Sole Survivor

by Holly Dunn

  “So it was true,” Heather said. “They were tied up. Holly thinks he had an accomplice who was telling him to do things.”

  None of them spoke for a while.

  Around eleven o’clock that Saturday night, CNN and other channels started broadcasting breaking news out of Europe.

  “Just before daybreak, Paris officials confirmed the death of Princess Diana, following a car crash beneath the Pont de l’Alma along the River Seine.”

  While attempting to elude the paparazzi, the car transporting the princess crashed into a tunnel wall. For the rest of my time in the hospital—and many days afterward—the royal tragedy dominated the news. Less than a week after I returned home to Evansville, I would join the 2.5 billion people around the world who watched Princess Di’s funeral on television.

  I talked about it with Heather, finding a measure of relief and welcome distraction in a tragedy that wasn’t focused on me. Heather’s reaction was muted. After what had happened to me just days before, the loss across the world couldn’t quite compare with what we were experiencing so close to home.

  CHAPTER 7.

  The Butterfly Song

  The days and nights in the hospital blurred together—for me because I slept all the time, for my family because they slept so little. But whether I was awake or not, a steady flow of friends, sorority sisters, and other visitors continued to stream in and out of my room.

  I had been in the hospital only a day or so when Chris’s best friend Brian showed up. I hadn’t yet had the chance to get to know him well, but I knew that he and Chris had met as Phi Psi brothers, and they were both very artistic.

  The moment Brian walked into my room and laid eyes on me, he burst into tears.

  “Oh, Holly, I’m so sorry.”

  I struggled to sit up so I could greet him, even though every inch of me writhed in pain. Brian knew Chris had died, but I don’t think he realized just how violent our evening at the hands of this attacker really was. He couldn’t speak for his grief. My wounds were a blazing display of just how badly Chris had suffered too. We visited for just a few moments, and then he was gone.

  My beloved sorority sisters were a constant presence during my recovery. Hospital rules stated that no more than two people were supposed to be in the room at any one time, but given the situation, my nurses tended to look the other way. At one point over the weekend, I had something like sixteen sorority sisters in my room at one time. I felt buoyed by their liveliness and laughter, though I was still so exhausted I slept through part of their visit. In the midst of this somber setting, my Kappa sisters helped me feel a little like my old self, even if only for a moment.

  I had a rather diminutive doctor who walked in while my room was crowded with Kappa sisters. I think he must have been overwhelmed by a room full of such tall and beautiful women. He shooed them out kindly so he could talk to me about the treatments still ahead—in particular, the surgery to fix my broken jaw. He was scheduling the surgery for Tuesday morning. The delay, he explained, was so he could wait for the swelling to go down to evaluate whether the jaw would need to be reset and wired shut. He had also been busy all weekend fixing a dozen people’s jaws that were broken in bar fights.

  My pain was pretty well managed with constant medication, but I could still tell I was busted up. Since I was on a catheter, I hadn’t had a chance to look in my hospital room’s half bath for a mirror. I started asking people to let me see one so I could check out my injuries. Last I had looked intently at my reflection, I was brushing my long, blonde hair and adjusting the silver hoop earrings I had put on for my night out with Chris. Though our date was only a couple of days ago, it now felt like a different lifetime.

  But no one would give me a mirror. Finally, my sister handed me a small, round makeup compact. I flipped it open and looked at the reflection.

  I was shocked at what I saw. I remember thinking, How is that my face? It doesn’t even look like me. The entire left side of my face was swollen. My cheeks were bruised and scratched, and the cuts were lined with dried blood. My lip was puffy. The tissue around my broken eye socket was so swollen that my eyelid was still nearly closed. My jaw was so off-center I couldn’t bite straight. I snapped the compact shut.

  I looked as bad as I felt. The nurses had done their best to clean me up after my arrival, but I had been in too much pain for them to do much. I was so deeply exhausted that I couldn’t stay awake for long, and I hadn’t been able to stand for more than five minutes at a time. Heather helped sponge-bathe me the day after she arrived, but by Sunday I was finally begging to take a shower. I felt disgusting—inside and out. My skin was sticky and grimy from blood and sweat. I knew that traces of my attacker still clung to me and I wanted to scrub him off as hard as I could.

  Heather helped me walk the distance from my bed to a shower room down the hall. She turned up the hot water until steam filled the room. I sat down on a plastic stool so she could more easily shampoo my hair. I could tell Heather was trying to be gentle, especially around the wounds where my hair was tangled in the staples.

  “No, scrub it harder than that,” I urged.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Just do it. Get it out.”

  I’m not sure how many times Heather had to wash my hair to get all the blood out. Rinse after rinse the water poured red and then bright pink and then lighter pink down the drain. Once my hair was clean I went to work on the caked blood and grime that coated my body. It felt like I spent the afternoon in the shower stall. I was so beat down that it took everything I had to engage in this one routine task.

  Heather helped me into a clean hospital gown and back into bed. She combed my hair and did her best to untangle the knots and matted areas around the rows of staples. Relieved to finally be clean and warmed by the hot water, I quickly fell back asleep.

