She Survived (9 page)

CHAPTER 26

FRESH MEMORIES

As Melissa took
in the realization that Scott Saxton was someone she saw on occasion and lived so close, and was now, without a doubt, the man who had nearly killed her, it sparked new memories.

“Scott Saxton was my neighbor,” Melissa said. “His front door faced my front door. I shared the landing at the top of the stairs with him and his, what I assumed to be, girlfriend. I don’t know why I never thought they were married.... I think I may have spoken to her on a couple of occasions. I know I never spoke to him except to say hello when he was outside. It always seemed like he was outside at his car when I was leaving for work. I never put it completely together at the time, but I think it was a little odd. Except for once. I’m such an idiot! I gave the guy all the information about myself he ever needed to attack me—and I never knew it.”

According to Melissa’s recollection, she claimed Saxton stopped her one day while the two of them were outside. It was sometime after her male roommate had moved out. Saxton started with friendly chitchat. For Melissa, the guy was a neighbor. One was supposed to be friendly to one’s neighbor. Despite a creep factor reading that Melissa picked up being in his presence, she really had no reason
not
to talk to him. She had lived there for over a year by then and had never really spoken to the guy before. The opportunity arose. What the hell, why not?

“It was not in my nature to be rude to people,” Melissa recalled. “Anyone would tell you, I was very much a people person.”

Looking back on that day and the questions that Saxton asked sent “chills down my spine,” Melissa said when she later thought about it. “And it still pisses me off to no end that they couldn’t charge him with attempted murder because of the specific questions he asked.”

“Your boyfriend/husband, he’s not living there anymore?” Saxton asked Melissa casually on that day, according to her memory of the conversation.

Melissa said no.

“Do you have anyone else? Any pets to keep you company?”

Melissa thought for a brief moment that the questions seemed a bit odd, but she didn’t feel threatened. “No,” she answered.

“You must keep a gun for protection, since you’re living alone?”

“Nope,” Melissa answered.

Melissa said that if she had a gun in the house, she would have wound up dead: “I am certain he would have used it on me.”

CHAPTER 27

MOMENTS OF GREAT DESPAIR

Becky Buttram felt
a genuine connection, not to mention a tremendous amount of compassion for Melissa Schickel. She knew Melissa had been through hell and, in the end, Scott Saxton was probably not going to get what he deserved, only because the law in these types of crimes protected the perpetrator more than the victim. Still, in those days after Saxton’s arrest, Buttram kept in touch with Melissa, calling her every week, letting her know she was there for her if she ever needed anyone for conversation and talking. Throughout her career Buttram had seen women deal with assaults in various ways. Not all had the will, drive, and wherewithal that Melissa had displayed. Buttram felt Melissa would be okay. Time would heal her wounds.

“I kept in constant contact with her,” she remembered. “Melissa is a very practical young lady. I don’t think she was coddled as a child. Everything has been very practical for her. Look at what takes place during the incident. She remains as calm as she could. She makes this comment to Saxton, ‘Excuse me, I’m bleeding very badly.’ I interpreted it to mean, ‘Excuse me, I’m dying here. Stop killing me!’ Which just floored me when she told us that. She explained that she said it because at this point she felt she didn’t have anything to lose.”

Buttram believed Melissa had “moments of great despair, I’m sure, but she’s always been able to pull herself up by the boot straps and go on. It’s just the way, I think, she was brought up.”

 

 

Melissa looks back at what happened to her in different ways. She doesn’t see it as so black-and-white. She understands, though, that most people want some sort of foundational power source as an explanation for how she was able to get through it all and remain somewhat sane and even find some humor in certain aspects of her crime and survival.

“Was it my spirituality?” she asked rhetorically. “Well, I would love to be able to say yes. I mean, I was raised Catholic, but after eight years of parochial school and confirmation. . . and several years of nonstop masses, I, like many other good Catholics, lapsed.”

By the time Melissa attended college, she had no idea if she wanted to be involved in religion at all. She took philosophy of religion courses to try and understand all the different types of religious beliefs so she could maybe make a sound, educated decision about where she wanted to go with her spirituality.

“That taught me that we actually all believe in some higher being, yet we all call it by a different name, and practice it in different forms. It also taught me that I don’t necessarily need to be sitting in a building every Sunday to say I am a Christian.”

What got her through—and still continues to, in so many ways—was that humorous bone within her, and comedy in general.

“As I have mentioned, since I could not sleep after the attack, I spent every night watching Comedy Central. I could not stand the thought of watching any channel that might have anything dramatic on, and I felt that laughter was the only thing that would not remind me of what just happened. I also kept watching because I knew that they often showed clips of people like George Lopez, Marc Maron, and others I had met and came to know, and that gave me a kind of comfort.”

There was a point where Melissa had made humorous comments about the attack, even on the night of the attack while in the hospital. Again, this mechanism, while not something other survivors of violent attacks might agree with or relate to, was something that worked for her. It gave more credence to the argument that not all rape, sexual assault, or violent attack survivors will react to his or her situation and the extenuating trauma in the same way.

 

 

There was one Comedy Central show in particular that Melissa found incredibly comforting. She watched
Short Attention Span Theater
several times a day while recuperating. It was hosted by the then-relatively-unknown comic Marc Maron. The series would show several different clips of several different comedians on a rotating basis.

