She Survived (8 page)

CHAPTER 23

FINALLY

For Melissa, Scott Saxton’s
arrest was starting to sink in. It was her neighbor—the guy across the hall. Mr. Nondescript. Someone she had seen in passing in the halls numerous times and not even noticed. She had not even paid a second thought to him. But Saxton had been watching her, lusting for her, thinking about her. Melissa wondered how many times he’d been inside her apartment while she wasn’t home. How many times had he planned to attack her but stopped for some reason? It was paralyzing, that fear of the unknown—those images in her head now of what could have happened. We all go there. It’s akin to an entire new layer of trauma for the crime survivor, the victim. Once the perp had been apprehended and the victim began to learn things about the crime and the perp’s life, the victim began to suffer all over again.

Yet, as Melissa thought more deeply about Saxton as the days after his arrest went by, she came up with one very “distinctive” memory. It was right after she had first moved in. She recalled seeing this guy outside in the parking lot working on his car. Melissa and her boyfriend were walking by, on their way into her apartment.

“Oh, my God! That guy looks like a child molester,” Melissa had said to her boyfriend, judging the man by the way he looked. We all do it on occasion.

She didn’t know if this man working on his car was Scott Saxton, in fact. But Melissa had a good inclination it had been him.

Becky Buttram told Melissa, “Your instincts were dead-on.”

“So what are you charging him with?” Melissa asked the cop one day.

“Aggravated battery, confinement, and burglary.”

This was devastating to Melissa. She “couldn’t understand it.”

What about attempted murder? she wondered.

“The son of a bitch tried killing me!”

“So great,” Melissa said to Becky Buttram, “you’re telling me that in Indiana, you can be put away in prison longer for possession of a controlled substance than you can for trying to kill someone? That is what a life is worth? That is how backward the laws are in this state? But, hey, that was supposed to be great news, right?”

Buttram had no way of responding; she did not write the laws in the state. She only tried her best to uphold them.

Melissa had four more weeks to go until the wires came off her jaw, but it was no consolation. Her jaw would never be the same. She had deep, noticeable scars on her face. Scott Saxton had disfigured her, maimed her for life. Of course, the emotional hell she had been through aside, sleep was becoming her biggest obstacle: getting enough. It was harder and harder for her to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Buttram told Melissa about the additional attacks for which they suspected Scott Saxton. Melissa also found out through talking to the detective that the reason he had chosen that apartment where the army sergeant lived was because up until approximately two weeks prior to the attack, there had been a petite young girl living there.

“She was built much like me,” Melissa recalled. “She had moved out shortly after my attack, but he did not know that. He thought she still lived there. That apparently was his MO. He was of slender build himself, so I see why he had to pick the small ones. However, they were never able to charge him with either one of those two attacks because neither the girl nor the staff sergeant was ever able to identify him.”

When Becky Buttram brought the sergeant in for a lineup, indeed, she could not pick Scott Saxton out.

“Sorry,” the sergeant said. “I just cannot say for sure.”

“Lucky for me,” Melissa said, “he had left enough fingerprints and handprints in my blood all over my walls, my sliding glass door, and the weapons to put him at the scene. Although later—get this!—he kept trying to argue that his prints were on my hockey stick because he had been in my apartment before and that I had shown him my hockey sticks!”

There was something else Melissa had been avoiding, partially because she had “mentally blocked it from [her] mind” and, equally, “because I think this is something that caused me more pain than anyone will ever know.”

CHAPTER 24

CHAMBER OF HORRORS

It happened two
or three days after Melissa had been released from the hospital, long before Scott Saxton was apprehended and charged. Melissa still had that grave, unsettling task ahead of having to pack up her apartment and move everything. She had been avoiding going there ever since the attack. And there was no way, of course, she could ever live there again.

“I didn’t see how I was going to face going back into that apartment—even just to pack and move my things out.”

It had been the scene of so much focused emotional and physical pain, however blurred some of it seemed now, along with snapshot images of the terrible violence that had taken place there. Melissa knew a visit could be detrimental to her healing. Just seeing the stains of her own blood all over the place would be bad enough. The memories could come flooding back. The smells. The sounds, even. The silence. The stillness of everything as it was on that night and police had left it.

However, being the strong-willed, nothing’s-going-to-stop-me person she was—independent in every regard—she believed she had to do it. If not her, who else?

According to Melissa, she called an ex-boyfriend. “Can you come and help me?”

No answer.

“Well?”

“No.”

Incredible. Did the guy not have a sympathetic bone in his body?

She then called any friend she could think of. She explained the visit back to the apartment as: “Could you come to just babysit while I pack up the rest of my stuff?”

They all told her no.

One so-called “friend” even had the nerve to say, “Melissa, I don’t see what the big deal is. It will be daylight. Just lock the doors. You’ll be fine.”

Melissa finally convinced someone she knew to go with her.

“He came for a few minutes and then left me there.”

Nice guy. Real gentleman.

Now sitting in her apartment by herself, fingerprint powder, like pool cue chalk, everywhere, the place nearly ransacked and looking more like the set of a horror film, Melissa could only break down and cry.

