Entombed

8

"Raise your right hand, place your left hand on the Bible, please. Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"

Darra Goldswit answered me. "I do."

I was standing at the back of the room, behind the two tiers of seats in which twenty of the twenty-three grand jurors were arrayed in amphitheatrical fashion, facing the witness. To my left sat the foreman and his assistant, along with the secretary. The stenographer was seated beside the young woman to record every word spoken.

I had tried to calm Darra by assuring her there would be no surprises at this proceeding. The defendant had no right to be present. There was no defense attorney to cross-examine her. The questions I had reviewed with her would likely be the only ones she had to answer, unless I left out something relevant that a juror caught at the end of my presentation. I had done this enough times to be confident that would not happen.

Two of the young lawyers from the unit had asked to sit in as observers, and the warden leaned against the door, interested in the charges that I had submitted on the slip of paper I had filed with him earlier in the day.

"Would you tell the jurors, please, what your name is and where you live?"

"Darra Goldswit. I live in New Jersey now. I moved there from Manhattan."

"I'm going to direct your attention to March eighth," I said, giving her the date of her attack, emphasizing that it had occurred almost five years ago. There was audible murmuring among the jurors now, as they did exactly what I had reminded them was improper just moments ago. They nodded and winked at each other, puffing up with pride as the one grand jury among six that was getting to decide the front-page news.

"How old are you now?"

"Twenty-seven. I turned twenty-seven earlier this month."

"Are you employed?"

"Yes. I'm the assistant to the manager of public relations at Madison Square Garden. I've worked in that office since I graduated from college six years ago." Smart, stable, responsible- qualities all summarized in a job description and title. A trial jury would get more detail, but in these bare bones presentations, this would do the trick.

"Can you tell us what you did on the evening of March eighth?"

"Certainly." I could see that her hands were trembling slightly as she kept them clasped on the table in front of her. "I was at the Garden that evening. There was a special event, a basketball game with professional athletes who were raising money for charity. I had to stay at my office until the event ended, shortly after midnight."

"Did you leave the Garden alone?"

"No, no, I didn't. My boss had a car service waiting to take him home. It picked us up on Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue." She pressed her fingers tightly together. "He was tired and wanted to get home to his apartment on Park Avenue, so he asked me if it was okay to drop me at the corner of Park and Seventy-sixth Street. It was about oneA.M."

I could have started my questions at the front door of her building, but wanted this jury to hear that this victim, unlike several of the others targeted by the rapist, had not been walking from a neighborhood bar or coming from a party.

"I lived between First and Second back then, so I just walked east on Seventy-sixth Street."

"Did you talk to anyone on the way?"

"No. I didn't see a soul."

"What happened next?"

"My building's a brownstone. I climbed the six steps with my key in my hand. I stopped to unlock the door, and just as I opened it I felt this body on my back-suddenly, out of nowhere."

She paused to compose herself. "His left arm was around my neck and he was holding a really sharp object-I couldn't see it but I could feel it sticking into my neck. That was in his right hand. I-I froze. He was talking the whole time, really softly. 'Don't scream and you won't get hurt. I don't want to cut you. I just want your money.' He kept pushing me inside until he could close the door behind us."

Jurors were slinking down in their seats, all of them staring in Darra's direction. They were fidgeting as they watched her try to calm herself. This would be the hard part, I had warned her. Looking twenty-three strangers in the eye and telling them the story of the most intimate assault one human could commit upon another.

"What did he do next, Darra?"

"I handed him my pocketbook and he told me to keep walking. He pushed again, this time toward the staircase, and told me to go upstairs." She stopped. "I wouldn't move."

"Did he say anything else?"

"Yes," she answered, nodding her head. "'Go upstairs or I'll kill you.'"

She stopped to take a breath and most of the jurors seemed to hold theirs.

"He dug the knife into my neck then. I, um, we went up slowly, 'cause he wouldn't take his arm away from my throat, and when we got to the landing at the top he handed me back my bag and told me to take out my wallet so he could count my money."

