by Liz Seccuro
In the next few weeks, still suffering intermittent, milder attacks, I started seeing my therapist more frequently. I stayed home from work. One afternoon I switched on the television. The Oprah Winfrey Show was on, and the focus of the program that day was panic disorders. A woman about my age was tearfully describing her symptoms and medical journey. She had the rapid heartbeat, the fear, the feeling of going crazy, the lack of medical explanation, and the battery of tests, and had morphed into an agoraphobic, someone who never leaves the house. My jaw dropped—it mirrored my story exactly. An expert came on and spoke of these “panic attacks” as part of an anxiety disorder closely related to or coexistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. It was, he said, the body’s way of dealing with distress or trauma that was locked away. It could strike anyone, but mostly it struck people who had been victims of domestic, sexual, or child abuse, those who had witnessed violence, war veterans, victims of crime where bodily harm took place, and so forth. He went on to explain that the first attack usually struck in a patient’s twenties or thirties and that the average sufferer saw sixteen different health professionals before getting the proper diagnosis and treatment. I literally ran to call my therapist. Her secretary told me I could come first thing in the morning. The next morning I felt better than I had in weeks, as I burst into my therapist’s office.
I told her about the Oprah show, and what I had learned about panic disorder, and she said that she had begun to suspect that might be what I had. She didn’t stop me or tell me to slow down. She said that the long-buried trauma of my rape, combined with my abusive marriage and divorce proceedings, probably triggered the attacks. She ordered me off caffeine and all stimulants, told me to practice deep breathing and meditation, and gave me a prescription to treat my anxiety and the acute attacks.
Gradually, my life renewed itself. I still had attacks every so often, but with the medication, I felt in control. Tom and I took a vacation in Mexico, and I returned to work feeling much better.
And then things changed all over again.
A few months later, Tom accepted a career-changing transfer to Philadelphia to be an apprentice to Chef Michel Richard, of Citron and Citronelle fame. I decided it was time for me to move on as well. Serendipitously, a former colleague and dear friend called me about a job opening as a sales manager at the historic Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C. I jumped at the chance to work with old friends and to change my landscape. I still visited Tom in Philadelphia when I could, but increasingly he felt just like a supportive best friend. I moved in with a friend on Capitol Hill and I settled into a new routine, determined to make a fresh start in a new city. Friends old and new helped bring me out of my fearful shell. I began to go out again—to the store, the gym. I was no longer agoraphobic. I was making progress and was so grateful to have the beginning of a genuine life again.
In June of 1996, after a business trip to New York, I disembarked from the Amtrak train at Union Station in Washington. I called my roommate to ask for a ride home, but he explained he was hosting a dinner party. Could I take a cab home? Not really wanting to go home to a party in full swing after a long business trip, I opted to wait it out and grab a bite to eat at the round restaurant and bar in the center of the station. I ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine, then took out my planner and jotted notes from my sales calls in New York. Looking up from my notes, I noticed a young, strikingly handsome man sitting about six seats away at the bar. He was looking through a hefty document and had his tie tucked into his dress shirt as he attempted to eat a rather large sandwich. We locked eyes, and his kind look and smile hit me like a wall. I felt like I had come home. To this day, I cannot explain it.
Walking over to me, the man introduced himself as Mike Seccuro. He explained that he was waiting to take a train home to Baltimore, after spending the day in long meetings. He worked as an investment banker and traveled to Washington a great deal. He had a wonderful way about him, a quick smile and deep brown eyes that hinted at his clever but sensitive nature. He was quick-witted, hilarious, and insightful. We exchanged business cards and promised, after chatting briefly, to get together. I didn’t let myself get my hopes up, though.
Two days later there was a voice mail on my work phone. Mike was coming back to Washington the following week for three days, and would I like to have dinner? He was scheduled to stay at the Hay-Adams, so I had him upgraded to a suite and sent him some fresh fruit and bottled water. To this day he insists that it was purely coincidental that he was booked into the hotel where I worked.
We met on a Monday evening for dinner back at Union Station and fell in love on the spot. As we talked about our pasts, he mentioned that he had gone to the University of Virginia. Fear struck at my heart. Please, God, please let him not know about me. Please let him not be a Phi Kappa Psi. But no, he was a Chi Phi, and he had graduated in 1995, seven years behind me. I hadn’t realized he was so young. After that first night, we became inseparable, traveling weeknights to see each other and spending together every moment we could spare from work, going to the zoo, the movies, dinners, and the opera. I loved him in a way I had never loved anyone in my life.
About one month into our relationship, I knew that I had to tell him my story. If I believed in this relationship, I needed to be fully honest about my past and tell him what had happened at our alma mater. On a quiet date, fingers intertwined, I told him everything. He listened intently, and then reached over to hug me. I was sobbing, and scared he might reject me, thinking I was “damaged.” Instead, he told me he loved me. I had indeed come home.
Through ups and downs, panic attacks, relocations, and separations, our love grew stronger. On November 13, 1999, we married in a church in Atlanta, Georgia. I had found my partner, my rock.
