The following are the Cambridge incidents for 1971:
1-8-71, 9:30 PM
3-15-71, 8:30 PM
3-16-71, 9:20 PM
3-16-71, 9:55 PM
4-2-71, 9 PM
4-12-71, 9:45 PM
4-21-71, 9:50 PM
4-22-71, 12:05 AM
Same MO as the description of the 1970 incidents.
While at Cambridge—read the reports from Provincetown PD on the 3 incidents they had in late August. Incident involved a subject fitting our subject and the Cambridge subject. Girls involved were young teenagers. In an attempted rape in Canton, spoke with Sgt Reno about incident in that town. W/M 5’11” 140 slender build. Blue eyes, mask, mask taken off. Same MO as our incident. Canton incident was on 3-12-71 at about 9 pm.
In going over the incidents (Cambridge and Canton and Provincetown) they are very similar. The only missing items are the gloves and rocks. These two items are in our incident [the rape at Concord Academy that Inspector Nestle was investigating at the time]. The rocks show up in the Natick incident, which occurred on 4-26-71. The other similar items are the use of salve, the gun, and the masks. All the victims are aged 9 to 19. The Cambridge incidents involved girls who live in an eight-block area around Radcliffe college, some of the incidents were in the dorms, the others in houses used by students living in the area. The Natick incident was at a private girls’ school, the same as our incident. The Provincetown and Canton incidents were in private homes.
In going over all the available info, there is no question that all these incidents are almost identical, the only marked difference being the rocks used in Natick and Concord, and the gloves used in Concord.
I send the list of dates to Lucy. She was raped on March 15, 1971, at 8:30 PM. Now she tells me about the salve, which she was too embarrassed to tell anyone before, even her mother. There was something particularly disgusting about it. And she tells me about the rapist’s piercing blue eyes, which she says she will never forget.
Lucy’s reaction, and the reaction of her family, is surprising to me. Her sisters treat me like a hero, rather than the troublemaker I know myself to be. They send me thank-you notes. They are interested in what I am writing, and when I send them parts of my manuscript, they respond almost immediately. We get together for brunch, as if we were gathering for a family reunion. Her sisters tell me that because I’ve helped Lucy find the identity of her rapist and because we’ve discovered that the rapist is dead, Lucy will live with less fear.
All this softness, at a time like this, is almost hard for me to take. I feel held, even loved. But I am afraid to express to Lucy and her sisters how much their reaction means to me.
I visit Lucy at her home. She lives on a cheerfully busy street in Burlington, Vermont, in a big, rambling Victorian, reminiscent of the rambling Victorians you find in the part of Cambridge where she grew up. We are sitting in Lucy’s living room, our stocking feet resting on a chair in front of her woodstove.
Now that we’re pretty sure we were raped by the same man, Lucy and I have more detailed conversations.
“Why did you get curious about your rapist?” I ask her.
“I was coming up on my fiftieth birthday. I guess that was important because that was the age my mother was when she died. And then my father died. When we were going through his papers, I found a subpoena of one of the suspects. On the back of the subpoena I found a diagram in his writing. A diagram that showed where my room was in the house.
“So I found this subpoena,” she repeats.
She switches back to what was going on in her life when she first became curious about her rapist.
“My marriage had started to fall apart. I felt betrayed. Three years ago. And that brought back the memory of the earlier traumas, my rape, my mother’s death. For months I had a feeling, that terror feeling, that feeling in your stomach.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. I never thought of any of the feelings I get when I’m afraid as a “terror feeling,” and I want to know what Lucy feels.
“It’s like a spark of fear, the feeling you get when you see the police pulling up behind you. But it didn’t go away, it stayed in my stomach.”
With a gesture of her hand in the air, she indicates a line in the air from her lower abdomen to her heart.
“It hurt so much,” she says. “I couldn’t relax my abdomen.”
I imagine Lucy’s muscles clenched tight, her abdomen trying to muscle something out, but actually forcing it deeper. I am listening to Lucy, but in another part of my mind, I carefully remove the pain from her abdomen.
“My marriage had fallen apart, and there was no reality in my world anymore. I was afraid. It brought back an earlier period when I was afraid all the time. My father and mother split up when I was in seventh grade. My father remarried in June of my seventh-grade year, and in March of my eighth-grade year I was raped.”
“I think he was being a Peeping Tom before he raped me,” she adds, switching back to the rapist.
I don’t ask her what she means by that. Maybe I’m too frightened. Did he case her house before he raped her, the way he scoped out ours? Before my sister and I were raped, the rapist had figured out how to cut off the telephone. In one of the files I read through quickly, a woman on the Cape came home to find Brian Beat in her home, apparently casing her house in preparation for a future crime. She saw him clearly, and was able to identify the intruder for the police. He would later be convicted of raping a woman who lived nearby, as well as breaking in and entering her home.
“You might have thought it was a dorm where we were living,” she says. “It was 1971. Cambridge. A big old Cambridge Victorian. There were eleven women in the house at the time I was raped.
