Jane Doe January (13 page)

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the bare bones of Fryar's military record have arrived, revealing him to have been in the air force starting in August 1972. My research tells me that the air force didn't take draftees, so he must have volunteered, possibly to avoid being drafted into a situation more likely to see combat, which was a common tactic. If that was his goal, he made a good choice. He never left the United States. I've been reserving some sympathy in case he'd had some traumatizing Vietnam experience, but no: he was an airman basic at Lackland in Texas and at Chanute in Illinois. He received the National Defense Service Medal for being on active duty during wartime, and was discharged in May 1974 without ever leaving the country.

Staten Island has sent me the “Appearance History” for Fryar's drug case with them. It's a several-page printout listing every time the case was put before the Richmond County Supreme Court.

One date stands out to me, at the top of the first page. It says that he was arrested (presumably the arrest for dealing) on August 27, 1986, then “INC” on December 22 that same year. “Incarcerated”? Maybe. That December date sticks out because it was also my sixteenth birthday. I'd had a bigger party than usual, “sweet sixteen,” with three dozen friends over my house for soda and cake. That night was the first time I ever French-kissed. Fryar was thirty-four then, and his apartment was only a half-hour drive away from me.

The documents are full of abbreviations and acronyms that I don't understand. Only gradually, with the help of Gavin and Google, do the New York legal system hieroglyphs become words to me. I still don't understand all of it, but this is what I do get:

Fryar's Staten Island address is an apartment building that I learn is in an area that was nicknamed “Crack Hill.”

The charges for that one 1986 incident include dealing, multiple counts of possession, and “criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree.”

Fryar finally paid bail in June 1987, and was released until sentencing. July 23, his sentencing, is marked “BFWO,” which means “Bail Forfeited, Warrant Ordered.” He didn't show up. That's when he got away.

The dates then jump nine years, to 1996. Between April and October of that year, Fryar's sentencing was attempted seven times. It kept being adjourned and rescheduled, until it finally succeeded on Halloween, assigning him three to six years.

He was, understandably, held without bail during this sentencing process (the abbreviation “RE” indicates “remand”), so it's a mystery why I can't find a prison record for this crime until six years later. But there's something even more interesting to me here, given that I'm waiting for news from Fryar's public defender, who seems to be avoiding Evan.

It's a Latin phrase in the header which I had to Google:
pro se.
Just below that, there's an “attorney summary,” which I had assumed at first to be a style of summary meant for attorneys to read. Gavin figured out that it's actually a summary of the attorneys defending Fryar. I can be forgiven for my confusion; Fryar himself is listed twice. Apparently, in 1996 and again in 2005, he represented himself. That's what
pro se
means.

Another Pittsburgh rapist did that last year, represented himself in court, and cross-examined his own victims. If Fryar's proposing to do that, maybe that's why his defense is stalling.

I hate possibilities. I hate not knowing. This is when I have to repeat it:
choose life, choose life
. Accept being in the middle of things. Not knowing means that there's more to happen, good things, too, things so good that I can't even think of them. This is what I struggled for on the floor of my Shadyside apartment: being alive.

Evan, on his way to a training out of state, e-mails me from the plane; he doesn't want for me to have to wait to hear: Fryar's attorney is filing for a postponement.

It's almost midnight here. I was about to go to bed, but suddenly can't sleep. My flights and hotel will have to be canceled. My passport, which is nearing expiry and which I've been holding off renewing until just after the June trial, will need to be dealt with to accommodate the new date. My expectations will need recalibrating. Friends will need to be told.

Evan sends a second e-mail only minutes after the first. He doesn't yet know much, but the delay is not, as we had supposed it would be, for bringing in a DNA expert. It's for a psychiatric evaluation. I reply with bafflement and questions.

The last thing that Evan writes to me before I go to sleep is that the evaluation likely isn't for an insanity defense; Fryar's probably just investing in a future argument for mitigation at sentencing. I think, given Fryar's avoidance of extradition back in the fall, that realistically it's just a delay tactic.

