Sole Survivor

by Holly Dunn

  The gala dinner itself was held in the regal East Hall, an enormous dining room with iconic columns, marble floors, wall murals, and a glass-coffered ceiling. The program featured nine total national awards, which included Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen, and Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged. NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, who sat at the table next to ours, accepted the fourth award for Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 or Under for his work as founder and president of the PeyBack Foundation to Benefit Children. Five Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Awards for Greatest Public Service Benefiting a Community would be given out as surprise presentations throughout the evening.

  About three-quarters of the way through the program, it was time to announce the fourth of the five national Jackie O. Award winners. The large screens on the sides of the stage began to play a video, and when I noticed that the footage featured news clips of my efforts to promote Holly’s House, I knew in an instant I was about to be honored and, of course, I started to cry. Jacob handed me a white linen handkerchief that I used to wipe my eyes until the presenter officially announced my name.

  I made my way to the stage amid a standing ovation, navigated up the steps in my floor-length, black evening gown, and walked past a number of US senators, public figures, and leaders in business and entertainment to the podium where I tried—in vain—to offer up words of gratitude. I was too overcome by emotion to make a sound. I held up a finger as if to say, “Just give me a moment.”

  That’s when I did something that surprised the audience and shook me back to a calmer state. Like I’d taught the little girl onstage at the Take Back the Night event, I made a funny noise—I was still carrying Jacob’s handkerchief in my hand, so I snorted into it close enough to the microphone that the zerbert sound echoed throughout the elegant marble room.

  The audience laughed at the embarrassing noise, and naturally I had to explain myself.

  “Normally, when I’m crying and I don’t want to be, I make some kind of strange noise, and then I laugh,” I said.

  The audience clapped, and I went on. I hadn’t written a speech or planned anything in particular to say, so I told the audience about my attack, and about Chris Maier, and how even nine years later thoughts of him both move me to tears and make me smile.

  “I think of him on bright sunny days, on his birthday, and when I see his family,” I said. “He’s in my life all the time. I just want people to remember who he was.”

  I talked of my passion for Holly’s House and our continued efforts to ensure it opened. I was surprised and honored to receive the Jackie O. Award, given that none of the work I’d done on Holly’s House had been any attempt to do something glorious or noteworthy.

  “What I do is all part of my healing process,” I said. “It’s what helps me continue to live a normal life. I do it because I feel I have to—it feels right. Though I’m not doing this for the recognition, it is definitely amazing to be recognized.”

  The Jackie O. Award was an immense honor, but the true blessing was its timing, which kept me from dwelling on Resendiz’s impending execution and all of the emotional trauma and painful memories that resurfaced. John F. Kennedy once said, “One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.” The people I met in DC showed me how much good can be done by even one dedicated individual. Just as each person can make a positive difference, one very different kind of person can wreak havoc on dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people.

  During the manhunt for Resendiz, more than fifty police agencies around the country called the task force in Houston to compare their unsolved cases with the details of the murders Resendiz had committed. Once he was in custody and cooperating with extensive interrogation, investigators began connecting him to many more murders around the country. Around the fall of 2001, Resendiz, who’d been nicknamed “Choo-Choo Man” by other death row inmates, became especially enthusiastic about confessing to murders because he believed it might speed up his execution.

  As a result, he admitted to several more killings dating back to 1986, including a homeless woman, whose body has never been identified, whom he shot to death near San Antonio. In mid-July of 1991, thirty-three-year-old Michael White was shot several times and his body abandoned in the front yard of a house in downtown San Antonio. Resendiz drew a map of the crime scene to prove his involvement, and years later police verified he was in fact the killer.

  In March of 1997, just months before Chris and I encountered him, Resendiz attacked and killed nineteen-year-old Jesse Howell and sixteen-year-old Wendy Von Huben, a newly engaged couple who had run away from their hometown, Woodstock, Illinois, the month before. Jesse’s body was discovered in a field next to a set of train tracks in Belleview, Florida. His head had been beaten in with a brake coupling. Wendy’s whereabouts remained unknown for more than three years before Resendiz confessed to authorities he had raped and strangled her a few hours after killing Jesse. He drew them a map to where he had left her body, fifteen miles from where Jesse was found.

  And less than a week before he made his way to Claudia Benton’s home in West University Place, he killed Fannie Whitner Byers in the tiny rural town of Carl, Georgia, about forty miles northeast of Atlanta. The eighty-one-year-old widow was found lying in a pool of blood inside her home, her head smashed with a pickax from her own front porch. Fannie’s house was not far from the CSX freight tracks.

  This catalog of killings isn’t even complete. In all, Resendiz confessed to some twenty murders, though only fifteen could be verified. He even said he’d committed two murders whose details he would take to the grave—withholding closure to those detectives’ cases and resolution for the victims’ families. It’s atrocious that he took so many lives, but he brutalized many, many more people than just those who died. He broke the hearts and scarred the psyches of all his victims’ loved ones, friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors. It amazes me to think how this one wretched criminal affected so many people so deeply and terribly.

