Dancing with the Octopus

by Debora Harding

  Besides the adjustment to being around the general population, including women and children, and the social graces he needed to start practicing, he was discovering all sorts of other adaptions. Just the other day he had encountered an automatic flushing toilet, which freaked the hell out of him. And mobile telephones, so many people had them these days. Being the social man he was, he was getting one of those as soon as he could.

  And just to show he wasn’t presuming anything about release, he signed up to be one of three prisoners on a panel to answer questions from about thirty or forty staff trainees. His parole hearing was coming up in September and besides a break from the monotony of work, he’d get points on his record for being cooperative.

  And then—why the hell did this keep happening to him? There he was, just being Mr. Helpful, and some chick in the audience starts asking about the kidnapping and sexual assault charges. He tried steering the conversation back to the robbery, that’s what he’d signed up for, but she wasn’t having it.

  So he admitted to the kidnapping. And then she asked him, in front of everyone, would he admit he was a rapist? Where was this going? He finally offered up that he was surprised when the girl had started crying. But the chick wouldn’t leave it. She asked the question again in front of the whole room. Asked him if he could admit he was a rapist—she wanted to hear him say the words, so he did just to shut her up. What the hell? It was enough to make a guy paranoid.

  In Which I Contemplate a Stimulating Conversation

  Shepherdstown, 2003—After a month of thinking it through, I took the next step, called the office of Victim Services at the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services, and spoke with a calm and gentle-sounding woman named Jill. She confirmed that yes, Nebraska did offer a Victim-Offender Dialogue program. But after she heard my story, she grew more cautious. They had never before facilitated a case that involved a severe crime or a repeat violent offender. Before we entered dialogue, and to ensure my safety, Goodwin would need to be evaluated by a prison mental health professional. And then he would have to agree to participate. I thanked her for the information and sat on it for another month.

  When I reached out again, she was, for lack of a better word, glad I called. There had been a further development, but she didn’t feel that she could invade my privacy by contacting me. After my previous conversation with Jill, Goodwin had volunteered to speak on a prisoner’s panel for a staff training she was conducting for Victim Assistance. But apparently he had been caught off guard, thinking that he had offered his services as an experienced bank robber, not as a kidnapper and rapist. When pushed about the kidnapping, he volunteered that he had dropped me off on a country road; and when pushed further about whether he was a rapist, he offered that he was surprised when I had started to cry. Jill raised her hand from the audience and asked him if he could say the words “I am a rapist.” She said he did so, but reluctantly. This might have been because he was in a group of thirty people. The reason she shared it with me was because it suggested that he had never come to grips with what he had done.

  I hung up the phone wanting to vomit. What was I doing? What could I possibly hope to achieve? It was an abstract battle I was fighting here, and perhaps I could better take care of myself by disengaging. And suddenly it struck me. What if Mr. K/a.k.a. Fucking Asshole/Charles Goodwin said “yes”? That he was prepared to speak with me? I was totally unprepared. I had no idea how the process worked, how to evaluate it, or what kind of training Jill had.

  I went back on the internet and found a mediation training program in Austin, Texas, based on the principles of restorative justice. The man who founded the program, David Doerfler, facilitated encounters between the families of murder victims and their offenders.

  I spoke with David over the phone, explained that I was contemplating making contact with my offender, and we discussed the dangers in cases of severe crime such as mine—retraumatization, being manipulated, physical dangers, false hope that there could be a happy ending, or a fantasy that some kind of healing would occur that would remove the pain. Our minds worked so quickly together that he asked if I would be interested in going through the training myself as a mediator. Given the violence of the crime we were talking about, it might be a good strategy. He’d let me participate in the course for free if I thought I could swing the airfare. I’d learn about the process and find ways to assess each and every stage I was at, so I could feel more in control.

  I dropped Dad a quick email, briefly introducing the concept. He wrote back interested in hearing more, asking me to provide a link to David Doerfler’s work. Told me how much he missed Thomas and the kids, and asked if I could send some digital pictures.

  And then I asked him about the letter that Charles Goodwin had sent to our Iowa address and whether he still had it. And that was the beginning of what I hoped would be the conversation I had waited for all my life. He didn’t respond.

  Two weeks later I flew to Austin.

  In Which I Chase Nickels

  Shepherdstown, 2003—A week after I returned from Austin, Texas, I was still waiting to hear if Goodwin would consent to an initial meeting with my victim advocate. I had plenty of time to re-question the process I had embarked on. Why had I put myself in a precarious position where I had handed him decision-making power in my life? As each day passed, I resented my situation more. When the phone rang at last, Jill told me he had agreed to Victim-Offender Dialogue, that we could move ahead. I felt a mixture of sweeping gratitude and relief, and then anger that I should feel thankful, and then elation.

