Sole Survivor

by Holly Dunn

  By early fall, the interior demo was complete and construction got underway. Kathy Boyd, an electrician and member of the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, began volunteering in her off hours and quickly became my go-to person when questions and issues arose on-site. After she was laid off from her job that December, she took on the role of general contractor and devoted all her time to the project, until the following May when it looked like she would have to leave to find a paying job. Holly’s House received yet another boost from the labor unions, who offered to pay Kathy’s salary for the next ten weeks so she could see the project to completion. Kathy led the crews not just to finish the project in time for a fall opening, but with a quality of craftsmanship that well exceeded what we could have ever afforded.

  In all, more than five hundred volunteers contributed to the build-out, whether through a professional trade, like sheet metal, construction, electricity, or plumbing, or by picking up screws and nails and sweeping the floors. Countless people jumped into the work simply because it needed to be done. Some workers, however, demonstrated that Holly’s House was healing people even before it opened. Kathy, who’d been a victim of both sex abuse as a child and rape as an adult, found a measure of healing through working on Holly’s House. Many of the construction workers who came to help told stories of being molested in childhood, many of whom had never told a soul, not even their own wives.

  “Had Holly’s House been here when I was little,” they’d say, “my story might have been different.”

  On an interior back wall, every construction worker signed their name and wrote out their hopes and dreams for Holly’s House. These faithful people poured out not just their skills and energy, but also their deepest wounds and long-held secrets into every inch of this facility. While building a place that would bring freedom to the abused, they found a measure of freedom for themselves.

  Once the build-out was complete, Hafer Associates, a local design, architecture, and engineering firm, helped us bring the facility to life. I worked with an exceedingly sensitive interior designer named Amy, who listened to our vision for the interior and intuited the environment these women and children would need. Whereas in the Evansville precinct victims had to walk past mug shots of people released on parole, at Holly’s House they would walk past bees and butterflies and lady bugs painted on the walls toward safe, homey rooms with comfortable chairs. There would be no comparison to the threatening interrogation rooms used at the police department.

  The week before we opened, we were almost completely functional. Evansville’s West Side Nut Club had donated a sizable amount for our interviewing equipment and computers, which still needed to be installed. Pictures were hung on the walls, but we didn’t yet have glass panes in the doors. Only days before the ribbon cutting, our volunteers were still running around frantically trying to fix things. One of our carpenters freaked out every time his cellphone rang because his wife was nine months pregnant and due to give birth at any moment. That week I must have spent sixty hours doing odds and ends to prepare, including cleaning up drywall debris, dusting furniture, vacuuming, and working on last minute details.

  On Saturday evening, August 23, 2008, Brian Turpin and Kathy Boyd stood on either side of me as we cut the ribbon to officially open Holly’s House. We invited guests into the lobby and uncorked bottles of champagne.

  I remember looking around and thinking, This can’t be real. This can’t finally be happening!

  After four and a half years of development, several disappointments, lots of tears, and numerous victories along the way, Holly’s House was not just a legal organization, but a fully functional facility, ready to receive the people whose mission it was to serve.

  Brian and I led a tour of the facility, showing guests and donors the lobby and conference rooms, the specially designed waiting areas for the children on the left, with its stuffed animals, building blocks and dolls, and the waiting room for adults and teens on the right. We pointed out the two interviewing rooms and viewing area on the kids’ side, and the medical exam room on the adults’ side. The police department’s domestic violence and sex crimes units had open offices in the back, and private office space was set aside for our colleagues from the Lampion Center and Albion Fellows Bacon Center.

  After the tour of the facility, we adjourned to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall for a catered dinner and dancing. The theme of the event was Rays of Hope, and the dress code was sundresses for female guests and open collar for men, and funky shades for all. Though the mood was upbeat and joyous, the opening gala was incredibly emotional, a release of all the stress and anticipation and hard work poured out for nearly five whole years. I felt like I was floating the entire evening.

  I can’t begin to express how grateful I am to the Evansville community for their support of Holly’s House, from the start of our development, through the downturn in the economy, and well after the doors were open. Major organizations like the Welborn Baptist Foundation and Allstate Foundation and countless individuals—including two hundred members of the Evansville police force—donated significant funding to ensure Holly’s House became a reality. By the time Holly’s House officially opened on Tuesday, September 2, 2008, we had raised more than $380,000 and—thanks to the overwhelming generosity of the library board and labor unions—we had no debt from the facility and its necessary build-out.

  We hired a receptionist to help manage the office, and Brian moved in along with the rest of the Evansville Police Department’s domestic violence and sex crime units. By the following year, we would also have on staff a full-time forensic interviewer and, by 2010, a detective who specialized in Internet crimes against children. Starting a brand-new advocacy center was a bit like baptism by fire, and every day presented something new. We opened as prepared as we could be, but once we were interacting with real-life situations, we had to adjust our processes on the fly and establish more resources to offer our clients.

