Sole Survivor

by Holly Dunn

  “Yes, ma’am,” Judge Harmon replied.

  “Pass the witness.”

  The defense had no questions, and I was allowed to step down. I was so shattered I barely had strength to stand. The bailiff had to practically carry me out of the room. I gave every ounce of my soul to that testimony, but it was worth it. I had fulfilled my promise: If I live through this, I will get you.

  I can say with full certainty that testifying at the trial was the absolute most horrific part of this entire experience. The trial was worse than the night of the attack itself. It was worse than being raped. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life. The trial was traumatic not just for me, but for my whole family. The only thing that could have made it any worse was if I’d had to be cross-examined by the defense. That exemption made me quite possibly one of the most fortunate rape victims in judicial history, given how ruthless defense attorneys in rape trials are known to be.

  As soon as my testimony was complete, my family and I were escorted out of the courthouse and back to the hotel where we packed our bags, piled into the rental car, and headed straight for the airport. As soon as I was buckled into my seat on Dad’s plane, I passed out and slept the whole way home.

  We were in the air by the time the jury returned from lunch, court resumed, and the attorneys launched into closing arguments. I later learned how the defense made a desperate plea for Resendiz’s life—even though that wasn’t what he wanted anyway. They asked the jury to give him credit for turning himself in, and they even warned of an international incident with Mexico should he be given the death penalty.

  Devon Anderson had been on fire the whole trial, and her closing statements were one final glorious blaze.

  “One of the defense attorneys said there is something wrong with him. You know what, I’d agree with that. We’re not here to say he’s a sick weirdo. He is sick. There is something wrong with him, but does it make him any less morally responsible? No. Because he knows what he is doing, and he is making the choice to do it and he won’t stop,” she said. “We cannot give the surviving family members what they really deserve, and we can’t give him what he richly deserves, so I guess justice is just going to have to do.”

  Then she turned and pointed her finger at Resendiz, her voice fierce and her eyes alight.

  “Please join me today in telling all these family members and this defendant that it is over. It is OVER!”

  I was, and still am, amazed by Devon Anderson.

  The jury deliberated only an hour and forty-five minutes before returning to deliver their verdict.

  Devon called me at my parents’ house to tell me the news: the jury was unanimous, and Resendiz was sentenced to death. It was satisfying, to say the least, though I didn’t expect anything less. I couldn’t have fathomed justice being served to him any other way.

  Despite his protests to Judge Harmon, an automatic appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals would trigger a judicial review of the case, and eventually the Mexican consulate would hire its own lawyer to fight his conviction. Even in the face of legal maneuvering, I remained confident he would never be free to ride the rails again.

  Though the State of Texas had delivered its response to Resendiz’s crimes, there were so many questions left unanswered. I wanted to know why in the world he did this. Why did he choose me and Chris? But there are no reasonable explanations for what he did. I had to move from asking why to asking what now? I had been given a second chance, and my desire was to live well and with joy—for myself, for Chris, for the other victims, and for everyone whose lives were torn apart. This horrific nightmare I had lived through wasn’t just my story; I was part of something so much bigger. Now I wanted what was evil to be transformed into something good. I wasn’t sure yet how, but that answer would come in time.

  PART 3:

  A Way Forward

  CHAPTER 16.

  A Season of Renewal

  After two weeks of training at the Kappa Kappa Gamma headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, I returned to Evansville to spend a couple of weeks before my job officially started. I was standing in my parents’ kitchen when my niece Erica, my eldest sister Kathy’s daughter, walked in. What she said next made me forget what I was doing.

  “This guy has been calling you for the past three days,” she said. “He won’t leave his number, but he says his name is Jacob.”

  “Jacob?” I asked. “Jacob called me?”

  I hadn’t heard from Jacob Pendleton in two years. We hadn’t spoken, emailed, or kept in touch in any way in all that time, and I missed him terribly. Though I’d gone on dates here and there, I never went out with the same guy twice and hadn’t met anyone with whom I’d had the kind of connection I felt with Jacob.