  Jill framed what we might achieve, careful to contain my expectations. She reminded me that only a few months ago Charles Goodwin had denied being a rapist while serving on the panel in order to help prison staff trainees. After all these years, I didn’t need an admission of guilt, though. I knew he, Goodwin, was looking at the door to freedom and wasn’t likely doing this for personal growth reasons. I wasn’t hoping for truth and I wouldn’t have to meet him. I wanted to rid my brain of the image of that ski mask and to see the human with the eyes. I wanted to establish that the person who attacked me was not an evil monster lodged permanently at the back of my head like that blade he had pressed into my skull. I wanted to dispel the ghost of him in the same way Dad had taught me when he offered me a nickel to look under the bed all those years ago in Maine. Granted, it might sound like a sledgehammer approach to treating hallucinations.

  I began to focus on what I wanted out of the dialogue. We would communicate through Jill—I wouldn’t have to see him. I wanted to know how much of the violence of those four hours he remembered, if what he had done to me was important enough for him to remember. That was also a catch-22—that he might be walking around with that memory in his head wasn’t a rosy idea either. I had his police statement from the night he was arrested and was so horrified at the brutality of it, I wanted to compare it to the version he would tell today, to hear the word choices he’d use. I hoped to get an idea of how self-aware he was, of his ability to reflect on the chain of events that led to his becoming so out of control. I was also curious to know who he was, what kind of background he had, who his family was, what motivated his violence against me and my family. Had he targeted me?

  I also wanted to know specifics surrounding the crime, how far in advance he had planned the kidnapping. Why me? Did he know my father? Had he been following me that day? How much of that story he fed me about his grandmother—about his belief in God—were lies?

  And then there was the deeper layer of questioning. I wanted to know whether I was right about my instinct, that he had intended to kill me, and if so, what changed his mind. Kim told me he said in their meeting that day in prison that he couldn’t kill me because I kept talking to him about God. I wanted to know if he came back for me. It wasn’t in the police report. I wanted to know what happened when he went to meet my father. I already had answers from the newspaper articles and police reports, but I didn’t know it from his fir
st-person point of view. I had no idea if it was right to ask him these questions, but Jill assured me there were no rights and wrongs. I was the victim. He could choose not to answer the question.

  The day the meeting was scheduled moved excruciatingly slowly. Goodwin couldn’t meet with Jill until after he was back from work.

  The phone finally rang. Jill spoke with more energy in her voice than her usual measured tone. The meeting went better than she expected, he answered all the questions, and she thought I would be pleased to have the answers. She’d write up the notes and have them over to me by the next morning.

  When the email came through the next day, both Thomas and I were astonished at the answers. Goodwin’s account mirrored in detail the one I had struggled to write at my desk. We compared his answers to the police report when he was seventeen. The adult Goodwin, complete with his psychology degree, recounted the day’s events with astounding clarity. He admitted to being grossly out of control, to having a gun, even to his murderous intent. He said that he had changed his plan to kill me after a temporary moment of compassion in recalling our conversation about God, and even felt a pang in the thought that he had hurt a friend. And then, to settle the question of the nature of his violence, something rapists are often blind to, and by far the most painful thing to hear, so painful I winced—he said I had “gone so limp” after the assault, he thought I had died. On hearing it, I thought his choice of wording noteworthy—he thought “I had died.” It made his role in the act sound so passive—not like he might have killed or murdered me.

  There was a stark change of tone between the two accounts; he spoke with a different vocabulary. The police statement of December 3, 1978, was given by a rage-filled seventeen-year-old, consumed with vengeful hatred of everything my father and I represented in his world, who bragged about the way he terrorized my father and about his violent assault against me. Most of all, the difference in his self-awareness was striking. I was stunned. What had I expected?

  Reading over the account, I couldn’t believe how quickly my fear, anxiety, and rage disappeared, how deeply grateful I was that he had verified the truth of my memory. And even then, even when I was flooded with the impact of hearing my memory of twenty-five years recounted in exact detail by Goodwin, voiced with an awareness of its devastating impact, I found my thoughts turning in an unwanted direction—to my mother. What a gift it would be to my sisters and me if she would do the same. But she would never hold herself accountable. Why should she when Dad was giving her a total pass?

  I read through the notes again, and that’s when I caught something I’d almost missed. Goodwin said he was surprised that I hadn’t displayed any fear when he abducted me. It struck me as remarkable. I’ll never forget the moment—the deafening loudness of that silent scream, grabbing his wrist as he had the knife to my throat, then fighting, kicking against him as he shoved me into the van. He confused my lack of submission with a lack of fear.

  Again, there were similarities with Mom, in Mom’s perception of her actions—the way she described her knife attack on my father with no shame, no thought as to the fear he experienced in wrestling the knife from her hand. And whatever that was, that emotional blind spot, it was the same thing missing in her that left my sisters, Dad, and me at her mercy, and her present denial of what she had put us through.

  A few days later the tape cassette of Jill’s interview with Charles Goodwin arrived in the mail. Thomas and I sat at the kitchen table and listened to it together. I was afraid of how I might react, but my imagined fear was quickly dispelled. Instead of sending a chill down my spine, we were both surprised at the pleasantness of Goodwin’s voice, how soft-spoken he was, like one of those trained meditation experts, almost.