  But it was obvious from the start we were needed: not even an hour after we opened our doors, a woman walked in seeking help escaping an abusive relationship.

  “I heard about you on television,” she said, “and I didn’t know where else to go.”

  That same day, a young girl came in with her grandmother to report being molested by a neighbor, a man everyone thought was great with kids but who later confessed he’d been molesting children for forty-five years.

  Developing Holly’s House and the work we were doing was emotional and difficult, but it didn’t feel like going to work at all. I felt like I was right where I belonged.

  • • •

  Ever since I began speaking and giving public presentations on our vision for Holly’s House, I was establishing myself as an expert in sexual assault. I didn’t want my expertise to be limited to my personal experience, so I sought out every training opportunity to learn about best practices in communicating with victims of assault. I went to conferences and joined groups like the Kentucky Coalition Against Sexual Assault and RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, to expand my knowledge and influence. I also underwent intensive training with Evansville’s Albion Fellows Bacon Center to become a certified sexual-assault advocate who could talk to victims about their available services, whether safe shelter, counseling, legal assistance, or other critical resources. I began incorporating what I learned into my speeches, especially to first responders, law enforcement, and child advocacy specialists.

  After I became executive director of Holly’s House, I took my training even further by participating in the weeklong forensic interview program, Finding Words, which has since been renamed ChildFirst. The course taught me the skills and proper protocol for conducting an investigative interview with a possible victim of abuse. During a practicum, I worked with a professional actor who pretended to be a kid who’d been abused so I could see exactly what it might be like to have to escort a child into a room and conduct an interview. Sin
ce we had detectives on hand at Holly’s House, I wasn’t expecting to do actual interviews, but I thought the executive director should know how it was done.

  Once Holly’s House was officially open, I spent the bulk of my time managing the office, writing grants, securing funding, giving media interviews, and going to industry and community events in the evenings. But after the Finding Words training, I did end up conducting a handful of interviews, even though it wasn’t my primary role to do so. As a rape survivor myself, I remembered how I’d wanted people to talk to me like I was a normal person, so I applied that same empathy to our clients. I didn’t focus on the abuse but rather on relating to them on their developmental level. If it was a little kid, I raced cars down the hallway to make him or her comfortable or played board games or hangman to help facilitate our discussions. Thanks to the training, of the six to ten interviews I conducted, I was successful in every instance at walking the child through a full disclosure of the molestation or other crime that had been committed against them.

  Despite all my experience and extensive training, however, I was not immune to the distress caused by hearing about other people’s trauma.

  When Holly’s House was first underway, the stress of development began to wear on me rather quickly, and once I was on the job full-time, the cumulative responsibility of getting construction finished and the doors opened became overwhelming and downright scary. I was never afraid to show my emotions; in fact, I showed them to everyone. I cried and vented in many meetings with our interim board of directors, especially staff from the Lampion Center and the Albion Fellows Bacon Center. I hadn’t met with an actual therapist since that one fruitless appointment on the University of Kentucky campus after my attack, but I knew I needed professional help, and I began seeing a therapist who could help me navigate the confusing, traumatic feelings that were emerging.

  The stress and overload I’d experienced during development and build-out was alleviated once Holly’s House was real and happening, and meeting clients made me feel like we were making an enormous difference in their lives. But a new kind of emotional overload set in from being the sounding board for others’ traumatic stories, stress, and expectations. For a while I handled it all fine, but I wasn’t prepared for how I’d feel hearing the constant, horrible stories of abuse in our community.

  What got to me most, however, was learning how much violence was inflicted on children, even in my own small city. It ate at me. It affected me more than I wanted to admit. If I hadn’t been violated, I might not have reacted as strongly, but when you’ve had your own trauma, you can’t help but be triggered by what you encounter in the child advocacy setting. I think anyone who works with abused kids will have a hard time. The average tenure of a forensic interviewer in this environment is only three to five years. Whenever I speak, I always try to praise and uplift those who work directly with victims and encourage them to develop consistent self-care habits so they don’t burn out from secondary trauma. Self-care isn’t a luxury; it’s a dire necessity to keep people in their chosen field, or else they won’t be any good for their families, let alone their clients.

  Another issue that emerged was that I had been so focused on getting the organization up and running that I hadn’t thought about how being the namesake would put me on display. I was paraded as the Holly of Holly’s House. When kids came in, staff pointed out my profiles in Glamour or People magazines and brought me out to meet the clients and visitors.

  I’ve often said that I didn’t choose my passion—my passion chose me—but I’ve had to walk a fine line between allowing what happened to fuel my drive to help others versus letting it define my core identity. Yes, I was the sole survivor of a notorious serial rapist and killer. Yes, I was the Holly of Holly’s House, and proud of it. But I didn’t want to be defined by the violence committed against me. I believed—for myself and for every client that walked through those doors—that life was so much bigger than that.