What overwhelmed her was the unnatural odor of iron (actually, that iron smell was dried blood). Some describe it as “electric.”

“Something I will never forget. . . .”

After her “friend” took off, Melissa sat and asked herself:
Why would you leave me alone in here?

Melissa looked around.

As she began packing, Melissa zoned out. She was able to take herself out of the situation and get the work done. If you’ve spoken to Melissa and gotten to know her even in the slightest, you’d understand how she could overcome this setback and, with her nose to the grindstone, take it on by herself.

“I honestly don’t remember how anything got moved. I just know it somehow went to storage and I went to live with my grandmother.”

An emotional blackout. Many violent crime victims have expressed this same sort of emotional amnesia when confronting traumatic events after the incident.

“The thing about that apartment complex for me today, and for many years since then, is that I view it as a
Brigadoon
—a place where I became lost in the woods. I used to have to drive by it every day on my way to work, but as I passed, it wasn’t there, or at least I couldn’t see it. It’s like a cloud or fog that sits along the highway, and I can never see the apartments I know are in there through the haze.”

Back on that first day Melissa was released from the hospital, she had her mother drive her straight to see a woman who had been her longtime hairdresser and friend. She’d spent the past four days in the hospital with dried blood in her hair, her jaw wired shut, the functionality of her left arm in question (she could hardly move it), and not enough energy to stand in a shower on her own and even try to wash her hair. One wish straight out of the hospital was to have someone clean her hair of all the blood. A second was just to take a hot bath.

These were simple, everyday things in life that all of us take for granted. For the victim of a violent crime, such as the one Melissa endured, these common chores we don’t even think about become a great challenge, both physical and emotional.

“It’s funny what you find to be your creature comforts in a situation such as this,” Melissa recalled.

From the hairdresser’s Melissa and her mother headed to the store where Melissa once worked. She needed to shop for her new diet of baby food and soup.

“I lived on baby food, milk shakes, and soup for ten weeks.”

Melissa was so desperate for good food near the end of this period she actually put a Taco Bell Burrito Supreme in a blender, gave it whirl, and ate it.

“I realized how limited my choices for eating out were. We didn’t have Steak ’n Shake in Anderson at the time. So I was pretty much limited to Dairy Queen (which, unfortunately, was seasonal) and Chinese restaurants, so I could order egg drop soup. Of course, I frustrated the hell out of my doctor when I kept asking, ‘But how am I going to brush my teeth?’ I was one of those people who never left the house without brushing my teeth. I probably brushed my teeth six times a day.”

Even today, twenty years after her attack, Melissa still has issues eating solid foods. Every meal is a challenge.

CHAPTER 25

AFTERMATH

Scott Saxton was
formally arrested on August 23, 1992. He faced charges of public intoxication, resisting arrest, and voyeurism. He was held while the MCSD ran his prints against the evidence it had in Melissa’s case.

Detective Becky Buttram was in the office two days later, going through another day, waiting, watching the clock, wondering when the call with the results was going to come in.

Her phone rang.

“Yup,” she said. “Uh-huh.”

Hanging up, the detective screamed.

“Honey, I will tell you what,” she recalled, going back to that moment, “that was the highest I have ever been in my life.”

She jumped up from behind her desk, still screaming, running through the office, her arms flailing above her head. “We’ve got him! We’ve got him! We’ve got him!”

She couldn’t say those three words enough.

Her boss, Joey Davis, came running out of his office.

“What’s going on here?”

“We’ve got him, Joey! I’ve got him.”

Buttram’s partner, Earl Cooper, who had helped with the investigation, sat behind his desk, looking on. He gave her an agreeing nod, leaned back in his chair, and said, “I knew it all along.”

“Well, Earl, you’ve got a little bit more seasoning than I do.”

They laughed and rejoiced at such great news.

Buttram knew that catching a guy peeping in a window was one thing. If those were the only charges Saxton faced, he’d be out and about within a few days and probably end up with probation when the courts got done with him. But putting him in Melissa’s apartment was quite another set of crimes altogether. Scott Saxton was now looking at doing serious time.

“I’ve never had a feeling like that at work ever in my life,” the detective said later.

After the exhilaration calmed and she settled down, she sat at her desk and typed up a probable cause warrant to have Saxton charged with the additional crimes.

Thus, two days after he was arrested while peeping in a woman’s window, still in custody on those charges, Scott Saxton was arrested and charged with burglary, confinement, and battery. Attempted murder, if it was to become an additional charge, would have to be resolved later—if at all. There was still some discussion whether the law allowed them to charge Saxton with attempted murder.

Fingerprints taken from the hockey stick in Melissa’s apartment matched those of Scott Saxton, proving he had attacked Melissa. Police were working to link him to the other two assaults that took place after Melissa’s. Saxton was held on $75,000 bond.

Not a lot of money considering the charges and accusations against the man, especially when you take into account the serial nature of Scott Saxton’s crimes. The guy was a repeat offender, arguably motivated by a rage-fueled, deviant sexual nature, a serial stalker, Peeping Tom, home invader, and violent attacker. Yet the law dictated that for the price of a used car (10 percent of the $75,000 bond to a bondsman), Scott Saxton could walk the streets.

Didn’t seem fair.