While the City Slept (21 page)

After a time, Jennifer said on the stand, “He got off of her, and he told me to take my clothes off, which I did. And then he told her, ‘Lick her pussy.’ And she got in the position, but she didn’t do it. She pretended. I was really grateful for that. But I remember I could just feel her near me. And I watched him walk by the dresser near the window, and he just, one by one, shut all three windows.”

In the courtroom, it felt like windows were closing. Everyone was still, as if hoping that this would keep him from hurting them.

He raped Jennifer next.

“I remember I laid very still, or very flat. I remember thinking, ‘Just get through it and he’ll go. He’ll go. Don’t do anything crazy.’”

She recounted how he smelled (“clean”), what his build was like (“muscular”), his race (“black”), how much hair he had on his body (“very little”), the volume of his voice (“soft”), the speed of his speech (“medium”),
and the manner in which he spoke (“Other than using the word ‘pussy,’ which kind of seemed lower brow, to be honest, the rest of his speech was very intelligent”).

She remembered feeling Teresa reach for her arm, remembered Teresa saying, “I’m so sorry.”

“Then,” Jennifer told the court, “he told me to get on my knees on the bed.”

The prosecuting attorney asked, “Why?”

“Because he wanted to. Well, he did. He put his penis in my anus.”

Already, Teresa had been praying out loud through the ordeal: “Our Father, please help us. Our Father in heaven . . .” Jennifer now began praying, too: “Please, God, let us live.”

Then, “He stopped and he stepped away. And he told Teresa to get down on the floor on her knees in front of him . . . I heard him say ‘swallow,’ and I heard what sounded like gagging noises from her.”

—

Jennifer visualized waiting, getting through this, the man leaving, then calling someone to come get them. At some point, he was done forcing Teresa to perform oral sex, and the two women both “scuttled up” on the bed, backs against the headboard, knees pressed to chests, arms around knees. Teresa told him their purses were in the kitchen, that they didn’t have much cash but he could have whatever he wanted. They didn’t know, but their purses had already been rifled through and left on the kitchen floor.

“He said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.’ Then he said, and I remember, ‘Don’t get too excited. That was just round one.’”

He stood there, leaning against the dresser in their bedroom, naked, knife in hand, staring. Jennifer noticed his expression.

“He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t scowling. He was just staring.”

For Jennifer, this waiting for more pain was worse than experiencing the pain in the moment.

The prosecuting attorney asked, “How many rounds, to use his term, were there?”

“Three.”

—

Her first day of testimony ended. The next morning, June 9, 2011, Jennifer was back on the witness stand. In a building filled with horrors enacted by one human upon another, this courtroom was about to go well beyond the norm, beyond what most people are brave enough to imagine, let alone recount. It is not necessary to recount all of Jennifer’s testimony. It got very gruesome. But in order to understand their bravery, it is necessary to hear, as much as possible, what was endured.

Teresa’s mother, Dolly Butz, sat listening to the testimony on one of the wooden benches, just as she had every day of the trial so far, other members of the Butz family tight on either side of her, a small woman, just like her daughter, who was only five feet two. One thought: If this woman can absorb, at the level of detail required for proof before a jury, the particulars of what happened to her daughter—can view the bloody crime-scene photographs, can listen to the 911 call from Sara Miranda-Nino leaning over Teresa and screaming “Ma’am, wake up! Please wake up, ma’am!” (while, to the 911 operator: “Please hurry, please hurry”), can hear the testimony about DNA evidence and what orifices it was recovered from—then no one else in this courtroom can dare turn away. Dolly’s presence, too, created an imperative: This happened. You must listen.

—

Isaiah sat in the sealed jury room on the ninth floor, “voluntarily absented” from the trial, left to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television while strapped into his restraint chair. Up to this point in the testimony phase of proceedings, he hadn’t been fighting his confinement in the upstairs room, but this morning, of all mornings, Isaiah had changed from his green suicide smock into a dress shirt and slacks and requested
that he be allowed to sit in the eighth-floor courtroom with his accuser. After his lawyers went up and talked to him, he retracted the request.

