She Survived (6 page)

CHAPTER 15

LUCKY TO BE ALIVE

Becky Buttram had
been with the MCSD for over a dozen years by the time Melissa's case came in. For Buttram, the case was personal. She'd been involved with the sex crimes division of the department for years and had seen the worst of the worst with regard to sex crimes. Yet, with Melissa's case, it was such a rare thing to happen in this part of Indianapolis. Buttram was understandably concerned about the possible serial nature to it all. Someone who was that brazen to go in through a sliding glass door, not knowing what was beyond the door—if he didn't know, that is—meant the guy had definitely done it before and was going to do it again. There was no doubt about this in Buttram's mind. And it scared the detective.

When Becky Buttram walked into Melissa's apartment a few days after the crime, she was overwhelmed by the amount of blood inside the place.

“I thought, ‘She's lucky to be alive,' ” the detective said later. “There was so much evidence left over there inside her apartment. I think because Melissa said to him, ‘Excuse me, I'm bleeding very badly,' that [it] startled him. He didn't expect that. It scared him.”

Buttram ran a laser light around the apartment with a colleague to see if they could find any additional evidence, but nothing turned up. It was okay. They didn't really need it, anyway. They had so much blood, fingerprints, and a few palm prints. There was enough to get started.

“We believe Melissa actually hit him and caused him to bleed, so we believed we had his blood.”

Problem was, that sort of evidence was only as good as something to match it up to.

One of the other immediate observations Becky Buttram made as she walked around the apartment was how certain she now was that the crime had not been a random act of violence. He didn't just begin to break into females' homes and slash them up; and it was pretty clear to Buttram that he knew Melissa. He didn't choose her on that night. There was no way.

Another thought had occurred to Buttram as she stood looking at all the blood and mess that the scuffle had produced:
I hope to God it doesn't happen again.

“Melissa's attack was potentially going to be a homicide,” Buttram said later.

The possibility of it happening again worried Buttram the most. In fact, the detective became so concerned after seeing Melissa's crime scene and reviewing her case that at night she would drive the apartment complex and others nearby, hoping to spot a suspicious character.

She never did.

He hid himself well—at least then.

Because, at that moment, just as Becky Buttram suspected and knew in her gut, the man who had attacked Melissa was planning several more home invasions.

The detective was right: He was not going to stop. The question was: Would he escalate to murder, now that he knew Melissa was alive and talking?

CHAPTER 16

ANDREW

There was another
monster knocking on Melissa's door as she stayed with family in Florida. This one started off as a tropical depression along the coast of Africa around August 14, 1992, and turned into one of the most devastating hurricanes on record: Andrew. By the time Andrew hit the Florida coast near South Florida during the week of August 20, with winds well over 175 miles per hour, he was a Category 5 monstrous storm capable of wreaking havoc anywhere he decided to spin. When Andrew was finished, he had caused $26.5 billion worth of destruction and dozens of deaths.

With forecasts of Andrew preparing to hit the Florida coastline near Melissa's home, her father said, “You need to leave.”

The man, like any father, was scared for his daughter, who had been through so much already. Melissa did not need to confront a hurricane, on top of everything she had been through already. Of course, she couldn't explain to anyone and make them understand, but after that bloody ordeal inside her apartment, standing firm and fighting a hurricane seemed like child's play to Melissa. She had endured hell. She'd met the Devil, face-to-face. A hurricane was nothing.

As Andrew started to blow in, Melissa's dad explained that she had to leave now or stay an extra couple of weeks
after
the storm left.

“I wanted to stay the extra weeks, but Dad put me on a plane the next day and sent me back.”

On the day the hurricane blew through Florida, Melissa was home, back at her grandmother's. The phone rang. The call was for Melissa. It was some detective.

Becky Buttram, actually. The cop had some news to share.

CHAPTER 17

EVOLUTION

To Detective Becky
Buttram's great disappointment, just as she was actively looking into Melissa's attack and thinking the MCSD was getting somewhere, the case ran cold as a river stone. Weeks went by. Nothing happened. Not another attack. Not a hit on any of the DNA or fingerprints. Not a witness coming forward to say she'd seen some sleazebag staring in through her window.

Nothing.

