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

through a sliding glass door on a first-floor balcony.
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œYou 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.)
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œShe 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.
    â€œWe were so afraid he was going to hit again after those two new attacks,” Detective Buttram said.
    But cops finally had a description to go on, along with eyewitnesses, additional DNA, additional fingerprints—all of which linked the cases.
    Still, none of it was doing any good because the guy had stayed under the legal radar in the county.
    â€œWe had a Crime Watch meeting after that third incident—people were mad as hell at us because we hadn’t caught this guy yet,” Buttram said.
    Women lived in fear. It was probably more frustration than anger. The community was being held hostage by a seemingly fearless night prowler whose motive, it appeared, was to sneak into females’ homes and hurt them. No rapes had been reported in any of these attacks. After Becky Buttram heard of these two recent attacks on the same night, she was now more concerned than ever that he was going to escalate his behavior to murder at some point soon. After all, the guy had been shooed away by the father of one victim, only to go on and attack a second, nearby victim in the same night. It showed how brazen and careless and compulsive he was—and also how he couldn’t stop himself.
    â€œWell,” Buttram explained, defending the investigation, “it was like looking for a needle in a haystack! . . . I was out there every night, just patrolling around the area.”
    Lots of cops were. Nobody wanted a madman stalking their community, randomly attacking females inside their own homes.
    One of the things that baffled Becky Buttram the most was that