"What did you do?"

Darra looked away from me and the jurors, toward the clock on the wall. "I was stupid enough to believe that's what he wanted."

"Did you open your wallet?"

"Sorry. Yes, I did." Darra's head was down. "He slammed me into the wall and crushed my face against it while he went through my wallet. He wasn't looking for money-he never took a thing from me. He wanted my ID to see which apartment I lived in, 2D- it was right on my license. He said it out loud."

I waited for her to go on.

"Then he dragged me by my hair, still with the knife to my throat, up another flight and right to my apartment door. He made me open the door."

She was trying to talk even as the words got wrapped up in her tears. She was reliving the events and getting to the worst moment.

"Take a deep breath, Darra. Would you like to step outside?"

"I want to get this over with, Ms. Cooper," she said, shaking her head. "He made me open the door. I tried to beg him not to but he smacked my ear with the handle of the knife. He closed the door behind us and told me to get on the bed, and that's when he saw my fiancé."

"Where was your fiancé?"

"We had a studio apartment. Henry-Henry Tepper is his name. Henry was asleep in the bed, right next to the door."

"What did the man do?"

"He made me stand beside the bed, next to Henry," she said, now sitting on her hands and looking up at me. "He put the knife next to my eye. Like this."

"For the record, Ms. Goldswit is holding her finger against her left eye."

"Yeah, he was sticking the knifepoint in my eyelid. He handed me something. I couldn't tell what it was, 'cause my eyes were half closed. I looked down and it was panty hose."

"What happened next?" There weren't a lot of different ways to ask the questions that moved the story along and elicited all the elements of the crime.

"'Wake him up,' he said. I leaned over to touch Henry's arm and he woke up, sort of groggy. The guy told him that if he moved a muscle, the knife was going to go right into my eye." Darra leaned an elbow on the table and rested her forehead in her hand.

"What did Henry-?"

"He didn't do anything. He couldn't do anything. The guy made me tie his hands behind his back. I tried to do it loose but it wouldn't have mattered. He never took the knife away from my eye, so Henry never moved. Didn't say a word."

She described how the man made her undress and lie down next to Henry before he lowered his pants and straddled her. There were never more than five seconds that the blade of the knife was not next to her eyelid. When the attack was completed, the rapist used more hosiery to tie Darra's hands and feet, as well as tighten Henry's bonds. He ripped the telephone cord out of the wall and walked out the door of the apartment.

It took more than ten minutes before they could untie each other and pound on a neighbor's door to ask her to call the police.

I needed to establish that Darra had not recently had intercourse with Henry, to prove that he was not the source of the seminal deposits recovered. Her testimony ended with the hospital examination that yielded the sample for DNA analysis, through which her assailant would ultimately be identified.

"Did you sustain any injuries during the assault?"

"There were some scrapes and superficial marks on my face and neck, where the knife was poking me the whole time. Nothing that needed stitches or medical treatment."

"The man who attacked you, have you ever seen him again?"

"No, I have not."

"Thank you, Ms. Goldswit. I have no further questions. If there are-"

I had tried to make this clean and get out without irrelevant inquiries from jurors.

Two hands shot up to make it clear I had not succeeded.

I walked down the steps to juror number nine and he leaned over to ask me, "Where's Henry? What happened to Henry?"

Henry Tepper was not essential to my presentation, but since he had been an eyewitness to the assault on Darra-and himself a victim-it was natural that jurors would be curious about him. They didn't need to know that he had been unable to handle the guilt of not being able to prevent his fiancée from being raped- secondary victimization, as the shrinks called it. They didn't need to know that he had broken their engagement a month after the attack and moved back to Phoenix.

"When is the last time you spoke with Mr. Tepper?"

"Last night. I called him last night. I hadn't heard from him in a couple of years. He lives in Arizona now."

The gentleman who asked the question sat back, satisfied somehow to know that Henry was out of town, and out of Darra's life.

