She Survived (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

BAD FEELINGS

It was Valentine’s Day.
Melissa Schickel found herself in a rough spot. She and her boyfriend weren’t getting along. The last time they talked, the conversation had not gone well. Melissa was thinking he wanted to end the relationship.

Melissa had a profound stubbornness about her that she’d learned to embrace—as opposed to grappling with—over the years. She understood who she was and did not fight it. On Valentine’s night, 1992, Melissa had gone out to a hockey game. As she sat and looked on, not paying too much attention to the play, she contemplated the idea of going out to one of the bars she and her boyfriend generally frequented. Maybe she’d run into him. They could talk things out.

“Don’t go,”
said a little voice in back of Melissa’s mind.

Her fear, deep down, was hitting the local hot spots and then running into the guy as he sat with his arm around another girl. It would be uncomfortable, to say the least. There would no doubt be a scene.

The guy had money. Melissa later described her socioeconomic status at that time as being “from the wrong side of the tracks.” In this way, she thought, they were not compatible. It would never work. She thought the relationship was doomed from the beginning.

“And I figured that was what came between us.”

She never went out to the bars that night. To forget about the guy not calling and the silence between the two of them, pigheaded Melissa got up the next morning and took off to Florida for a few weeks to visit family.

It was a nice little getaway in the middle of winter from a place—Indianapolis, Indiana—that could yield to snow piling up by the foot. In an age without cell phones and e-mail, Melissa never really considered not hearing from her boyfriend to be anything more than the two of them in a standoff. The time and space was good. She was hurt bad, but maybe this was the way it had to be.

She had no idea, of course, that the news awaiting her at home, after that brief visit to Florida, would alter her perception of life and how silence on another person’s part is not always what it seems.

CHAPTER 2

COLLISION COURSE

A life can
be altered in an instant. Melissa would learn this firsthand as she arrived back home from Florida and went about her life.

At “four feet, nine and a half inches,” Melissa knew how tall she was “exactly,” because she had recently auditioned for a spot at Disney. MGM Studios theme park had held open auditions to play various characters. Melissa made the cut. However, she was not tall enough to play the main “princess” character, so they offered her work at Disney World playing Mickey, Minnie, Chip, or Dale. Thus, exemplifying the word “petite,” at 105 pounds, Melissa was just a tiny little thing. Hazel eyes, a natural blonde, twenty-five year-old Melissa Schickel was pretty, smart, athletic, and eager to take on the world as a young woman of the ’90s. She had been going about her days just outside Indianapolis with a profound sense of not really knowing what she wanted to do with her life. Florida and Disney looked good on paper, but did she really want to stand around all day, giving high fives to little kids and posing for photos, sweating her ass off in a felt costume?

Melissa was grateful for what she had, certainly. She never questioned the way things happened, and certainly never wondered about the course her life took. Yet, at this moment in time, she did find herself standing at a crossroads.

“I had graduated Ball State University in 1988 with a BS degree in business (half in management, half in insurance),” Melissa said. “I had worked three jobs while going to school, so by the time I graduated, quite honestly, I was just burned out and wanted to find a job. Unfortunately, the economy was shaky, and even with a business degree I was finding it very difficult to find a job.”

All she heard during the course of job interviews was “You don’t have enough experience.”

When she returned from Florida, Melissa felt she could think through things a bit clearer. There were no messages from her boyfriend. As much as she might have hoped he’d called or asked about her, she had not heard from friends that he was wondering where she had run off to, what she was doing, or had been trying to track her down.

But it was okay.

“I still didn’t think anything about it when he didn’t call,” Melissa remembered. “I just figured he’d moved on.”

In early March 1992, Melissa went out to one of the bars she’d gone to with her former boyfriend and other mutual friends quite frequently. As she sat, nursing a drink, every time the door opened and someone walked in, Melissa secretly hoped she’d turn around and see him. They could sit, chat, patch things up, and maybe move forward. She did love the guy. She thought he had strong feelings for her also.

The bar was in an affluent area of town, where her boyfriend lived. A friend of theirs moseyed over to Melissa and sat down next to her.

They had a drink and talked about old times. At one point the woman looked at Melissa and said, “Isn’t it such a shame about Steven (pseudonym)?”

The comment caught Melissa off guard. She had no idea what the woman was talking about.

“Excuse me?” Melissa asked.

“Wasn’t it such a shock about Steven?”

“Steven who?” Melissa asked. She was confused. Was the woman referring to
her
Steven, the boyfriend she’d been thinking about now since that Valentine’s Day decision to take off to Florida and run from the memories of him?

“
Our
Steven,” the woman clarified.

“What are you talking about?” Melissa responded.

The woman took a pull from her drink. “The car crash, Melissa.”

“What are you
talking
about? What do you mean?”

“You didn’t know?”

“What. Are. You. Talking. About?”

As Melissa’s head began to spin, the woman explained that Steven had died in a fiery car crash.

Melissa recalled the entire bar, “same as in a movie,” spinning around her in slow motion as she was being told the man she loved was dead. It was as if she had been hit on the head. It all made sense. That was why he had never called. He was dead. No one from his family had called her because they really didn’t know about her, the two of them being, Melissa explained, “from different sides of the tracks.”

Leaving the bar, Melissa wondered how her life and the pain she was now experiencing—the sorrow and remorse and all those thoughts about what
could
have been—could get any worse. Could life deal her a more devastating blow than this one?

