Obsession (26 page)

As Linda Fairstein says, “Getting control back is the first step. I am a big believer in the fact that most rape victims recover from the crime. They don’t ever forget that the crime occurred, but most recover very well. And how they recover has to do with how they are responded to personally by people close to them, and for those who choose to enter the criminal justice system, by how the criminal justice system responds.”

If you have not kept silent about your assault, and if you are not getting the support you need from family or friends, it’s not because your experience doesn’t warrant their concern. It may be that they need help to confront their own feelings and fears and learn how to deal with them. But please don’t let your loved ones’ guilt, shame, misunderstanding, or simple awkward silence affect your recovery. And if you have been a silent victim, know that you only have to keep your secret as long as you want to.

Some people can get through it on their own. But for others, there are rape crisis centers where you can meet other survivors of sexual assault—people who’ve been there and know what you’re going through. If you feel uncomfortable contacting someone face-to-face or by phone, as a first step there is a vast array of resources available on the internet—Web sites for national organizations established for victims that can provide general information and refer you to local support. Or just start in your phone book. We’ll talk more about survivor support in the next chapter.

Just as no one deserves to be assaulted, no one needs to go through the process of reclaiming her life alone. God bless you and those who make the journey with you.

“
I
’m sorry you have to belong to a group like this. I’m sorry you qualify for a group like this. But I’m glad that you’ve come together to help each other through caring and sharing. And everything that I know about homicide, I learned from a homicide survivor.”

These are the words Carroll Ann Ellis uses to open the biweekly meeting of the homicide support group in Fairfax County, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C. The term
homicide survivor
may appear, at first, tobe an oxymoron; by definition of the crime, the victim does not survive. Yet this seeming contradiction highlights what is probably the simplest and, at the same time, most profound concept in the entire field of criminology and law enforcement: Each crime, no matter how specifically directed at a single individual, leaves many victims and many deep scars. And murder, or any form of homicide—the taking of a human life by another human being—leaves the most victims and the deepest scars of all.

Carroll Ellis is director of the Victim-Witness Unit, which is within the Criminal Investigations Bureau of the Fairfax County Police Department. Tall and attractive, with a striking bearing and commanding presence,
Carroll would seem at first glance to be the proverbial fish out of water—a civilian in a police world, a woman in a man’s world, a black in a white suburban world. And yet many people credit her with making it possible for them to continue their lives. Paradoxically, she has a deep and robust laugh, which comes easily, as if bearing witness to all the tragedy she has seen has made her value more preciously moments of levity and humor.

She can also be sardonic, as when describing the banality of people who just don’t understand: “How do you balance your life with the woman next door whose tulips just aren’t as brilliant as they were last year? You just say to them, ‘This is what I do’ or ‘Let me tell you what
my
day was like.’ We call that ‘slappingthem around a little bit,’ and it can be fun because of the reaction you know you’re going to get.”

But Carroll’s real concern is with the people who
do
understand, who can’t help but understand because of what they have had to endure.

Jack and Trudy Collins lost their beautiful, blond, nineteen-year-old daughter, Suzanne, to a vicious sexual predator in July of 1985. It was a life and a case we recounted hi detail in
Journey into Darkness:
how the spunky and adventurous young woman enlisted in the Marine Corps, excelled and proved herself throughout the rigorous basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina, then went to the Memphis Naval Air Station outside Millington, Tennessee, for avionics training, with the hope of becoming among the first women Marine aviators. Late in the evening of July 11, 1985, while jogging alone on the base, Suzanne Collins was attacked, beaten, abducted, horribly sexually tortured, and murdered in a public park in Millington by Sedley Alley, a twenty-nine-year-old, six-foot-four, 220-pound laborer for an air-conditioning installation company whose wife was enlisted personnel on the naval base.
Alley is currently on Tennessee’s death row, where he has been for more than a decade as his seemingly endless appeals churn through the system.

After I worked on the prosecutorial phase of the case and met and spent time with the Collinses during the trial, we became good friends. They also became dedicated advocates for victims’ rights, speaking around the country, including at congressional committees and the FBI Academy. At the time of the murder, Jack, a retired foreign service officer, and Trudy lived in Fairfax County, which was where Suzanne and her brother, Stephen, had gone to high school. The Collinses were there at the beginning of the homicide-victim support program in 1990 and 1991, and what they have to say about Carroll Ellis and her staff is typical of the reactions I’ve heard.

“It may sound somewhat trite these days, but Carroll shows true compassion and empathy,” Jack comments. “She was a marvelous guide for us through the jungle of emotions we were all dealing with. It’s strange, but after a while, our hearts went out to her. Here we were unburdening ourselves of this incredible pain, and Carroll would go home from these sessions takingall of our pain on herself. And you can’t pay a person enough to make her want to do this kind of work. What she did was strictly out of love for all of us.”

“She let us shed any guilt we might have felt about being angry,” states Trudy Collins. “We had been feeling not only was there no light at the end of the tunnel, but no end of the tunnel. She urged us to express ourselves, so we were no longer bottled up, no longer buried under a rockslide of grief and sorrow with no way out.”

Adds Jack, “There was never a moment of awkwardness with Carroll, no hesitation. She’s become a member of the family.”

Carroll feels the same way. “I have learned more from those people than I’ve learned from any other experience that I know of. I’ve learned how to live because of these people. I learned about true courage. And I’ve learned what real strength is and what real guts are all about, because these people go on. For others who would say, ‘Get over it, stop bellyaching and quit whining,’ they haven’t a clue, because these survivors get up every morning of their lives and they shower and they get dressed and they go out and, as the expression goes, they take on the world. But they take on the world with such a heavy heart and such a burden to their lives that most people who have not experienced it have no idea. You simply don’t take a shower and wash it away. It doesn’t go away.”