  Despite the jury’s conclusion during the 2000 trial and Resendiz’s own wishes, his defense attorneys continued to argue up to the end on his behalf. After the last of his appeals were denied, Resendiz was scheduled to be executed on May 10, 2006, but a lawyer who’d been hired by the Mexican government succeeded at postponing it to June 27 so that a hearing could be held to determine whether Resendiz was mentally competent.

  All the while my family was in DC, Resendiz and his appellate attorney were in a three-day hearing before Judge Bill Harmon in a Houston courtroom. His defense continued to insist he was too mentally ill to be put to death; the prosecution believed him to be malingering. No one who kills twenty people is mentally healthy, but the legal issue at hand was simply whether he understood he was being executed, when, how, and why—which he did.

  On Wednesday, June 21, the day after the awards ceremony, Judge Harmon affirmed that Resendiz was in fact competent to be executed.

  As Resendiz’s execution date approached, the media—not surprisingly—began to hound me, just like they’d done after the attack, during the manhunt, and when he went to trial. The calls around the execution upset me more than any of the prior inquiries. Everyone asked the same question: “How do you feel about your attacker being put to death?” Just like my family had done in each prior instance, we released a statement to the press asking that no members of the media contact me directly. In addition to announcing the honor of receiving the Jackie O. Award, I gave them the only words they would ever quote in regards to the impending execution: “I have to say that I guess it will be a relief when he’s not in the world anymore, but I’ll live with the emotional trauma whether he’s in the world or not. The scars will never completely go away but I have learned to live past the trauma, and I have focused my energy toward helping others.”

  The day of Resendiz’s execution, Tuesday, June 27, was also my sister Heather’s wedding anniversary. Ou
r whole family congregated at Mom and Dad’s house for a big dinner that night. The impending execution overshadowed any celebration, but I was thankful to be surrounded by my loved ones. I never had an opinion on the death penalty before I was attacked. Heather was adamantly opposed to it—before the attack—but what my family and I went through at the hands of Resendiz changed her mind. No matter their personal stance on the issue, everyone connected to me expressed how relieved they would be once he was definitively removed from society.

  I sat at a computer in my parents’ den staring at a website associated with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to keep track of what was happening in Huntsville. Though I was offered the opportunity to witness Resendiz’s execution in person, alongside a number of his victims’ loved ones, I chose not to. Witnessing a person take his or her final breaths—whether you love them or hate them or don’t know them at all—is one of the most traumatic and unnatural events a human being can endure. I had already witnessed one person die, and I certainly didn’t want to watch another, not even my attacker.

  In the final hours before Resendiz entered the death chamber, the US Supreme Court had deliberated on and ultimately denied his final appeal. Just before the injection was administered, Resendiz offered his last words to those who had gathered to witness his execution.

  “I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me,” Resendiz said. “You don’t have to. I know I allowed the devil to rule my life. I just ask you to forgive me, and ask the Lord to forgive me, for allowing the devil to deceive me. I thank God for having patience with me. I don’t deserve to cause you pain. You did not deserve this. I deserve what I am getting.”

  Prison staff administered the lethal injections at 7:58 p.m.

  As he waited to die, Resendiz kept repeating a prayer: “Forgive me, Lord. Forgive me, Lord.”

  I kept refreshing the website over and over until his time of death was finally posted: 8:05 p.m.

  It was finished.

  My entire family was emotional in that moment, even more so than when we received the call from the prosecutor’s office with the results from the trial.

  The minute I saw he was dead, I heaved a huge sigh, overcome by relief that he could never get me now. That ice pick or screwdriver, the fifty-pound rock, the sledgehammer, the bronze statuette, the antique flat iron, the pickaxe—all the blunt force objects he’d ever held over his victims had hovered over me in my mind, until he breathed his last breath and I knew he’d never, ever have the chance to complete what he left unfinished. Resendiz’s death was an immense relief, but his execution didn’t—and couldn’t—close up the wounds his crimes had inflicted. The execution was never going to be an end to something. I will carry the scars from what happened for the rest of my life, and I will be healing for the rest of my life.

  In his last words, Resendiz acknowledged his wrong and asked God and his victims for forgiveness. His asking for forgiveness before his death was the last piece of proof that he knew right from wrong. But if I ponder the possibility that his repentance and remorse were sincere, then based on the tenets of my Christian faith, I have to also ponder the possibility that I may encounter him in heaven one day, redeemed and restored. The ultimate hope of the Christian faith is perfect reconciliation and healed, loving relationship with God and with each other. This notion that Resendiz could enter into such a state is probably more than most people affected by him could accept, but regardless of the eventual spiritual outcome, I have found peace with the idea in the here and now.

