She Survived (7 page)

CHAPTER 20

GREAT SCOTT, WE’VE GOT HIM

Becky Buttram was
at home. It was the middle of the night. Her phone rang.

“We’ve had another incident,” the cop explained.

Buttram knew what that meant. No other clarification was needed.

“I’m on my way.”

After a brief foot chase a cop tackled the sick bastard and handcuffed him. The Lawrence Police Department now had in custody the individual whom investigators working the case that night believed to be the night prowler that the entire county was seeking.

Caught red-handed, in the act.

The sketch the MCPD had generated, when matched up to the twenty-eight-year-old suspect, Scott Saxton, whom they caught staring into the window of an unsuspecting victim, was a near exact match. Buttram could not believe the accuracy in which the witnesses had described the guy—all but Melissa, that is.

“I tell you what,” Buttram said, “that was the best composite sketch I have
ever
had.”

At times, Saxton wore thick-framed glasses, sported a pencil-thin mustache, a receding hairline, and comb-over. His head appeared too big for his skinny, scrawny frame. He had larger than average ears. He looked like a nerd, straight from one of those ’80s “revenge” films that were so popular.

“A twerp, a dweeb,” one cop later described Saxton. “He was this little guy.”

Disturbingly, Scott Saxton had a wife and child at home.

As she checked out Saxton’s background, the key to Melissa’s attack, Buttram soon learned, was that Scott Saxton had lived directly across the hall from Melissa at one time. Although Melissa described a much different perp—smooth face, no facial hair that she could feel, possibly some acne, possibly not—Buttram was certain she had the same man responsible for Melissa’s attack. Standing inside Saxton’s apartment, the detective explained, you could look across the way and into the apartment of the woman he attacked with the ball-peen hammer. So this made it clear to Buttram and law enforcement that Saxton was a stalker. He watched his victims. Probably targeted a woman and followed her, watched her for days or weeks, then decided when the perfect opportunity was for him to attack. He likely became obsessed with those women he targeted, and could not control his impulses.

When police arrested Saxton on the night of August 22, he was clean-shaven and had not worn glasses—which had thrown Melissa off so much when she laid eyes on a photo of him postarrest. She didn’t recognize this man at all—not as her neighbor or her attacker. The photo of Saxton wearing glasses and a mustache had been taken up north, in another county, after his arrests there. So it was an older image. He had moved south and changed his appearance.

“As far as seeing the picture, Detective Becky Buttram can back me up on this,” Melissa explained further, “it was a complete disconnect for me. In fact, I kept asking if they had the right person—only because, as you can see from the picture, the neighbor that I always saw had a mustache and wore glasses. The person in my apartment that night was very clean-shaven and did not have glasses on. Becky told me that fact concerned her greatly, too, [because of how adamant I was] until she verified his whereabouts on the night before that last attack. He was working as a waiter, where, in fact, he had to be shaven (no facial hair) and that he was now wearing contacts and was, in fact, wearing them on that night. Thank God he left bloody prints in my apartment!”

One more thing also became clear: Scott Saxton was changing his appearance likely because of the descriptions police had publicly put out.

CHAPTER 21

THE ANGUISH OF THE FIRST RESPONDER

It was old-fashioned
police work and community outreach that caught Scott Saxton in the act of potentially committing another violent crime—one that certainly could have ended in murder, as Detective Becky Buttram feared, had he not been apprehended beforehand.

“The sheriff ’s department held Crime Watch meetings,” one law enforcement official told the
Indianapolis Star
after Saxton’s arrest, “. . . and made residents more aware of what to do if they saw something strange. It paid off. The resident in the apartment called as soon as they saw him. . . .”

That call Melissa Schickel received after Saxton’s arrest was more comforting than sunshine at the beach: “We’ve made an arrest.”

Melissa had felt relieved for the first time in a very long while. They had the man who had brutalized her—finally. He had possibly committed several attacks similar to Melissa’s, cops told her over the phone.

Thus, Melissa felt a bit safer after Saxton’s arrest. Up until then, it had been difficult for her to believe law enforcement would ever catch the guy. Not because of incompetence or shoddy police investigation tactics, but because of sheer luck. This was something they hadn’t experienced in Melissa’s case until that night Saxton was caught in the act and everything fell into place.

“How confident was I he would be caught?” Melissa considered later. “Honestly, not very much. I knew the forty-eight-hour rule. And considering I burned that time up while in the hospital and they had nothing when I got out, I was less hopeful. Plus, knowing I had no clear description and the fact that unless this person’s fingerprints were actually already on file, there would be no hope of knowing who it was. So no, I was
not
very confident he would ever be caught.”

