Jane Doe January (9 page)

I Google. There's not much there. He hasn't owned property. He hasn't worked, at least not the kind of work that ends up on LinkedIn. Most of his life predated the Internet, so there isn't much from his youth except for a list of high school classmates on a reunion site.

I'm tempted. I bet I could find a few of those people on Facebook. I ultimately decide, though, that for my own sake I need to be hands-off. I'll window-shop the facts of his life, but not actually interact with anyone.

That leaves terribly little. I can't see what he's posted to Facebook, but, even if it weren't set to “friends only,” I doubt that there's much there. He'd joined various other sites, sometimes with a photo or birth date or graduation year, but seems to have not done much with any of them beyond registering.

Noticing the user names hidden in the URLs of his generic, uninformative reunion-site pages, I'm able to find a little more, like dating-site profiles.

He hasn't filled out much information on those either, just age, photo, and that he lived in Brooklyn. On one, he wrote “lets get to fuckin . . .” On another, he was slightly less direct, but still succinct: “fun lighthearted and ready for action. I'm here to meet not chat for ever, if you don't want to meet don't hit my profile.”

It makes me queasy to see his past attempts at trawling for sex. I wonder if he's the kind of person who rapes to get the sex he wants, not caring if the woman struggles, or if the struggle is part of the attraction for him, part of the satisfaction. In Bill's notes, I can see that Fryar treated me like a pickup at first.

After he caught the door behind me, my hope had been that he lived in my building, and that I'd just happened to never see him before. I'd wanted to be polite, not make superficial assumptions that he was unlikely to be from this neighborhood. According to the file notes, I'd asked him:

                
[Victim]: “Do you live here?”

                
[Actor]: “Yes, haven't you seen me around?”

                
V: “No, what's your name?”

                
A: “Bob.”

I remember that now. I think it's weird that I never wrote about his calling himself that, or really even thought about it much. I must have never believed that it could possibly be his real name. Fryar does have a known alias, according to the original arrest reports in the news: “Butch Johnson,” which I suppose could have yielded interesting information on the Internet, but there's a football player who has that name, and his career, including two Super Bowls, obscures whatever Fryar might have done while calling himself that.

                
V: “Mine's Emily.”

                
A: “Is that your apartment?”

It took me a while to figure this out. I remember that this conversation took place just inside the front door, not upstairs near my door, so what was the “that” that he was asking about? I think I was stalling by fiddling with my mailbox. I didn't want to lead him upstairs. So, from the mailbox, he must have seen my apartment number. That explains how he knew where to hide upstairs, to be able to jump me. Before I discovered this in the notes, I'd wondered if he'd watched me earlier from outside, seen me through a window. I can't remember if I was careful about curtains or not, or if I even had them. Turns out that I should have been more careful about my mailbox.

                
V: “Yes.”

                
A: “Do you invite friends to your apartment?”

                
V: “No, I'm just polite.”

                
A: “What about a husband?”

                
V: “That's private.”

I find it interesting that I didn't lie, which might have protected me. It's pretty obvious that anything other than “Yes, and he's up
stairs waiting for me” would mean that I lived alone. But I've found that even experienced liars will balk at deviating too far from what is either true or prepared. If you take things in a direction that they haven't planned for, you'll often get the truth, or at least a lie that's red-flaggingly weird, because they're being sort of truthful.

“Bob” seemed to just want to have sex with me, seemed he would have been happy with my saying “Sure! Come on up.” If I'd invited him up with me, would that have satisfied what he was after? Or was he glad that I said no, so that he would have the pleasure of overpowering me? The times he's had a girlfriend, did he still rape people? Or was it only in dry spells?

Maybe
yes
and
no
were each desirable to him in their own ways.
Yes
would have flattered him and stroked his ego, but
no
was a chance to push back against past rejections or against self-loathing in his own mind. The context in which he'd approached me was completely outside of social norms and seemingly designed to get a negative response, which I think may have been the point. I think he was already angry, and getting me to say no gave him the opportunity to hurt me.

But this wasn't a beating; this was violence via sex, and it baffled me. What could anyone possibly enjoy about it? Rape seems like it would be awful for the person doing it. It takes me years to think of one possible turn-on:

Fighting against my
no
gave him the opportunity for total control. Consensual sex is a mutual thing, an improvisation created by responding to one's partner's actions and reactions. The only way for him to have total command of the experience, to force it into his exact specifications, was to neutralize my autonomy. Saying
yes
would have made me a wild, unpredictable partner with personality and preferences influencing and maybe even surprising him. Even consensual surrender would have retained an element of control for myself, just by being offered freely. By creating a situation in which
I resisted and he conquered, he was able to direct our interaction entirely. He was able to ensure that he got exactly what he wanted.

