“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.

  In the months before her attack, Melissa was crowned one of the princesses of the “Little 500.” (Photos courtesy of Erin Moulton)

  “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.

  Weeks before her attack, Melissa posed for a photo with Dave “The King” Wilson, a good friend and local Indianapolis comic. (Photos courtesy of Erin Moulton)

  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.

  CHAPTER 5

  INSTINCT

  Sex. Rape. These crimes are what Melissa immediately thought upon realizing she had been suddenly awoken by a guy who was on top of her, pounding her in the face with a blunt object.

  It had started exactly like that: Melissa opened her eyes and felt around in the dark, only to be whacked repeatedly by blows to the head by someone straddling her.

  The nightmare was real. It was happening.

  “I was assuming that it was eventually, probably, going to be a rape,” Melissa said later. “That was my first thought.”

  Why else would a man break into a woman’s home and begin beating her?

  This thought of being sexually assaulted scared the hell out of Melissa Schickel. A single woman’s worst fears taking place in front of her: A rapist/home invader gets inside her apartment; she’s alone; there is nothing she can do.

  Her attacker bashed Melissa in the head, over and over. The blows were violent and sudden and full of force. “Waking up as a blow” hit her, Melissa later recalled, she actually screamed out in fear, as loud as she could, “What the fuck?” (She termed her response and language a “trucker’s mouth.”)

  Next she realized he was, in fact, straddling her, striking her repeatedly, and he wasn’t going to let up.

  He wasn’t a large man or that muscular. Melissa knew this because her former boyfriend was two hundred pounds, and she recalled this man—the monster from underneath the bed—to be much, much lighter, by as many as fifty pounds. He was skinny, too. Scrawny, even. Plus, he had a particular stink to him.

  Despite his size, though, he had mounted himself on top of Melissa, held her down, and was continually smashing a hard object into Melissa’s head and face. She had no idea what was happening or who this animal attacking her was. Nor did she know what he actually wanted from her. Moments had gone by now and he was still just beating her.

  Instinct took over from there as Melissa was being brutally beaten to death.

  She immediately rolled over on her back; then she put her arms up to block the blows to the back of her head.

  “Help me!” Melissa screamed.

  She could smell an aroma of stale booze mixed with some type of cologne. It was horrifying. Alarming. The guy smelled like the inside of a nightclub after a Saturday night.

  Things took a strange turn when Melissa realized she didn’t know if she was screaming out loud or not. It all seemed so surreal: One moment she was sleeping, and the next she was being brutally beaten by a stranger in her own bed. How had he gotten in? Was he hiding inside the apartment? Who was he? What did he want?

  “Just as in your dreams,” Melissa said, “you can’t really tell if you are screaming out loud.”

  As she flailed her arms around, trying to protect herself, a thought occurred to Melissa that her attacker might be a young kid.

  Is this some teenager?

  “It was because his face was so smooth,” she explained later.

  And his size: He was so damn small.

  In a way Melissa was paralyzed by the fear of the unknown and the possibility of being killed, but she was also running on adrenaline and thinking about what she could do to stop what she now believed was a man on top of her who was going to rape and kill her violently.

  Melissa recognized she had screamed out loud when she heard her attacker say, “Shut up, bitch!” He spoke through clenched teeth, as if trying to disguise his voice.

  Melissa screamed again.

  “Shut up, bitch!” he said again.

  It was right after he uttered those words for a second time when Melissa felt the first stab wound—a hot, metallic pain, electrifying, and then a burst of hot liquid above her left eye, like a large blister had exploded.

  He just stabbed me in the eye, Melissa thought.

  The sting of the blows was severe. Random. It was dark. She could not see anything.

  Melissa’s attacker had actually stabbed her just above her left eye in the brow, an area of the body that bleeds profusely.

  Almost immediately blood ran down from the top of her brow into her eyes, blinding her. It was pitch-dark, anyway—but Melissa now believed she’d lost one of her eyes to the blade of a knife.

  Feelings were coming in waves through all the pain as Melissa continued to fight the guy off best she could.

  She continued to scream. Each time, louder and louder, hoping somebody outside the sliding glass door, or the women in the apartment below, would hear her.

  He kept repeating, in a threatening manner: “Shut up, bitch! Shut up. . . .”

  “The more he told me to shut up, the more I would scream. And I just kept fighting and fighting,” Melissa said later.

