“I interviewed the young adult,” Becky Buttram later said. “She really couldn’t tell me much of anything besides what we had—that he had cut the screen, actually, and reached in and grabbed her because her bed was right there by the window.”

  Buttram knew the man who had attacked Melissa was out and about, ready to commit more crimes. That this latest attempt—it was the same guy.

  Later that same night, a thirty-eight-year-old female army sergeant from nearby Fort Harrison was awoken by a man jumping up onto her bed and slashing her arm wide open with a knife. He had entered her apartment through a sliding glass door on a first-floor balcony.

  “He had just broke the hell out of that sliding glass door,” Buttram recalled.

  Becky Buttram had gone out to that scene, too, to have a look and speak with the woman.

  “You see, she had glass everywhere in her apartment,” Buttram later explained. “She had traveled all over the world and had collected really expensive glass from Europe—and he had broken some of it.”

  The woman had just moved into the apartment. She still had boxes unpacked. What the woman didn’t know before she moved in was that the tenant who had lived there before her had also had a run-in with a man trying to break in. (Buttram believed it was the same attacker.)

  “He had been watching her (the woman who had lived in the apartment before the army sergeant),” Buttram recalled. The woman was so scared after that botched break-in that she moved out. What saved her from being attacked was that he had gotten into the apartment, but she was in her bedroom and the door was locked. When he figured that he couldn’t get into the bedroom, he took off.

  With the attacker standing on the army sergeant’s bed, slashing her arm with a knife, she screamed as loud as she could. She was naked already, because that’s the way she slept. She did not even have sheets on the bed yet, because it was only her first time staying overnight and she had forgotten to buy sheets.

  The attacker took off after she started screaming.

  Or so she believed.

  After calling 911 to report what happened, as she waited for police to arrive, the man came out of the shadows inside her apartment and went at her with a ball-peen hammer, hitting the woman repeatedly, striking her at least twenty times, several reports indicated, on the shoulders, head, and arms, nearly killing her.

  “She told me later,” Buttram said, “all she could think of while this was going on was ‘Here I am, stark naked, fighting with this guy—and he’s got a hammer! ’ ”

  What saved the woman’s life, the detective said, “was that she was a strong, big gal, about five-ten, maybe six foot. She had actually grabbed the hammer from him and wrestled it away, which scared him, and so he took off running a second time.”

  And never came back.

  Through both attacks, a composite sketch was developed.

  “We were so afraid he was going to hit again after those two new attacks,” Detective Buttram said.

  But cops finally had a description to go on, along with eyewitnesses, additional DNA, additional fingerprints—all of which linked the cases.

  Still, none of it was doing any good because the guy had stayed under the legal radar in the county.

  “We had a Crime Watch meeting after that third incident—people were mad as hell at us because we hadn’t caught this guy yet,” Buttram said.

  Women lived in fear. It was probably more frustration than anger. The community was being held hostage by a seemingly fearless night prowler whose motive, it appeared, was to sneak into females’ homes and hurt them. No rapes had been reported in any of these attacks. After Becky Buttram heard of these two recent attacks on the same night, she was now more concerned than ever that he was going to escalate his behavior to murder at some point soon. After all, the guy had been shooed away by the father of one victim, only to go on and attack a second, nearby victim in the same night. It showed how brazen and careless and compulsive he was—and also how he couldn’t stop himself.

  “Well,” Buttram explained, defending the investigation, “it was like looking for a needle in a haystack! . . . I was out there every night, just patrolling around the area.”

  Lots of cops were. Nobody wanted a madman stalking their community, randomly attacking females inside their own homes.

  One of the things that baffled Becky Buttram the most was that there was a guard shack heading into the apartment complex where he had attacked on each of those three recent occasions. In other words, one had to check in with the guard before one could drive or walk into the complex.

  Was he sneaking in? the detective asked herself after first learning about this.

  “Unbeknownst to us then,” Buttram said later, “he had a sticker [or parking pass]. . . .”