  It was hard to believe this was the man behind the mask. How ironic that of all the people in the world to confirm in exact detail the truth of my memory, he proved the reliable narrator. And with that thought, with the feeling of catharsis, I pushed the stop button on the tape recorder.

  Thomas and I marked the passage by pausing to make a cup of tea. Before putting the paperwork away, we ran through the list of questions once more, imagining regrets of the future, thinking about anything I might have missed before contact with Goodwin was finished for good. That’s when I identified two more crucially important things.

  I wanted to see him without the mask, so I could replace the intrusive memory and flashbacks with a real human face. I wanted one more interview on film, video, where Jill would ask him about the letter he sent me, and how he obtained my address. I submitted my request in one last email.

  Several days later, Jill called back. Goodwin had refused my request. It seemed we had reached the end of his generosity. He was not willing to be filmed, concerned that I might release it to the public. And he denied writing the letter, even though he had admitted to writing it when Kim and the members of the prison staff asked him how my Iowa address had made it into his file. Instead, he suggested I had been the victim of a horrible prank, or maybe his defense attorney had obtained my address in order to send me something. His explanation might have been worth entertaining had I not read the letter myself.

  I tried my request again, this time through a handwritten letter, detailing my reasons for having him filmed, the issues I had with PTSD, told him again how helpful it would be to me, assured him the videotape would be destroyed. Pointed out that once released as a sexual offender, his photograph and address would be available to the public anyway. I offered up the stories of sexual offenders whom I had just met in Texas who embraced the challenge of entering back into the community as ex-prisoners, by knocking on the door of their neighbors, providing them information about their rehabilitation and ongoing treatment. The guys talked about how important it was to reducing their chances of recidivism.

  But he just said no.

  That left me with a problem. He was lying. And he was refusing me the most honest thing he could do—show me what he looked like without the mask, the thing that had given him the most power over me. Suddenly, the dialogue process felt a sham. In my desire to believe he had changed, had become one of the good guys, I had relaxed my guard too much. Thankfully, I had shared none of my story with him, revealed nothing of myself other than the benefit to me of seeing his true image. Maybe there was a different way to think about it, a way that would salvage the good that had come out of the process. I did finally have so many answers. He was no longer an unnamed knife-wielding masked man who seemingly stepped out of a fold in the air. Perhaps I could grant that he had acted on a higher impulse by agreeing to the dialogue. Just enough that it wouldn’t cost him.

  His parole hearing was now ten days away. I was angry, and then angry that I was angry. I wanted to close the door. But now, I felt a duty to let the parole board know who they were releasing on the streets. Before I did anything I might regret, I thought a reality check was in order. Thomas supported me as I spoke to our family and friends about going to Nebraska to testify against Goodwin’s release. No one was in favor of it. In fact, the older generation of my family in England was adamantly opposed to it. Why take unnecessary risk? I also received an unsolicited letter from an expert who had heard my story through a friend. She dealt with violent sexual offenders and advised me that establishing contact was dangerous.

  But how was I meant to convey the level of anxiety I had been living with all my life, and the fear—the weight of it on my inner world—to this circle of people who loved me? Honestly, the idea of inaction, of being frightened into passivity, scared me more. And there was the community of Omaha; shouldn’t the police at least be alerted?

  I remembered then our friendly small-town mayor, who I’d often stop and talk with on the street, sometimes on the way home from the gym in Shepherdstown. We’d compare notes on the progress of our bum knees. He happened to be a long-time corrections counselor currently employed at a county prison in Maryland, with years of valuable experience in the penal system.

  In
fact, in 1989, he had been at the Camp Hill prison in Pennsylvania when a riot broke out and numerous prison staff and officers were held hostage. By the time the Pennsylvania State police had regained control of the institution, many buildings were on fire and were in various stages of destruction. I knew he would honor my confidences with discretion if I asked for his advice. Still, it wasn’t an easy conversation to initiate on my own—I found it extremely difficult to talk about this traumatic experience—so Thomas volunteered to be with me, support me, while I had the conversation.

  The mayor was watching a television documentary with his wife when we knocked on the door. He guessed this wasn’t a social call from the look on my face, so he ushered us into the kitchen. I took a deep breath and told him the whole story in ten minutes, after which he didn’t hesitate to give his thoughts. “I’m going to make this clear as possible for you,” he said with a smile. “There are people who commit crimes because they make mistakes, and there are people who commit crimes because they are just awful people. Those people don’t change very often, if at all, in my experience.”

  We talked about the Victim-Offender Dialogue process, and how the timing with the parole hearing may have influenced Goodwin’s decision to participate. The mayor suggested I go to Lincoln. He encouraged me to exercise my power, assuring me it could be healthy but the decision was mine. He said the parole board would take my words seriously about possibly paroling Goodwin. Particularly if I flew all the way to Nebraska to tell them how the brutal crime was continuing to affect me. Hell, they’d appreciate having the additional information that could influence the outcome. Victims, understandably, rarely attend these hearings.