CHAPTER 3

LITTLE PRINCESS

Melissa landed a
job managing a small independent video store in that affluent area of Indianapolis where her late boyfriend had resided. Living in Anderson, Melissa decided to move closer to the city and into Indianapolis. She found an apartment in a place she believed to be “okay.” It wasn’t the Fifth Avenue district, but it wasn’t a ghetto, either. She was content in moving on and living a low-key life.

“If you would have asked me thirty years ago,” Melissa recalled, “if I could have mentally survived all I went through, I would have told you that you would have to lock me away in a padded room for the rest of my life.”

This strange year of her life had kicked off after the midnight fireworks popped and banged in the New Year, 1992. Her boyfriend, the divorced father of a daughter, was dead. That video store job, which she thought seemed promising at first, didn’t turn out to be so great. So she quit the position and was now looking for another full-time job. It had been the customers and the area where the video store was located, mainly, that made Melissa uncomfortable and ultimately change her course.

“I was very neurotic,” she said. “I was the only child in grade school and high school with ulcers. But you never know what you can handle until you are actually faced with it.”

From there, as the hammer fist of life smacked her around a bit, showing Melissa that even the simple daily chore of a car ride can alter the lives of so many, she began working two to three part-time jobs to make ends meet. She was commuting to two different cities, keeping busy, not allowing the sting of depression to engulf her. Things started to look up by the time May of that same year came around.

“The Indianapolis 500 is obviously a huge event,” Melissa recalled. “But there is the Little 500 in Anderson the night before, which is the big sprint car event every year.”

As it turned out, Melissa was crowned one of the princesses of the Little 500 that year.

“So I spent a lot of time holding court and attending several events associated with the races. It was fun.”

And it kept her busy.

As the summer season began, Melissa felt as though life was getting somewhat back on track and normal, whatever that was. She knew she’d find a full-time position sooner or later, and would fall into the routine of a job she adored. It was only a matter of time. What’s more, she had been thinking about moving out of her apartment and into a better neighborhood. She’d even found something in a quieter, what she deemed to be a “safer,” neighborhood and was two weeks from packing her final bags and walking out the door for good. That old place she was in had some bad karma, anyway. It was a symbol of things in her life she wanted not necessarily to forget, but definitely to move beyond.

As the Fourth of July holiday passed, Melissa later recalled having a “really bad feeling.”

She couldn’t shake it. She felt something was about to happen. Something major. Something big.

She just didn’t know what.

Or when.

CHAPTER 4

SAFETY IN SELF

The year 1992
would prove to be a banner one for headline-making news in American history, especially where big events were concerned: Hurricane Andrew, a devastating storm that would kill dozens of people and become one of the costliest hurricanes in American history, would soon pound the southern Florida coast. Godfather John Gotti would be sentenced to life in prison for his role as a Mafia don. DNA fingerprinting would be established as an investigative tool, bar none. Bill Clinton would be elected the forty-second President of the United States, a two-term world leader who would leave a legacy—both good and bad—not to be reckoned with.

For Melissa Schickel, July 18 was going to be a glorious, exceptional day. Melissa would celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday. Still a few weeks out, she’d not planned a large celebration, but meeting up with friends and having some drinks and dinner was in order. Being a good-looking woman, Melissa had no trouble finding male companionship. But men, at this point, were not on her list of life’s duties. Relationships were work. Just having come from a relationship where a man she loved had actually died so suddenly and unexpectedly, Melissa was willing to wait for the right situation to come around.

Her apartment, the one she was planning on moving out of in a matter of two weeks, was located on the second floor of a complex on Wiebeck Court in Indianapolis. The complex was located directly off the I-465, USS Indianapolis Memorial Highway. The individual apartments were housed in what looked from the outside to be several raised ranch-style homes connected to one another. There was an upper and lower apartment, each with its own small balcony and a sliding glass door. Nothing much—just your normal apartment balcony, where Melissa could sit with a cup of coffee or glass of wine and stare out into the courtyard or across the way at other cookie-cutter apartments like hers.

Melissa’s corner apartment was a two bedroom, with a large living room as you walked in. She’d rented the second bedroom to a friend, who had moved out because of personal issues shortly after moving in.

Living alone, Melissa said, was not a big deal.

“For the most part, I felt safe.”

But the area had taken a hit and Melissa realized “it had started to get kind of rough” by her standards. It was one of the reasons why she’d decided to move out.

Melissa had chosen this apartment complex because her mother had lived nearby for many years and had never had a problem. She had not met or become friends with anyone in the complex because she had been working all those jobs and was never home.

On July 8, 1992, seemingly just another routine evening for Melissa, she had gone out with her old friend (former roommate) to look at storage facilities in order to stockpile some items in between moves. The trip had run long. Her friend dropped her off in front of her apartment about 9:00
P.M.
As he pulled up, he noticed that nobody was around. It was very dark. The place looked deserted.

“Hey, you want me to walk you in?”

“No, no . . . I’m fine,” Melissa said.

They exchanged good-byes and Melissa closed the car door.

Her friend watched as Melissa walked into her building.

Melissa reached the final flight of stairs, didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, and put her key into the lock.

Fidgeting with the tricky apparatus, she got into the apartment and closed the door behind her, making sure to lock and dead bolt the door.

Melissa was tired. She had to get up early.

I’m going straight to bed,
Melissa told herself.

Within an hour, the life she had known up to that point would change forever as Melissa awoke and faced that monster under the bed that we all know exists.