In 1964 the nation was scandalized as Kitty Genovese was murdered in stages, screaming for help, in the NYC borough of Queens while 38 people watched from their windows and did nothing. Not likely to happen here. On our state capitol is"The salvation of the state is the watchfulness of the citizen," a motto Nebraskans frequently quote, use on websites, and certainly act by.
Nebraskan neighbors caught the Dundee rapist for us, thankfully for Omaha's frightened women. (Actually, that mid city section, once a village by that name, was where Thomas Freeman committed a number of rapes but not the only area he stalked women.) These neighbors helped eight women, sobbing on the witness stand, get justice, as well as several unknown victims. As last Sunday's Parade magazine cited, only 36% of rape victims report the assaults, and the Omaha Police Department, hereafter OPD, estimated that Freeman raped somewhere around 20 or more.
First, our serial rapist. Freeman had been convicted of second-degree murder for stabbing his girlfriend. Don't ask me why, but, despite a life sentence, he was paroled--not once but twice. He began his spree shortly after the second parole. He apparently had a black father and a white mother. A very muscular, athletic 6'2", TF had converted one of his girlfriend's bedrooms into a weight room, just so you understand what women had attacking them usually from behind in the dark. (He had a job moving furniture when he was finally caught.) He was very particular about his victims not seeing his face, using their clothing or handy items like pillowcases or towels while ordering them not to look at him, in one instance even using a Halloween mask. The mask didn't prevent that victim's noting his neck and hands were black, and another victim got a vague glimpse of him as he rushed into her bedroom. He usually had a knife placed to their throats to threaten the women--the victim in her bedroom got a defense wound when she threw her hand up to fend him off--but once claimed to have a gun, which the teenager said she felt but never clearly saw, the only (weapons) charge he wasn't convicted of. He had trouble initially achieving an erection, often asked for tongue, i.e., French kissing, and occasionally became rough when angry. He demanded money "to go to Kansas City," rifled drawers and stole jewelry, in one instance a coin collection and a VCR. Twice he insisted upon raping the women in her child's bedroom (the daughter and the son were fortunately gone in those two instances). After the rapes he demanded the women wash themselves thoroughly and often stood by to insure they did in bathwater or shower. The strong suggestion is that he trawled for victims, perhaps stalking them, for most of the rapes occurred in early morning hours, women coming home alone from work or socializing. Many of the rapes were on his day off, another pattern. I list these characteristics, called his modus operandi, the Latin favored by attorneys translated into Standard Operating Procedure, because their repetition certainly helped a jury decide in our big second trial for the eight victims willing to testify. TV addicts familiar with the forensic series so popular now, such as CSI and its spinoffs, know that serial criminals have such signature behaviors.
The key to identifying our serial rapist was the best eyewitness I ever had the pleasure of reporting, and I'm using his name, because I've always thought he deserved a medal of some kind, for enduring the police and legal proceedings for so long that he went from living in a southwest Omaha apartment with his girlfriend and baby daughter to being a married man with two children and a new job in Council Bluffs, which is how long justice took in this case. Terry Michael Bock was angry because his car had been broken into and parts stolen several times, so one remarkable night he was sitting up all night by his patio doors on a cooler, shotgun at hand, watching his car in the parking lot. A particular car drove up and down the lot a few times, alerting his interest, and, when it finally parked, he headed toward it. He actually nearly collided with Freeman at a corner near a bush so that both exclaimed, "You scared the shit out of me!" simultaneously. Not only did Terry get a close-up view of Thomas in his all-black clothes but also noted a boning knife sticking out of Freeman's back pocket. Our rapist claimed to be coming home from work.
The victim that early morning--this is around 4:00, 4:30 a.m.--had been talking out an argument with her boyfriend, then was walking alone back to her apartment after the boyfriend drove off. She was suddenly flattened from behind, with a knife to her throat, the usual threat, but managed to scream. Besides Bock, another neighbor, sleeping very close by, was extremely irritated by the noise at that hour and rushed out yelling. Having returned to his apartment, Bock also ran out of his apartment with the shotgun, and both men came upon Freeman on top of the girl. Bock yelled for him to get off, which Freeman did with speed neither man could match, though the other man ran after him. Knowing where Freeman had come from, Bock took a shortcut and beat Freeman back to his car. Our bold rapist ignored Bock's demand to stay put and got in his car and took off, nearly backing over Bock, who was loath to shoot him, understandably. But Terry had an excellent view of the car: that and his face-to-face encounter would be the key for the detectives, who had no such identification from any of the victims and merely some fingerprints and a partial palm print from another, earlier attempted rape.