  Maya Angelou once said that the greatest gift you can give yourself is to forgive—forgive everybody. I came to realize that the only way I would be truly free of Resendiz was to forgive him for what he did to Chris and to me. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment in which I forgave my attacker; rather, it was a gradual process I initiated during and after the trial to shield myself from all the pain that repeatedly resurfaced. I was overwhelmed with stress and anxiety when the media hounded me for comments and interviews, and I had to find a way to protect my heart and psyche.

  My choice to forgive my attacker was a gift and a blessing not bestowed on him, but on me. Forgiving him absolved not one ounce of his guilt or responsibility, but it lifted off of me tons of emotional weight I didn’t deserve to carry. That’s not to say that forgiveness comes easily, especially for a monster like Resendiz. He represented everything negative to me. I didn’t want feelings of rage and revenge, anxiety and guilt; I couldn’t live with that kind of negativity. I had to let those feelings go so I could get on with my life. I put those feelings on him, gave him all of it, and let them die with him. I took all my power back—starting with when I went back to school a month after the attack, and again when I joined the rape support group, and continuing through how I embraced joy in my life. I decided that I was in charge of what happens to me now, not Resendiz.

  It’s taken me years to put in words what forgiveness meant for me. Even when I didn’t have the words, my attitude was about living a healthy, positive life in spite of what he had done. The so-called Railroad Killer forced me into a dark and horrid story alongside many other people whose lives were wrecked by his actions. But I refused to allow his narrative to define me. The story I wanted to be part of, the one I would continue to tell through Holly’s House, was much bigger than him.

  Though I would never have chosen what fueled and directed my life, I can’t deny I found in Holly’s House a passion I never expected, and at the time, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Though I appreciated the recognition for my work, the truth was that helping others was helping me heal and was giving me daily strength to keep going. I had found my purpose in the world, and I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do.

  But it would be another two years before the clients, the very reasons for my passion, would finally walk through the doors of Holly’s House.

  CHAPTER 21.

  Difference Maker

  Our proposal to the Evansville-Vanderburgh Public Library Board of Trustees had been tabled for more than a year, but by November of 2006, we managed to get back on their agenda. At the meeting, some who were vocally opposed to the donation were conveniently absent, and others who might have voted against it were swayed by the presence of reporters and camera crews that Brian had invited for the vote.

  The majority of the library board agreed that our community needed Holly’s House and voted in favor of donating the old North Park branch building to our cause, though since the building was funded by tax dollars, the donation was facilitated through Evansville Public Works. A month or two later, we received the keys to the building.

  It was official. Holly’s House had a home.

  Long before our official sign was crafted and hung, I had a large banner made that featured our logo and the words “Coming Soon!” in blue script. As soon as we had the keys in hand, we held our first open house to give a sneak peak to the community and the media so they could see the “before” state of the building and the blueprints for our future, and to let kids write blessings and prayers on the walls for the future clients who would cross the threshold.

  During the years of development, I split my time between Dunn Hospitality Group and Holly’s House, but once we had an official building, I was there practically every day. When the board of directors later asked me to apply for the position of executive director, however, I resisted—at least at first.

  “I’m vice president of my dad’s company,” I said. “I can’t just go be a director of a nonprofit.”

  I spent the next three or four months soul searching and talking to Dad. Deep down, I wanted to be the executive director so badly—I couldn’t imagine anyone else leading the fledgling nonprofit once it was operational. But taking over the company my father created had been my lifelong dream, and I couldn’t imagine just walking away.

  One day at Dunn Hospitality headquarters, I took a deep breath and walked into my dad’s office. I anticipated this would be a hard conversation to
have, but his response surprised me.

  “I was expecting this,” he said.

  “You were?”

  “If this is what you need to do, do it,” he said. “I think you’ll be great at it, and I give you my blessing.”

  I started my job as executive director of Holly’s House in September of 2007, just after the tenth anniversary of the attack—a fitting way to mark such a milestone.

  • • •

  Back in April of 2007, we had asked the local unions at a Southwestern Indiana Building and Construction Trades Council meeting for a donation of labor on the renovations to the ten-thousand-square-foot building, to which they unanimously agreed. The gift of time from the hundreds of volunteers during the next year was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The building and construction labor were the biggest cornerstones to our progress—and once we’d secured those, we were in the home stretch.

  The building hadn’t been occupied in several years, and the long-neglected site was in disarray. We hosted a number of cleanup events that summer and fall, and at each event, up to fifty volunteers arrived throughout the day to pick up trash, tend the overgrown trees and shrubs, clear tall weeds, and pressure-wash dirt and graffiti off of a façade that hadn’t been cleaned in decades.

  Renovations started at a snail’s pace given that the volunteer contractors and electricians usually worked during off hours and vacation days. By summer, the interior of the building had been demolished and piles of crumbled concrete, old piping, dust and dirt were cleaned out, largely thanks to members of the Laborers’ Local 561. Local 561’s field representative, Steve Wilson, was one of our original volunteers who worked long hours to get the building ready, including taking off two weeks from work just to do demo in a building that had no heat or air conditioning.