CHAPTER 30
REALITY CHECK
Melissa was shaken.
She had no idea what to expect while testifying at a deposition. In the years after her attack Melissa would go into the legal field and actually prepare people for depositions. In 1993, however, as she thought about what was going to happen now that she had to sit and answer questions from her attacker’s lawyer, Melissa grew concerned. She didn’t know how to feel about it. So she asked Phil Blowers, the prosecutor.
Blowers told her not to worry. In fact, he was so certain things would go smoothly, according to Melissa, Blowers prepped her only five minutes before they were set to begin.
“Have you ever given a deposition before?”
“No,” Melissa said.
“Okay, just answer his questions honestly and be polite.”
“I’m always polite. What do you mean?”
“Just be polite.”
Word from Saxton’s camp was that Scott Saxton was saying he had once been invited into Melissa’s apartment and had handled the hockey stick in question after she showed it to him. Saxton was denying any role in this vicious crime.
“I had no idea he was about to throw me to a guy who was basically a pit bull,” Melissa explained later, referring to Saxton’s lawyer, Jeff Baldwin.
Melissa sat and faced the attorney representing Scott Saxton. Phil Blowers explained to Melissa that all she needed to do was talk about what she remembered. She would not be pressed. She was not on trial here.
A deposition is supposed to be for discovery purposes only—not the sort of knockout, drag-out, verbal sparring that a trial can sometimes produce between a defense attorney and key witnesses. They were there to see where the case was headed. As Saxton’s attorney, Jeff Baldwin, explained to Melissa within the first few questions, “This is just . . . so I know what I am looking at when it goes to trial—
if
that happens.”
“Okay,” Melissa answered.
As they continued, Melissa recalled the day and night of her attack in striking detail. She talked through it, step by step. Her candid, resolute manner came through clearly. Although walking into it scared, she didn’t seem at all jolted by the severity of the crime as she described it for Baldwin. Melissa was stronger now than she had been in quite a while. She was ready to see the man who had assaulted her pay for his crimes and was willing—to a certain extent—to do whatever she needed to see that happen.
“So you went to bed about ten o’clock?” Saxton’s lawyer asked.
“Yes.”
“What was the next thing—”
“The next thing I knew, I was being beaten.”
It was the first blow to her head that Melissa “felt or heard.” The way she described this scene—in such a pithy, direct way—it was chilling in its simplicity: You wake up in the middle of the night to a man beating you. You have no idea what is happening.
From there she told her story of being beaten nearly to death and then fighting off her attacker. Again and again, Melissa claimed, those three words she’ll never, ever forget kept coming out of the perpetrator’s mouth: “Shut up, bitch.”
She told Saxton’s attorney it was the only thing his client ever said to her.
Sitting, Melissa could hear him all over again:
“Shut. Up. Bitch.”
These three words in the context of such a horrible crime made it perfectly clear what Scott Saxton thought of females in general.
Melissa explained how she fought him off by grabbing hold of what she thought was a piece of metal, but it was actually the blade of the knife he had been using to stab her in the face.
They went back and forth regarding which side of her face Saxton supposedly came at her from. One would guess Saxton was going to claim he was right-handed and the attacker was left-handed.
Left-handed, right-handed, it all meant nothing.
“Did your underwear come all the way off?” Baldwin asked.
“Yes.”
“Was the individual straddling you?”
“Well, [he] could not have been straddling me to take it off. I kept thinking [he] moved to the end of my feet. Because by this time I had lost a lot of blood. So I’d just given up. So I’d stopped struggling.”
After her assailant was finished taking off her underwear, Melissa explained, she uttered those incredible lifesaving words: “Excuse me, I’m bleeding very badly.”
With that, her attacker abruptly stopped what he was doing and took off.
Melissa had scared him off.
From this point on, Melissa and Baldwin talked about the investigation portion of Melissa’s case and how cops spoke to her in the hospital.
The question came up whether Melissa would have allowed anyone into her apartment to touch or handle what were seven hockey sticks she had collected as a fan of the sport—which made it clear where Saxton and his case were headed.
“No,” she said.
Melissa was then questioned about whether she knew Scott Saxton from living so close to him and if he had ever been inside her apartment.
She said no, of course not. But she had, in fact, gotten mail addressed to Saxton before, and thus placed it back into the mailbox as “return to sender.” So, why hadn’t she just walked it down the hall and knocked on Saxton’s door and handed it to him?
Because Melissa didn’t know Scott Saxton at all.
Baldwin asked Melissa about the fight she engaged in with her assailant.
She said she believed she kicked him in the face, but not hard enough to do much damage.
“What about scratches? Did you scratch them anyplace?”
“No. I wish I had!”
Jeff Baldwin asked Melissa if she filed a civil suit against anyone in her case.
“No,” she said.
Thus, with a few more inconsequential questions, he was finished.
