Sole Survivor

by Holly Dunn

  In the end, however, I didn’t have to go looking for a way to increase the impact of my story or to come up with a worthy cause to promote and support. Instead, the cause of my lifetime and its visionary instigator found me—right in my hometown.

  CHAPTER 18.

  Holly’s House

  I had been in Louisville working at my father’s hotel for only about a year when Dad called me up and told me he needed me to move back to Evansville and work in Dunn Hospitality Group’s executive office. We had just sold a package of nine hotels to another company, and he tasked me with coordinating and executing simultaneous renovations on all nine properties before the buyers assumed ownership. The extensive rebranding project would take more than a year to complete.

  Even as vice president of Dunn Hospitality Group and undertaking an enormous project, I still felt compelled to speak as often as I was given the opportunity. One of the benefits of working for my family was that Dad always let me go speak whenever I was invited, which I never could have done with a regular employer. The emotional exchange with audiences as I shared my story continued to be a significant part of my healing process, and I couldn’t envision slowing down any time soon. The only issue that remained was finding a way to channel the story into some kind of cause or organization that could effect tangible change in the realm of violent or intimate crimes.

  And then, at the end of the summer of 2004, I got an unexpected phone call from Evansville police detective Brian Turpin that would answer this unspoken prayer.

  Brian wanted to meet with me to discuss a project he was pursuing: he had a vision for creating a new facility—an advocacy center—to function as a safe reporting location for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, child sex abuse, or child abuse or neglect.

  “My wife, Shana, heard you speak at the Visiting Nurse Association back in July, and she suggested I reach out to you,” explained Detective Turpin. “I’d really love to see how you could be involved.”

  We agreed to meet at my office not long afterward, where I learned more about Brian and his plans for the advocacy center.

  An employee of the Evansville Police Department since 1996, Detective Turpin joined the domestic violence unit in 2003 and was then asked to join the sexual violence unit in 2004. A prerequisite of working in sex crimes was specialized training in how to properly interview young victims. In early July of 2004, Brian participated in a program known as Finding Words, a forty-hour curriculum developed by CornerHouse, an organization based in Vermont that had been honing effective and reliable ways to interview children about sexual abuse for twenty-five years. Through proper training, forensic interviewers learn how to build rapport with a victim and conduct clear and effective interviews without any leading questions or behaviors that might frighten or intimidate the child. The better a forensic interview, the stronger a case against a perpetrator.

  During his week of training, Brian had dinner one evening with the faculty—volunteer teachers who worked in the field and were passionate about their work—who kept referring to their “children’s advocacy centers.”

  “What’s an advocacy center?” Brian asked.

  “It’s a safe place where we interview the kids,” a teacher responded. “Where do you interview your victims?”

  “At the police department, typically.”

  “That’s barbaric,” the faculty member said.

  Brian described to me how he started to see our city’s operations in an entirely new light. An advocacy center, he learned, was an exclusive, dedicated place where victims of intimate crimes could be interviewed by all the agencies that take part in the investigation—especially law enforcement, Child Protective Services, and prosecution. The goal was one joint forensic interview process that made an already demanding emotional experience something the victim wouldn’t have to relive over and over. Beyond forensic interviews, advocacy centers often have medical rooms for physical exams in a safe, comfortable setting, and support services for survivors and their families.

  Back at the precinct, Brian learned from his superiors that he wasn’t the first person to inquire about and pursue the possibility of establishing a victim advocacy center in Evansville. People in both the Evansville Police Department and the Department of Child Services had tried—and failed—usually from lack of necessary support. Earlier administrations hadn’t seen the need to fix a system they didn’t perceive to be broken. The current chief of police was open to the idea, but Brian would have to pursue the project on his own time.

  During our meeting at the Dunn Hospitality Group offices, Brian explained that he was seeking to name this new facility after a victim—something that would evoke the kind of emotional reaction that would result in community support and investment.

  “We can’t use a child victim’s name for confidentiality reasons,” he explained. “I’m hoping the namesake can be someone who can take the stage and talk about this cause, someone who’s mature enough to shoulder the honor and responsibility that it entails.”

  “You can certainly use my name,” I said, “but I can’t just have something named after me and not be involved. I’d love to help out in any way I can.”

  The activists who tried to change the system fifteen years earlier had encountered territorial bosses in various agencies who weren’t willing to collaborate. But Brian and I now found ourselves in a more advanced era, equipped with new ideas and the right people who were willing to come together to effect the kind of change that would impact countless women and children in our community. While Brian was working out the legal details of our new organization, Holly’s House, I went online to research the purpose and practices of an advocacy center, and I toured several of the same places Brian had visited after he first learned of the concept. I visited model facilities in Fort Wayne and New Albany to see how they operated—the set-up of their lobby, waiting rooms, and interview rooms, the monitoring and recording equipment, and the interview methods used by the staff.

