So she tried again.
Nothing.
“You’re going to wear the battery down,” he said. “Maybe it’s flooded. Leave it alone for a few minutes and try it again, it might turn over. Sometimes that happens.”
Mary Ellen had the window down. She was still sitting in her car. He was standing by her window, leaning down. At some point (Mary Ellen couldn’t recall exactly when) the man left her, got into his car, and pulled up alongside. Their cars faced opposite directions, but they were parked side by side to each other. He, too, sat in his car with the window rolled down. Waiting for the carburetor to flush itself out and dry up, so she could try to restart her car, they talked some more about how she would get on the highway. The man wanted to be sure she knew where she was going.
After waiting for what was about ten minutes, she tried to start her car again. Turning the key and allowing the ignition to crank and crank, the engine finally fired. But it was bumpy, sputtering and backfiring. She was nervous about driving it home.
“It stalled on the way over here,” Mary Ellen yelled out her window as the engine groaned and hiccupped.
“I can show you how to get on the highway if you follow me,” the man yelled back. “Maybe I ought to follow you after that, because your car doesn’t sound right.”
“That would be nice,” Mary Ellen said to the man. “Thank you.”
Mary Ellen followed the man onto the highway and then pulled ahead of him so she could show him the way to her apartment.
II
Inside about twenty minutes, Mary Ellen pulled up in front of her apartment and parked her car on the street in front of the lawn.
The man parked directly behind her.
Before Mary Ellen could even get out of her car, the man was, as she later put it, “right up by my car door.” He had startled her. As she opened the door, he said, “I didn’t realize it was so far. I have to use the bathroom.”
She didn’t see the harm. He had helped her. He had demonstrated his thoughtfulness by following her home. The least she could do was allow him to use her bathroom.
“Sure, let me open the door.”
15
I
Mary Ellen Renard had lived in fear for so many years after she left her first husband that she had become blind to its most outward signs. In some ways, she was an absolute whiz when it pertained to certain things. Her job was to transcribe doctors’ notes. No one else could understand the Asian and other foreign language–speaking doctors who spoke with broken-English accents. But Mary Ellen picked it up with ease.
Where it pertained to judging males and their intentions, however, Mary Ellen later admitted that she was a bit naïve. She was cautious, but maybe just a bit inexperienced and trustworthy. It was 1987. What woman didn’t watch the news? What woman didn’t know that it wasn’t such a smart move to invite a man you had just met into the privacy of your home? For all she knew, this man had taken her gratitude as a open sign for a nightcap and some good lovin’.
Still, if there was one attribute that separated Mary Ellen from most, it was that she gave people the benefit of the doubt. She wanted to believe in people.
II
After Mary Ellen unlocked the dead bolt and let him into the hallway leading up to her apartment, she turned around and, with her key, locked the dead bolt to the entrance door behind her, per her meddlesome landlady’s orders. It was a safe bet, in fact, the nosey old woman was on the opposite side of her door as Mary Ellen and her friend were in the hallway, peering through the peephole, watching them.
A moment later, Mary Ellen and her new friend walked up the stairs to her apartment; within a moment, they were inside. “The bathroom,” Mary Ellen said, putting her pocketbook down on the counter in the kitchen and pointing to the hallway just beyond where they were standing in the living room, “is right down there.”
“Thanks,” he said, looking around, adding, “nice apartment.”
Mary Ellen took off her shoes and placed them by the door. After that, she walked into the kitchen and placed her keys inside her pocketbook. Then she went into the refrigerator and looked for a block of cheese she always kept on hand. “I always eat cheese when I got home,” she explained, “because I have hypoglycemia and I need to eat frequently.”
It was nearly 3:00 A.M. She hadn’t eaten all night. With her condition, doctors suggested a small meal of protein every two hours. With a block of cheese on a plate, Mary Ellen took a knife out of the drawer below and carved the cheese into several slices. When she finished, she got herself a diet Slice (“my favorite”), grabbed the plate of cheese, and headed for the living room.