Jennifer began her second day of testimony with the awful silence of the man standing there that night, leaning against the dresser, staring, promising more, propelled by forces she had no idea of, a stranger she could not grasp. “So much had already happened,” she said. “I was trying to imagine what else . . .” And, “I didn’t feel like Teresa and I could communicate. I didn’t feel like I could tell her, ‘I love you’ . . . I almost thought it would be worse, and I don’t know why, if he knew I loved her too much.”

The man said to the two women, “All right, get ready for round two.”

The horror of what happened next made the court reporter’s eyes well up, made the bailiff cry. The jury handed around a box of tissues. The prosecutor took long pauses to collect himself. The family and friends in the courtroom cried (though, truth be told, they had been crying throughout). The
Seattle Times
reporter seated next to me cried. I cried. The camerawoman who was shooting video for all the television stations in town cried and later hugged Jennifer as she left the courtroom for the mid-morning break.

—

Perhaps it is enough to restate how one of the two prosecuting attorneys summarized the attacks in opening arguments at the beginning of the trial. Isaiah, this prosecutor said, “raped them every way imaginable. Vaginally, anally, orally. He wasn’t wearing a condom, and he ejaculated several times.”

Perhaps it is enough to know that Dr. Lymberis called the attacks “dynamically oriented.” Perhaps it is enough to say that through his manipulations and torture Isaiah saw what he had not been able to share: a love strong enough to require self-restraint and self-sacrifice. Perhaps it is enough to hear some of the conversations in that room in the red house, as Jennifer recounted them on the stand.

The man asked the couple for lube before one of his rapes of Teresa.
When the women replied that they didn’t have any, he said, “Too bad for her.”

The man asked, at one point, “So are you guys lesbians or are you bisexual?”

Jennifer’s mind spun. Which would be worse? Which answer would make him more likely to stop?

“I remember what I said was, ‘Well, we’ve been together a long time, so I guess that makes us lesbians.’”

Jennifer felt that she deserved to ask him a question at this point, so she asked, “Have you seen us before?”

He shook his head no.

Teresa asked, “What if we’d been an old man?”

He just shrugged.

Jennifer made up a story that someone was coming to pick them up at 5:00 a.m. to take them to a wedding in Portland. She asked him if they were going to make the wedding. He said yes. She said, “Please don’t hurt us. We’re good people.”

He said, “Yeah, you seem like you’re good people. I wish we could have been friends.”

Teresa replied, “Yeah, I wish we could.”

“Which,” Jennifer said on the stand, “is exactly what she would do . . . Even in that moment, she wanted to make some sort of connection. She said, ‘Maybe we still can.’”

He asked, “Do I seem like a good person to you?”

“She put the tips of her fingers on his chest—I will never ever forget this—and said, ‘I am sure there is some good in here.’”

He said, “No more questions.”

—

“I just did what I had to do,” Jennifer said. “At one point, I felt the tip of the knife just kind of touch my arm. I said, ‘Ouch!’ and he actually said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’”

She remembers thinking, “There’s no way he’d say ‘I’m sorry’ and be a murderer. We’re going to get through this. There’s got to be some level of compassion there or something.”

Teresa was reacting differently, and at one point made a play for the knife. He said, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that!”

Jennifer, who was being raped at that moment and was in a more vulnerable position, also said to Teresa, “Don’t do that. Don’t do that.”

Teresa stopped trying to get the knife. The man said, “I know you’re going to call the police. They all do. But I’m going to be long gone. I always am.”

—

He was not, and has never been, linked to any other rapes. Maybe this statement was grandiosity. Maybe it was manipulative braggadocio, meant to intimidate. Maybe, when he said “they all do,” he was recalling all the women in his family who’d called the authorities on him over the last few years when he’d violated their senses of safety. Maybe he was recalling how many times the police had been called on his father. Teresa and Jennifer had no knowledge of what all it might mean, no way to take it at anything but face value: “They all do.”

“Maybe we won’t,” Jennifer told him.

“Well, you might not,” he said.

Then he looked at Teresa: “But she will.”