I e-mail Evan back that he should prod Fryar's defense to get a DNA expert now as well, because I don't want to have to put up with new delays later. Fryar waiting for the DNA test results—same as the results we'd already had—as a prompt for requesting this evaluation was game-playing anyway. He could have started the ball rolling weeks ago, no delay required.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

I wake up angry.

Ever since the calendar ticked over to May, I've felt the imminence of the trial, its nearness. It's not just my emotions that had tensed up and not just my mind that got distracted; it was my body, too, taut and buzzing with readiness. I want trial, and I want to get on the other side of it, not for it to dangle forever in the distance in front of me, like a rainbow.

Changing this date is bigger than canceling a few reservations. There's a lot that we've built around this, kid things and work things. More than that, I've divided my life into
before
and
after
. Now
before
is stretching out further, perhaps much further, and the
after,
with all its plans for becoming normal again, is suddenly a long way off. I don't think I can sustain this level of intense preparedness, but neither can I just drop it, knowing that the trial is, in fact, going to come, even if only eventually.

Maybe Fryar just likes the power, just likes messing with the system. They've given him these rights and he's going to use them, just because he can. It's probably useless to read any strategy into this, practical or psychological. He has to know that the outcome is always going to be the same, eventually. Maybe he's not thinking long term at all. Maybe he's just thinking,
I can affect this,
and that feels good.

There's an addendum of “motions” in the Staten Island appearance history that began as early as November 1995. Five times, there's a motion for “reassignment of counsel” that's adjourned; the sixth one is granted. This might have been Fryar demanding the right to represent himself when the drug case caught up to him, or might have been him nitpicking the quality of his public defender. Three times he tried to withdraw his 1987 guilty plea (the motion was ultimately denied), and after it was all over he tried and failed to vacate the judgment and then the sentence.

This present request for postponement shouldn't surprise me. There will be more.

Just as we're about to pull out of our driveway, to take the boys to drama and yoga, our mail is delivered. I notice a large envelope in our postperson's grip and wave to her. She pulls back from the slot in our door and instead hands our mail to me through the car window. The return address on the big envelope from New York is stamped “Orange County.” I've been waiting for this.

This is Fryar's first conviction, for the rape in 1976. He was twenty-four, two years out of the military, unemployed, and living in Newburgh, his mother's hometown, across the river from his hometown of Beacon. The stack of pages is half an inch thick.

Compared to Richmond County's terse summary of their case with him, the full records of which have been destroyed, the variety and detail Orange County has photocopied for me is astonishing, not least because their case is much older. Besides the many legal pages that I've only glanced over and so can't yet classify, there are
the victim's medical records from that night, signed by her mother because she was only seventeen (not a preteen, as the current definition of “second-degree rape,” the charge he ended up pleading to, had implied). They include a disconcerting “rape examination form” with check boxes for the state of her hymen (options for “intact,” “not intact,” or “traumatized”) and vaginal orifice (“virginal” or “marital”).

Most shocking, there's Fryar's detailed confession, apparently given to police voluntarily right after it happened, over an hour before the girl and her mother reported it at the hospital. Part of his confession includes that they had been smoking pot together, which perhaps partly contributed to his extraordinary decision to turn himself in.

He's not panicked-seeming in the typed words, nor sorry-seeming. After being officially advised of all his rights, he waives them.

His description is stilted, like mine on the stand at the hearing. Perhaps, like me, he was advised to be listlike and unambiguous in his official statement, which presumably followed a more spontaneous, and possibly more emotional, confession. Perhaps on top of that the person typing his statement exacerbated the formal tone in how he or she took it down. Fryar dictated to the officer (all spellings and style sic):

Between the hours of 9:45PM and 10:30PM on 9-8-76 I picked up a young Lady on the corner of Renwick Street and William Street. We rode around looking for a friend, we rode around for a couple of hours getting high, we were just talking about a whole lot of different things. We rode around Newburgh and then we went down to Front Street. We were there about a half hour whene I made advances, trying to kiss her and feeling her all over her body. Then a struggle broke
out with me trying to force my will upon her and her trying to ward me off. She got the door of my car open and we struggled outside. From fear she struggled harder and I hit her a couple of times and knocked her down. Before we struggled out of the car I took her pantie hose and panties off. I think I tore the pantie hose. After I knocked her down I pulled my pants down around my thighs and then I layed on top of her. Then I proceeded to have intercourse with her.