Given the number of times Terry Bock had to repeat his testimony and the usual obnoxious, repetitious defense efforts to discredit him--he did get a bit testy by the final trial--I have to say I had wonderful satisfaction when the defense attorney tried to attack his identification of the automobile by year, make, and color. How did he know it was a 1987 Pontiac Grand Am, metallic gold flake paint, honeycomb hub caps (with no license plate)? Well, besides seeing the rear emblem when Freeman almost backed over him, he'd worked in a body shop for two years previously. Uh-huh. With the help of an FBI agent, the OPD detectives traced the car back to Freeman's then girlfriend, found out TF also used the car, had his name--and, after visiting his job, a photo--and then could match the fingerprints. Today I think OPD links to IAFIS, Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a computerized database maintained by the FBI; but at that time it had to have a name before it could go to its own files of fingerprint cards to try to match unknown prints found at crime scenes.
To detour briefly, as mentioned, in another attempted rape some fingerprints and a partial palm print had been found, but OPD had no way then of matching them to any known files. In that attempt a young woman whose husband had left for Minneapolis that morning was out shopping late, pulled into a relatively dark garage area, and was attacked from behind when she had begun getting her groceries from the passenger's side. She had been shoved into the car, clothes pushed up and down to leave her nude from shoulders to knees, threatened, but screamed anyway. (Freeman's prints were on the door post.) An apartment neighbor and his dogs, who'd seen her earlier, were in the nearby laundry room and ran out to see what was going on, the door slamming behind him and apparently scaring off our unfriendly Dundee rapist (this was one of the Dundee events). At the same time, undoubtedly more cause for Freeman's fleeing, a young woman at a neighboring complex was taking a bath, heard the screams, ran to the window, and was shouting down, asking if she should call 911. Again, great neighbors to have!
So the puzzle pieces began forming a clear mosaic: car leads to name leads to fingerprint identification. Freeman fled to Colorado Springs, having been alerted by a police visit, from where he was extradited by the FBI and OPD. And Bock again won my utter admiration. Naturally, the resultant lineup was for him, the guy who almost collided with Freeman and saw him not once but three times, including under a floodlight. He identified TF before the lineup even got started: "Right away I said, "That's him right there, that one right there,' and I picked him out. . . . There was no question in my mind. I knew for a fact it was him." The detectives had to insist upon the formality of going through the whole lineup procedure, but Bock never budged from his absolutely positive identification. You understand now why I think Terry Michael Bock deserves a medal?
"The salvation of the state is the watchfulness of the citizen."
Mental Scrap--book: May 2006 Archives
I did this entry elsewhere and then copied it into my formatted area here and got all sorts of little glitches, so I'm redoing it in the hopes of avoiding those, though, as I explain, the computer and I have a very troubled romance. I love it for its electronic global reach forward and backward in time across the politicial and geographical borders, able to give me all sorts of data and pictures instantly--when it's working. Using it for transcripts, however, is game-playing of a very high--or low-- order.
The ten volumes of re-created courtroom proceedings in 2507 pages by the Kinko count, which included some partial pages, title pages, and the lengthy index, occupied most of my three months from January through March. Much of the ordeal was role-playing Don Quixote , my new computer's windmill whacking away at me. Not referring to the 1984 and 1990 movies, during World War II in comic strips we had gremlins, "the little men who aren't there," doing mischievous sabotage; and I sometimes wonder if they haven't been hiding these decades until computers invaded our lives. At other times I think I'm dealing with a mechanical brat squalling, "No! No! I don't want to!" throwing itself down in a childish fit.
One of the first signs my new computer was ready for a brand-new assault on my sensibilities was the punctuation matter of a colon followed by a closing parenthesis. This happens steadily in our transcripts when we start a new section with time, date, parties, ending with "the following occurred:)" Movable Type is keeping a tight rein over my HP here, but what happens otherwise is an automatic Smiley Face lacking only its bright sunny yellow. The same sort of problem occurred when I did dates like the 21st or 22nd, for my HP automatically miniaturized and lofted the "st" and "nd," along with the Smiley Face way too casual for our sternly censorious state supreme court. So I had the nuisance solution of spacing between the colon and the paren or the numbers and the letters, then backspacing and deleting the spaces.