The attacks became more sadistic. Things began to happen that were beyond Jennifer’s worst imagining. She felt as if she were going to be ripped in half. She thought, “He’s not going to kill me with a knife, but he’s going to kill me this way.”

Then she heard Teresa say, “Why are you cutting me? Why are you cutting me?”

The man said to Teresa, “Shut up, or I’m going to kill your girlfriend.”

He took the women into another room in the house, where he’d undressed before waking them. He turned on the light and pulled another, smaller knife out of a pair of jeans he’d left on a guest bed.

The story he had been telling them, the story Jennifer had been telling herself, the story that he just wanted sex and was not going to hurt them, now completely shattered. “I remember seeing him,” Jennifer told the court, “and there was a moment where we just stood there and he kind of looked at us, and I feel like in that moment I knew, he’s going to kill us. I just knew. I just felt it. There was something different in his gaze. There was this kind of looking. I didn’t feel fear from him, I didn’t feel anger from him, I just felt this nothing.”

He made them go back into their bedroom. They pleaded with him, tried to think of what they could possibly say. They told him they were on the board of a nonprofit that helps homeless people, which was true. He didn’t respond. They were back on the bed, on their backs, one of his knees on each of them, pinning them down, similar to the way his father allegedly pinned down his mother, a knife in each of his hands.

The next thing she heard was Teresa saying, “You got me. You got me. You got me.” He had slashed her neck seven times.

“I remember thinking, ‘No. No. No. No. No. No. No. We were supposed to get to leave. We were supposed to get to go. She can’t be dying.’”

The man was slashing Jennifer’s neck now, too.

“He just cut, cut, cut, cut, and I remember just feeling the blood come down, some of the blood just spurting up and out. And I remember thinking, ‘This is it. There’s no way I can have my throat slit and live. There’s no way. There’s just no way.’

“The next thing I remember him doing was switching his hand from a cutting motion to a stabbing motion.”

Each of the women had their hands up, trying to push him off. Jennifer realized, though, that the more she struggled, the more blood gushed out of her neck.

“It’s the weirdest thing. You don’t hurt. Blood’s spurting out of you, but you don’t feel anything,” she told the court.

She thought, “This is how I’m going to die.”

It was, she said, “sort of a moment of peace.”

She thought, “Maybe what Teresa tells me about heaven is true. Maybe it will be okay.”

She stopped fighting and released.

“The next thing I felt was just this powerful surge of energy.”

Teresa had pushed and kicked the man off the bed.

“I remember screaming, ‘Get him!’”

He punched Teresa in the face. (An autopsy later showed her three bottom teeth broken and pushed back.) He stabbed her in the heart. Teresa grabbed the nightstand.

“I saw her holding that metal table, that little teeny tiny table. She kind of pushed him back with it.”

—

No stories mattered anymore. No hopes. No promises. No mitigating factors. No human systems and their flaws. No excuses. It was now fight or flight in that room, kill or be killed. Teresa threw the table through the window. She pushed herself through the jagged glass, fell to the ground outside, leaving a hole in the window big enough for the white curtain to flap through. She got up, sprinted to the curb, ran into the street. Then, Jennifer said, “as quickly as she started running, she just fell straight back.”

The man and Jennifer were still standing there in the bedroom, and they looked at each other.

He ran out of the room.

Jennifer ran to the front door.

“I remember I couldn’t get the front door open because my hands were too bloody,” Jennifer told the court. Eventually, she did get it open, and she ran to the neighbors across the street, ran past Teresa lying on her back on South Rose Street, because both of them needed help right now, because it seemed as if they didn’t have much time. “Just ran as fast as I could,” Jennifer told the court. She was naked. They were both naked. She reached the neighbors’ front door.

“I bang on the door as hard as I can,” she said. As she did, she noticed
the skin open on one of her arms, muscle popping through. She didn’t even remember being stabbed there. Her flat palms left perfect bloody prints on the door. The neighbors weren’t home.

“So I just turn around and start screaming, ‘Help us! Help us!’”

—

Indifferent silence. Unanswered cries. A murderer and rapist running away through the night. Cruelty unchecked.