  After hearing he was trying to reach me, I sat by the phone for three days. I didn’t want to leave the house for fear I’d miss his next call. He hadn’t left me a phone number, so all I could do was wait.

  And then he finally called.

  I wasn’t exactly sure how this conversation was going to go. At the end of 1998 when things between us were at their worst, he’d treated me rather badly—not because he wasn’t a good guy, but because I had hurt him with a breakup that turned out to be premature and unnecessary. He couldn’t get over the fact that everything had been going great, and then suddenly it wasn’t. I regretted it as much as he did, but it apparently had taken him these last two years to get through the pain, anger, and disappointment and to forgive me enough to even have a conversation.

  So here we were, on opposite ends of the line, trying to find a way across the chasm between us.

  The start of the conversation was rather awkward. I didn’t know what to say. There were some pleasantries. I mentioned testifying in the recent trial against my attacker. We talked all around the main issue at hand, until he finally admitted why he was calling.

  “Usually when I write someone off, they’re gone,” he said. “But there’s something about you. There’s always been something special about us.”

  He missed me as much as I’d missed him, and hearing him say this meant so much to me. Our personalities, dispositions, upbringings, and preferences fit together so well there was a sense of oneness to our relationship. We had a connection that we weren’t done exploring. I wasn’t convinced yet that he had truly forgiven me, but I knew I wanted to be with him more than anything. I always had.

  After that initial phone call, I went to Lexington for a weekend to see some friends before starting my job, and I asked Jacob if he’d like to meet up while I was in town. He wasn’t sure he was ready, but in the end he agreed to see me, though the encounter was relatively brief and unmistakably awkward for us both. It was clear that Jacob didn’t want to jump in wholeheartedly and end up hurt again. Though this tentative new start was promising, the renewal of our relationship would prove to be a painfully slow, drawn-out process that would span the next five years.

  I hit the road a few weeks later, traveling to thirty-two different college campuses during a nine-month academic year to advise Kappa chapters on best practices in finance, operations, and leadership. The position didn’t pay much, but I had a blast traveling the country and meeting other girls still engaged in the sorority experience I had treasured so much at UK. Jacob and I couldn’t see each other very often, and when we did it tended to be distant and strained. We were different this time, and unsure of how to be in a relationship, but our bond meant enough that we kept trying even though we were flailing along the way.

  The following summer, after I finished my stint as a traveling consultant and before I started an MBA program at the University of Southern Indiana (USI) in Evansville, I took the first of several trips to Maine to experience for myself what it was Chris loved so much: Maine is magical, there’s nothing like it. My traveling companions on my maiden voyage to the Pine Tree State were Brian and Adrienne, two people central to our “Life Is Good” clan. Heading north to honor Chris’s memory was Brian’s idea,
and he would play tour guide for this first excursion. He’d gone with Chris to Phish’s Great Went festival in Limestone the week before Chris died, and he knew all the places across the state that Chris especially loved to visit.

  We drove from Kentucky in my silver Toyota Highlander packed with camping gear I’d acquired during my time at Phillip Gall’s, stopping in Boston to visit Reed, one of Chris’s best friends from high school. One of our destinations was Solstice Farm in Cherryfield, Maine, where Chris’s high school friend Justin’s parents still lived. Even though Justin was living in another part of the state, Brian and Chris had stopped in to see his parents, Michael and Christine, in Cherryfield when they were in the area for the Great Went, and their remote, rural homestead became a refuge for all of Chris’s beloved friends every time we journeyed to Maine.