  He could drive right by the guard without stopping.

  CHAPTER 19

  PEEPING TOM

  It was Saturday, August 22, 1992, twelve days after the most recent attacks, when he came out from underneath his rock and struck again. At around 1:00 A.M., a call came into the Lawrence Police Department (LPD), a suburb of Indianapolis directly near where the other three attacks had occurred, literally straight across the freeway from where Melissa and the others had been attacked. He had moved his operation a mere 1.8 miles east, yet kept to the same MO in choosing an apartment complex.

  “There’s a guy in a tree getting into an apartment on Cider (Mill) Lane,” the caller told the 911 dispatcher.

  They had him in the act.

  The caller indicated a man had climbed a tree and used the structure as a way to try and break into an apartment. He was sticking to those old behaviors of using any edifice available to get up onto a balcony or deck so he could get in through a sliding glass door or open window. This information immediately told law enforcement what they had expected all along: They were dealing with a bold, brassy son of a bitch who would not be deterred even after being confronted on three occasions, which they knew of.

  “We had put out flyers and information to all the local police departments,” Becky Buttram explained. The MCSD had alerted local agencies that there was a night prowler whom every cop on the street out walking or driving around should be on the lookout for—a guy who liked to get into homes through windows and open doors, using any means necessary to get up onto the second floor of apartment buildings. The MCSD said in the announcement that its investigators were certain he would strike again.

  Sure enough, nearly two weeks later, here he was, out and about, trying his luck again.

  The LPD rolled up on the scene. Two officers got out of their vehicle and began stealthily combing the area with flashlights.

  Within a few moments they spotted the guy fitting the description that the 911 caller had given. He was now on the ground, peering creepily into an apartment window, perhaps getting ready to make a move to go in. After all, he had no idea someone had spotted him and called 911.

  Initially they held back, watched, and waited for him to make a move.

  The man crawled up to a nearby sliding glass door on a deck and began looking inside the apartment.

  Another police officer, arriving on scene at that moment, approached the porch where the suspect now stood, preparing to go into the apartment.

  But then, the perp heard something and turned.

  Just as the cop got there, the elusive Peeping Tom, now startled, took off running.

  “Stop!” police shouted.

  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.

  Melissa was attacked by her ex-neighbor, Scott Saxton. (Photo courtesy of Marion County Prosecutor’s Office)

  “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.)

  Another thing I need to say is that at the time I came back from Florida, and by the time of the arrest, my jaws were still wired shut. I had also been sent by the victim’s assistance and prosecutor’s office to a psychologist provided by the state under the victim’s assistance fund. However, I learned that she was actually a student, or in training, and it definitely showed that she had no clue how to handle a situation such as this. Nor did she have any business doing so.

  At the third visit, when she told me she felt I wasn’t “talking about this enough,” I had to point out to her that my freaking jaws were wired shut and the doctor said it was a miracle I was talking at all. She was wrong—I was talking . . . but her response was always “You need to own that feeling.” I looked at her and said: “You’re full of bullshit.” I left and never went back.

  I was not there for someone to feed me textbook phrases and basically call me a liar. I truly was receiving more therapy from coworkers and customers and friends than she was providing. I did not like the fact that the prosecutor kept saying it was going to hurt my case that I was not going to a therapist. But I could not continue to see someone who was truly not helping me with the issues I really needed help with—such as, Would I ever be able to sleep again? Not to mention the depression that was going to eventually set in.

  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.

  I also remember the first time I was questioned by all the different detectives. Just like in movies and TV shows and books you’ve read, they try to make you feel like it was your fault. They kept asking me questions like had I been drinking, taking drugs, any prescription medication and why. I had taken my cough syrup because it was the middle of allergy season. And, yes, I left my patio sliding glass door cracked open so my cats could go in and out and it was hot out and I lived on the second floor. But I was asleep inside my own home. I was in my own home asleep! I was not doing anything to “ask” for this. They start questioning your lifestyle. And then you start questioning your own lifestyle.