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THE RAPE

By Mark Donald |

She lay in her darkened closet, too frightened to remove the bed sheets from around her head. He had told her | to sit there, not to move for 15 minutes. If she told anybody what had happened-the police, anybody-he would come back and kill her. She could hear the radio in her bedroom, and still felt uncertain she had survived. She kept pinching herself, but she couldn’t feel anything. Only when she bit herself, nearly drawing blood, did she feel any pain.

Betsy Cummings was weeping now, at once terrified and glad to be alive. This wasn’t supposed to happen-not in her own home. She had lived alone in the same apartment for five years, priding herself on her independence, on staying in control, and on meeting life on her own terms. But now, at 31, all that had been brutally taken away from her.

Forty-five minutes passed before Betsy summoned the strength to crawl out of the closet. Still weak from the attack, she dragged herself into the living room, poised over the phone, at first too scared to dial. Finally, she called work, an engineering firm in Fort Worth, and spoke with her boss, barely saying enough between sobs to be understood. “A man…, ” she said. “Rape… “

When the Fort Worth police arrived that April 3, 1986, Betsy immediately felt protected. She explained that she had been going through her morning ritual: Get out of bed by 6, fix the coffee, shut the bedroom door so Pete, her cat, would stay in the living room out of her way. She was just about ready for work when she heard a muffled thump. Figuring Pete must have gotten into something, she went to open the bedroom door and froze. To her dismay, the knob was turning on its own, the door suddenly opening to a pair of gloved hands reaching for her. Betsy let out a scream, loud and long, getting a brief look at her attacker, maybe three seconds. He had intensely brown, deep-set eyes, thick lips, dark skin-and a scar on the side of his face. She tried to run but couldn’t. He overpowered her, his hands clamped so tightly around her face she couldn’t breathe. “Shut up you f bitch, ” he yelled. “I’ll kill you if you look at my face. “

Sensing what was going to happen, Betsy quickly decided that she wouldn’t resist. He lowered her onto the bed, piling the blanket and sheets over her head. She expected him to be cruel and sadistic. But here he was caressing her, acting more like a lover than a killer, fantasizing in his twisted mind that she actually wanted him.

“Doesn’t that feel good?” he would ask her, “Oh baby, isn’t this great?” When she didn’t answer, he would beat her, so she began to indulge his fantasy-hugging him, massaging his back.

For a time after the rape, Betsy moved in with her boyfriend. She felt cheated, depressed, angry at her parents for not being there, at her mother for dying when she was 17, at her father for moving to California, never to be heard from again. “I grew up to be incredibly independent, ” says Betsy. “But after the attack, I couldn’t even go to the grocery store by myself. “

The Rape Crisis Program of the Women’s Center of Tarrant County proved Betsy’s savior. There she began her recovery, talking in therapy groups with other women. She stopped blaming herself for the rape, convincing herself that no amount of resistance or precaution could have staved off the attack.

When Betsy received word that her attacker had been caught, she felt both relief and anxiety. She knew that the state’s case would rise or fall with her testimony, that she would be the eyes and heart for 30 other victims.

The trial began in early December, 1986. Betsy, on the witness stand for six grueling hours, remained adamant that the defendant who sat so sullenly before her was the same vicious rapist who had attacked her. The defense attorney attacked her credibility, questioning how she could possibly identify her assailant with only three seconds to observe him.

After deliberating only 45 minutes, the jury filed into the courtroom. Betsy held her breath and the hands of two other victims sitting with her. The judge read the verdict, “guilty as charged, ” and Betsy burst into tears, hugging those around her. “I really needed them to believe me, ” she says, “and they did. “

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