When Mike got a job on Wall Street, we moved to New York, and I found work as an event planner. On Christmas Day, 2002, we welcomed our first child, Ava Noelle. Holding her that day, I realized how far we had come. How far I had come. We moved to Greenwich when Ava was one year old and I began my own event-planning company, which flourished. Life was a miracle, and when I looked at my family with such joy and pride, the nightmares of the past seemed very far behind me.
And then, that September day in 2005, the letter arrived. And the nightmare was back.
CHAPTER 6 The Charges, the Arrest,
and the System
On January 5, 2006, Police Chief Timothy Longo of Charlottesville stood on the steps of City Hall in front of a smattering of reporters and other local media and read the following statement:
In mid December 2005, a thirty-eight-year-old Connecticut woman came forward to report a sexual assault that had occurred some twenty-one years ago.
According to the victim, the incident occurred in October 1984 while visiting the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, located in the one hundred block of Madison Lane in Charlottesville, Virginia. Both she and her assailant were students at the University of Virginia at the time. This was not a “date rape.” The assailant was a stranger to the victim at the time of the assault.
In the months prior to reporting this incident, the victim reports having been contacted by her assailant. She has not seen or otherwise had contact with this person since approximately two years after her attack, sometime in 1986.
During the course of these most recent contacts by her assailant, the victim was able to discern the subject’s whereabouts. It was shortly thereafter that she reached out to us in hopes of bringing this person to justice.
Detectives have met with the victim, conducted an extensive interview with her, and conducted a timely and thorough investigation. Subsequent follow-up investigation of her report was offered to the Charlottesville City Commonwealth’s Attorney and based on that a warrant was sought for the suspect’s arrest.
On the evening of January 4, 2006, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police arrested Mr. William N. Beebe of Las Vegas, Nevada, pursuant to a Virginia warrant charging him with rape in violation of Virginia State Code 1
8.2-61. A determination of his extradition status has not yet been determined.
The matter of his return to Virginia to answer the charge is currently being resolved by the Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office and the authorities in Nevada. UVA is now looking into what was done back then. It was not reported to city police.
UVA spokesperson Carol Wood released a statement that UVA had been “cooperating fully” with police, and had found documentation in the Office of Student Affairs verifying my complaint of 1984. However, Wood said, “We don’t comment on ongoing criminal investigations.”
And so it began, with a press conference ripple that became a wave of controversy.
* * *
How did we arrive at this point a little more than a month after the darkest days of the Thanksgiving holiday? The end of November brought so many emotions to my household. The e-mails from William Beebe continued to haunt me, and I would intermittently e-mail him. The correspondence was never friendly, to my mind, although my questions were sometimes benign. I was still afraid he might come after me, and I believed that if I stayed in close touch with the predator, he couldn’t sneak up on his prey.
Christmas loomed and I did the best I could, decorating a huge Norwegian spruce tree with masses of fairy lights, draping garlands over the banisters, and baking cookies. We took our annual holiday photos and I set about addressing Christmas card envelopes. I went to preschool holiday activities and continued my heavy client workload. But at night, in the quiet cold of Connecticut, I would still sit on my porch, looking at the stars and wondering when the next e-mail would come. Already, William Beebe’s reemergence was sending waves through my life. In early December, one of my dear friends, Sarah, brought her kids over for a play date with Ava. As the kids ran wild in the sunny playroom, we discussed preschool and holiday preparations. I hadn’t yet opened up to many people about what was happening, and I wanted my friend to know. I told her I wanted to show her something and ran upstairs to get the letter.
She read it, turned it over in her hands, and sighed.
“I’m so sorry, Liz,” she said.
“It’s crazy, right?”
“Yes, yes it is.”
But our discussion went no deeper than that. Instead, she looked at her watch, gathered her children, and begged off, saying she had to make holiday cookies for her daughter’s class.
I never received another phone call from her. I saw her at parties and the playground and she always greeted me with a pleasant smile, but there was nothing more there. Sarah was the first, but, sadly, not the only, friend to withdraw when I shared this new development. Many had known about what happened in college, but bringing it into the present was somehow different. Perhaps some people feel that tragedy is contagious and to see it happen to a friend is to acknowledge the possibility of its entering one’s own life. Regardless, it hurt deeply to lose friends I had considered a part of my support system.
Corresponding with Beebe had me thinking more about the past, and I’d been doing some Internet research on rape statistics at the University of Virginia and other colleges. Just Googling “University of Virginia rape” brought up an astonishing number of stories on blogs and in area newspapers of those who had been victimized at my alma mater and other area colleges and universities. One Web site was called “UVA Victims of Rape,” and it was stunning to me that such a Web site even existed. It began with the story of Susan Russell, whose daughter, a University of Virginia rape victim, not only had been denied justice but had almost been run off campus for reporting her attacker. I felt immediate sympathy for this family. There were dozens of other UVA rape stories as well. Many, like mine, and like Susan’s daughter’s, were cases that the university did not want to hear, or that they deemed were actually “consensual” sex. Many victims did not even bother to report the rapes for fear of retribution by their attackers or the university.
