brown mustache, angular face, light skin, pointed nose.
An idea struck. He’d seen me this morning with my son. I glanced at the clock. 6:10. “My
ex-husband will be here any minute with my son.”
“Is that so?” he said sarcastically.
“Yes,” I answered, trying to keep my voice steady. I was determined to plant a seed of
worry. “And he won’t like finding you here.”
“No,” he smirked. “I suppose not. So let’s not waste any more time.”
Without warning, he pushed me into my little boy’s room, threw me face down on my
son’s bed. A Donald Duck poster—the only witness.
“Don’t make a sound or I’ll kill you,” he warned repeatedly.
The innocence in the room dissolved into spinning darkness. He penetrated me with a
hard, cold object. Was it the knife handle? Would the blade be next? I started to cry and plead; my false calm had broken into fright.
“Please, don’t hurt me,” I begged. Drenched in the horror, I imagined the pain of a knife slice. On my knees, I begged, pleaded, cried. His eyes glared into mine with a terrifying vacantness. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul—in his eyes, I saw a portal into sheer evil. I was certain; this man would have no problem killing me.
He thrust penis into my mouth. I felt sick and worried that I might gag. If I did not follow his orders, I would be dead in minutes. I had no sense of how much time had passed. Was it seconds? Minutes? Hours? As time slowly folded into itself, he ejaculated in my mouth. I could not turn my head and expel it; I had to swallow—and nearly vomited.
He forced me back into my bedroom. My mouth tasted vile. I was dying inside. He pushed me onto the bed and cut the phone cord. “I’m leaving before your ex-husband gets here.”
Did this mean the ordeal was over? Or would he kill me before he left? I was face down, naked, and vulnerable. The bedside clock read 6:20. What had seemed like an eternity had only been ten minutes.
He threw the blanket over me. “So you don’t get cold,” he said. “Don’t move for five
minutes.” He stood in the doorway then disappeared. “Five minutes,” he called from somewhere
in the house.
I heard the front door close and waited. The house was unbearably quiet. I felt broken but
could not cry — it would be a long time before I’d cry again.
An ex-convict out on parole, he was soon apprehended. His name, David Fleury—a thirty-three-
year-old shoe repairman.
I’d moved but imagined Fleury lurking in the shadows of my new place. I bought a Doberman and slept with a loaded gun under my pillow. Even so, I didn’t feel safe. I would never feel safe. Each evening, an unfamiliar noise or an eerie sensation would ignite terror. I deteriorated. Sudden mood swings, temper outbursts, irrational panic—my son silently witnessed it all. Worried that he would imagine himself to blame, I reluctantly decided to explain why I had been acting this way.
One day, I pulled the car to the side of the road. “I guess you’ve noticed that Mommy hasn’t been very happy the past few weeks.”
He nodded.
“I know I’ve been grumpy,” I said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to do that.” “Did I do something, Mommy?” His innocence made my heart ache.
“Oh, honey, no. You’ve been such a good boy. It’s just that—” The clanking in my head clouded my thoughts. “Before we moved to our new house, something made me so sad that I still get upset.” I paused. This was something that a four-year-old should not have to know. The
aching radiated in my stomach. “A burglar came to our house, and he scared me.”
“What did he do?”
He seemed incredibly fragile.
“He was a bad person.” A lump in my throat made it difficult to speak. “He made me do
things I didn’t want to do. I was very scared.”
“Did he have a cape and a mask?”
“Just a mask.” I struggled to steady my voice. “So, I’ve been sad because of the burglar.” Silence.
“What are you thinking, honey?”
“I was just thinking about the burglar and that he scared you.”
“And what about that?” I asked softly.
His eyes squinted with little-boy anger. “I’m just really mad.”
Why wasn’t I furious? The rapist had violated me, had threatened my life, but instead of anger, I felt numb and vacant.
The upcoming trial represented the battlefield. I would challenge him head-on and set myself free. I showed up for all the court dates and pre-trial hearings, only to be informed of last-minute postponements. Week after week, month after month, with an arsenal of technicalities to continue the delays, the defense attempted to wear me down. Six months after the attack, I finally testified.
From the stand, I glared at David Fleury. I imagined him hearing my thoughts. Not so powerful anymore, are you? I told my story, naming him, pointing him out. "Yes, I’m certain it was him." Yet as I relayed the specifics of the rape, I saw an eerie exhilaration on his face. Did hearing the details arouse him? I felt suddenly naked and exposed.
“Yes, your honor, hopelessly deadlocked.”
The jury’s verdict left me stunned and enraged. I glanced at the defense table where Fleury
sat, a smug expression on his face. What had gone wrong?
Outside the courtroom, I confronted his public defender. “How can you let him go free
when you know that he did this to me?”
“I’m sorry, I was just doing my job.”