As it happened, Melissa's attacker's fingerprints were not on file in Marion County. A thorough, more comprehensive check of records didn't provide any match, which meant the guy had not been arrested in Marion County. Various neighboring counties back then didn't necessarily swap info or trade off with other counties on possible suspects and perps. There was a national database, but nothing like it is today, where law enforcement agencies from around the country input new arrests and any fingerprint/DNA evidence they wind up with on a daily basis. You could arrest a guy in Massachusetts and, after putting his prints through the system, find out he's wanted in Texas. Because this system wasn't yet refined during the period of Melissa's attack, a major break in her case was lost. The technology just wasn't in play yet.

“We find out later that he had done similar crimes up north,” Detective Buttram said of Melissa's attacker. North of Indianapolis, that is. “Basically breaking into apartments. . .” It had occurred sometime before Melissa's attack.

This attacker was evolving, obviously. Back when he'd started, he'd break into a woman's home, stand and stare at her as she slept. He might rub her arm or thigh, but that was it. He never took it to the next level.

Later, when the detective looked at what the same guy did up north and then compared it to Melissa's attack, Buttram believed he was leading up to killing a future victim. Banking on what he had done to Melissa, Buttram affirmed that the guy's behavior was “escalating.” He was taking more and more chances.

Melissa was on the mend when Buttram first spoke to her. Even still, Melissa looked terrible. The law officer could only imagine how much pain the poor woman had endured. She had seen the photos of Melissa right after her attack. It was one of those moments in this cop's career, she later said, she would never forget.

“Melissa was the tiniest, sweetest little thing you ever met,” Buttram recalled. “I thought what in the world would prompt someone to do what was done to her? She had never bothered anybody. She just wasn't that type. She was kind of a hockey groupie,” the detective added with a chuckle. “She was just . . . a very nice person.”

Melissa did not have much to add to what she had already told Detective Godan back in the hospital within those immediate hours after her attack. Becky Buttram had gone through that interview and read it closely. She had gone out to the scene. She had thought about the crime while staying up late at night, trying to figure out if they had missed anything.

For the cop, nothing added up. A random attack that had been so brutal? That was scary in and of itself. Melissa couldn't have known her attacker or she probably would have recognized him or figured 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,” 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.

“We 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.

“Well,” 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 there was a guard shack heading into the apartment complex where he had attacked on each of those three recent occasions. In other words, one had to check in with the guard before one could drive or walk into the complex.

Was he sneaking in?
the detective asked herself after first learning about this.

“Unbeknownst to us then,” Buttram said later, “he had a sticker [or parking pass]. . . .”

He could drive right by the guard without stopping.

CHAPTER 19

PEEPING TOM

It was Saturday
, August 22, 1992, twelve days after the most recent attacks, when he came out from underneath his rock and struck again. At around 1:00
A.M.
, a call came into the Lawrence Police Department (LPD), a suburb of Indianapolis directly near where the other three attacks had occurred, literally straight across the freeway from where Melissa and the others had been attacked. He had moved his operation a mere 1.8 miles east, yet kept to the same MO in choosing an apartment complex.

“There's a guy in a tree getting into an apartment on Cider (Mill) Lane,” the caller told the 911 dispatcher.

They had him in the act.

The caller indicated a man had climbed a tree and used the structure as a way to try and break into an apartment. He was sticking to those old behaviors of using any edifice available to get up onto a balcony or deck so he could get in through a sliding glass door or open window. This information immediately told law enforcement what they had expected all along: They were dealing with a bold, brassy son of a bitch who would not be deterred even after being confronted on three occasions, which they knew of.

“We had put out flyers and information to all the local police departments,” Becky Buttram explained. The MCSD had alerted local agencies that there was a night prowler whom every cop on the street out walking or driving around should be on the lookout for—a guy who liked to get into homes through windows and open doors, using any means necessary to get up onto the second floor of apartment buildings. The MCSD said in the announcement that its investigators were certain he would strike again.

Sure enough, nearly two weeks later, here he was, out and about, trying his luck again.

The LPD rolled up on the scene. Two officers got out of their vehicle and began stealthily combing the area with flashlights.

Within a few moments they spotted the guy fitting the description that the 911 caller had given. He was now on the ground, peering creepily into an apartment window, perhaps getting ready to make a move to go in. After all, he had no idea someone had spotted him and called 911.

Initially they held back, watched, and waited for him to make a move.

The man crawled up to a nearby sliding glass door on a deck and began looking inside the apartment.

Another police officer, arriving on scene at that moment, approached the porch where the suspect now stood, preparing to go into the apartment.

But then, the perp heard something and turned.

Just as the cop got there, the elusive Peeping Tom, now startled, took off running.

“Stop!” police shouted.