Phil Blowers did not have much. He cleared up a few facts he thought were misrepresented, and then he asked Melissa about her injuries. After all, Melissa’s suffering was the most important part of this deposition—the trauma and misery she had been through and continued to go through. Melissa was not there to defend herself. She wasn’t there to make a claim that Scott Saxton was her attacker—that was the prosecutor’s job. She was there to explain what happened to her, show how badly she had been victimized, and how far she had come in her recovery since her attack.
Establishing that her jaw had been wired shut after the attack, Phil Blowers asked for how long.
“Ten weeks and one day.”
“During that period of time, what was the nature of your diet?”
“Liquid, baby food, and what I could put in a blender.”
Phil Blowers was done.
CHAPTER 31
PLEA
Scott Saxton’s lawyer
must have brought his client back to reality and convinced him that his only chance of not going to prison for what could amount to the rest of his life was to try and strike a plea deal. Scott Saxton could say he was inside Melissa’s apartment and that was how his DNA and fingerprints had gotten there. But in the end, Melissa Schickel was an incredibly powerful witness who was going to bury Scott Saxton’s stories and lies if the case went to trial.
Asked if she agreed with offering her attacker a plea, Melissa had some reluctance, but she ultimately went along with it.
“Knowing how unpredictable juries can be,” she explained later, “I was willing to take the plea—but only if I could get him to take the full maximum amount of time. That was my only way of allowing him to plea. I knew a jury could offer him less time.”
On May 3, 1993, Scott Saxton took a deal that amounted to a recommendation of a “twenty-year sentence, with three years suspended and seventeen years executed, to be followed by three years’ probation, during which [time] the defendant [would] undergo psychiatric counseling.”
Saxton admitted to breaking into Melissa’s apartment and causing her
serious bodily injury, that is: stab wounds to the face, a broken jaw, bruises, cuts and abrasions.
Count I of the plea—i.e., burglary, a class A felony. In Count II, aggravated battery, a class B felony, Saxton did
knowingly inflict bodily injury . . . by touching her in a rude, insolent or angry manner, that is: by stabbing and beating Melissa Schickel about the face and body by means of deadly weapons, that is: knife and a hockey stick which caused serious permanent disfigurement. . . .
Count III was confinement, another class B felony.
Scott Saxton, it could be said, made out on this deal.
He was formally sentenced on June 4, 1993; Saxton’s projected release date was slated for December 8, 2000, ten years before he was due to get out, providing he served good time. Melissa made a point to attend the sentencing hearing.
“Yes, I went to this,” she said later. “I went by myself, in fact.”
Melissa sat with Detective Becky Buttram in the back row. Buttram held her hand through the entire process.
As she sat, waiting for Saxton to be brought into the courtroom—the first time she would lay eyes on the guy since the attack—someone pointed out that Saxton’s wife and “two older people” were there supporting him.
The fact that she had never really seen his face on the night of the attack helped Melissa. Seeing him walk in, she wasn’t as tense and agitated as one might expect. Buttram even thought Melissa was going to “jump out of her skin,” Melissa said later. But that didn’t happen.
I remember being called to the stand and having to answer several questions. At times, [both attorneys] kept trying to place themselves between me and Saxton, but I just kept staring at him. He didn’t look at me much—the damn coward. I remember the judge actually asking me questions. I remember someone asking me what my life was like at that point—the fact that I couldn’t eat (and I had not even had my third surgery by then), that I couldn’t sleep, that I was afraid to go anywhere or live by myself (I was still living with my grandmother).
The judge did ask me if there was anything I wanted to know. So I asked, “Why? Why did he do it?” The judge (a big man with a deep, booming voice) asked Saxton: “Son, were you on drugs, or high, or something? What in the world made you do this?”
Scott Saxton replied, “I had been drinking at the time, but I knew exactly what I was doing.”
After the sentencing hearing Becky Buttram and Melissa Schickel stood outside in the hallway by the courtroom. As Saxton’s wife and parents—those “two old people”—walked out, Melissa took a moment and looked at them. It hadn’t really dawned on her, she said later, that they would be there, or that a guy like Saxton would have supporters.
As they walked by, Melissa could hear Saxton’s wife, she claimed, say, “Yeah, that’s her!” She was speaking to his parents and referencing Melissa. This was alarming to Melissa. She had a revelation while standing there.
“Not only did I realize I had faced him, but now I had to deal with his family, who were still free to do whatever they wanted, and, in my opinion, in complete denial of what happened,” Melissa said. “In fact, they were probably blaming me for his problems. And those thoughts, as I had them, terrified me.”
Melissa and Buttram stood and chatted. “He’s lost a lot of weight,” the law officer remarked to Melissa.
“I don’t care how much weight he’s lost,” Melissa said, always the one to bring the situation back into comic relief, “as long as Bubba still wants him, once he gets to prison.”
The bailiff standing nearby burst out laughing, repeating: “As long as Bubba still wants him. . . .”
Jeff Baldwin walked up to Melissa and said, “I am really sorry and I hope you can get on with your life. I wish you the best.”