He's weirdly objective and fair, describing her resistance in a way that accepts it as reasonable and to be expected. The act is unabashedly made clear to be forced. There's no pretense that the encounter was consensual, deserved, or unimportant. Neither do I see any pride or bragging; nor the opposite, guilt or shame.

                    
Q. Arthur, when you first started to kiss this girl and feel her did she resist in anyway?

                    
A. She just said Don't do that and Stop.

                    
Q. Did the girl resist when you started to remove her pantie hose and panties?

                    
A. Yes.

                    
Q. How did she resist?

                    
A. She started pushing me away and saying Stop and Don't.

                    
Q. When you say that you hit her outside of the car, in what way did you hit her?

                    
A. Closed hand, fist.

                    
Q. Did you hit her hard enough to knock her unconsious?

                    
A. Yes, but she didn't go unconsious.

                    
Q. Did you stun her when you hit her?

                    
A. Yes.

                    
Q. After you hit this girl and she fell to the ground, did she [illegible—probably “resist”] you in any other way?

                    
A. No.

                    
Q. Could she resist?

                    
A. I think if she wanted to she could have but I think she probably felt the safest thing to do was be cool.

What he describes feels eerily familiar to me. I wasn't in a car with him, and he smothered me instead of punching me, but her story feels just the same, in its essence. I, too, felt that the “safest thing” was to “be cool.” He communicated that very clearly.

                    
Q. Do you know this girl's name or have you ever met her before?

                    
A. Her name is [redacted]. I've never met her before to talk to but I have seen her a couple of times.

                    
Q. Why did you pick [her] up at William Street and Renwick Street?

                    
A. Because she was there.

So she was Mount Everest, and so was I.

He doesn't describe her at all. He doesn't seem angry at or disgusted with her, nor does he speak of her as any sort of prize. It's the raping itself that drives him, not the particular women.

I no longer need an allocution or explanation. It's simple: he's a machine that does this, and I was there. That's all.

At a sentencing proceeding nine months after this confession, Fryar's attorney argued for leniency. Fryar didn't get any, beyond what the court had already allowed, which was letting him plead to a lesser version of the charge, second degree (which back then must have had nothing to do with the victim being a child).

The attorney argued, among other things, that Fryar's unblemished record, and his behavior immediately after the crime, war
ranted a lesser sentence (where the defense attorney's words are cut off on my photocopy, I've made my best guesses):

The Defendant advised me that after the [inci-]

dent occurred he sat with her, talking for a [period]

of time and most significantly was at the Pol[ice]

Station before she was. He did not try to ru[n away]

to avoid any sort of responsibility. As a ma[tter]

of fact, when he was at the Police Station th[e]

police officers practically asked him to leav[e]

until they had a complaint. He went there a[nd]

gave a written statement.

I have no idea why Fryar did that. There must have been some sense of guilt, or at least some understanding that what he did is supposed to be punished. I've referred to this crime before as his first
convicted
rape, not his first rape, because who knows when he started? But, reading all of this, I'm inclined to believe that this one could well have been his first, surprising even him.

Fryar switched from confession to resistance sometime before sentencing. In hope of leniency, his defense attorney noted about the Probation Report:

I know they refer to him being [non-]

chalant about his prospect of incarceration b[ut]

certainly not in this case. This defendant d[oes]

not want to go to Jail.

He's been trying to get away with his crimes ever since.

The most surprising thing that I find in this envelope is the solution to the Richmond County mystery: How is it that he was in
court in Staten Island in the middle of his Pittsburgh years, and only served the Staten Island sentence much later?

The answer is that he was in prison in Pennsylvania.

In November 1995, at the same time that he started tangling again with Richmond County over that drug sentence that he'd run away from years before, he sent a request to Orange County from inside Somerset prison, a newly built, medium-security, all-male, Pennsylvania facility, where he was serving three and a half to seven years. If he served the whole thing, that would explain why he didn't start his New York drug sentence until 2002. Petitioning from prison also explains why he was representing himself at that point. It wasn't because of an urge to stand up in court.