  The state of Indiana had sixteen advocacy centers at the time, but Vanderburgh County was the largest county in the state with no advocacy center at all. I wish we could say that our community didn’t need an advocacy center, but we did. According to the National Children’s Advocacy Center in Huntsville, Alabama, one in ten children will be sexually abused before they turn eighteen. Twenty percent of children are sexually abused before the age of eight. The ugliest truth about child sex abuse was that it isn’t perpetrated by complete strangers—the overwhelming majority of cases are committed by people the child’s family knows and trusts. No one is immune from this kind of violence—no gender, no race or ethnic group, no socioeconomic level is left out.

  Evansville was the county seat of Vanderburgh County, which has a population of just over 181,000 people. Brian would later point out in presentations that the Evansville Police Department interviewed nearly four hundred adult victims of domestic and sexual violence in a given year. Child Protective Services conducted more than 2,200 investigations of child abuse, child molesting, and child neglect. But given that sixty percent of child sexual abuse victims never tell anyone at all, 2,200 investigations represent only a fraction of the kids actually being hurt. Investigations based on one child’s report might lead to seven other kids who have been abused by the same person.

  I asked Brian how these domestic violence and child abuse cases were handled, and this is where the need for Holly’s House really emerged. The environments set up to receive such crime reporting were at best too public and at worst completely intimidating.

  At the time, Child Protective Services, a division of the Department of Child Services, was in the same building as Family and Social Services, where people came to do things like collect food stamps or apply for Medicaid. On any given day, the lobby would be full of all kinds of people through which a child victim of abuse or molestation would have to walk through a space the size of a football field. Even once safe in an interview room, victims could hear work
ers talking just outside. There was no sense of privacy or protection or any way to keep them from otherwise feeling on display.

  Adult victims were typically interviewed at the Evansville Police Department, which was an even worse environment. Victims of rape or domestic violence who came to the station to give a statement had no guarantee that they might not have to face the suspect in their case—in fact, if a family member was arrested at the time of the incident, the victim might find themselves alongside their perpetrators at the station waiting to be interviewed. Once it was time for the interview, a victim was led down a dim and gray hallway past a lineup of mug shots of wanted criminals or people recently released on parole to the same type of sterile, closet-sized rooms where detectives interviewed suspects—no windows, steel chairs, a microphone and camera in the victim’s face. To make things even worse, sexual assault victims faced any number of institutional biases subtly or not so subtly implied by staff who asked them questions about what may have happened to them.

  “Imagine waiting to be interviewed by law enforcement,” Brian said, “and a member of your church who came to the Civic Center to pay their water bill sees you sitting there and asks what you’re doing? Do you share your deepest secret? Do you lie?”

  When we finally opened Holly’s House, we wanted to be able to assure our clients that the only people present in the facility were those who were there to help them. No one else on the premises would need to be there for any other reason.

  Through my research, I also learned that an advocacy center would make casework more efficient and more effective. According to the National Child Advocacy Center, the combined interview approach in a child advocacy center saved more than a thousand dollars per case. Communities with an advocacy center helped more victims and conducted more thorough investigations, which resulted in better cases and more perpetrators arrested and jailed. What’s more, prison sentences were thirty-two percent longer when the case was handled in an advocacy center as opposed to any other setting. Having an advocacy center would improve our entire local justice system’s efforts to bring abusers to justice and would provide the much needed services that would help victims start their road to healing. Our entire community would be safer and healthier.

  Evansville had other organizations that were serving victims of rape or domestic violence, but no one was yet doing what we set out to do. Our most stalwart community organizations included the YWCA, a shelter and service provider for domestic violence victims; Lampion Center, which provided counseling and mental health services; and Albion Fellows Bacon Center, a support system for sexual assault victims and a secret shelter for domestic violence victims. Even before I met Brian, I’d been involved with Albion Fellows Bacon Center, which was named after a prominent nineteenth-century reformer, through one of Albion’s rape crisis support groups. As soon as I moved back to Evansville, I knew I needed a support network to continue healing. Since my time with the Lexington rape support group, however, I had grown and healed enough that I now could give hope and support to other survivors whose own trauma might be more recent than mine.

  Each of these organizations offered the community something unique and necessary, and Holly’s House sought to fill an evident gap: a safe and welcoming environment in which victims could recount their stories to qualified people who would fight for them in the justice system. Rather than duplicate any of the existing services within our community, we chose to partner with the other nonprofits so that our combined offerings would be a holistic and comprehensive approach to domestic violence and sexual assault. Brian and I not only consulted with these existing organizations, but we invited them to join our interim board of directors and to use anticipated office space once Holly’s House was up and running.

