Missoula by Jon Krakauer Read Free Book Online

very hard for victims to win.”
    On Tuesday, November 29, four days after he’d proposed that they meet, Detective Baker still hadn’t heard from Huguet. So he sent her another e-mail, inquiring, “Do you still want to talk?”
    Huguet replied:
I am now back in Oregon. I’m confused on what to do about this situation and I did talk to a lawyer but he was not exactly comforting, basically he told me [to] prepare to have my life completely changed. I just kinda want to know if I meet and discuss the situation with you, do you then have to report it?
    Baker answered right away:
It depends. If you tell me you committed a violent crime then I might be obligated to investigate it, but if it’s not that, then we should be able to talk about it. We can talk on the phone if you want. Does it involve something you did, or something that was done to you?
    Huguet replied:
It was something that was done to me. It was a year and a few months ago, but when I talked to the lawyer he said the statute of limitations is not up on it. It’s something I thought I could handle. But every time I come home I realize I’m mad at myself for not reporting the situation. I will be home this Friday, though, so maybe we can meet up after that some time.
    Allison Huguet returned to Missoula for Christmas break on December 9, 2011. One night soon thereafter she went out to a bar called the Bodega with her friend Carol and some other girlfriends, and the conversation quickly turned to the subject of how unsettled Huguet had felt ever since running into Beau Donaldson at the Mo Club. Coincidentally, Donaldson’s close friend Sam Erschler also happened to be at the Bodega that night, and he sat down with Huguet and Carol to have a drink. As the night slid past and Huguet became intoxicated, she grew increasingly agitated over the fact that Donaldson apparently felt no remorse over the violence he had done to her. When she disclosed that she had been having nightmares, Erschler revealed that he, too, had been having nightmares—about Donaldson chasing Huguet down the alley. Erschler told Huguet he would do anything to make her feel better.
    “Well, if you really want to do something for me,” Huguet replied in a moment of drunken pique, “you could hurt Beau.” She offered Erschler a thousand dollars to beat the shit out of Donaldson.
    “Al,” Erschler replied, “you know I can’t do that.”
    Disappointed that Sam Erschler refused to exact revenge on her behalf, later that night when Carol and her boyfriend were driving Huguet home, she begged them to swing by Donaldson’s house and slash the tires on his truck. “I think that’s when I realized that I was acting crazy,” Huguet observed, “that I was starting to totally lose it. I was wanting to do things I would never have even thought of doing in a normal state of mind. Honestly, if I could have found someone who would kill Beau for me, at that time I think I would have paid them to do it. And that started to really scare me—that I was angry enough to think like that.”
    A few days later Carol told Huguet, “Every time you come home now, you’re more and more angry. I can tell that what Beau did to you is really stressing you out. I really think you need to do something about it. I think you need to report Beau to the police.”
    On Friday, December 16, 2011, Huguet heeded Carol’s advice, went to the Missoula police station, and told Detective Baker that Beau Donaldson had raped her. She made it clear, however, that she wasn’t sure she wanted to file a report about the incident.
    ----
    * pseudonym

CHAPTER FIVE
          A llison Huguet had the digital recording of Beau Donaldson admitting that he “took advantage” of her, and the nurses at the First Step sexual-assault response center had obtained physical evidence of the rape. But because Donaldson had been unaware that he was being recorded, his confession would not be admissible as evidence. Furthermore, because the