To look through the files of the Victim-Witness Unit, to read through their newsletter, to attend one of their support groups, is to be confronted by the enormity of evil, by what one human being is capable of doing to another. But also of what other human beings are capable of doing to say, “We acknowledge your pain. We can’t make it go away, but at least we want to respond to it. We want to try to do something for you, and for that vague concept of justice, which is so hard to define or fully achieve but which is at the basis of everything we need to be to live in a society. Because if we’re serious about our constitutional rights, the most basic of which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we must acknowledgethe impossibility of all three without the concomitantpursuit of justice.”

The job descriptions of the members of the Victim-Witness Unit are as varied and changing as the needs of the individuals they serve. At the heart of the issue for most, though, is that vague and often elusive quest forjustice, however they define the term.

“I think when people first come to the criminal justice
system as innocents—the very first time having become victims—they do have a reasonable expectation that there will be justice … until they get involved in this cumbersome, complex process and begin to realize that there are so many pitfalls and so many tentacles and so many ‘ifs,’ they become skeptical. They become frightened and they feel betrayed because things don’t run smoothly, and sometimes there is no justice.”

The Victim-Witness Unit is set up to be the friend and advocate of victims and survivors, whatever it takes. An equally important function is to prepare witnesses for the experience of trial testimony. It’s a hugely positive trend that is definitely on the upswing around the country, and we should not be satisfied until every jurisdiction has such an effective unit. Another significant aspect of the program in Fairfax County, Virginia, is that unlike many around the country that are tied in to the district attorney’s office, Ellis’s unit is a creature of the police department. The reason this is such a fundamental consideration is that it allows victim coordinators to become involved literally as soon as the first officer on the scene calls in and the detectives arrive to begin investigating and interviewing potential witnesses. In the case of a rape or murder, this can often prevent or minimize major problemsdown the line, both in terms of the emotional well-being of survivors and willing, well-prepared witnesses who have had the system demystified for them and are not as afraid of what they might face.

Carroll Ellis’s closest associate in the unit, as well as one of her best friends in life, is victim coordinator Sandra S. Witt, universally known as Sandy. At a first meeting, she might seem in many ways to be Carroll’s opposite number. They are both mothers—Carroll of a son in college, Sandy of two young daughters and a son. But Sandy—younger, shorter, white, and a faster,
more intense, admittedly opinionated talker—is a pretty, former Air Force brat whose family ended up in the area for high school. She stayed through college and a degree in criminal justice at the George Mason University in Fairfax, with the intention of becoming a parole officer. Instead, she became an intelligence analyst for the Drug Enforcement Administration. She heard about the Fairfax Victim-Witness Unit, thought it sounded interesting, and signed on.

Carroll comes from a more traditional background, the daughter of a carpenter-cabinet maker father and a schoolteacher and reading-specialist mother. She was born in New Orleans and lived for a while in New York City while her mother cared for Carroll’s grand-mother, who was dying of cancer. Then, in search of work, her family moved to what is now the tough urban community of Gary, Indiana. But in those days, she reminisced, “It was middle America, straight out of
Leave It to Beaver
.”

She majored in psychology at Central State University in Ohio. “My master’s degree is in psychology and counseling from Marymount University. But I always believed that I could help people and make a difference. It was something that I was always drawn to. I grew up in a time and an era and in a family where it was very important to give something back. There was always volunteer work through scouting, Sunday school, church efforts, civic organizations. My parents were involved in those kind of activities, and it just was the natural thing that I would also care about community and family and people in general.”

Before coming to Virginia, Carroll was a social worker in Chicago, a probation officer in San Francisco and then just over the Golden Gate in Marin County, a teacher in Germany, and a volunteer worker with domestic-violence victims. Her husband, Claude, is a retired Army colonel, now the head of
his own firm, and she has two brothers. Her older brother is a former high school principal who is now a college professor, and her younger brother is a television news anchorman in Detroit.

Neither background, however, prepared Carroll or Sandy for what they would face in their work.

They both began within a month of each other in 1990, hired by the director, Joyce Williams. The unit, then known as the Victim-Witness Assistance Program, or V-WAP, was just getting off the ground, having been in existence since 1986. County and police officials thought it sounded like a good idea, but no one quite knew what to do with it. One of the main defined functions was to provide escorts to court and baby-sitting service to mothers who had no place to leave their kids on trial days.

“We were shortcutting and dead-ending people without extending counseling services and reaching out beyond and looking at what we could do to expand services and resources,” Carroll recalls. “How can we meet the unbelievable needs that we were finding out there? Essentially, what we were passing off was ourselves as baby-sitters—which we didn’t qualify to do, because we weren’t licensed to provide child care, but were doing it anyway, while one of us would take a mother to court and sit there and hold her hand or keep her apprised of the docket, upcoming hearings, and provide support throughout the trial. I couldn’t spend my life doing that. That wasn’t enough for me. And that’s why I knew that some changes had to be made. You’ve got to make assessments, then go in and provide services and tailor them specifically to the needs you find. You’ve got to go face-to-face with people and bring them in. Over a period of time, we began to change the unit.”

The first thing they tried to get across was that their work could not be quantified by time. Sandy says,
“We’d get questions like, ‘Why did you spend an entire hour with that family just to explain our services?’ And the answer is, ‘Because you have to! I might have to spend twenty hours with them if that’s what it takes.’ That’s a lot of what Carroll taught me, of how to spend the quality time with the clients that we’re working with.
Getting in the moment with people
. Really understanding what their experience is all about. I don’t see how any victim-service program can be effective without understanding the victim’s experience to some extent, without getting in the moment with those people.”