Stories of Survival

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Oxford Eagle
Sunday, October 5, 1997
STORIES OF SURVIVAL
How three crime victims are moving on with their lives
Chase McFadden
STAFF WRITER
How do you move on when you've been the victim of a horrible crime? How do you pick up the pieces? For some people, it is impossible to continue with their lives as they once were. Daily activities become such a frightful burden that at times we don't want to go on living at all. The victims of crime are legion but their most heartbreaking statistic concerns the young. Nowadays more and more children are both criminals and the victims of crime. Crime has begun to sweep into our lives much earlier than ever before, as evidenced by the recent wave of rapes centered around the popular college student bar Proud Larry's in downtown Oxford. Imagine that you are, for instance, a young girl&emdash;a college student, who is suddenly the victim of rape after an evening at the bar? In an instant, your life would be forever changed.
Three such stories exist in our area today, as I write. They are three of the five women who were the victims of the Proud Larry's Rapist, who police now say was one Anthony Phelps, a 21-year-old college student at the University. These women still live in the area and one still attends the University on a part-time basis. The other two work full-time. They each agreed to talk to me but on one condition&emdash;that their names would not be revealed. This condition was easily met, as this paper has always had a policy of shielding such information from the general public.
The first woman that spoke with us is the one who is still in college. Unlike the others, she decided right away that the tragedy would not deter her from finishing her college education. She is a pharmacy student and two semesters away from her degree. She retains a certain amount of bitterness at Anthony Phelps. "I'm glad the bastard's dead. He was just cruel," she said when I asked her about Phelps.
She would have had no problem, she said, appearing at his trial to testify against him. She followed the arrest and interrogation phase closely, appearing at the detention center to pick Phelps out of a line-up with no hesitation and confirming that he committed the assault after watching him through a one-way mirror as he talked to detectives. At one point officials had to restrain her from trying to strike Phelps as the two passed by chance in the hallway.
What about her life had changed, I asked?
"Oh, everything, in a way," she replied. "I don't trust anybody now, and I'm locked in my house before the sun goes down. Sometimes my breath will catch in my chest and I'll get real nervous. It happens a lot when I'm out in public, or when I get into some kind of crowd situation. After that's happened to you, you sort of close in on yourself, because it gives the most protection.
But it appeared that she was able to go on, I said.
"Yes," but it hasn't been easy. I've been very independent in my twenty years. Now some of that has been taken away. But I'm going on. I'm going to graduate and be a pharmacist, and a good one. I'm going to live in Tennessee, I think, and just make money. I know one thing, though, I'll never forget this town, or Phelps. It's branded in my mind."
The second woman works in an accountant's office. She withdrew from school immediately after the incident and sought active employment two months later. This woman was attacked in the back parking lot of Proud Larry's hours after the bar had closed, and raped while lying on the asphalt between two parked cars. She had been walking home from a party and had gone to get her car when suddenly a hand went around her neck and pushed her down.
She too, considers her attacker a low form of life; but unlike the first victim, she has not been able to convince herself that Phelps is that attacker. Her uncertainty has led to frustration &endash; like the other victims, she is searching for a sense of closure to the incident, so that she can try to move on with her life.
"I wanted to blame someone. I wanted them to pay. I resent the hell out of whoever did this to me, for making me lay on that filthy parking lot while he did what he wanted. I wish I could say it was Phelps, but I have to be honest. I don't know. I don't think so. I went to the line up, I looked at his picture, I just can't say it was him. I wish I could, then it would be over. But I still look over my shoulder everywhere I go. If it wasn't, I want the guy caught, I want him to go to trial and I want to be there."
You'd go to his trial and testify? I asked.
"I certainly would," she said, "but first I'd spit on him as I walked by his table on my way to the stand."
How has your life changed? I asked.
"I lead a very quiet life now. A much quieter life. I don't go out, except with large groups of friends, and I never go into Proud Larry's, even though I know it's not their fault. It's just that there's a lot of people there who know what happened to me. I can't look them in the eye. And I can't be certain that he isn't still there watching."
"It's not your fault, though," I said.
"I know that, and they know that, but still...," she said.
Do you have a significant relationship right now? I asked.
"I do. And I love it. He's normal. Just a guy. He's an accountant for another office. I actually like being the homebody now. He understands me and what I've gone through, how scared I still am. That doesn't change what happened, though."
Will anything ever change it? I asked.
"No way," she answered, " no way."
The third woman also works full-time, as an assistant librarian on the university campus. It is a job that she got a few months after the attack. She approached the chancellor of the university with a request&emdash;that he put her to work in a quiet, sedate environment so that she could re-integrate into the university community, and he did. She says that she likes working in the cool, quiet stacks, shelving books and magazines, and talking to very few people throughout the day. It is this quiet life that she craves, she says, perhaps because around the time that she was attacked she led such a loud, boisterous life -- in Proud Larry's almost every night and then on to parties that lasted until the break of dawn.
"I was beyond wild," she says, in a quiet voice, looking down.
I found that hard to believe, and I said so.
"Oh no," she said. "It's true. I didn't know when to stop or slow down. This whole thing made me re-think my priorities."
She works every day from the early morning to the afternoon, and her specialty is the bound magazine collection of the university. She keeps up with them and organizes them, often stopping to read an article now and then. She has one supervisor that she checks in with once a day, but is mostly left to her work.
I asked her about Phelps and she hesitated, not sure once again that he is the right suspect. I asked her about the lineup and her thoughts, but she immediately turned her back on me and began to walk away. Further questions made her fluster and turn bright red.
"You don't know anything about it until you've been there," she said. "You haven't been there."
I asked if she was leading a fairly normal life now, if things were calmed down enough for her to get through every day.
"I have my bad moments, but they don't show. I don't think it was Phelps, but the attacks have stopped. If they start again, I'll be in Montana or someplace right away."
Are you glad Phelps is dead? I asked.
"I wish he was alive, so I could know it was him and watch him twist in the wind," she said, her eyes narrowing. "But yeah, if he really was the one, I'm kind of glad."
She said she had to get back to work then, and turned and walked away and disappeared behind a bookshelf.
Anthony Phelps is dead. These victims are all still alive, dealing day-by-day with the horrible specter that rape left with them. But they are all hopeful, and strong. They are surviving, and will continue to survive.
The question is, has the rapist survived as well?