Missoula

by Jon Krakauer

  “I’m so proud of my daughter for standing up and not letting him get away with this,” Kevin continued. “She’s amazing, smart, incredible, and beautiful on the inside and out, and didn’t deserve to have this happen to her. Judge, please do the right thing and send him to Deer Lodge, where he belongs.”

  —

  KEELY WILLIAMS TESTIFIED after Kevin Huguet. She told the court that Allison Huguet was her “best friend” and that she had known Beau Donaldson since kindergarten. When prosecutor Fred Van Valkenburg asked her to describe the party at Donaldson’s house in September 2010, Williams said there were about thirty people in attendance. She and Allison arrived around 10:00 p.m., Williams recalled, and went to bed between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. She testified that Donaldson and Huguet did not kiss or fondle each other at all. “That would not happen. Beau had a girlfriend at the time,” said Williams. The relationship between Donaldson and Huguet had never been romantic or sexual, Williams emphasized.

  At the conclusion of the party, when Allison went to sleep on a couch, alone, Keely Williams recalled, “I went to wake her to have her come sleep with me, and she said, ‘I’m fine. I’ll just sleep here.’ And so I left her on the couch.” The next thing she remembers, she said, was “a phone call from Allison, crying, saying, ‘Beau raped me. You need to get out of the house right now! My mom and I are outside to get you.’ So I got my stuff together, and I ran outside, where Mrs. Huguet was waiting with Allison in the car.”

  As Beth Huguet drove Allison to the hospital, Van Valkenburg asked Williams, “What was Allison doing? How did she react during that period of time?”

  “She just kept crying,” Williams answered. “She couldn’t even talk. She just cried the whole way….The next morning, I called to see how she was.”

  “And what was happening then?” Van Valkenburg asked.

  “She was still crying,” Williams said. She then described going to the Griz game with Allison: “She tried to act like she was fine, but didn’t make it hardly through the game.”

  Van Valkenburg asked Keely Williams if Allison ever talked about “reporting this matter to the police.”

  “She didn’t want to go to the police,” Williams replied.

  “Why not?”

  “She told me that she didn’t want to ruin his life….And she wanted to give him a chance to make it better.”

  Van Valkenburg asked Williams why Allison eventually decided to report the rape to Detective Baker. “I remember her saying that if she had just gone to the police right away,” Williams answered, “that maybe the other girls that had been raped wouldn’t feel like they wouldn’t be believed, and that they could stand up for themselves, too.”

  “It’s been nearly a year now since Beau was charged with raping Allison,” Van Valkenburg said. “How has this last year been on her?”

  “It’s been extremely difficult.”

  “Why is that?”

  “She felt like she couldn’t come home, and couldn’t be in Missoula because people were so horrible to her. And when she went back to school [in Oregon], she couldn’t focus. And she had a hard time finishing college at the end, because she had so much to deal with here, and couldn’t be present in school.”

  “Do you feel like Beau has accepted responsibility for what he did to Allison?” Van Valkenburg asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  If Beau Donaldson had accepted responsibility, Keely Williams replied, “he would have stopped his family and friends from saying horrible things about Allison and her family” during the fifteen months after he raped Allison, before she reported him to the police.

  Van Valkenburg asked Williams, “What do you think the judge should do to Beau Donaldson?”

  “I think the judge should sentence Beau to the thirty years he agreed to,” she replied, “so that he has time to deal with the issues that he so clearly has.”

  Turning to Judge Townsend, Van Valkenburg said, “I have no other questions, Your Honor.”

  “Cross-examination, Mr. Datsopoulos?” Townsend asked.

  Keely Williams had been a very sympathetic witness: sincere, utterly convincing, and likable. Because this was a sentencing hearing, and not a trial, there was no jury Datsopoulos could pander to. Calculating that he stood to gain nothing with Judge Townsend by challenging Williams’s testimony, he replied, “We have no cross-examination.”