This made Scott Saxton’s arrest all that much more gratifying for Melissa. But still, leading up to the arrest, Melissa had been feeling the effects of being the victim of a serious violent crime and the social stigmas and judgments that some in law enforcement had made. (Simultaneously Melissa would always point out that Becky Buttram and many others from the MCSD were kind, always thoughtful, sympathetic, and not like a few bad seeds at all.)

Melissa felt she was being mistreated by some of those people put in place to help and protect her.

“Sometimes the victim is victimized over and over by those who are actually supposed to help,” Melissa recalled.

Many survivors of traumatic violent crimes make this same claim: that some of the first responders and those in charge later on of investigating the case (in
some
instances, not all) become insensitive and begin to question the victim as though she is holding things back. Mostly, it’s a response to not having solved a case. In some rare instances, of course, the blame-the-victim game is going on—but that is definitely not the norm. Law enforcement and legal professionals care about victims.

“Take for instance the night of the actual attack,” Melissa claimed, again talking about the lack of compassion she said she experienced. “When the [first officer] arrived at my door, after making sure the place was secure and finally calling for an ambulance, he tried questioning me as to what had happened. I told him how I was beaten and stabbed and really needed to get to the hospital. He says, ‘Oh, honey, I’m quite sure you weren’t stabbed. He just probably hit you really hard and that split your skin open.’

“Wait a minute,” Melissa said as she looked back and remembered how this comment made her victimization that much more difficult straight from the get-go. “I know what the hell just happened to me! And you are telling me you don’t
believe
me? I’m about to pass out and you are going to tell me I don’t know the difference between a knife and a fist?”

Melissa explained further that one of the investigators later told her how another cop picked up the bloody knife, walked up to that deputy, and said, “Hey, do you think that
this
could be what she
wasn’t
stabbed with?”

Looking back on what happened to them, survivors of violent crimes often talk later on about that initial, mounting trauma as it expanded into the community via law enforcement directly after their incidents. No one would know at the outset how to deal with this in a sympathetic manner, unless they’re trained to do so. Some first responders often drop the ball and make insensitive remarks, not out of malice or viciousness or disbelief, but because of not being educated about victims and how to respond to a person who has just been viciously brutalized. No one victim responds to a crime in the same way, which makes it all that much more difficult to train officers and first responders. But training is the key. And it was not until the early 2000s that this type of detailed, dedicated training (other training had existed, but nothing like it is today) was finally instituted in police departments and other first-responder units all over the country and was taken seriously.

For a victim such as Melissa, the trauma was akin to a festering, hibernating virus of the soul. As time moved forward, the victim did not realize how badly the attack was affecting and weighing on her emotions, feelings, general thoughts about life, love interests, and those everyday chores and routines we all take for granted.

The absolute “worst day,” Melissa explained, took place when she called down to the police station to make plans to submit to a blood test.

“Turns out that they had, in fact, found two types of blood in the apartment that night, which was great, because it puts him at the crime scene,” Melissa recalled. “But then came the realization and the fact that they did have to warn me there was a chance I may have gotten in a good blow to his nose, like I thought I had. I could have possibly even broken his nose. And get this—I was told that because of that blow to his nose I had landed, it might now set me up for a lawsuit. I couldn’t believe it. But, yes, under the screwy laws of Indiana, my attacker could sue
me
!”

CHAPTER 22

DEAD RINGER

Becky Buttram arrived
to see Scott Saxton sitting in a police interrogation room. She wanted to stare into the eyes of this creepy SOB and ask him pointed questions. By now, they had Saxton’s list of crimes from up north and Buttram was more confident than ever that they had stopped a man before he escalated from home invasions and violent assaults to cold-blooded murder.

Buttram later recalled looking at Saxton for the first time: “Well, I remember having the composite with me and it matched this guy in front of us to a tee. I mean, he was a dead ringer.”

The detective slid the sketch across the table, stopping in front of Saxton.

He looked down.

“I . . . I . . . don’t know who that is.”

It was akin to a facsimile of him.

Checking Saxton out from head to toe, Buttram viewed scratches and bruises and scuff marks all over the guy.

“Those were from when he fought with the army [sergeant],” the detective said. “We could see them.”

Buttram and her colleague questioned Saxton for two hours. They asked him all the questions you’d expect: where, when, how, what time, alibi, etc.

He had an answer for everything. None of it, of course, made sense.

“I thought,” the law officer explained, “as I sat there and listened to him, looking him over, ‘What a wimp.’ I mean that. He was a little weasely piece of mucus. Disgusting. Gross.”

“Why were you out there looking in that window?” Becky asked Saxton.

He had no answer.

Most of what Saxton said during those two hours, as far as Becky Buttram could later recall, revolved around Mr. Saxton denying everything they threw at him.