His typed requests from Somerset superficially look as good as the rest of the legal paperwork in this little stack of his history, even though, according to the declaration at the top of his 1976 confession, he'd had only eleven years of education (which explains his absence as a grade-twelve senior in the Beacon High School yearbook).

I don't understand why he was involving Orange County, where he'd already served his time for the '76 rape long ago. His request was that Orange County send him copies of all of his records, for free, because he couldn't afford to pay for them and required them for a Post-Conviction Hearing Act petition. He appears to have been appealing the old rape conviction, possibly in an effort to apply those years already served to his upcoming drug sentence? That's the only reason I can think of to make it worth his while, though I'm not sure that that's even possible.

My interest in the minutiae of his life is waning. I've now fit all of the big pieces together: his youth in Beacon up to age twenty; the air force for two years; rape in Newburgh and seven years in Sing Sing; drug dealing in Staten Island leading to the life of a fugitive in Pittsburgh; up to seven years' prison in Somerset, Pennsylvania; three years' prison in Otisville, New York; Long Island City; Brooklyn; now.

With all of those stepping-stones now solid enough and close enough together for me to cross the whole distance, I feel like I've at last arrived at the present. Onward.

Dan tells me—but only when I specifically ask, using the information that I'd found for myself—that Fryar's Somerset prison sentence was for a 1994 burglary, and confirms that Fryar indeed did serve the maximum sentence, from July 1995. That must have been some creepy burglary to get seven years.

I've always assumed that “burglary” has to do with theft, but it doesn't; it's entering a private or secured place with the intent to commit a crime, with higher charges for the place being a home and/or for someone being present. For example, one of Fryar's charges for me is burglary. I suppose that this 1994 burglary could have been the prelude to a rape, but the woman turned it around. I can't even picture that. I don't know what it would look like, not in a situation like mine. Aprill confirms to me that this is the case she had mentioned where the woman bit him, which I hadn't dared to do. I was already trapped and it would only have made him angry. Maybe she wasn't in as small a space with him as I was, or was closer to an escape route or other people. Maybe she was just stronger and faster than me; good for her.

It must have been this Pennsylvania incarceration that triggered Staten Island's finding him in the midnineties. It also explains why it wasn't until June 2002, when he got out of Pennsylvania's Somerset prison, that he began his Staten Island drug sentence in New York's Otisville.

Dan and Aprill knew this all along, the Pennsylvania part, but I didn't. Pennsylvania doesn't have searchable online databases for incarceration and criminal histories like New York does, not that I was able to find, not open to the anonymous public. But there had been an even bigger wall between me and what I'd wanted to know.

The detectives had only ever offered me generalities, and I'd had to be careful about seeming too persistent. People worry when I show too much of an interest. I didn't want them to think of me as neurotic or unbalanced. When I asked anything, I had to inquire carefully, with subterfuge or a flurry of explanations. It reminds me of when my brother counts cards in Vegas. Whenever he's going to do something that goes against the superficially expected, he justifies it with a joke about “lucky numbers” or something, so that the dealer won't be left with the only other explanation: counting, which is against house rules. Then, after he's won a little, he leaves the table, even switches casinos, to win a little more.

That's what it feels like I have to do: never ask too much of any one person, act blasé, distract. I'm not supposed to want to know these things.

Now I know enough:

Beacon, New York, 1952–1972

Air force, Lackland and Chanute, 1972–1974

Newburgh, New York, 1974–1977 (September 1976—his first rape?)

Incarcerated (Sing Sing) 1977–1984

Staten Island, New York, 1984–1987

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1987–1995

Incarcerated (Somerset) 1995–2002

Incarcerated (Otisville) 2002–2005

Long Island City and Brooklyn, New York, 2005–2013

I feel like I did the day after W. was born. All my life I'd wanted kids. When we got engaged, I warned Gavin that, two years from then when I turned thirty, it would be “baby time.” After we had S., I didn't want him to be an “only”; I needed another. Then, four years later, while I was lounging in the hospital bed with one-day-
old W., the urge evaporated. I was satisfied. For literally the first time in my life, I didn't want future children. I had literally never before been without the desire for as-yet-unknown-babies; but, suddenly, I had what I wanted and was done.