  The prosecution’s next witness was Hillary McLaughlin. When the hearing had been postponed until January, McLaughlin lost her nerve and said she couldn’t testify. Less than two days before the hearing, however, Detective Baker persuaded her to change her mind. But because she had a ten-month-old baby and the roads were icy, the state had arranged for her to testify via video to avoid having to make the treacherous two-hundred-mile drive from Great Falls to Missoula.

  McLaughlin, a slight woman with long blond hair, appeared on a large video screen on the west side of the courtroom. She began by describing the party at Joanna Sutherlin’s house in 2008. “I had never met Beau before,” McLaughlin said, “but throughout the night he was all over me and wouldn’t leave me alone.” McLaughlin explained that shortly after she went to bed, “Beau walked in the door, shut and locked the door behind him, pulled down his khaki shorts and underwear,” climbed onto the bed, and began to grind his naked genitals into her pelvis.

  Even as McLaughlin screamed for help, and her friends were trying to break down the bedroom door, she recalled, “Beau continued to grind on top of me.” After the attack, she said, “I told very few people and tried to block it from my mind. Ever since that night it has affected…the way I live my life. I live in constant fear of being attacked walking to and from my house, to and from work, and while in my own home. I have a very hard time trusting anybody around me.

  “I have struggled with extreme anxiety,” McLaughlin continued, “and I have recently been put on medication to help deal with it. This has changed the way…I carry myself as a person.” She said she had finally decided to tell her story in public because Beau Donaldson clearly had not taken responsibility for attacking her or raping Allison Huguet, and McLaughlin hoped her statement would “help prevent it from happening to someone else. No one should have to live their life in fear because of someone else.”

  —

  WHEN BETH HUGUET, Allison’s mother, took the witness stand, prosecutor Fred Van Valkenburg began by asking her to tell the court about Allison’s birth and the kind of relationship they had. Allison, Beth said, was “a very large baby,” and her birth had been difficult: “Twenty-six hours. They had to break both of her collarbones for her to be delivered. And yet, four hours after she was delivered, she was smiling. She had curls in her hair….Allison has always been happy-go-lucky, smiling. My parents have always described her as almost angelical and cherub-like…, wanting the best in the world for everyone, and nonjudgmental. A very loving, very caring individual who has been a spark in my life, a love in my life.”

  Beth Huguet testified that Allison “has always been very open and honest with me and has confided in me about a lot of things. I’ve always believed we’ve had maybe a stronger mother-daughter relationship than…a lot of other mothers do. I think part of this is from me being a high school teacher: I’m able to have an honest rapport with the kids. And I have a pretty good BS detector, so I can figure out when my children are telling me things.”

  Asked by Van Valkenburg to describe Beau Donaldson when he was growing up, Beth explained that the Target Range neighborhood where Beau and Allison were raised and attended school together is a tight community. “That group of kids,” she said, “were always very close, took care of each other, looked out for each other. I know Allison always looked at Beau as the big brother that she didn’t have.” When Van Valkenburg asked Beth Huguet about the night Donaldson raped Allison, she told the court about being awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from Allison pleading, “Save me, Mom! Help me….He’s chasing me down an alle
y.”

  As Allison ran for her life, Beth told the court, she could hear a male voice in the background, commanding Allison to stop and warning her not to say anything. “I thought, ‘God, I know that voice,’ ” Beth said. After driving across town to Donaldson’s neighborhood, she saw Allison running along South Avenue with one hand clutching her phone and the other hand holding up her pants. “She got in the car and she just kept rocking back and forth and just crying, frantically….And then she said, ‘Beau raped me.’ ”

  Beth Huguet testified that Allison asked her not to share that information with anybody. “You didn’t share it with Allison’s father?” Van Valkenburg asked.

  “I shared it with no one,” Beth said. “It wasn’t my right. It was my child’s right. She was an adult….I needed to protect her wishes.” During the months that followed, Beth said her home “became almost like a tomb” from Allison’s “crying and walking in the middle of the night, and sobbing….It was five months of complete, sheer hell, to say the least, to watch her go so far within herself. The raw pain, the internal raw pain that was there every day—and I could see it in her eyes—was horrific, to the point where I could barely function, to get up every day and go to school and teach and keep a smile on my face when I had a child that was suffering so horrifically.”