  • • •

  Monday morning, Detective Craig Sorrell came back to the hospital to record a formal statement.

  “You can have one person in the room with you,” he said.

  I chose my sister. She was my rock, right from the beginning. I could count on her for comfort and support and to help me articulate the story I had told her two nights before.

  Detective Sorrell was sitting on the left side of my bed, and my sister was on my right. He spoke into a small tape recorder.

  “Today’s date is September 1, 1997, and it’s 08:47 hours. I’m Detective Sorrell. I’m going to interview Holly Dunn. Present in the room is her sister, Heather Dunn. I’m going to just set this over here.”

  He placed the recorder on the rolling tray next to my bed and looked up at me, smiling kindly.

  “Anytime you need a break or anything—you just let me know. We’ll stop, and I can go down the hallway.”

  “Okay, got it,” I said.

  I reclined in my hospital bed, propped up on several pillows. I felt more alert than I had been since I was admitted. I knew this interview wouldn’t be easy, but I wanted to get the story straight and recount as many details as I could remember. What mattered most to me was that this guy got caught.

  “How about we start at the point where you arrived at the party.”

  I told him how Chris and the two guys and I enjoyed a few beers at the party and then decided to go for a walk by the railroad tracks. I recounted how the guys left to go back to the house first, and once we started back, a man came out from behind some railroad equipment near the GE plant.

  “We were kind of in shock, like it wasn’t really happening—like, ‘What’s going on here?’”

  Despite the horror of my story, I tried to remain detached—focused only on the business at hand. Detective Sorrell asked me questions, and I returned with facts. I described how he made Chris turn around and how he tied him up and drug him on his stomach over the rocks and tracks until he was in a ditch on the opposite side. I recounted his demand for money, how we’d offered everything but couldn’t appease him.

  “There are gaps I�
�m missing. I can’t really remember. All I can remember now is when he—” I paused, choking up as I recalled what that monster had done, “when he started to hit Chris with something like a big blue board, not a board, maybe a log. He had it in both his hands, and he started hitting Chris. I think he hit him five or six times.”

  Detective Sorrell gave me a moment to collect myself, and then he gently corrected me on that count. Apparently it had taken only one blow to kill Chris. It seemed my mind had, in that instant, seen it over and over again.

  Then I had to describe how he had raped me. I told every detail I could remember even though I felt intense shame talking about it to a male police officer. How could anyone understand the things a woman will say or do to make a sadistic rapist like you enough, so that maybe—just maybe—when he’s through he’ll let you live?

  “After that, he covered us with leaves. I guess he beat me, because I can look at myself and see that, but I don’t know if he beat me before or after he covered me with leaves.”

  Knowing I was nearing the end of the story, I rushed to finish it. The sooner this was over the sooner I could get back to the relief of sleep.

  “I waited to see if he was gone,” I continued, “but I don’t know for how long. When Chris and I were lying there, he kept leaving and coming back, saying he was looking for somebody, that someone was with him. When he would go away I thought we could get away, but he’d always come back too soon. So when he did finally leave, I got myself untied somehow. But I don’t remember that. I don’t remember getting to the house where I called 9-1-1.”

  After I had finished blurting out the length of the ordeal, Detective Sorrell went back to our arrival on the tracks and asked more clarifying questions about the lay of the land.

  Then he said, “Let’s go ahead and go over the description of this fella again. You think he had an accent that you believe to be Hispanic.”

  “Yes.” I knew the accent I had heard was Mexican because I had been to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with my family many years ago.

  “What about his height?”

  “Well, Chris is six foot five, so everyone seems short next to him. I think he was shorter than me. I’m about five foot eight, so I’m guessing five foot six or so.”

  “How about his build?”

  “He seemed average—like medium build. Not fat or skinny.”

  “Sure. Hair length?”

  “I can’t remember if he had something in his hair. When he was on top of me, he had glasses on, so that’s—”

  “You mentioned glasses to me when I spoke with you in the ER. But when you mentioned it, you said you thought they were Chris’s glasses.”

  Chris had been wearing glasses the night we were attacked. I don’t know why, perhaps he had run out of contacts or they had been bothering him. But I remembered thinking the frames the attacker wore were similar to Chris’s. I was having trouble describing them, and I felt frustrated that the detective wasn’t following what I was trying to say. I was doing my best to give him solid details but he was questioning my memory.

  “Now, I know that he wasn’t wearing Chris’s glasses, so I wonder if maybe you put that in there, or do you think he actually had glasses?” he asked.

  “No, he had glasses on. He definitively—”

  “You’re certain he had glasses.”

  I may have been wrong about how many times the guy hit Chris, but I knew I was not wrong about those glasses.

  “I’m positive he did. When he was having sex with me, I know he had glasses on.”

  “Okay, but, it’s just that for me,” said Detective Sorrell, “I’ve personally never seen a male Hispanic with glasses. I’ve really thought about it and cannot recall ever seeing a Mexican with glasses. I’m sure there are some, I’ve just never seen one, you know. But, you think he was wearing glasses.”