  Despite the town’s name, Cherryfield is actually considered the wild blueberry capital of the world and home to the world’s largest wild blueberry farmers and processors, and we arrived late enough in the summer to witness the harvest in action. Solstice Farm was a beautiful property with a pond that rivaled Claude Monet’s in Giverny, France, replete with blooming water lilies, bright yellow swamp candles, and wild irises shooting out from tall green stalks of grass. Nestled among the trees, Michael and Christine’s farmhouse was white with a steep-pitched roof and a screened-in side porch where we enjoyed the evening as it cooled. A heavy wind chime that hung from a nearby tree resounded with the deep tones of a harbor buoy bell whenever a strong wind blew. Even though I was only meeting them for the first time, Michael and Christine were immensely likable and down-to-earth people who made us feel like we’d known them all our lives.

  Our pilgrimage to honor Chris and enjoy what he loved about Maine took us miles away from Cherryfield down to Bar Harbor, about fifty miles south. In Bar Harbor we drank blueberry ale and bought fresh lobster right off the boats. Brian led Adrienne and me on hikes to watch the sunrise on top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park. We took a ferry to a remote campsite on the Isle au Haut. We jumped into the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean together. We built lots of campfires. We slept in tents and sleeping bags and took hot showers in coin-operated stalls that stood just off the road. When we tired of roughing it, we were always welcome back at Solstice Farm, where we could sleep in a real bed and use an actual bathroom.

  Maine was amazing, just as Chris had said. I realized while I was there that I have never felt so calm or such deep peace. I finally understood what Chris meant in his funny voicemail on my dorm answering machine about having no concept of time here. Just being outside and disconnected from the mad pace of the rest of the world allowed me to be quiet, to be present, to enjoy the moment I was in, a blissful and surreal experience.

  Brian, Reed, and I journeyed again to Maine in the summer of 2002, before the fifth anniversary of the attack, and I went again in 2003 with my sorority sister Amy and one of her friends. Each trip to Maine was an attempt to trail Chris’s spirit and continue getting to know him even after he was gone. We visited Michael and Christine at Solstice Farm and toured all of Chris’s favorite spots—which by now had become places I too treasured deeply. At the end of my third trip, Amy and I did something that was quintessentially Chris—we went to a Phish concert, the It festival on the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone.

  I had never done anything like this, and probably never would have had it not been for Chris’s singular influence on my life.

  Limestone is a small town in the far northeast corner of Maine, almost two hundred miles north of Solstice Farm, and a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. Loring Air Force Base spanned nine thousand acres and, at its peak, once held twelve thousand military and civilian personnel before eventually being officially shut down in September of 1994. In the late afternoon on Saturday, August 2, 2003, my two girlfriends and I disappeared into a crowd of sixty thousand Phish fans who had gathered for the two-day festival. Each of the three times Phish held a concert at this venue, the temporary city that sprung up became the second largest city in all of Maine, outranked in population only by Portland.

  A Phish concert has to be experienced to be understood. Just getting to the concert site was a madcap adventure, as we spent hours navigating our way in a miles-long queue of cars and vans in nearly standstill traffic on the one main drag into town. Fans en route took advantage of the stop and go, jumping from one car to another or riding along on the top of their vehicles. Along the way were creative and useful pop-up businesses: a variety of people, even parents with young kids in tow, sold grilled cheese sandwiches, burritos, cold shots of Jägermeister, and other concert sundries to travelers in cars or on foot.

  Once we finally pulled up to the venue, we then had to wait in line to pull our car into the campsite and park, and then dash for the best spot to set up camp based on the direction they pointed us in. It felt like we were settlers in the Wild West making a run across the plains to claim our own perfect plot of land. And that’s what it would be for those two nights—a makeshift homestead, a cluster of our three individual tents, an outdoor suite of sorts with a canopy of shade in the middle.

  We were camped at least a mile away from the main stage, but if we needed to take breaks, we could still hear the music back at our tents and then return to the concert without missing much. At the concert, we generally stayed with the crowds toward the back, but occasionally braved the front for a few choice songs. Wet weather and heavy traction had turned portions of the field into ankle-deep mud, and the area right in front of the stage was a mud pit so thick and sticky you couldn’t traverse it without losing your shoes. The girls and I set up a tarp near the mud pit to use as a rest area and storage spot for our flip-flops, and we danced barefoot in the mud alongside the massive throng of people that blanketed the venue for acres on all sides.