  Allison “wasn’t the same person anymore,” Beth continued. “There was no smiles. There was no laughs….She went back to school [in Oregon] in January. But I would frequently get calls from her, about every other day, where she was having trouble focusing on school….At least she was out of Missoula and the people there didn’t know. But internally, she was being eaten alive….She had a lot of fear and anxiety.”

  Beth Huguet told the court about Allison’s visit to Missoula during Eastern Oregon University’s Thanksgiving break in November 2011. It was an especially awkward visit, Beth said, because she and Allison were trying to keep the rape secret from her sisters and father so they wouldn’t have to endure the anguish Beth and Allison were feeling. To that end, Beth explained, every day she and Allison had to “put a brave face on.” Then Allison went downtown with her friends one night and ran into Beau Donaldson at the Mo Club. “I think that’s when it hit her full force…how deep-seated her pain and fear was,” Beth testified, “and that she really wasn’t living. She was just managing day to day, getting up and putting one foot in front of the other.”

  Van Valkenburg asked Beth if she thought Donaldson had “done a good job…of telling his family and his friends exactly what he did to Allison.”

  “No,” she replied, pointing out that even after confessing twice to the police that he raped Allison, “he chose to let his family and friends believe that he didn’t do it. And that’s not a person standing up for what’s right.

  “Beau has been put on a pedestal most of his life,” Beth continued, suggesting that his many admirers “wanted to believe he didn’t do it, and he chose to allow them to believe he didn’t do it.”

  When defense counsel Milt Datsopoulos was given the opportunity to cross-examine Beth Huguet, he tried to elicit testimony from her that Beau Donaldson had been an exemplary friend to Allison as they grew up together. At one point Datsopoulos asked Beth if there was anything she’d observed in Donaldson over the many years she had known him to suggest “he might have some kind of violent or mean streak.”

  “He didn’t do anything to me or my child,” Beth conceded. But, she said a moment later, “I guess that’s what makes this even more horrific, is that this is such an extreme betrayal between friends.”

  Datsopoulos kept pushing Beth to take Beau Donaldson’s entire life into consideration, rather than just a single, inexplicable act. “When you measure people’s lives, who they are,” Datsopoulos pointed out, “you have to look at the entire spectrum of that life, not a narrow piece of it—wouldn’t you say that’s an accurate premise?”

  “Yes,” Beth Huguet replied. But then she pointed out that there are sides to people that are impossible for even family members and close friends to know. “I think Beau’s sexual deviancy is a side that many of us were not aware of.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When Beth Huguet finished her testimony, prosecutor Fred Van Valkenburg called Allison Huguet to the witness stand. As one of his first questions, he asked if she had ever had a romantic or sexual relationship with Beau Donaldson. “No,” Allison replied. “But Beau and I were closer than I was to any other guy growing up…and had a lot of respect for each other, I thought.”

  Referring to the night Huguet was raped, Van Valkenburg asked, “Do you know where Beau Donaldson was at the time you decided to go to sleep?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What’s the next thing you remember happening, Allison?”

  “I remember waking up to Beau moaning and a lot of pressure and pain,” she answered. She was facedown on the couch, with her pants pulled down, and Beau was penetrating her from behind.

  “Were you scared?” Van Valkenburg asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “I mean, he’s got at least a hundred pounds on me. If he’s willing to do that while I’m sleeping, I definitely thought he would have done a lot more to keep me from resisting, or telling somebody….So I pretended like I didn’t wake up.” Allison described waiting until Donaldson had finished raping her and left the room, then grabbing her phone, bolting from the house, and being chased barefoot down the alley by Donaldson until she saw her mother’s car. She told the court about driving back to Donaldson’s house to rescue her friend Keely Williams, and being examined at the hospital. Because Donaldson hadn’t used a condom, she testified, she worried that she might become pregnant with his child or have contracted “multiple STDs, including HIV.”

