Jane Doe January (25 page)
Authors: Emily Winslow
This reminds me of what a friend has advised me. She asked me how often I used to think about 1992 before last year's arrest. I answered with a manageable and far-less-distracting frequency than has been the case for this prosecution year. She then said:
That's where we need to help you get back to
. It's a kind thought, and probably a wise one, motivated by generosity and concern for my happiness,
but I bristled. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong to be thinking a lot about what's happened.
Ten days after my return from Pittsburgh, I find a more comfortable goal, through a chat with a stranger. One of the entertaining things about Cambridge is that anyone you talk to is very likely to be an expert in whatever it is that they do. This man is a restorer, specializing in
kintsugi,
a Japanese method of fixing broken ceramics. Unlike the restorers at the Fitzwilliam, who smoothly hid the lines where the shards were joined, practitioners of this method highlight the repair lines with gold, admitting to the object's past shatters, incorporating the object's experience as part of its presentation, and of its changing, growing, aging beauty.
Bill Valenta is the assistant dean of MBA and Executive Programs at Katz Business School at the University of Pittsburgh. After numerous delays, the drunk driver who killed his nephew pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two and a quarter to four and a half years in prison.
All of Detective Aprill Campbell's cold cases except for ours have skirted the Supreme Court decision unaffected, because the statutes of limitations for those other vulnerable cases had “tolled” when their defendants left the state while the cases were still active. After Arthur Fryar was released, Aprill stopped pulling unsolved case files out from basement storage. She wrote to me, “Maybe someday I will go back down there, but right now I can't because I care about how we made you and Georgia feel. The only people I want to hurt are the âbad guys.'” In July 2015, she finished out twenty years with the Pittsburgh police and is now an investigator with the Pennsylvania attorney general's Computer Forensics Unit, working with the Child Predator Unit.
Detective Dan Honan continues to investigate Pittsburgh sex crimes, domestic violence, and child abuse. Christine's cancer is in remission.
Assistant District Attorney Evan Lowry is now married to Jessie, and he continues to prosecute rapists and child abusers. Assistant District Attorney Kevin Chernosky won a conviction in the cyanide case, with an obligatory sentence of life in prison for the defendant. He continues to prosecute murderers. The district attorney's office has a strict media policy that was triggered by this book, so we're not allowed to talk to each other anymore. That rule took at least Kevin by surprise and the silence fell suddenly and without explanation to me. I miss them.
I thought that Sam Centamore, who arrested Fryar in 1976 and helped put him away for seven years, would be pissed off that I'd been less than candid with him at first, but he was a peach about my confession of personal involvement in the Pittsburgh case. He wrote to me: “I could never understand over my 40 years of experience in law enforcement how we as a society and our law makers have not taken a much stronger stance on the prosecution and sentencing [of rapists] . . . New York state finally got it! There is no more statute of limitations for rape by forcible compulsion . . . Please live a peaceful and happy life. My thoughts are with you.”
New York has done more than lift their statute of limitations. New York City cleared their rape kit backlog in 2003, and in 2014 Manhattan's district attorney turned $38 million from an asset forfeiture into a grant pool to help other jurisdictions clear their backlogs. In 2015, the federal government added $41 million to the same purpose. It's estimated that these combined funds could back the testing of as many as seventy thousand evidence kits nationwide.
Arthur Fryar is free. His DNA profile is in the FBI's CODIS database, and will be automatically compared to the results from any new or newly processed evidence from other crimes.
This is a true story. Five pseudonyms were used: for the woman Fryar attacked in November 1992, for Fryar's defense attorneys, and for a county clerk employee. All other names mentioned are unchanged.
My mandate for myself while I was writing this book was to be “direct, vivid, and compassionate.” It's an honest record of what I felt and did, not meant to define what others should feel or do. It's not meant as advice.
I'll put some advice here instead.
IF YOU'VE BEEN SEXUALLY ASSAULTED:
This should not have happened to you.
You need and deserve support. Reach out, even if it's hard. The consequences of not reaching out are harder.
Discover who helps you.
You may be surprised by which friends step up and in what ways. Be open to that surprise.
Figure out how you feel.
There's no template for this; your feelings are your own. Think about what you want, even if it's some
thing you can't have, or if your desires contradict each other. Just knowing what things you wish for is useful. Perhaps you can work toward a variation of them if not the ideal things themselves. If you can't do even that, you'll at least know specifically what you're grieving. That can be valuable just on its own.
Your body is important; seek medical help.
Allow evidence to be collected, if you're in time for that. The experience is unpleasant but it will leave you options in the future. If you choose to make a police report, you deserve to be treated with respect and kindness. If you choose to pursue prosecution, value each step along the way, even just the act of standing up for yourself. You may not get a satisfying ending, but there can be value in what happens along the way.
If you feel that there is any chance of self-harm, seek help.
If someone you turn to is not helpful, seek help elsewhere. Help is not everywhere, but it is somewhere.
IF YOU'RE SUPPORTING A FRIEND WHO'S HURTING:
There's no generic right way to help.
The right way will be something you discover from knowing your friend, from observing your friend, from asking your friend. What they want from you may be different from what they want from someone else, depending on your specific relationship. Help requires listening, and accepting things that may be different from what you expect, or from what you want.
It's a wonderful thing to protect someone physically if you find yourself in a position to do that, but you will be much more often in the position to protect someone emotionally or psychologically.