So he got just that, utter dominance through a mechanical enactment of only exactly what he'd choreographed beforehand in his mind, which turned out to be pretty bare and pathetic. I don't mean that vanilla sex is pathetic; the basics can be delightful and satisfying without remarkable elaboration. But the machinelike lack of exchange in his ideal fantasy, the lack of communication and response and discovery, is sad. Total control is by definition pitifully narrow. One of the great joys of life is being surprised by other people's generosity and individuality, though I suppose that's easy for me to say. I have been treated kindly for most of my life.

Georgia and I aren't the only ones Fryar attacked. Besides the seventies rape, there's the University of Pittsburgh student who the police suspect he may have gone after just three days before me, and who was asked, like me, “Do you wanna die?” Later, Aprill's told me, another woman got away from Fryar by biting him. Neither of these two women can prosecute him now, because they don't have DNA evidence with which to override the statute of limitations.

They're lucky that they didn't get to that stage. I remember once a teacher in the drama department drove me home on a rainy day, when I was a senior. She said that someone once broke into her house and she scared him away, so she knows
exactly how I feel
. I was too shocked to correct her.

Mostly the Internet just gives me years: his birth and high school graduation, and various years of incarceration.

If he is indeed a disabled veteran, his military service likely fits within the five years between graduating high school and his rape conviction in Orange County, New York, in 1977.

He was in Sing Sing from 1977 to 1984, and then I have nothing for the next three years.

Honan's told me that Fryar lived in Pittsburgh from 1987 to 2002. I have no idea why he went there, and I see no connections. None of his Facebook friends appear to be in Pittsburgh, or even anywhere in Pennsylvania. More athletes get in the way of my Googling: a baseball player for the Pittsburgh Pirates has his last name; as does a football player, who never played for the Steelers but played against them enough that he clutters my results, too. Maybe the Pittsburgh years are when Arthur Fryar was Butch Johnson.

From 2002 to 2005, he was in prison in Otisville, New York (again, upstate), for selling drugs. That's when his DNA got put in the system.

In 2005, he was released and made his way south to New York City. This is also when he appeared to discover the Internet. In 2005, he registered with a reunion site as living in Long Island City, and I find an address for him that matches a Salvation Army veterans' shelter. In 2009, he changed his location on the site to Brooklyn. Records indicate that he shared an apartment address with a woman for at least part of his years there.

The Brooklyn period was when he was on the dating sites I found, and also on Twitter to promote an unsuccessful auction business. He attempted to flirt with an
X
Factor
contestant, and whined about a fake lottery scam that must have briefly taken him in. That's also probably when he put himself on the “talent” site where I found most of his photos. He didn't follow through with that either. There's no evidence on his profile of his getting any work from the site. His only film credit on IMDb is as an extra in the coming-soon indie movie
Free the Nipple,
about the right of women to go topless in public.

The Brooklyn address is where they arrested him in September, so that's his whole life, sketched. I want more: some detail, some color.

I look harder.

When I moved back to my parents' house in New Jersey in 1994, I spent a fair amount of time in New York City. Most of my college friends were there, too, attempting the career that we had trained for. I had abandoned acting and was in graduate school, volunteering at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as my internship, first in Rare Books and then in Egyptian. I felt embarrassed that I no longer wanted what we had all wanted, and which my former classmates still wanted and some were achieving. I worried that they would think that I was cowardly for not even trying to audition for anything, but I enjoyed my quiet, orderly work. I was assigned the task of identifying all of the paintings in the museum that had books represented in them, as references for a history of bookbinding. I was left to answer the phones one day in the Egyptian department, and took a comically furtive call from an anxious lawyer who was trying to find out if it was legal for his client to inherit a mummy.

One day while commuting into the city, I saw an article in the newspaper about a rape similar to mine. I can't recall any details now. Honestly, it was probably only superficially similar, in the way that all rapes of a certain type are, but I was desperate. I had no reason then to believe that Fryar had moved to the New York area, just the idea that, well, he could have. I had; why not him, too?

I called the police in charge of that case, and arranged to meet a detective. My friend Kali waited with me, and she brought me a single pink peony. It was the first time I'd ever seen a peony, such a delightfully alien flower. When the detective met me on the famous steps of the museum, in front of its enormous banners, he was undercover, not in a uniform or suit. He looked, I think, like a stereotype of a biker. I wasn't what he'd expected to see either. I'm not sure why. I remember at the time seeing the surprise on his face, and assuming that he thought I wasn't pretty enough for someone to have bothered raping. Nothing came of the meeting; they took my information and presumably it's noted in a file somewhere.

I kept checking in with Pittsburgh every couple of years, phoning the sex-crimes number and having to introduce myself to new detectives. It was on the call that I made from California, shortly after marrying Gavin and moving to Silicon Valley for his job in 1998, that I was told that my statute of limitations had passed. No one had ever told me that there even was a limit.