  Melissa considered what every self-defense class taught women: Poke him in the eyes. But then, as soon as that thought occurred, she told herself, No. If I miss, or don’t do it hard enough to stop him, it’s only going to piss him off more.

  Plus, as it stood, he was the one with the weapon—and surely angry enough already.

  With the idea of poking him in the eyes swept from her mind, Melissa had a second thought.

  Use your legs—and start kicking.

  Melissa felt he did not have a firm grip because she was flailing around so much and giving him a difficult time. She even thought she should begin punching at him and kicking at the same time.

  And so she did.

  As they fought, Melissa managed to strike him with one of her legs in the face.

  Then she grabbed the knife blade.

  “I didn’t even know it was a knife, really,” she later said. “I didn’t know what the hell he had.”

  Reaching out and punching and kicking and grabbing, Melissa wound up with the knife.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHITE LIGHT APPROACHING

  Realizing the knife was in her hands now, Melissa’s attacker started to punch her in the face.

  Blow after blow after blow.

  Melissa was fighting for her life. She also still believed without a doubt that his one true motivation was to rape her. She wasn’t about to allow that to happen without a fight.

  As she punched and kicked her legs (almost winning at one point), slowing him down at least, Melissa started to feel the effects of losing so much blood. The sheets around her were soaking wet. Blood had engulfed her face and hands and body.

  Then, suddenly, as if the air was let out of her body, Melissa became weaker and weaker.

  “I really couldn’t fight anymore. . . .”

  Her next thought was: That’s it . . . I’m dead.

  As Melissa faded, her attacker reached down and put his hands on her panties.

  Then he started to pull them down her legs.

  All Melissa had now were her thoughts and words. She had no fight left within a body suffering from the effects of losing so much blood. It was so dark in the room, she realized, Melissa didn’t even know how much blood she’d lost, but she could sense all the tackiness and wetness around her, on the bed, on her body. She could taste the steeliness of her own blood, the salty, metallic bitterness. She could feel her head spinning, the dizziness, the light-headedness.

  He was winning.

  Melissa’s attacker was about to rape her.

  Melissa realized she was probably going to die.

  CHAPTER 7

  SECOND WIND

  As Melissa later explained in her own words, she would learn in those harrowing days after her attack that her attacker had actually used a hockey stick he found inside her apartment to beat her that night. His choice of weapon would have a detrimental psychological effect on Melissa forever.

  I guess I should back up for a minute here, for a couple of reasons. First, before any of this happened, I was really into going to hockey games, comedy clubs, and watching bands. That is why it came as kind of a sad shock to me that I was beaten with one of the hockey sticks I had collected. It made me question how I would react if I tried to go back to watch a hockey game.

  I was blessed to have a great sense of humor. It was something I seemed to get from my father and my grandmother. Like I said, one of my “vices” before this happened was comedy. I had season tickets to the local hockey team and I would go to the comedy club as often as I could. I had also been fortunate enough to make friends with several local and national comic—some known, some unknown (at the time). Before my attack, I used to date a couple of local comics. I also used to hang out with this one national comic who would come to town two or three times a year. He even finally made a small, unknown movie called Ski Patrol. When it came out on video, he would come into the video store I was running and yell, “Hey, where’s my movie?” People would just stare at him strangely. I would point and say, “Over there, Mr. Lopez.” I kept trying to convince people to go see this comedian and people kept saying, “George who?”

  Too bad they didn’t listen.

  Not knowing where she might have dredged up the presence of mind to do it, very quietly, almost in a whisper, Melissa said to her attacker: “Excuse me, but I’m bleeding very badly.”

  This comment stopped the bogeyman in his tracks. He froze. Perhaps he did not expect his victim to humanize herself. She was not an object any longer, maybe. Melissa had turned herself into a person, a human being.

  After she said that, Melissa’s attacker quickly jumped off the bed and ran, as if Melissa’s comment had snapped him out of the rage-fueled, sexual frenzy he was in and brought him back to reality. It was as though he realized what he was doing wasn’t working.

  Melissa thought quickly and reacted.

  “I did not even give him the chance to get to the bedroom door when I rolled over and grabbed the phone and dialed 911.”

  A move that likely had saved her life.

  As her attacker scrambled to get out of the apartment, Melissa pleaded with the 911 dispatcher. Her first two sentences were so quick and garbled and full of terror, the words were hard to comprehend. What wasn’t difficult to recognize, however, turned out to be the final words of Melissa’s first interaction with that 911 dispatcher: “. . . He tried to rape me. . . . I’m bleeding. . . .”