  Van Valkenburg asked Huguet how she was affected by encountering Beau Donaldson at the Mo Club in November 2011.

  “At that moment,” Huguet said, “it hit me that…as hard as I tried to separate the person who raped me and the person I grew up with, I had to realize that they were the same person, and…he was not sorry. He was not sorry in any way….When Beau stood there and laughed in my face, I think I was forced to realize that by not going to the police, I was allowing him to think that this was okay, and I was giving him the opportunity to do this to other females. And I can be honest with you in saying that if I had found out that some girl was going through this hell because I didn’t say anything, I probably would have killed myself. There is no way I could have lived with that, at all.”

  “What’s this last year been like for you?” Van Valkenburg asked.

  “It has been hell,” Huguet said. “It was very obvious that Beau had not told his family or friends [the truth], as they went around this town saying horrible things about me, saying that I had made this all up.”

  “What do you think should happen to Beau?” Van Valkenburg asked.

  She had been struggling to answer that question, Huguet replied, explaining that he was “someone that I cared about, I truly loved, and he’s the person that raped me. I believe that if I didn’t know Beau, if Beau was a complete stranger, I would ask for you to have him sent to prison for the rest of his life. But, unfortunately, I can’t take away the fact that I care about him. I want him to get help. I want him to be the person that I grew up with.”

  Beau Donaldson had received many accolades when he was younger, Huguet acknowledged, and deserved the love he’d received from all the people who admired him. “I loved that person, too,” she lamented. “But I don’t think that person is sitting right there.” Huguet gestured toward Donaldson, who hunched impassively at the defense counsel’s table. “I don’t think that’s the same person at all,” she said. “I don’t think he’s taken responsibility, and I think the only way he’s going to get it is if he has to sit in prison.”

  Looking at Donaldson with a conflicted expression that conveyed both sincere concern and utter revulsion, Huguet said to him, “And honestly, I think…you deserve to be raped every
day until you understand the pain you have caused me, until you understand what this does to you emotionally—until you get it, Beau. Until you are actually sorry. Until you can take responsibility and get help….And I truly hope that you can come out of this a person of quality, a person of substance. I hope after you are punished, and after you get it, that you have a great life….Until then, I don’t care what happens to you.”

  —

  TAKING THE WITNESS stand was difficult for Allison Huguet. She knew most of the people in the gallery, and many of them were attending the hearing to offer her moral support. But at least as many people were openly supporting Beau Donaldson, including several individuals she’d previously considered friends of her family. Seeing them sitting on Donaldson’s side of the courtroom was exceedingly hurtful, and she had trouble controlling her emotions as she testified. Several times Huguet had to fight back tears, and it looked like she might not be able to proceed. On each occasion, however, she willed herself to regain her composure, and continued to speak her piece. It was a remarkable display of courage.

  Huguet is a warm, cheerful woman. She doesn’t look fierce, but her upbeat demeanor that day hid an abundance of tenacity. When defense counsel Milt Datsopoulos began his cross-examination of Huguet, he had no idea what was in store for him.

  Datsopoulos began not by asking Huguet a question but by lecturing her. “I just want to explain to you,” he pronounced, “why certain things happened. Beau admitted on at least three different occasions…that he took advantage of you—that he had sex with you without consent….He said he was guilty of doing things to you without your consent that were horrible….I think it’s important for you to know that he has consistently told various people—but most importantly, law enforcement—‘I made a horrible mistake. I committed a crime. I had sex with my friend. She did not give consent.’ Charges were then filed….And we came to court and pled ‘not guilty’ [at Donaldson’s arraignment]. That outrages a lot of people. It’s hard to understand how that occurs when you’ve already admitted your guilt, like Beau did.” Datsopoulos explained to Allison that when Donaldson made the “not guilty” plea at his arraignment, he wasn’t actually claiming that he wasn’t guilty. It was merely a procedural formality.