Just then, as she sat down on the couch, she heard the toilet flush. He must be on his way….
Several minutes went by before he came out of the bathroom, however. It was odd that he was taking so long.
What is he doing?
When he finally returned, Mary Ellen asked, “Would you like a soda?”
“No,” he said. Then, “Are those your kids on the wall over there?” He was standing by the door. Mary Ellen sat on the couch in front of him a few yards away.
Mary Ellen smiled. Everyone asked about the kids. She explained to him that she had grandkids. She was a grandmother. Imagine that.
“Your daughters are very pretty,” he said. He was standing in front of Mary Ellen now. Closer. He seemed different. He even sounded different. Something was wrong.
“Thank you,” Mary Ellen said.
As she went to speak again, he approached her and, bending down, tried kissing her on the lips. But she backed away immediately.
“I don’t want you to do that. I really don’t know you. It makes me uncomfortable.”
On the mantel by her television set was a photograph of her brother. After backing away, he turned his attention toward the picture. “Is your brother a priest?”
Mary Ellen got up. She wanted him to leave. He was acting a bit squirrelly, as if he had taken some sort of drug (he hadn’t) when he was in the bathroom. Mary Ellen had to cross paths with him to get to the door. She’d heard enough. The kiss scared her. She wanted to see him out and lock the door. But as she walked past him, he grabbed her by the shoulders and tried kissing her again.
She backed away instantly. (“I was alarmed,” she recalled, “I mean, it was not the same type of kiss.”)
Not only the kiss, but his entire demeanor had changed. He was totally out of it. Completely inside his own head, as if he were drifting away somewhere. Earlier that night, Mary Ellen was in awe of his good looks. But now he didn’t even look the same.
He didn’t speak. (“He just stared at me, stared into my eyes,” she later remembered.)
Looking through her, the man grabbed Mary Ellen by the shoulders once again. Mary Ellen could feel his grasp this time. He was hurting her. “Stop it,” she said loudly.
He began kissing her again, forcefully. She hated it. When she denied his advances repeatedly, he became enraged and threw her backward onto the couch. (“I was trying to break away,” she recalled, “but I lost my balance.”)
On top of her, down on the couch, he grabbed at her right breast. “Stop,” she pleaded, “you’re hurting me.”
Without saying a word, he continued clutching her by the breasts. He was fascinated and, at the same time, aroused by the violence he was perpetrating while touching her breasts. Just the sight of them as he opened her blouse, ripping her bra off and exposing them, did something to change him, Mary Ellen knew.
She was large. C cup. Her breasts had changed him. After he was finished fondling Mary Ellen’s breasts, he looked up. “He didn’t say anything. He stared—just stared into my eyes.”
16
I
This man in Mary Ellen’s living room, the one on top of her, sexually assaulting her, planning in his head how he was going to kill her, profoundly hated his given name, Edwin Fales Snelgrove Jr. His distaste was so much that he had whittled it down years ago. “Call me ‘N
ed’,” he’d tell new friends. Edwin sounded so Gilded Age. So dated and traditional. So, Ned it had been.
Ned had pushed-back kinky hair of a brownish blond persuasion, cut conservatively. He wasn’t overweight by any means. He had a chiseled body (not through weight lifting, though, but genetics, one of those “you can eat whatever you want and never gain an ounce” bodies that some are lucky enough to be born with). Being a fan of wrestling, he could get you in a hold that, former college friends said, he could keep for hours. Beyond this penchant for pain, Ned had serious psychological issues. He hated women. Not that he hated being around them, or the sight of them, but something inside of him was wired so that he viewed the female—the good-looking ones with large breasts—as some sort of object that, in a certain position, provided, in his words, “enormous sexual arousement.” Yes, they had to be in a particular situation. This was important to Ned. They had to submit. Appear helpless. Powerless. And there was only one way to get them there, Ned believed: strangulation.