Protect people
when they cautiously express feelings that embarrass them. Protect people when others say cruel or mocking things to or about them. Speak up. Be kind.
IF YOU'RE ANGRY ABOUT THE WAY THE LAW APPLIED IN THIS CASE OR OTHER CASES:
Violence is always a terrible thing.
Violence can't make up for violence. Being kind to wounded people is more helpful than taking revenge on the people who hurt them.
You can't go back in time and make others do right things, but you can do right things yourself from this day on. First, do no harm.
As for actively doing good: Be a friend.
Listen to those who are hurting. Consider volunteering with or contributing to groups that do good work. Support legislation that makes the system work better for those who come after. Use your vote to help the vulnerable.
Lastly, whether a victim will want to forgive someone who has brutalized them, and how such forgiveness would manifest in practical terms, is something each person must consider individually for themselves. But I do have a recommendation regarding another kind of forgiveness: victims, forgive your friends.
Some of your friends will likely hurt you, in tiny ways, in biggish ways, mostly accidentally, mostly in ignorance or misunderstanding or panic or self-protection. Maybe someone will hurt you in a way that is so significant that you have to step away; do so. But most of them will be trying to be kind; some of them failing but, yes, trying; or too frozen to actively try but in their hearts thinking kind thoughts that you wish
they would actually say; or saying things that come out strange but are kindly meant. Forgive stumbling. Forgive awkwardness. Forgive when they make you ask for what you wish they would offer. Treasure those relationships. You'll need their forgiveness, too. We all need each other.
Being both protagonist and author makes for a long list of thanks.
I'm deeply grateful for the support of Bill and Jane Valenta, Dan and Christine Honan, and Aprill-Noelle Campbell. It was kind of you to let me get to know you, and to let me write honestly about that. I appreciate your willingness to be in my story, both in the living of it and the publishing of it. I'm equally grateful to Evan and Jessie Lowry, and Kevin Chernosky. I wish I could thank you directly. Thanks also to Sam Centamore.
When I first started sharing my thoughts, I began with friends who write or are in the writing world, because I felt that they would be most able to understand the impulse to make a record of ugly and difficult things, and to see something perhaps lovely and good in these things being written well.
In New York, this was Randall Klein. We were no longer working together officially, but he will always be “my editor.” Elsewhere in America, these were Carla Buckley and Mimi Cross.
Here in Cambridge, they were Sophie Hannah, Amanda Good
man, Kate Rhodes, and Allison Pearson. Sophie treated my writings as the start of a proper book from day one. Her practicality and praise made me smile, and helped me to eventually transition from living inside the story to living past it, connected to it by a different role.
David Carter and Nick Austin were the first of the choir parents to read it, and it's thanks to Nick's urging that I began to share with friends outside of writing circles. Many thanks to those who read along as it was happening: Ysanne Austin, Victoria Goodman, Melanie Hey, Maree Richards, Marianna Fletcher Williams, and Margaret White; Gina Holland, Morag Nevay, Laura Gerlach, Hannah Bekker Diller, and Ella Kennen; Anna Matthews, Steve Midgley, and Cindy Wesley; Amy Weatherup and Sarah McQuay; Delya Stoltz, Tom Paquette; Matt Miller, Allison Metcalf Allen, and Melissa Bell Lusher. Your understanding and encouragement were meaningful, and in some ways shaped the telling.
I finished the last chapter a week after returning from Pittsburgh, on Halloween night, just home from trick-or-treating. From then, both Randall and my agent, Cameron McClure, gave concise editorial comments. By Christmas, what had started as a diary was a manuscript. I'm grateful to Cameron for putting our friendship first and making me convince her that I really wanted this published. Once she was confident of my intentions, she worked fiercely to make that happen.
For early legal guidance, thanks to Louis Smoller and Jonathan Lyons at Savur Threadgold. Also to Paula Kautt, criminologist, for corrections and comments. I have done my best with their helpful advice.
Thanks to Deb Brody at William Morrow for sensitive and wise editorial comments and to publicist Danielle Bartlett for her creativity and enthusiasm. From our first conversation onward it has been a pleasure. Thanks also to the team at Harper360 who are bringing the book to my overseas home and beyond.
Thanks to those friends who read
Jane Doe January
in the manuscript stage with such kind responses: Mark Williams, Ian White, Nick Widdows, Rebecca Fitzgerald, Mary Laven, Jason Scott-Warren, Clare Bantry Flook, and Janet Hughes; Kali Rocha, Angel Rocha, Bradley Dean, John Hollywood, and Rik Nagel; Brenda Harger, Gary Harger, Joanne Spence, and Michael Fuller; Alexander Finlayson; Helen Orr and Nick Moir; and Kate Miciak.
Thanks to talented and wise colleagues, without whom writing would be lonely: Melanie Benjamin, Lisa Gardner, Eliza Graham, Julia Heaberlin, Allison Leotta, Jamie Mason, Brad Parks, Kristina Riggle, and Amanda Kyle Williams. I needed that expanded support as I approached publishing.
There are a few who did not read the manuscript who were nonetheless very present. Thanks to Sarah Dane, Matt Wise, and Jennifer Fields for sharing grief, and to Alice Kane, not just for listening but for always asking.
Throughout all of this, Gavin's confidence, patience, generosity, and affection were my steady foundation. Thank you for going through it with me.
EMILY WINSLOW
is an American living in Cambridge, England. She's the author of the novels
The Whole World, The Start of Everything,
and
The Red House.
http://www.emilywinslow.com
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