She Survived by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page A

out who he was by his voice, even though he tried disguising it.
    All Becky Buttram could do at this point was wait. See what happened next.
    Would he attack again?

CHAPTER 18
    OUT FROM THE SHADOWS
    On August 10, 1992 , a sixteen-year-old girl was sleeping comfortably in her bed in the middle of the night, probably dreaming innocently of some boy she’d met at school. Her room inside the apartment where she lived (close to Melissa’s residence) was set up so that her bed was near a window on the first floor. As she slept, the youngster was awakened by a man reaching in—he cut the window screen with a knife—and stroking her leg.
    The girl, startled awake, screamed as she woke up and realized what was going on; her father came rushing into the room. By then, the guy had taken off. The girl’s father called police, and his daughter gave officers a detailed description of the entire incident, including identifying marks of the suspect, as best as she could recall.
    “I interviewed the young adult,” Becky Buttram later said. “She really couldn’t tell me much of anything besides what we had—that he had cut the screen, actually, and reached in and grabbed her because her bed was right there by the window.”
    Buttram knew the man who had attacked Melissa was out and about, ready to commit more crimes. That this latest attempt—it was the same guy.
    Later that same night, a thirty-eight-year-old female army sergeant from nearby Fort Harrison was awoken by a man jumping up onto her bed and slashing her arm wide open with a knife. He had entered her apartment through a sliding glass door on a first-floor balcony.
    “He had just broke the hell out of that sliding glass door,” Buttram recalled.
    Becky Buttram had gone out to that scene, too, to have a look and speak with the woman.
    “You see, she had glass everywhere in her apartment,” Buttram later explained. “She had traveled all over the world and had collected really expensive glass from Europe—and he had broken some of it.”
    The woman had just moved into the apartment. She still had boxes unpacked. What the woman didn’t know before she moved in was that the tenant who had lived there before her had also had a run-in with a man trying to break in. (Buttram believed it was the same attacker.)
    “He had been watching her (the woman who had lived in the apartment before the army sergeant),” Buttram recalled. The woman was so scared after that botched break-in that she moved out. What saved her from being attacked was that he had gotten into the apartment, but she was in her bedroom and the door was locked. When he figured that he couldn’t get into the bedroom, he took off.
    With the attacker standing on the army sergeant’s bed, slashing her arm with a knife, she screamed as loud as she could. She was naked already, because that’s the way she slept. She did not even have sheets on the bed yet, because it was only her first time staying overnight and she had forgotten to buy sheets.
    The attacker took off after she started screaming.
    Or so she believed.
    After calling 911 to report what happened, as she waited for police to arrive, the man came out of the shadows inside her apartment and went at her with a ball-peen hammer, hitting the woman repeatedly, striking her at least twenty times, several reports indicated, on the shoulders, head, and arms, nearly killing her.
    “She told me later,” Buttram said, “all she could think of while this was going on was ‘Here I am, stark naked, fighting with this guy—and he’s got a hammer! ’ ”
    What saved the woman’s life, the detective said, “was that she was a strong, big gal, about five-ten, maybe six foot. She had actually grabbed the hammer from him and wrestled it away, which scared him, and so he took off running a second time.”
    And never came back.
    Through both attacks, a composite sketch was developed.
    “We were so afraid he was going to hit again after those two new attacks,”