  I started listening to Phish only after Chris died, and then mainly because his friends listened to the band so much, but I soon came to appreciate how unique they were. One of the things that Phish bandmates Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Page McConnell, and John Fishman are famous for are long, drawn-out sets of constant jamming. After the first few Saturday night sets, we retired into our tents only to be awoken at 2:30 a.m. by a commotion near the air traffic control tower. The band was playing a set of ambient music—unscripted, unrecognizable jams—while a haze of theatrical fog billowed around them. A light show cast incandescent shapes up and down the tower and spotlights revealed a team of acrobatic dancers suspended in harnesses from the sides of the tower.

  Never in my life had I experienced anything like this, and I couldn’t help but think Chris would have been ecstatic next to me, completely present in the moment and feeling fully alive.

  Looking back, I laugh at how it must have seemed crazy to my family that I was a graduate student almost done with an MBA who takes off for a Phish concert. Dad had to be looking at me and thinking, “She’ll never get it together. She’s twenty-six years old and she’s going to Phish concerts.” I would have thought my kid was crazy. But neither he nor my mom ever said, “What do you think you’re doing?” All along they let me process my grief the way I needed and wanted to—even if that meant camping out at a Phish festival in a remote field in northwest Maine.

  Maine was healing for me without my realizing it at the time. Some people find it counterintuitive or backward to deal with tragedy and horrible aspects of life by having a good time, but those trips were more therapeutic than what would have happened in a therapist’s office. My theme in healing isn’t avoiding the pain but finding positive ways to cope, and engaging in activities and relationships that make me happy. And not just superficial happiness, the kind that’s temporary and fleeting, but genuine joy that comes from embracing life. Those are things that heal, and the healing never ends.

  Those early years of renewal that followed Resendiz’s trial and conviction were full of such healing moments, with one major exception. One of the biggest triggers of my traum
a happened only a couple of months after our first trip to Maine.

  On September 11, 2001, I was living in an apartment in downtown Evansville, and I woke up to an early morning phone call from my sister Heather.

  “Have you watched the TV?” she said. She sounded panicked.

  “No, I’ve been asleep like most normal people.”

  It was nearly eight o’clock in the morning Central time. My master’s program at USI was at night, and I didn’t work a full-time job during the day, so I had no reason to be up and about yet.

  I rolled out of bed and turned on the television, just in time to witness the second plane hit. The news cameras were trained on the twin towers of the World Trade Center from a distance—the north tower was engulfed in black smoke, orange flames flickering from its gaping holes. Reporters paused their commentary as the roar of a jet engine preceded the appearance of another plane, and then United Airlines flight 175 from Boston crashed directly into the south tower. Spectators near the news crews started screaming as the plane disappeared into the building and sent a massive burst of fire and debris ballooning from all sides.

  I hadn’t yet fully comprehended what was happening, but I felt a pervasive sense of shock, a feeling that was all too familiar—I was watching once again as someone committed a barbaric, devastating act against innocent people. Overwhelmed with grief from the trauma and sheer loss of life, I cried uncontrollably all day.

  Even though I didn’t know anyone in or even near New York City, I called everyone who was close to me—my parents, Jacob, my best friends. The “Life Is Good” clan had a LISTSERV so we could email each other, and I checked in with them to be sure everyone was all right. Jacob thought I was crazy to check on him in Lexington, but he and I took weekend trips to New York City every year, and I needed to know he hadn’t taken a side trip on a whim. My master’s classes weren’t cancelled that evening, but I couldn’t pull it together enough to attend. The most I could muster was getting dressed to meet my parents and Heather at my dad’s office so we could be together.