If that didn’t work…well…out came the knives.
These thoughts and urges began during Ned’s childhood, as far back as the second and third grade. For unknown reasons, he wrote later, he had never thought it was a problem until years after it started. The pleasure, he explained to a friend in a letter, came from seeing a good-looking female become helpless. The woman could be “asleep,” but he had to be standing over her “in person.” Watching “a girl faint,” too, did something for him. And yet, seeing a girl “killed in a movie or TV show” seemed to offer the most satisfaction—that is, beyond the real thing.
I cannot even come close to describing the feelings I get, he once wrote, talking about seeing a woman in a movie incapacitated. When he watched women in those situations, his heart rate increased to a point, he wrote, until I think [it] is in my mouth. Ned became “dizzy” and his “hands sweat.” He also got an erection like never before. Back in grade school, Ned explained, he had these same feelings about his teachers. Every time I see a girl I am attracted to, he wrote, and it didn’t matter if it was in person, on television, or in photographs, instead of “undressing” the woman with his “eyes,” Ned always imagine[d] strangling her or hitting her over the head and carrying her limp body onto a bed. Once she was unconscious, he would undress her and arrange her arms and legs in some kind of seductive pose. Maybe position her like a doll. If she came to, well, that was her problem: he’d have to resort to other means.
II
The man who liked to be called Ned, or even “Neddy,” whom Mary Ellen had met at the singles dance and allowed in to use the bathroom, was now on top of her, forcefully grabbing and clutching her breasts and holding her down with all his might. As Mary Ellen struggled with him, he put both of his hands “up onto her throat.” And then he squeezed as hard as he could.
Mary Ellen started to say, “What are you doing?” but could not finish because her airway was closing. With that, he placed both of his thumbs together and dug them into the middle of her throat. He had obviously studied the human anatomy and knew exactly what he was doing.
“I almost wanted to think he was kidding,” Mary Ellen said later, “but he wasn’t kidding…. He was staring straight at me and he just squeezed my throat.”
She could barely move. He wasn’t much taller than Mary Ellen, but he was much more powerful. Looking at her, it wasn’t hard to see what Ned had found so attractive earlier that night when it seemed he was interested in getting to know her. She had shoulder-length, wavy-cut dark brown hair, emerald green eyes (quite alluring and inviting), a comforting “Mary Tyler Moore” smile, and porcelain, blemish-free skin. Mary Ellen was plainly attractive, kept her figure slim, and had a charisma that drew men toward her.
Ned wasn’t interested in any of those positive qualities, however: he was focused on rendering her unconscious so he could finish fulfilling his fantasy. As he squeezed her throat harder and Mary Ellen began to slip into unconsciousness, a notion occurred to her: I never thought my life was going to end like this. And then a white light, she recalled, approached…and here it was—after all she had been through. All she had put up with throughout her life. Here, things were beginning to get back on track and she had attracted another animal, a rapist this time, who was obviously going to kill her.
Has it really come to this?
She felt herself losing consciousness…and so she began to pray. The white light soon disappeared, Mary Ellen recalled. Then she saw total darkness. “I said my prayers—I said all of my prayers…and the room was spinning, and it was getting black, and I knew, I knew I was dying.”
“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name….”
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee….”
What Mary Ellen didn’t know was that as she slipped further into unconsciousness, he was undressing her from her waist up, refusing to strip off any of her clothing below the belt. He wasn’t concerned with her vaginal area. It was her breasts. To complete his fantasy, he needed to have her breasts fully exposed. Her bra couldn’t be hanging off her shoulder. This was important. He needed to stare at them as he straddled her like a horse and choked her.
“I remember,” she said later, “as I was slipping into unconsciousness, him staring into my eyes, directly staring into my eyes. He never spoke a word. I realized later that he was watching me die. He was fascinated by this. Losing consciousness, it felt like I had died…. I knew I was dying.”