Melissa didn’t recall what she said to the defense attorney, but underneath her breath, she muttered: “Go to hell.”
I was stunned. I couldn’t understand how he had the audacity. I asked the prosecutor how someone could even defend someone like that, and how did that guy sleep at night. He explained to me that Saxton’s attorney technically was there to only defend the guy’s rights, not his morality. He doesn’t necessarily agree with his client, he just has to protect his rights. An attorney I worked for later (and we did some criminal defense) put it in terms I understood: “Hey, the guy goes to jail, I go to lunch.”
Melissa left the courthouse and put this chapter of her life behind her—that is, until she heard the name Scott Saxton once again.
CHAPTER 32
OLD DOG, SAME TRICKS
A year after
beginning his prison sentence, Scott Saxton was charged with conspiracy to escape. He was slapped with another two years.
When Saxton was released in 2000 (he served no additional time and was out ten years earlier than expected), he managed to keep his nose out of the neighbors’ windows for at least two years—or, rather, two years that he wasn’t caught in the act doing it.
On May 13, 2002, however, all of that changed.
A man was at home one night in his suburban Marshall County, Indiana, home when he happened to look out his kitchen window toward a female neighbor’s house.
Something didn’t seem right.
There was a man outside her window. The neighbor didn’t know it yet, but it was Scott Saxton. He was standing on the woman’s air conditioner unit, peeping into her bathroom window.
The neighbor yelled to his significant other to phone the police, just before he took off out of the house, yelling at Saxton, getting a good look at him.
Saxton ran away and the neighbor lost him around a corner.
When he returned to his house, however, the neighbor spotted a truck parked in the front that he did not recognize. He felt the vehicle might belong to the Peeping Tom, whom he had just spotted staring into the neighbor’s window.
Shortly thereafter, as the neighbor watched the truck to see if anyone came back, Scott Saxton reappeared, ran to his vehicle, hopped inside, and started it up.
The neighbor chased Saxton, but he couldn’t prevent Saxton from making a getaway.
The man’s significant other was outside by now, curious as to what was going on. As Saxton drove away, she was able to see the license plate number of his vehicle and report it directly to the police.
As Saxton sped away, he failed to stop at a nearby traffic light. An officer witnessed the infraction, hit his lights, and pulled over Saxton’s truck.
The cop soon realized the license plate number of the truck matched an APB that had just gone out, as well as a description of the truck every local law enforcement patrol officer had by now.
The cop returned Saxton to the neighbor’s house, where the Good Samaritan positively identified him.
Once again, Scott Saxton was caught in the act.
The next month, on June 4, 2002, the local prosecutor filed a notice of probation revocation against Saxton. In that order the state alleged that Saxton had committed voyeurism. At a subsequent revocation hearing, on July 19, 2002, the state put up witnesses and the trial court concluded that Saxton had violated his probation by committing voyeurism, thus revoking it.
On March 14, 2003, however, the Court of Appeals of Indiana—quite shockingly—reversed that decision.
Why? Because although the state, according to Saxton’s written appeal, presented evidence that Scott Saxton “peeped” in the window of the victim, the state presented
no direct or circumstantial evidence regarding whether [the victim] consented to the peeping.
It sounded preposterous and equally unbelievable. Yet, as the ruling continued,
Under the statute, peeping alone is not a crime.
Imagine!
The reversal of that decision did not sit well with the Supreme Court of Indiana, however. On June 20, 2003, after the attorney general and assistant attorney general took the case to the highest court in Indiana, it was reversed once again, and the original trial court decision was affirmed.
We conclude the evidence was sufficient,
the four Indiana Supreme Court judges smartly wrote. They had based their decision on a witness who testified about “suspecting there was a Peeping Tom in the neighborhood. . . .” They noted the “time of the day” and Saxton’s “reaction to being discovered” while he stood, staring into a stranger’s window.
Put in terms of sufficiency of the evidence,
the Supreme Court wrote,
the question becomes: Can a trial court infer that someone caught standing . . . staring into a woman’s bathroom at 5 a.m., who runs off rather forcefully when challenged, was a person peeping without permission of the target? We say yes, and affirm the judgment of the trial court.
After all of that, Scott Saxton was released in 2004 after serving his time.
“I was really upset once I realized he did not get his backup time, especially over the fact that the prosecution didn’t call the right witness to trial!” Melissa commented later. “Or the fact that you have to
prove
someone is ‘peeping without your consent.’ Really? . . . Like I have said, the system is not built for victims. It’s built for criminals. I felt cheated, let down, by the whole thing.”
By 2009, Scott Saxton was once again facing time after being caught with a gun, which amounted to unlawful firearm possession by a serious felon.
He went back to prison and was released in 2011.
Make no mistake about this man, if you live near him, be very cautious and know that he is a repeat offender and will not stop. Check your local sex offender registry and see if he is on it. If he is, move.