“I loved watching that show,” Melissa recalled. “I got to see several of the greats, and the ones that people would never guess would become huge successes, such as Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, et cetera. But the host intrigued me. He was a good comic in his own right, but was never given much time to do any substantial material. But here was this show that got me through so much, because it took my mind completely off the pain and fear, and allowed me to laugh out loud and learn even more about comedians I hadn’t heard of yet. And, yes, it also showed clips of my friend George [Lopez], which cheered me up.”

CHAPTER 28

SERIAL OFFENDER

Ask Becky Buttram
what she thinks of Scott Saxton and the now-retired detective holds nothing back: “He is a slimy little bastard. He has completely fooled a lot of people because he appears so weak, but that rage inside of him, I don’t know where it came from.”

While serving time in jail, Saxton’s wife tried smuggling some “things,” Buttram said, into the prison for him. She got caught—and was arrested and jailed.

“She
never
believed us,” Buttram explained, referring to Saxton’s wife believing he had nothing to do with any of the charges.

Buttram saw an incredibly violent, dangerous repeat offender where Scott Saxton was concerned. She still believes that he will strike again if released from jail. She doesn’t believe Saxton will ever stop.

“It goes back to that stuff up north,” Buttram explained, adding how the crimes he committed before Melissa’s attack spoke volumes about the guy’s mind-set and motive. Apparently, in one of those cases up north, Saxton broke into an elderly woman’s home and wound up waking her up while on top of her. She was able to get away, grabbed a shotgun she had nearby, and chased him out of her house.

Buttram believed Saxton’s true motivation revolved around a repressed, abnormal sexual nature, surrounded by violent tendencies many serial rapists display. And the only reason he didn’t commit a rape that they knew of was because “he just hadn’t gotten to that point yet” in his evolutionary development as a sexual predator.

“First he’s caught peeping,” the detective concluded. “Then he’s standing over the women after breaking and entering into their homes. Then there’s Melissa’s case, where he attacks. And I think he would have killed Melissa and the army sergeant if they hadn’t fought back.”

CHAPTER 29

FINGERPRINT MAN

There are not
too many cases like Melissa’s and the additional attacks Scott Saxton was accused of that ever go to trial. Most of the time the perpetrator is faced with overwhelming evidence—either DNA, blood, or eyewitness testimony—and the crimes so vile and violent—with the victim sometimes ready and willing to sit in a court of law and tell her story—the perp is forced into cutting a deal.

There was a hearing several months after Saxton’s arrest in which the prosecutor, Phil Blowers, laid out part of his case against Saxton. During this hearing Saxton’s attorney, Jeff Baldwin, was able to question the forensic examiner, scientist David Zauner, who had found the fingerprint evidence connected to Scott Saxton inside Melissa’s apartment. As evidence in these cases go, this was not a slam dunk by any means—Saxton lived across the hall at one time. He could—and would—say that he had been invited into Melissa’s apartment.

On the other hand, once Blowers brought Melissa in to tell her story, which would sit as a precedent, before the other victims of Saxton’s madness and violence told their stories, there was no juror in the county who would ever believe this man was not a serial offender and a great threat and danger to society.

At this hearing David Zauner explained to the court that during a “high-intensity light source” search of Melissa’s apartment, he was unable to find any prints. “In my visual examination, [however], I did.”

Zauner explained further that the prints he located were actually found “in some dried reddish brown material and it was on a short section of wall on the left side of the entry from the front hallway into the living room.”

He was speaking of the archway and a “partial palm print” found there.

The second print Zauner located happened to be on the “exterior of the sliding glass door at the back of the apartment.”

Saxton’s lawyer questioned Zauner over how he took prints from Saxton and if there was anyone else on hand when he did. It was a simple defense tactic: attack the MO of the witness and see if anything pops.

Zauner said that, of course, there were others present. Scott Saxton was in jail at the time.

There was some discussion about palm prints and how good they were as compared to a thumb or any other fingerprint.

Basically, there was no difference. Everyone had a different palm print. It being a partial palm print also had little to do with disproving it was Scott Saxton’s.

What Zauner testified to emphatically was that the palm print was definitely not Melissa’s. Her palm print had “distortion,” and the one he found on the archway did not. This was a clear indication that it was not hers.

What made the print so easy to read was the fact that Saxton had blood on his palm at some point while inside the apartment and touched the archway with that palm, leaving behind a print as though he meant to do so. It wasn’t, Zauner explained, as if Saxton touched a bloody wall and left a print. He made the print himself, as if dipping his hand in ink and pasting it onto the wall.

From there they talked about Zauner receiving the hockey stick from Melissa’s apartment, along with two pieces of wood molding and a piece of paper “that looked like it had been peeled off a piece of drywall.”

Again and again, Zauner found Saxton’s prints—and only his—on these pieces of evidence.

The only place Zauner said he could not identify enough of a print to make a comparison was on the knife. He was able to extract the ridge of a print on the blade, but nothing substantial enough to make a comparison to Scott Saxton.

Phil Blowers had a great question for his witness, which explained, fairly thoroughly, the print examiner’s role in any crime investigation.

“When making a comparison, is that done in an objective manner?” Blowers asked.

“Yes,” Zauner answered. “I look strictly at the evidence. I do not allow any feelings or anything to get involved.”

It’s one of the reasons why fingerprint analysis is so exact and particularly compelling. It’s science. It either is or isn’t a person’s print. There is no gray area in the science of fingerprint analysis. The interpretation of the various prints compared against one another might offer some debate, but in the end the scientist believes that he is either looking at a print of a suspect or he is not.

Zauner explained this process well, adding, “I would not report an identification unless I was absolutely certain that that person had made the print.”

Next up was Melissa Schickel.