  Surviving a violent crime like I did is not going on to build an organization or starting a foundation or hitting the speaking circuit. Surviving is choosing, despite the tragedy, to live a full and happy life. The horrible things that happen to us don’t have to define us. They are part of us, but they don’t have to be the basis of our entire identity.

  My therapist agreed. She was trying to get me to think of myself in other ways. She knew that Jacob and I had been attempting to get pregnant since the start of our marriage, and she kept encouraging me in my pursuit of motherhood.

  “Becoming a mom will help resolve what you’re dealing with,” she said. “Once you have a child, you’ll be Holly the Mom, with something and someone else to focus on.”

  As a result of another round of soul searching and intensive discussions, I stepped down from my position as executive director of Holly’s House in October of 2009.

  I was beyond ecstatic at what we had accomplished, and I was committed to remaining a spokesperson on behalf of the facility, but I couldn’t sustain the day-to-day involvement. I left to focus on the family that Jacob and I were still trying to create, and to found Holly K. Dunn LLC, which would allow me to engage in motivational speaking and topical training on a more regular basis. I left knowing Holly’s House was well established: We were financially sound for at least the next five years, we had developed an operations and policy handbook, and we had wonderful relationships with complementary agencies to ensure a multidisciplinary approach to domestic violence and sexual assault against women and children.

  But we still had a gap to fill: education and prevention. Brian’s initial business plan had included intentional educational programs and other preventive measures to educate young people about sexual abuse. I wanted to do something big, something proactive. To that end, I researched and shopped extensively for a curriculum we could implement to teach kids and their families how to stay safe from predators, who were all too often people already in their lives whom they thought they could trust.

  Though I left before I saw it implemented, the program I settled on—my last legacy before leaving Holly’s House—was Think First and Stay Safe, a curriculum developed by Child Lures Prevention, child-safety experts in Vermont who had been dedicated to preventing crimes against children for more than twenty-five years. The program teaches children how to recognize the tricks predators use to override their own instincts and groom them for abuse. Since predators also train their victims to “keep it a secret,” kids are taught how important it is to tell a trusted adult when something happens. I loved this program from the moment I evaluated it, and I appreciated how enthusiastic and helpful their staff was in ensuring Holly’s House was well equipped with the right tools for abuse prevention.

  In December of 2015, Holly’s House conducted its thousandth Think First and Stay Safe class. As of April of 2017, more than thirty thousand students in numerous local counties participated in the program and are now equipped with the knowledge and confidence to recognize the ways predators lure them into sexual abuse. But even when this information comes too late, kids who’ve already been molested are enabled and encouraged to tell a trusted adult. It’s already happened more than once—kids who’ve been through the program then tell their parents about someone who turns out to have been molesting them and many other children for years.

  My vision for Holly’s House, and for how I live my life, was that both would provide a model for surviving and thriving even the most heinous forms of violence. Holly’s House felt at times like a mirage in a desert—an illusion that might never materialize. But thanks to the unfailing support of the Evansville community, the advocacy center is now a dream come true and a vital part of our region.

  One of the things about Holly’s House that makes me proudest is how we recognized early on that all of these thoughtful methods for working with abused kids work just as well for adult victims of intimate crimes. As a result, Holly’s House is one of the few advocacy centers that provides parallel services for both
children and adults. Since its opening, Holly’s House has served more than four thousand victims who have been impacted by domestic violence or sexual assault. Under the leadership of current executive director Sidney Hardgrave, Holly’s House continues to be a safe haven serving thousands of adults and children across nine counties in southwest Indiana.

  When I participated in the forensic interview training, I learned that all the other advocacy centers had some sort of ritual to let kids know they weren’t the only ones who had reported abuse. One center had kids who had been interviewed paint their handprints on the interior walls and along an outside fence. Another one collected buttons in a jar, one button per child. I wanted to enact something similar, but something unique. Holly’s House had been open for several months before I figured out what we would do.

  My idea was to have kids pick a stone and toss it into a fountain in the lobby. When the fountain filled up, staff could move rocks into a container kept on display so the fountain was free to receive more memorial stones.

  Amy, the interior designer from Hafer, designed the fountain, and Jack, a firefighter and airplane mechanic, determined the proper materials and built the fountain from scratch. One of our donors—911 Gives Hope, a local first responders charity established especially for children’s causes—gave us money for the fountain, and Mulzer Crushed Stone donated extra stone pieces from a nearby rock quarry. The fountain, which sits on the left side of the lobby, is rectangular with rounded sides covered in copper sheeting. Water flows down a glass plaque into the receptacle below.

  Amy also wrote the text engraved on the glass plaque. It reads:

  Standing in front of this wishing well, I am reminded I am not alone. For several before me have stood here and chosen a stone. The stone symbolizes strength to proceed forward. The water symbolizes the everlasting hope, faith, and dreams to conquer as I grow. The future is ahead of me to move beyond the moment that brought me here. As I place my stone, I will wish for everyone who stands after me comfort, knowing happiness in life will surround you.