At the tops of our pages are witness lines and page numbers, the former identifying different witnesses in the Q&A sections and what the examination is. The first examination of a witness is Direct; the opposing attorney then questions in Cross; further examination is then Redirect and Recross until the attorneys are tired of badgering. There can be two examinations on a page of rapid-fire clean-up questions or even two witnesses when one ends and a new one begins. That means that the header, which is where the witness line goes in computerization, must change. However, my Hal was inflexible: whatever name and examination I typed in, he insisted would go on all the pages. And change also fouled up the page numbers. I spent most of a day trying to override this dictatorial rigidity, but the computer would actually shut down after a certain regular number of tries, seven, as I recall. That's true obstinacy.
Actually, the problem was much more complicated, for my computer didn't like the format I was copying from my old IBM typing days and the state manual instructions. To the left side of a court reporter's transcript page runs a vertical column of double-spaced numbers, a sacred 25 to every page. This is for ease of citation, of course: "line 18, page 23." With my margins set for the body of the text, my computer sullenly warned that the header-witness line and the line number column were outside the printable areas and then proceeded to mangle everything, like squeezing someone obese like me into a bikini. I can be stubborn too, but the compromise between us involved a three-part process for every page. I had to print off batches of pages with the line-number columns separately from that template, then run them through again to print off the text body, and finally type on the witness line and page numbers on my old IBM. Are you still wondering why it took me a few months for 2500 pages?
I don't think I can explain two further complications with that column of line numbers, but I'll try. My sister's software manages all this handily enough for her specialized computer, and she doesn't single-space any blurbs. Blurbs are little parenthetical explanations and belong, according to the manual I was accustomed to, single-spaced to the far right of the page. MovableType won't let me illustrate it here, but one of those would be like "(Thus made part of this Bill of Exceptions, Exhibit #345 is found in Volume VI of Exhibits.)" or "(Off-the-record discussion between The Court and counsel.)" Naturally, when I was still trying to put the double-spaced line numbers on my text pages, the computer gave each single-spaced line of the blurb a number, so the sacred 25 might turn into 31 or 19 or whatever. At one later point, the printer inexplicably got drunk and began having double vision for the pages with the line numbers, doubling them ever so slightly and then worse and worse, so that looking at them was like that movie effect when drunks see two objects instead of one. This double vision was vertical and grew so bad as to fill in all the space lines. I had to stop--not even creating a new template helped at first--and just work on text for a while.
And I had various scares and disasters with the electronic Black Hole where pages disappear into Space Time forever lost. One Sunday evening I was too fatiqued and apparently didn't hit the holy Save, for Monday morning turned bleakly black with nothing there. I learned that, if I rested my little fingers on the Shift keys too long, a strange black highlighting spread like mercury and refused my efforts to banish it, suddenly going poof with all my work. Glaring and grinning meanly, the computer would zap away. 28 pages here, 57 there. Whee!
Most strangely the Spell Check grew tired and cranky after an unknown number of pages usually between 65 and 100 and simply quit working, with bizarre exceptions. I could make blatant mistakes, but it was off resting. Since this is one of the computer's most brilliant talents, I frazzled constantly from discovering, after printing, that I had missed something in on-screen proofreading--at which I'm pretty good after 15,000 students' worth of themes way back when--and had to make the correction and then repeat the tripartite printing-typing process. It didn't help that my aggravated arthritis conflicted with my manual speed, and I developed tics like typing "no" for "on," the latter a popular courtroom word. As we all know, as long as the word is standard, Spell Check won't red squiggle it, even if it's clearly wrong in context, as in the case of homophones, i.e., typing "hear" for "here" or "fore a wile."
As usual, I found a way around the hurdle instead of stumbling along. When I noticed that Spell Check had gone off for a nap, I usually quit; and so the transcript was done in various batches of less than 100 pages. Subtract the 643 pages my sister thoughtfully did for me in her TLC and guess how many batches I had to later put together, which explains why ultimately I ended up with some missing pages and doubled page numbers and not just when incorporating her portions. Three hard-labor months wrestling this quirky HP wizard to make sure our worst serial rapist would not get his mistrial motion because the original court transcripts had been lost by some irresponsible lout. I need a WWF belt with a big buckle.
