I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps

couch. (“I was trying to break away,” she recalled, “but I lost my balance.”)

      On top of her, down on the couch, he grabbed at her right breast. “Stop,” she pleaded, “you’re hurting me.”

      Without saying a word, he continued clutching her by the breasts. He was fascinated and, at the same time, aroused by the violence he was perpetrating while touching her breasts. Just the sight of them as he opened her blouse, ripping her bra off and exposing them, did something to change him, Mary Ellen knew.

      She was large. C cup. Her breasts had changed him. After he was finished fondling Mary Ellen’s breasts, he looked up. “He didn’t say anything. He stared—just stared into my eyes.”

      16

      I

      This man in Mary Ellen’s living room, the one on top of her, sexually assaulting her, planning in his head how he was going to kill her, profoundly hated his given name, Edwin Fales Snelgrove Jr. His distaste was so much that he had whittled it down years ago. “Call me ‘Ned’,” he’d tell new friends. Edwin sounded so Gilded Age. So dated and traditional. So, Ned it had been.

      Ned had pushed-back kinky hair of a brownish blond persuasion, cut conservatively. He wasn’t overweight by any means. He had a chiseled body (not through weight lifting, though, but genetics, one of those “you can eat whatever you want and never gain an ounce” bodies that some are lucky enough to be born with). Being a fan of wrestling, he could get you in a hold that, former college friends said, he could keep for hours. Beyond this penchant for pain, Ned had serious psychological issues. He hated women. Not that he hated being around them, or the sight of them, but something inside of him was wired so that he viewed the female—the good-looking ones with large breasts—as some sort of object that, in a certain position, provided, in his words, “enormous sexual arousement.” Yes, they had to be in a particular situation. This was important to Ned. They had to submit. Appear helpless. Powerless. And there was only one way to get them there, Ned believed: strangulation.

      If that didn’t work…well…out came the knives.

      These thoughts and urges began during Ned’s childhood, as far back as the second and third grade. For unknown reasons, he wrote later, he had never thought it was a problem until years after it started. The pleasure, he explained to a friend in a letter, came from seeing a good-looking female become helpless. The woman could be “asleep,” but he had to be standing over her “in person.” Watching “a girl faint,” too, did something for him. And yet, seeing a girl “killed in a movie or TV show” seemed to offer the most satisfaction—that is, beyond the real thing.

      I cannot even come close to describing the feelings I get, he once wrote, talking about seeing a woman in a movie incapacitated. When he watched women in those situations, his heart rate increased to a point, he wrote, until I think [it] is in my mouth. Ned became “dizzy” and his “hands sweat.” He also got an erection like never before. Back in grade school, Ned explained, he had these same feelings about his teachers. Every time I see a girl I am attracted to, he wrote, and it didn’t matter if it was in person, on television, or in photographs, instead of “undressing” the woman with his “eyes,” Ned always imagine[d] strangling her or hitting her over the head and carrying her limp body onto a bed. Once she was unconscious, he would undress her and arrange her arms and legs in some kind of seductive pose. Maybe position her like a doll. If she came to, well, that was her problem: he’d have to resort to other means.

      II

      The man who liked to be called Ned, or even “Neddy,” whom Mary Ellen had met at the singles dance and allowed in to use the bathroom, was now on top of her, forcefully grabbing and clutching her breasts and holding her down with all his might. As Mary Ellen struggled with him, he put both of his hands “up onto her throat.” And then he squeezed as hard as he could.

      Mary Ellen started to say, “What are you doing?” but could not finish because her airway was closing. With that, he placed both of his thumbs together and dug them into the middle of her throat. He had obviously studied the human anatomy and knew exactly what he was doing.

      “I almost wanted to think he was kidding,” Mary Ellen said later, “but he wasn’t kidding…. He was staring straight at me and he just squeezed my throat.”

      She could barely move. He wasn’t much taller than Mary Ellen, but he was much more powerful. Looking at her, it wasn’t hard to see what Ned had found so attractive earlier that night when it seemed he was interested in getting to know her. She had shoulder-length, wavy-cut dark brown hair, emerald green eyes (quite alluring and inviting), a comforting “Mary Tyler Moore” smile, and porcelain, blemish-free skin. Mary Ellen was plainly attractive, kept her figure slim, and had a charisma that drew men toward her.

      Ned wasn’t interested in any of those positive qualities, however: he was focused on rendering her unconscious so he could finish fulfilling his fantasy. As he squeezed her throat harder and Mary Ellen began to slip into unconsciousness, a notion occurred to her: I never thought my life was going to end like this. And then a white light, she recalled, approached…and here it was—after all she had been through. All she had put up with throughout her life. Here, things were beginning to get back on track and she had attracted another animal, a rapist this time, who was obviously going to kill her.

      Has it really come to this?

      She felt herself losing consciousness…and so she began to pray. The white light soon disappeared, Mary Ellen recalled. Then she saw total darkness. “I said my prayers—I said all of my prayers…and the room was spinning, and it was getting black, and I knew, I knew I was dying.”

      “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name….”

      “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee….”

      What Mary Ellen didn’t know was that as she slipped further into unconsciousness, he was undressing her from her waist up, refusing to strip off any of her clothing below the belt. He wasn’t concerned with her vaginal area. It was her breasts. To complete his fantasy, he needed to have her breasts fully exposed. Her bra couldn’t be hanging off her shoulder. This was important. He needed to stare at them as he straddled her like a horse and choked her.

      “I remember,” she said later, “as I was slipping into unconsciousness, him staring into my eyes, directly staring into my eyes. He never spoke a word. I realized later that he was watching me die. He was fascinated by this. Losing consciousness, it felt like I had died…. I knew I was dying.”

      III

      Mary Ellen didn’t know how long it was that she had been out. But it was quite some time later when she came to and realized that he was gone. Where is he? He left? I’m alive? Waking up, she looked around and figured out that she was on her bed—not the couch. He must have carried her into her room and posed her on the bed. She was at an angle on her bed, positioned in a certain way.

      His way.

      As Mary Ellen came to and began to get her bearings back, he realized she was moving as he walked back into the room. “He was coming back into the room, and I was on the bed, I was very dizzy,” Mary Ellen said. “The next thing I knew, he was on top of me again.” And that’s when she felt “something cold” in the middle of her stomach. It was here when Mary Ellen first saw that, as she put it, “my clothes wre torn off down to my waist, but nothing from my waist down had been disturbed.”

      Looking toward her ribs, Mary Ellen noticed his fist going up and down and wondered what he was doing. She felt that “cold” feeling again—it was steel—on her ribs. It didn’t hurt. Not then. She was still groggy. Dizzy. The room was spinning. She didn’t have the strength to scream.

      Realizing she still had a chance to survive, Mary Ellen made a decision to fight back. “I remembered that I had read an article about self-defense,” she said. It was there, in her room, as the man called Ned, whom she had just met, began stabbing her in the chest that Mary Ellen decided not to be a victim any longer. Suddenly two lines from that self-defense article came back