After that, I began to research statutes of limitations. They're state laws, all different, so there's no simple way to make countrywide change. I e-mailed a Pennsylvania politician; no reply. I contacted a national rape organization, asking what was being done about statutes of limitations, in terms of lobbying or even just collecting information, and the answer I got was that nothing was being done. I volunteered to be part of an effort, but it didn't get off the ground.

Later, from my new home in England, I called Pittsburgh sex crimes again. That's when I got Dan Honan. I told him that I just
wanted to know who it was. I knew that the district attorney couldn't prosecute, that too much time had passed, but please could he just get my evidence kit tested, and the results plugged into CODIS, the FBI's database of criminal DNA? I offered to pay for it, which it turns out isn't allowed. I brought up the recently convicted East End rapist, but he didn't think that my crime was similar enough. I bothered him several times. He finally asked the district attorney's office, and they said they'd authorize it if I'd promise to testify, traveling at my own expense, if a match was made. I didn't understand then, and I'm not sure if Dan did either, that the new law to override the statute of limitations was already in place. I assumed that they meant for me to testify in support of someone else's charges against him, perhaps to show a pattern, or to get a longer sentence.

I waited. This is what kills me with Aprill thinking that I'm not patient. I was patient, mostly because I found phoning the sex-crimes office to be really stressful. No one at that point had given me an e-mail address.

Later, much later, after a span measured in months at least and possibly over a year, I called back, to see if my evidence had made it to the lab. Dan was surprised to hear from me. He'd assumed that I was dealing with the DA's office. I have no idea why he thought that. At any rate, his contact who had agreed to authorize testing my kit had left. I was back to begging again. At least he gave me his e-mail this time around; I find writing to be easier.

It was shortly after that that Arthur Fryar was arrested for Georgia's rape and Dan told me of the likely connection to mine. I clicked links. I found the news stories.

I'm convinced that the Internet still has more to tell me.

I Google “serial rapists psychology.” Apparently there are several types, as coined by Dr. Nicholas Groth in the seventies and ex
panded upon today. My kind, the “power reassurance rapist,” is insecure and feels powerless. Rape gives him a moment of the authority that he craves. These men only use force as much as is necessary to control the victim, not beyond. They're not sadists; threat, pain, and actual harm are tools, not ends. Some sources prefer to override the clunky “power reassurance” title and substitute instead the ridiculous and inflammatory phrase “gentleman rapist.” I remember one of the detectives at the hospital, I think Bill, calling him that right in front of me.

Another feature of power reassurance rapists is that they sometimes fantasize, as best they can, that there is a form of relationship, a sort of kindness at play that the victim may resist now but will appreciate later. I remember when Fryar was done he told me, gently, to rest. He didn't do anything to prevent me from being able to call the police as he must have known I would as soon as he left. He asked me not to, but didn't threaten me or take my phone (I mean unplug my landline from the wall; cell phones had just barely been invented). He didn't restrain me; he'd gotten what he wanted; he was done with me. He left me on the floor.

I wonder where he went. How did he hide from the prowling police? There were a lot of busy restaurants just a block away, but I have trouble picturing him dining out. He must have been awfully keyed up, maybe even hyper, high on his victory.

Maybe he was sad, though. Maybe after it's done, all the urgent feelings used up, it doesn't seem worth it.

Maybe he was scared. Maybe he saw the police looking, and didn't have the money to get a restaurant table. Maybe he hid between houses or in the aisles of a drugstore, trying hard to look small and uninteresting but sweating under his clothes and unable to focus.

No one's ever going to tell me, so I pick the one I like: I pick scared. I hope he's been scared, for twenty-two years, of what's finally happening now.

I explain the sentencing possibilities to a friend, and what can affect the number, like the Offense Gravity Score, the Prior Record Score, all of that. She latches on to something I hadn't thought of, something that the justice system doesn't use but should: how long he's gotten away with it. She says that he should have to serve, at minimum, the number of years that he's had free after committing the crime. Those are years he never should have had at all. He owes them. We should start with twenty-two and add from there.

Evan's told me that they're ordering only the “disposition” of the old rape from New York, meaning the summarized result, not the full court transcript. I try to order the transcript for myself.

The only information I've found online is meager and contradictory. One New York database lists his arrest year as 1984, while another lists that as his year of release from prison. One implies a town called Orange as the place of arrest, the other Orange County. I phone both. The woman at the Orange County Clerk's Office seems at first officious and bored with me, reciting instructions on how to request a search: in writing, $2.50 per search year. I decide to search through a decade, 1975 to 1985.

If I'm lucky, this search will get me the number of the case, which I can then use to request a transcript from the court. I hastily scribble notes in my terrible handwriting, trying to get everything right, to think of everything I need to ask. Can they send me the result by e-mail? No? Oh. Well, I can enclose a self-addressed envelope, and I can use the U.S. address of a friend, but I don't have any U.S. stamps for it. I do have an American checkbook; maybe we could add the cost of postage to the check I'll be writing anyway? “I'm calling,” I explain, “from England.”