Monday I did not think of how the communist world and the Stater response would turn the first day of May into a distress signal ("May Day, May Day") of macho military preening, the militarist as dangerous as the religionist, especially if "super" is stomped at the front of either word. I didn't think of all that until I later saw the newsphotos to remind me, for what I was thinking of was another innocent childhood charm gone missing. Old people tend to do that to bore the young trying to ignore them with their Ipods and video games and other distracting hyper urban noise.
I can't remember dancing around a May pole except once or twice at school. May Day to us was May baskets. May baskets weren't baskets either except in requiring containers with handles, usually constructed of nutcups adorned with crepe paper, ribbbon, construction paper cut-outs, lacy paper doilies, tissue paper, even lilac sprigs, with some kind of handles, fuzzy pipecleaners, satin ribbons, colored cords, construction-paper strips. These May tokens were filled with salted peanuts, pastel mints, jelly beans, gumdrops, homemade fudge, Necco wafers, candy corn, and the like in very small amounts, given the tiny size of the baskets, not like today's, say, Easter candy binges. I'm going to guess the custom dates way back to ancient English spring (fertility) celebrations, though certainly we knew none of that, simply growing up with a tradition nearing its end. This was what you prepared for and what you did. The practice was to try to sneak a small basket up to someone's door despite a barking dog or a window watcher, hang the little basket of favors on the doorknob or set it in front of the door, knock, and then race off before the recipient could rush out, chase you down, and kiss you. If you got kissed, you lost. Good exercise. And genderless. Consider it lip tag with footraces. The winner was the fastest, period.
Strategy entered into it because May 1 usually is a weekday, meaning we had a small window between school and early evening. (Town mothers policed all our activities and agreed remarkably on start-ups and shut-downs.) If I went to the other end of town, that meant those there could hit my house while I was gone, and so we stalemated. After the production-line filling and lining up the May baskets in a cut-down cardboard box, I'd be driven around by Mom to the farther parts--two or three blocks away, that is--and had only to get back to the car and slam the door to be home ollie-oxen free. In my part of town, I had to make it all the way back to my house.
I hope I'm not dating myself by mentioning items like nutcups, little crimped paper cups, or crepe paper, cheap in its huge assortment of colors from bright dyes that ran and stained skin or anything else if wet, crepe paper the main decorative device then, easily cut but hard to tear because it stretched, ideal for twisted streamers and fake flowers. The town bridge club and periodic banquet organizers used nutcups regularly. Dime stores back then carried May baskets, but most of us created our own with nutcups and crepe paper, mindful of reputation depending on how fancy or full these little trophies were. (Someone made unwieldy construction-paper cones once, which spilled and broke. The easiest, no prizes, were cellophane-wrapped popcorn balls or colored cellophane squares tied with a bit of curling ribbon.) The preparation was just as important as the delivery, like making Easter eggs, so we spent creative time stapling and pasting to turn those plain little nutcups into Cinderella favors with pink crimped crepe paper or yellow bows or colored stars like the gold ones we got at school. The wealthier mothers might use fabrics, the poorer mothers construction paper, the middle mothers crepe paper.
I don't know how the politically correct would alter small-town mores, but I do know there was a caste system, even with May baskets. What I don't know is how recipients were chosen or why some adults were included. Mom was an elementary teacher at times, so I think I had every child in town roughly my age on my list--we did have lists--including separate baskets--oh, pain, to do it twice--for brothers (the McGill boys) or sisters (the Brockman girls). What I can't explain is how Mrs. Sandoz, the little white-haired lady across the street, and Mary Ellingson, who ran the town cafe, got on my list, but they were, much to my distress, for Mrs. Sandoz scampered like a rabbit and Mary was persistent in chasing me around and around my dad's gas pumps until both caught and kissed me, hugely embarrassing. They were "old ladies," after all. I also can't explain what fatal age ended participation, though older children clearly weren't involved, nor can I remember when it all disappeared. Unlike Halloween, when farm children came in to trick or treat, this was strictly a townie tradition. Not easy to sneak up on a farmhouse.
And that's what I was happily thinking of last Monday. May baskets.