III
Mary Ellen didn’t know how long it was that she had been out. But it was quite some time later when she came to and realized that he was gone. Where is he? He left? I’m alive? Waking up, she looked around and figured out that she was on her bed—not the couch. He must have carried her into her room and posed her on the bed. She was at an angle on her bed, positioned in a certain way.
His way.
As Mary Ellen came to and began to get her bearings back, he realized she was moving as he walked back into the room. “He was coming back into the room, and I was on the bed, I was very dizzy,” Mary Ellen said. “The next thing I knew, he was on top of me again.” And that’s when she felt “something cold” in the middle of her stomach. It was here when Mary Ellen first saw that, as she put it, “my clothes wre torn off down to my waist, but nothing from my waist down had been disturbed.”
Looking toward her ribs, Mary Ellen noticed his fist going up and down and wondered what he was doing. She felt that “cold” feeling again—it was steel—on her ribs. It didn’t hurt. Not then. She was still groggy. Dizzy. The room was spinning. She didn’t have the strength to scream.
Realizing she still had a chance to survive, Mary Ellen made a decision to fight back. “I remembered that I had read an article about self-defense,” she said. It was there, in her room, as the man called Ned, whom she had just met, began stabbing her in the chest that Mary Ellen decided not to be a victim any longer. Suddenly two lines from that self-defense article came back to her: “Hurt the attacker in his eyes. Try to blind him for a moment.”
Without even thinking about it, totally involuntary, Mary Ellen reached up and raked her long fingernails across his face. (“I gouged his eyes as hard as I could.”) It was as if her arm had moved on its own. (“I didn’t even have to will it—it just happened.”)
Mary Ellen never yelled or screamed. It was something she had learned not to do: “Usually when I’m frightened, I’m very quiet…. I kind of freeze.”
Not this time, though. This time, Mary Ellen reacted in a violent way toward the man who was trying to kill her: “I knew I was fighting for my life. I tell people now,” Mary Ellen said, “you have no idea of the strength you have and how quickly your mind can work when it’s about your survival.”
17
I
No sooner had Mary Ellen managed to gouge Ned in the eyes and rip the skin on his face open, when he jumped off her and ran out of the room.
The entrance door to the building was still dead-bolted.
As she got off the bed, Mary Ellen fell on the floor. Pulling herself up, she ran as fast as she could out of her apartment. She was weak. Sluggish. She had blood all over her skirt and blouse (which was torn and hanging down below her waist), but she didn’t realize she was bleeding. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Mary Ellen went straight for her landlady’s door. She was definitely home.
Her keys to safety were still upstairs in her pocketbook.
Near the bottom of the stairs, with several steps to go, Mary Ellen fell and tumbled down the last few stairs. Bleeding and bruised, she basically fell onto the landlady’s doorstep. (“My mind obviously couldn’t deal with the pain at that time; I was too busy staying alive.”)
Now Mary Ellen started yelling: “Come on…open the door,” she screamed as loud as she could.
By this point, after hearing the commotion going on above her, Mary Ellen’s landlady had already made the trip to her door to see what was going on. Unbeknownst to Mary Ellen, or Ned, the landlady had called the police. Waiting for them to arrive, she was standing on the opposite side of the door to Mary Ellen, asking, “What is it?” Her words were muffled through the solid oak door. “What’s happening out there? Go away!”
“Please, please,” Mary Ellen said, “open the door. Please open the door. He’s killing me. Please open the door.”
This was the first time Mary Ellen saw the blood. She looked down toward her abdomen and blood was streaming out of two slits in her midsection. It was gushing, she remembered, so she put her hand over the wounds and continued pleading with the landlady to unlock the door. “Please…hurry….”
Mary Ellen was trapped. She couldn’t return to her own apartment. For all she knew, he was still inside, regrouping, gathering his strength after being seriously injured in the eyes—and getting ready to finish the job he had started. It wasn’t hard to figure out that he had to kill her now. She was a witness. If she lived, he was going to jail.
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