  “Uh huh,” I mumbled.

  Though my recollection of parts of that evening were fuzzy and skewed at times, I was absolutely certain of this one detail. I hadn’t noticed the glasses before he was right in my face, but I was certain I had seen them in the end. He had been wearing clear, prescription-type glasses with square frames. I knew I was right, but I was done trying to convince the detective. I was ready to move on.

  Detective Sorrell resumed his questions about the direction we were walking, the angle at which the attacker approached, the weapon, the timing and order of events, all the things he needed to conduct a thorough investigation.

  “You think initially the motive was to rob you?”

  “From what I know of crimes, if somebody breaks into your house and knows that you’re home, and he stays, then that means he wants to hurt you. So this guy wants our money, then why is he tying us up? And why is he hurting us? I would have done whatever he wanted. I think one of the reasons he hit Chris was because Chris was trying to defend me. So I think he hit Chris to make him stop saying that stuff, to make himself feel better when he did—what he did to me. Supposedly he had just broken out of jail and needed money for the escape. But why did he keep saying, ‘You’re gonna see me on the news. I just broke out of jail.’ I kept thinking, why is he trying to hurt us? You know?”

  My voice broke. Heather leaned toward me and ran her hand along my arm.

  “We don’t know of anybody who just broke out of jail,” said Detective Sorrell. “Okay, I’m gonna pause the tape for a minute to gather my thoughts.”

  I was thankful for the short break. I had attempted to be emotionally removed from the story, but I couldn’t help but relive it as I retold it. When we resumed, he asked about Chris’s belongings and what Chris was wearing.

  “Chris was dressed like I was—in darker brown corduroys, sandals, and a gray T-shirt from Monte Carlo in Las Vegas.”

  “And the shirt that was used to gag you—that wasn’t yours?”

  “I don’t think so. Not from me.”

  “Did any of you all have anything with snaps, like a shirt that would snap?”

  “No.”

  It turned out that the gags the attacker had used came from a white, long-sleeve shirt with snap buttons.

  “All right. I’m gonna shut this tape back off.”

  The interview was time-stamped at barely an hour long, but every word took with it another ounce of energy. I was physically and emotionally spent.

  My sister kept me company after Detective Sorrell left. Chris’s funeral would start a bit later that day in his hometown, North Canton, Ohio, about a five-hour drive from Lexington. I was missing his funeral because I was still too injured and traumatized to go anywhere, and my jaw wouldn’t be fixed until the following day. Despite the constant support I received in the hospital, the days got harder and harder as the reality of what had happened sunk in more fully. Not being able to attend Chris’s funeral only made me feel even more despondent.

  Later that day, my cousin Sarah came for a visit. She was a student at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, not far from Lexington. Both Heather and Sarah knew I could use some cheering up, so they started telling stories and reminiscing about our childhoods.

  One of the stories was about our road trips to New Mexico. When my dad first started out in business, he owned and managed a number of radio and television stations, one of which was in Albuquerque. When Heather and I were little, our family drove out there during the summer and stayed in an apartment while Dad worked on-site. On those long, cross-country drives, our dad used to play a cassette tape of children’s praise songs to keep us entertained.

  “Do you guys remember Psalty’s praise songs?” Heather asked.

  “The Butterfly Song!” I called out.

  It was our favorite from The Kids’ Praise Album, the first of many children’s praise albums featuring “Psalty,” a cartoon singing songbook voiced by a man named Ernie Rettino. Once this particular song came on, Dad or Mom would have to hit rewind to replay the song over and over again.

  “Remind me how that goes?” Sarah asked.

 
Heather and I both started to sing, “If I were a butterfly, I’d thank you Lord for giving me wings. If I were a robin in a tree, I’d thank you Lord that I could sing—”

  “What comes after that?” Heather asked.

  This was the late 1990s, after all, before smartphones and widespread Internet access and the ability to look things up on the fly.

  “If I were a fish in the sea, I’d wiggle my tail and I’d giggle with glee, but I just thank you Father for making me, me,” I responded.

  The three of us burst out singing the chorus together: “For you gave me a heart and you gave me a smile. You gave us Jesus and you made me your child. And I just thank you Father for making me, me.”

  I was grateful for the moment of levity and joy. We were all so innocent before this predator came to town and wrecked our lives. Singing together opened a portal to a time long ago, an era when we were still unaware that such depravity existed and lurked so close by. Faith was so much simpler back then, and God was unquestionably good. While we sang and laughed together, the burden lifted for the length of the tune.

  That night, some of Chris’s friends came by the hospital with memorabilia from his funeral. They brought me a candle and one of the funeral programs, which was full of Chris’s artwork. The front and back covers were colorful, expressive flower paintings. I thought about the glittery plastic flower ring he had brought me back from Maine, now lost in the foliage where we had been attacked.

  At the centerfold of the program was the image Chris had created during our art session at his place just a day or so before he was killed. I traced the crayon silhouettes of his hand with my finger. In his absence, the waves of color seemed even more vibrant and resonant than when he had first drawn them.