“It was like there was a misfiring going on in my brain. All of these things were connected,” she says. She has switched back to her life of several years ago.
“My marriage was falling apart. I felt the same way I did after I was raped, the same way I did after my mother died. I lost a ton of weight. I couldn’t get my stomach to relax. As I sit here today I’m so happy, I’m so happy, I’m so happy I don’t have that feeling in my stomach….”
At first, hearing these words, I am puzzled. Why is she so happy? Then I realize she is talking about the pain. The pain had stopped.
“As I got into trying to understand this feeling, I started to realize that I was very afraid. I was dealing with something that I was afraid of—I could meet the guy that raped me, I could…”
Again, I’m confused. Is she talking about the feeling in her stomach? I sip some of the coffee Lucy has poured for me, needing the caffeine, hoping it won’t give me a stomachache. I have not been sufficiently vigilant about the ways her story might alter my own perceptions, might make it hard for me to stay in the room.
“So my dad leaves. My mother falls apart. I start eighth grade, and then in March I get raped. My mother dies. And now, many years later, my marriage was falling apart. It brought back all these earlier wounds,” she says, the many causes of the pain in her abdomen all jumbling out at once.
“Ever since the rape I have felt afraid to be alone in a big house like this. I slept in my mother’s room for years. If I was home alone at night, I would hear things. Dark big house, people in the big house…” She tells me that the place she felt safest was a studio apartment in New York City. “It was tiny,” she says. “On the sixteenth floor. No place to hide.”
Lucy has not told her two teenage boys that she had been raped. We talk about the pros and cons. I wonder whether children sense something, but don’t know what they sense; whether they might imagine that they are somehow to blame for their mother’s fear.
“Do you think the rape might have changed the way you were as a mother?” I ask. Of course I want to know the answer to this question for myself: How might it affect how I parent my son?
“I don’t worry that they’re going to be raped,” she says, answering a question I haven’t asked. “Th
ey are huge strapping boys. But I worry that something bad will happen to them. Of course it’s unlikely, but so was what happened to me.
“How likely was it in 1971 that a thirteen-year-old girl would get raped at gunpoint with her mother and nine other women in the house? Even today, in my old neighborhood, in Cambridge, this sort of thing doesn’t happen. It was something we couldn’t even imagine back then.
“I am overprotective,” she adds. She tells me about a chess coach her boys had; that she sensed that he was a predator. “I didn’t get a good feeling around him,” she says. “I didn’t want the boys to be with him.”
“How did your husband react to that?” I ask.
“He thought I was being overly paranoid,” she says. “He was dismissive.
“But I never let my kids be with the chess coach by themselves. They would say, ‘Mom, he’s not a pedophile.’ It turned out that he was. He’s now in federal prison.”
She may have been paranoid, but her intuition was correct. Does it take a victim to recognize a predator before anyone else does?
“How did your husband react when you told him you were raped?” I ask.
“He was compassionate. I think he felt bad about it, but it wasn’t real to him.
“For many years, I felt ashamed of myself. Ashamed of my own body.”
I see her looking out the window, trying to look away from an uncomfortable feeling.
I want to protect Lucy. She looks so slim and vulnerable. And today, while we are talking, I see a little girl.
But at the same time, in this moment, I will confess that I feel superior to Lucy. Emotionally healthier. More grown-up.
I am not aware of feeling ashamed of my own body in the way she describes. But I am aware of feeling ashamed of this feeling I have now, this slightly superior, competitive feeling with Lucy.
Now that I hear about the possibility of harboring this kind of shame, I imagine that I must have it, too. Like the medical students who imagine themselves with laryngitis, leukemia, lymphoma, every disease in the medical textbook. Perhaps I have repressed the feeling of shame over my own body. Perhaps I have muffled it. Or “forgotten” the many times I’ve been aware of feeling it.
But now, reading over my notes, I realize that this need I have to clean things—not so much when they are dirty as when I’m in the mood—might be connected with shame. This morning, for example, sweeping the hearth, I was determined to get the ashes from the spaces between the bricks. After I swept the hearth, I swept the leaves off the porch. Then I wiped off the kitchen counters, which were clean, with orange-scented soap.
“Why is rape so shaming?” I ask her. I am certain that rape is shaming, though I’m less aware of feeling ashamed of my body than Lucy is.
But now, again reading over my notes, I think back to the period before the rape. I was dancing a lot back then. Ballet and modern. The feeling of soaring. So much music in my life. After the rape, I remember the shift in my posture. Somehow I noticed it, as if I could stand outside myself and observe. The shoulders slumping forward, as if I had something to hide. How long did it take for me to shift from dancer’s posture to the posture of a victim?
And now that I’ve uttered that word, I am truly ashamed. I did not have the posture of a victim. I was not a victim. I was just raped.
“People say that rape is not sex, that it’s violence,” Lucy says, bitterly. “But it’s also sex. You can’t get around that,” she says. “He didn’t run me over with a car. He had sex with me. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re not supposed to have sex with an eighth-grader. You’re not supposed to have sex when you’re in eighth grade. It was very intimate. You can’t get around it. This part of the body,” she says, gesturing from her heart to her lower abdomen, though I understand she means to indicate her vagina. “If you’re sitting around with a group of women, talking about various traumas, someone will say, I got beaten by my mother. But if you say, I got raped, it’s a different thing.”