Only-doing-his-job had convinced the jury that there was a reasonable doubt that Fleury
was the one. The defense had used my initial police interview, taken minutes after the rape,
against me. Still in shock, I had referred to the rapist’s glasses as “silver, wire-rimmed, photo-
gray-type glasses.” The defense brought in optometry experts to prove that Fleury’s silver glasses did not have photo-gray lens.
Because of the rules of evidence, the jury didn’t know that Fleury had nine other convictions in the state of California. They had no idea that he had offered to plead guilty to some charges in exchange for a plea bargain, that he had been a Peeping Tom since the age of twelve, and that he had committed more than twenty sexual assaults in his lifetime.
Since the jury was deadlocked, a new trial was scheduled for the following week. By now, I was devastated and emotionally exhausted. The memory of Fleury’s pleasure during my testimony and the triumphant smirk on his face during the verdict sickened me.
The trial was repeatedly postponed at the last minute. I missed work, had to reschedule my patients’ appointments — my life revolved around Fleury’s schedule.
More months of delays and continuances followed. With each postponement, I would imagine Fleury’s glee. After all, wasn’t I still at his mercy? Although he was in the county jail, I felt like the prisoner.
Another cancellation. Another. Finally, I reached a breaking point. I crawled into bed and
sobbed for my lost life. But a sharp, snapping noise down the hall startled me into silence. Was he
here? Had he come back to finish this?
I grabbed my gun and headed in the direction of the sound. In my son’s room, the Donald
Duck poster had fallen to the floor. In an unexpected reunion, we stood together — the ghost, Donald Duck, and me. In that moment, heart drumming and adrenaline pumping through me, I
knew what I needed to do.
Just as he had done to me, I took him by surprise. I went to the county jail on visiting day, signed in, and waited on one side of a thick, glass window for him to enter the visiting area. Shock flashed across his face when he saw me. He froze but did not retreat. I had worried he might turn his back when he saw me, only to empower himself again, but he held his ground.
I pointed to the telephone on the side of the window.
“Hello.” His voice, that voice. The don’t-make-a-sound-or-I’ll-hurt-you voice. “Hello,” I answered. I looked him straight in the eye and did not blink. “I read your
confession.”
“What confession?” he asked suspiciously.
“To the psychiatrists. You know, you admitted to raping me and twenty other women.” I had chosen my words carefully, alluding to something that would incriminate him. I was bluffing; I hadn’t really read the reports. I’d only been told what they contained.
“Oh, that,” he answered.
My knees trembled. Suddenly, anger broke through — the long months, my shattered life, the relentless fear, the degrading violation.
“You owe me an apology. Do you understand?” My voice rose, waves of anger broke over
me. "You came into my house, held a knife to my throat, and raped me. I had to move, miss work
— you cost me thousands of dollars. I’m afraid—scared in my own home. All of this, because of
you. I want an apology. I demand it.”
He stared at me. Finally, he spoke—his words—a waterfall of misery. “Rape is an addiction,” he said. “I can’t stop.” He then said, “I can’t say sorry for raping you, because I’m
not.” He liked rape, could not stop, and would continue to rape if freed. He mentioned the victim-witness organization would financially help me.
He saw himself as a “basically decent” person, but nothing was more important to him than the high he got from overpowering a woman. He liked being in control and fed off the terror he saw in his victims’ eyes. Even if a woman acted as if she wasn’t afraid, he could always break her. And he liked it. Craved it.
“Well, you owe me,” I repeated. He shrugged.
“And you can pay me back by pleading guilty.” “That’s really—”
Suddenly, the phone went dead. Visiting hours were over. “Plead guilty.” I mouth the words one last time.
The case never went back to trial. When Fleury told his attorney about our conversation, the defense, realizing how damaging his conversation with me had been, convinced Fleury to confess.
Fleury got eight years, but good behavior and credit for time served prior to sentencing earned him a release in a mere four and a half years.
Later, I found out that Fleury, once released, had violated parole. Within months, he was
picked up in Louisiana, he’d been caught prowling outside a single woman’s window. Stuffed in
his jacket pockets were a stocking mask, three knives, and a rope tied into a noose.
Police connected him with other attacks. They charged Fleury with the rape of two other
women. He had stayed in their house for hours, assaulting and demeaning them. He was also charged with attempted rape of a third woman who had tried to fight him. He had beaten her so
severely that her jaw broke.
None of the women could identify him with certainty. However, twenty-three details in his
latest attacks were identical to mine. Under Louisiana law, this information was as solid as fingerprints. Consequently, his prior crimes were admissible in court to prove his identity in the rapes.
The Louisiana district attorney contacted me, flying me to New Orleans as a surprise witness. When I entered the courtroom, the shock and fear on Fleury’s face pleased me. This time, a jury took only a half-hour to find Fleury guilty. The judge said he’d never seen a more despicable human being and sentenced Fleury to two consecutive life terms without parole, and an additional 629 years. In the courtroom, with the other victims at my side, tears came to my eyes. No one would have to fear David Fleury again.