Juror number eleven was still waving frantically to me. I circled the front of the room to take her question before putting it on the record. "Is it still rape," the elderly woman asked, "even if she didn't fight the man? I mean, he didn't actually cut her with the knife, did he?"

It had been more than twenty years since the last of the archaic legal requirements had been stricken from the books. How is it that people still clung to these medieval attitudes? Well into the 1980s the law in New York State had demanded that sexual assault victims resist their attackers to the utmost, even when confronted with deadly physical force. Too many women were injured and killed resisting assailants who were armed and stronger than their prey.

"After the testimony is completed, I'm going to charge you on the specific elements of each of the crimes. I'll give you the definitions of every term used in the indictment." I would be telling this nitwit that the crime was accomplished if the sexual act was compelled by physical force, present here, or by the threat that placed either of the witnesses in fear of immediate death or serious physical injury. How much worse could it get than having a blade held against your eyelid, accompanied by threats to kill? "I expect it will be clearer to you then."

"Thank you, Ms. Goldswit. You may step out now."

The warden held open the door and she walked out. Mercer was waiting for Darra in the witness room. Like he had done dozens of other times over the years, he would take her back to my office and close the door, calming and reassuring her that those twelve minutes of discomfort would be worth the price of nailing the miserable bastard once we had him in our sights.

My next witness was Marie Travis, the serologist who had done the laboratory examination on the seminal fluid recovered from the body and bed linens of Darra Goldswit.

I took her through her training and credentials, and the duties she had performed for eight years at the forensic biology lab of the medical examiner's office.

"Four years ago were you assigned to the matter designated as the Manhattan Special Victims Squad pattern number five?"

"Yes, I was."

"And included in that group of investigations, is there the matter of Darra Goldswit, known by a particular forensic biology number?"

"Yes. That case was FB number 1334."

"Did you personally conduct the testing in this case?"

"Yes."

"Did you receive a rape evidence collection kit to examine in this matter?"

"Yes, that kit contained vaginal swabs and slides prepared with samples taken from sheets at the crime scene. Both items tested positive for the presence of semen, from which I was able to extract a sperm cell fraction."

"Were you able to determine a genetic profile from either of those samples?"

"Yes, from both of them, actually."

"What determinations did you make?"

"The DNA profile from the victim's vaginal vault was identical to that from the sample on her sheets."

"Did you compare that profile to others then entered in your data bank?"

"Our data bank was very small at that time, Ms. Cooper. We had just gone online several months earlier. I entered the profile but got no matches at that moment."

Darra's case was the earliest strike, to our knowledge, of the Silk Stocking Rapist, just weeks away from being lost to the statute of limitations.

"Did you undertake a statistical analysis to determine the probability of that profile appearing in the African-American population?"

"Yes, we knew from the victim's physical description of the assailant that he was a black man. We used the probability guidelines established by the National Research Council."

"In the African-American population, what are the odds of finding the exact profile that you identified and matched on the two samples in Ms. Goldswit's case?"

"We would find this, Ms. Cooper, only once-one time-in ninety-five billion African-Americans. We could put ninety-five billion men in one place, if we had a big enough room, and only one of them will fit this genetic profile."

Finding John Doe and pulling him out of that enormous haystack was the only major obstacle left in this operation.

I finished the questions I needed to prove the scientific aspect of the case, linking this crime scene evidence to the human phantom we were about to indict, and followed Marie from the jury room. She knew her way out of the courthouse, and I returned to read the definitions of the various crime categories charged and ask the grand jurors to vote.

When I left the room so they could deliberate, I found Mercer Wallace waiting at the warden's desk. "Got your vote?"

"Give them five minutes. The novelty of it will take them longer than usual."

"We've got a problem at Kennedy Airport. You can wait the jury out or come with me," he said, striding to the hallway.

"What-?"

"Annika Jelt's parents just landed. They've never been more than twenty miles away from their farm before. They don't have proper documentation and immigration won't let them into the country."