I wonder if that is true. Is rape really the worst sort of violation? I’m not sure. I often wonder why it matters whether we’re penetrated or not. There is the pain, but the pain doesn’t last. The shame does.
And I realize that for me, rape didn’t seem like sex. It seemed like a discharge of shame, an exchange of pain. Rape changes ones sexuality. Of course it does. It must. I’m terrorized when men are attracted to me. But I cannot write about my sexuality. I feel too vulnerable. I am afraid that if I call attention to myself in that way, I might be raped again.4
Now I want to ask her about her memory of the rape itself.
“What do you remember about the gun?” I ask, wondering if she remembers a white handle.
“I remember a short dark gun,” she says. I sense her entering the memory now. My body tenses. I will myself to stay alert.
“It was March fifteenth. I remember because it was the ides of March. It was unseasonably warm. The windows were open. It felt like an early summer day. It was too hot.”
I ask Lucy if she dislikes this kind of heat now, when it’s unseasonably hot. “I love the heat,” she says. But I don’t believe her.
“I remember that I walked home with my friends from Harvard Square. We all had dinner. Or maybe we had dinner in the square, I’m not sure. I know there were eleven of us in the house at the time. There were my two sisters. Jen had two friends over. There was my mother’s friend Polly. My friends. That makes nine. We may have had two other girls living in the house. We often had kids staying with us. So there were all these women in the house. I went upstairs…. I was raped at eight fifteen,” she says.
She pauses. I can see that she is trying to get this right.
“That’s right,” she says, a faraway look in her eye. “It was our spring vacation. There was no school then. So I came up to my room. I don’t remember where I got undressed. I went into my mother’s bathroom. I took a shower in her bathroom. I must have wanted to use her stuff, or maybe because it was a better shower.
“I turn the shower off and step out,” she says. She has switched to present tense. “As soon as I step out, I see a man wearing a dark blue slicker and a black mask with cutout eyes. It looked like a ski mask. He had very blue eyes.”
We are back in the past.
“I thought he was a friend of my sister’s, making a joke. I reacted that way at first. He had a gun. I said to him, ‘What are you doing? Get out,’ still thinking it was a joke. He didn’t respond accordingly. That was the moment that I realized that he was a man that was nobody I knew.”
Why did the police have such a hard time believing my sister and me that the man who raped us was “nobody we knew”?
And now she says, “I remember that feeling coming over me—”
Lucy looks out the window. She is bothered by a noise, which I haven’t heard.
“This house is too big for me,” she says. “They are chopping down the trees outside.”
She runs outside for a moment. Men from the telephone company, she says.
She returns, back to the too-big house. I see a faraway look in her eye now. It seems to me that her features are slightly altered.
“Is this really okay?” I ask.
She assures me that she’s fine. She returns to her story.
“At the moment when I realized that he was nobody I knew…”
She pauses. I hear the ticking of the clock. She finds her way back to her story.
“There is the moment when the blanket went over me, of disconnection with my body. Like I was almost floating at that point. I don’t remember exactly what he said, other than telling me, Don’t say anything. He told me to go through my mother’s room. To go out the door of her room and through the door into mine. There was a lock on the door from years before. A bolt lock. All I had on was a towel. He told me to lie down on my bed. My room had two beds in it. I don’t know how he knew which was my bed. I can’t remember what he did with the gun….” She pauses.
I wonder to myself,
Is she considering now whether she might have been able to grab the gun, might have been able to kill him? Whether she might have tried to run away when he put the gun down? I don’t ask these questions. I am afraid to interrupt her narrative. I do not believe I would be able to remember as much as Lucy has if I didn’t have the material I wrote down for the police at the time. I would probably not know what happened to me. I would have forgotten.
“I remember he got something out of his pocket. It was a tube of junk,” she says. What a harsh word, I think, the hardness of that final k. I feel the pain and the shame of the cold ointment on her vagina, the vagina of a thirteen-year-old girl.
I can see that she cannot describe what the “junk” was. Somehow it is this “junk” that horrifies her more than anything.
“He put it on me and on him,” she says. She looks far away. Her hand floats up to cover her mouth.
She recovers herself. “I said to him, Are you going to rape me?”
I notice Lucy’s long, lean legs, stretched out onto the stool in front of us. Her anger gives her strength, I think to myself. She will live through this.
“And then I don’t remember what he said.”
She pauses again. There is some thought here that is too painful to capture out loud.
“I do remember feeling his penis,” she says.
I am shocked awake by that word penis. It sounds so technical, so grown-up. It seems so out of keeping with the way Lucy has been speaking until this point.
“It was very, very painful. Like he was forcing something that is too big into a too-small hole,” she says.
I do not like this word hole, referring to a child’s vagina. I want to edit her recollections for her, but I don’t.
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