  • • •

  After our initial meeting at the Dunn Hospitality offices, Brian’s first order of business was drafting an interagency agreement between all the departments that would use and benefit from the new facility. The key players who ratified the agreement included the Evansville Police Department, the Sheriff’s office, the Vanderburgh County prosecutor’s office, and local nonprofits like Lampion Center and Albion Fellows Bacon Center who would provide complementary services. Holly’s House became an official organization in March of 2005, when all the necessary paperwork had been filed and the IRS approved our 501(c)3 status.

  The moment we were an official nonprofit, Brian and I started pounding the pavement making presentations to local companies, Rotary clubs, Kiwanis clubs, networking organizations, and other community leaders to garner support. There were so many groups to reach that we usually split up and tackled presentations on our own, though we collaborated on a few of the largest gatherings.

  At one big Rotary Club meeting, I went up to the microphone ahead of Brian, who stood behind me with his arms crossed, looking intent and serious.

  “Don’t anyone be afraid of this guy,” I joked, motioning to the detective flanking me. “He’s my bodyguard. I have police backing.”

  A few months later at the annual meeting for ANEW (A Network of Evansville Women), the biggest women’s organization in the city, he beat me to the punch.

  He took the microphone and said, “Y’all thought I was her secret service security.”

  I had to laugh. “You stole my line!”

  We were a dynamic duo with a singular focus and seemingly indefatigable drive. At each presentation, we described the concept of an advocacy center and why it was so crucial that Evansville establish Holly’s House to more effectively care for victims of violent and intimate crimes in our county as well as any nearby counties that lacked a facility.

  “Every victim deserves a safe place to be interviewed,” I said in my presentations. “Holly’s House will not only provide that safe environment to report crimes, but we will also offer support to the loved ones and survivors, and work to prevent these terrible crimes from happening in the first place.”

  In addition to asking for donations from corporate sponsors, we began lobbying for a building to be leased to us for a dollar a year or donated outright.

  Brian had his sights set on an unused, vacant branch of the Evansville-Vanderburgh Public Library at 750 North Park Drive. He’d grown up in North Park and spent much of his childhood in that very building, which closed after the library opened a much bigger North Park branch in April of 2005. The vacated location was in the north part of town near a major north-south street that ran all the way through Evansville, but was tucked away on a low-traffic road that would protect the privacy of victims going to and from the building.

  Brian described to me how well this location would work for Holly’s House, given its beautiful structure, utilitarian layout, and ten thousand square feet of space. He managed to get us on the library board’s agenda in August of 2005 so he could ask for the building, but a vote on the matter was tabled. Though many people on the board believed in what we were doing, getting the board to give the building away was going to be an uphill battle. Given the economic times we were entering as a community and a nation, board leaders preferred to sell the property and place the funds in reserve, and there were legal questions raised about transferring tax-supported property to a nonprofit agency. We wouldn’t succeed at getting a vote before the board until more than a year later. In the interim, both Brian and I met with numerous board members to try and convince them to vote in favor of donating the North Park branch to Holly’s House, focusing especially on those who were undeclared or otherwise uncertain.

  After more than a year of presentations and requests for support, Brian and I started getting discouraged. We didn’t get a lot of nos, but when we did, we’d let time pass and ask again later. Our cause pulled at people’s heartstrings, and if they said no, they might seem cold and heartless, but often we were simply meeting with organizations in the wrong budget season. The refusals to support were never because they didn’t believe in what we were doing. Even when we caught organizations in the wrong budget
season, their people would often support us personally. Every bit helped, but it just wasn’t adding up quickly enough.

  There were so many tears shed during the development of Holly’s House. It saddened me that it wasn’t happening faster. It needed to be open yesterday, and it was taking too long. One of the reasons the project hadn’t yet come to fruition was that we had a commitment to open debt-free. We’d been practically begging the library commission for the North Park building, but we had to consider what we would do if they gave us a definitive, irrevocable no. We might have to consider other locations, which would mean taking on a mortgage. The mere idea deflated me.

  I had to get us out of this funk. We needed a way to make this organization seem like a real entity, even though it was still just a vision.

  “We need a logo,” I said.

  I contacted a friend who worked for an ad agency and who did the work pro bono, and the result was just what I’d hoped. Creating a logo and tagline provided us with an identity tangible enough to reignite our resolve to see the bricks and mortar also come together. Holly’s House was real again, if only in our hearts and minds, which was all it took to keep us putting one foot in front of another so that it would be real for the people to whom it would matter the most.

  CHAPTER 19.

  The Wedding

  Back in 2004, when Dad asked me to move home from Louisville, I dreaded having to tell Jacob. The first few years of being back together had been frustratingly distant and tentative. He lived an hour away in Lexington where he eventually moved on from his job with the home builder and was being groomed to take over a company that provided underground utility contracting services. We saw each other at least every other weekend by that point, and by all intents and purposes we were dating exclusively again, but he was still guarded with me.