I was then directed to a local Charlottesville weekly, the Hook, which had run an explosive cover story, “How UVA Turns Its Back on Rape.” I sat mouth agape as I read about the case of Annie Hylton, another female student who was raped at UVA. She had been unable to criminally prosecute her rapist, but had finally prevailed in civil court. It outraged me that so many women had faced the same problems in dealing with the university administration, and that these cases continued to be mishandled. How big was the problem? I e-mailed the journalist who had penned the story, Courteney Stuart, explained my situation with Beebe, and commended her on her reporting. She e-mailed back, saying that she had received many powerful responses to the story, and asking if she could delve into my story further as a follow-up. Why not? Off the record, we began a correspondence. I told further details of my story and shared some of the e-mails between myself and Beebe. I was finding my voice again, a voice lost so many years ago when I burned my clothing in that trash can.
In the years since my rape, I had become marginally involved with sexual assault advocacy groups, working with other victims. But I felt removed from my own experience, and telling my story to these other victims was not about self-examination or reflection; it was more about helping and feeling as though I could do some good. The fact of the matter was that I was a bit detached from my own trauma and not doing the work I should have been doing on myself. Speaking and e-mailing now with Courteney during this time of the correspondence with Beebe hit much closer to home.
Next, I started e-mailing with Susan Russell, whose account of her daughter’s struggle had first made me realize the scope of this issue. Her daughter’s story was particularly painful in that the perpetrator was allowed back on campus and went on to rape another coed. Susan’s Web site seemed like a safe space to share ideas with someone of a like mind. We corresponded for a bit and I explained to her that I was denied any sort of resolution because Phi Kappa Psi was not under the Charlottesville police jurisdiction and that I had been advised just to seek a university Judiciary proceeding, a move that was pointless once William Beebe had left the university. Susan e-mailed back that what I said was incorrect. The Phi Kappa Psi house on Madison Lane was indeed part of Charlottesville police jurisdiction.
My brain froze. Could that be true?
Had they lied to me? I was stunned. I looked up the number for the Charlottesville Police Department and found the name of the chief of police, Timothy Longo. That seemed like a great place to start. I wanted to confirm Susan’s claim that I had been given incorrect information, but also, now that I was telling my story again, and now that there were new developments, I thought it might be worthwhile finally to tell the actual authorities under whose jurisdiction, as it now seemed, this crime had been committed. From my correspondence, William Beebe seemed erratic, perhaps antisocial. I still feared he might come to try to apologize personally. I wanted to let them know that this person had been e-mailing me and knew my home address.
On December 3, 2005, I picked up the phone, hesitated, then punched in the number to the Charlottesville Police Department. I asked for Chief Longo and was transferred to his personal voice mail box.
“Hi, you don’t know me, but I was a student at the university and I was raped by a fellow classmate in 1984 at the Phi Kappa Psi house on Madison Lane and I reported it to all of the deans and the university police. Nothing was done. Through the alumni association, this person has made contact with me again and he knows where I live and I … well, I don’t know what to do and I just need … Sir, I think I need your help. He’s been e-mailing me to apologize for the rape and he knows where I live and I am a little concerned. Um, I was told that the Charlottesville police had no jurisdiction over that house, but now I’m not sure and I’m afraid … and well, my name is Liz Seccuro, S-e-c-c-u-r-o, and ah, I live in Greenwich, Connecticut.” I left my number, thinking he would never call me back. He would probably think I was insane. But forty-five minutes later, my office phone rang.
“Is this Liz Seccuro?” Chief Longo asked.
“Yes! Thank you for calling m
e back!”
“Can you tell me about what’s been going on?”
I gave him a synopsis of what had happened in 1984, what reporting procedures I had been through, the arrival of the letter in September, and what had transpired. He asked if he could see the e-mail correspondence and I agreed readily. He asked if I had notified the Greenwich Police Department, which I had not, and he volunteered to inform them of the situation. He asked questions about the attack itself and how it had been handled. He was charming, polite, strong, and businesslike. I had no idea what was happening, but I kept answering his questions. When I asked, he confirmed that the house on Madison Lane was indeed under CPD jurisdiction and always had been.
“Ma’am, did you realize that there is no statute of limitations on rape in the Commonwealth of Virginia? This person can still be charged with the crime at any time.”
Longo and I exchanged e-mail addresses and he gave me the number of his direct line. I felt safe speaking with him, and I agreed to forward him the e-mail correspondence with Beebe as soon as we hung up. Chief Longo told me that either he or one of his detectives would follow up.
I gathered all of Beebe’s e-mails to me and mine to him and sent them to Chief Longo, along with some of my notes and a narrative regarding the rape itself, including each detail I could recall. Since I had been corresponding with Susan Russell and Courteney Stuart, it did not take long to gather the information that I felt was necessary.
When Mike returned home late that night, I told him about everything—my research, my conversation with the police chief, and what I had sent over. He listened and assured me that it was smart to contact someone and that maybe now I could rest a little easier. He was right. That night I slept for more than five hours for the first time in a long while.