The words are magic. Just as saying “DNA sample” to the police had automatically triggered their cautious, calming, sex-crimes mode, saying that I'm calling from England now mobilizes the
newly friendly woman on the other end of the phone. There will be none of this in-writing request making. She puts me on hold and goes to find the crime for me then and there.

I don't know if she trawls through a database or through file cabinets, but after a little while she returns, having hurried, to save me money on long-distance charges. She's victorious: Arthur Fryar, aka Frank Fryar (so that's what his middle initial
F
stands for), arrested in 1976, which fits with his 1977 entrance to Sing Sing and with 1984 as his year of release. She gives me the case's number and transfers me to criminal court.

The bureaucrat at Orange County's criminal court is snappish and annoyed. She finds no such case. I suggest that perhaps the database in front of her doesn't go back that far, and she shuts me down. I call the county clerk's office again. She, the nice lady, calls criminal court herself.

I hold for ages. When she comes back, she tells me that she got nowhere with the court lady either. So, she promises to find me the case file herself. “It may be just the disposition. There might not be any minutes. Is the disposition okay? What do you want it for?”

“I'd really like the minutes, the transcript, if you can,” I answer. “It's—it's personal.” I'd already decided not to explain who I am in relationship to the case, and had toyed with the idea of saying I'm a journalist, which is sort of true. In the end, “personal” is what pops out. That explanation is truthful, suggestive, and effective. She knows that it's a rape case.

She says that I should call back in a week, on Good Friday. They'll be open. Her name is Mary. She'll find me whatever she can.

This same day that Mary is kind to me, I submit my Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. military's National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. I use Gavin's name and his work address in Massachusetts, in case there may be some policy of letting those being researched know who requested their information.

I'm not hopeful of getting a result. Most of the information they require in the request, like “branch of service,” is the information I'm trying to find. All I have is his name and birthday, and some good guesses, like that he probably enlisted in his high school graduation year, 1972, somewhere near his high school town, and that he must have returned home from service sometime before the rape four years later.

1976. I've always liked that year, because of the Bicentennial, which marked two hundred years since America declared itself a country, no longer a colony. I remember the specially minted quarters, that Fourth-of-July feeling all year long. My mom gave my sister and me each a silk scarf with an image of the Declaration of Independence on it, and showed us where to find our ancestor's signature. For most of that year I was six years old.

I don't know how old Fryar's then-victim was. He pleaded to second-degree rape, which now means a victim under fourteen, but it might not have meant that then. I don't think he's a pedophile; he wouldn't have wanted twenty-two-year-old me if he was.

Fryar would have been twenty-four in 1976, presumably recently returned from military service. Strong. Trained to fight.

I realize that perhaps Fryar didn't enlist. He might have been drafted. It took me this long to consider that possibility because no one in my family, immediate or extended, had been the right age for Vietnam, which had left me oblivious. My father's father had been en route to serve in France when World War I ended; my mother had been born into Nazi Germany. There had been war in my family tree, but that was all before I was born. We were unaffected by Vietnam.

If Fryar had been drafted, he would have been assigned his number on August 5, 1971, just before the start of his senior year of high school. That was when the government randomly matched
the numbers 1 through 366 (365 + 1 for the leap year) with all of the birth dates for men born in 1952, for possible draft in 1972. Fryar's birthdate, March 19, was assigned the number 53. The draft would start with the men whose birth date had matched with the number 1 and go up from there. It wasn't clear each year how many numbers would be gotten through, just that the low numbers were likely to be called up and that numbers in triple digits were safer. Of 1972's potential draft groups, President Nixon called through number 95, more than 49,000 young men.

Of the seven infantry training centers I see listed for draftees, the nearest to Fryar would have been Fort Dix, New Jersey, just a little over an hour down the Turnpike from my hometown. I would have been two years old when a drafted Fryar was in basic training. For all Fort Dix's nearness, I can't recall ever knowing even one active military person while I was growing up, not even any friend's sibling. My dad had been in the navy before I was born, before he met my mom, but not as a career, just as a rite of passage, like his Ivy League undergrad years and law school. He'd asked for combat duty during the Korean War but had been kept stateside.

The draft lottery was suspended in 1973. If the draft is how Fryar ended up in the military, he was among the last of those forced.

I'd been completely protected from all of this. I wasn't just sheltered by the fact that I was a toddler; the margin around me was bigger than that. The news about it was never on in our house. None of my friends' moms were widows, at least that I knew of. There's nothing that I noticed then, or can recall now with hindsight, that was in any way touched by that war. I remember being surprised, when I got older and learned about Vietnam as history, to discover that it had happened while I was alive.