‘I just want to show you a good time:’ USD alumna recounts sexual assault 16 years ago in Vermillion

By: Megan Card and Trent Opstedahl

It was Dakota Days.

Julie and her friend Kaytie had returned home to their trailer after attending a house party in Vermillion. This homecoming, the party invites had found them, putting the juniors in good moods.

Intoxicated, Kaytie retreated to her bedroom to sleep off the night. A sober Julie prepared for bed in her usual routine — lock the front door, brush her teeth and turn on three fans to cool the stifling October air.

Just after getting into bed, Julie thought she heard a noise — like someone had dropped something — outside her bedroom window. After peering through the pink curtains she had sewn herself and seeing nothing, she crawled back into bed and laid on her side.

Her back was to the door.

In between consciousness and sleep, Julie heard two doors quietly open and close. Rolling over to look, she saw a large man standing in the doorway. She sat up, but he lunged at her, and placed his hand over her mouth. In a hushed voice, he said, “I just want to show you a good time.”

 —

Julie Ann sat down on the green couch in her sunroom, smoothed out her dress and looked around at the Ankeny, Iowa home she now shares with her husband and 10-year-old son. It’s been 16 years since her sexual assault at the University of South Dakota, but she can still remember her attacker’s bushy eyebrows, his scruffy face and the way she expected to smell alcohol on his breath — but could not.

“I don’t know if my first thought was is he going to kill me or rape me, I don’t know,” Julie said. “I just knew that I didn’t want him to get on the bed with me.”

Julie’s experience with her attacker, as he fondled her and attempted to rape her, is not the first time this crime has ever occurred — and likely not its last. It’s estimated between one-quarter and one-fifth of college females and six percent of college males experience sexual assault, according to reports by the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

Universities and colleges around the nation are attempting to lower these statistics. USD is required, along with every other post-secondary institution with Title IX financial aid programs, to make a number of changes to an amended Jeanne Clery Act and meet new requirements established by the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, a provision of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013.

But for survivors like Julie, new policies at her alma mater will not make the healing process go any faster. She never shared the full story of her attack other than the police for more than a decade, but the death of her mother and a passion for writing has provided its own kind of therapy. This led to “The Flutter of Butterfly Wings: A True Story of Friendship, Love and Obsession,” a memoir of her college years at USD centered around the attempted rape, her relationship with Kaytie and the consequences of identifying her attacker.

The assault

She remembers the man like a shadow. The force of his hand on her mouth — shoving her back — kept her from moving her head. Julie said she tried to squirm, which caused him to push her deeper into the bed, making it hard to breathe.

“When he put his hand over my mouth, then it is kind of this complete and total panic,” Julie said. “Because your first instinct is to get away, but when you are trapped, what do you do with all of that bottled up adrenaline and fear and paranoia?”

Her attacker, at one point, tried to kiss her, an action Julie called bizarre but said it gave her an advantage to get his hand off her mouth. She pried his fingers from one side of her face and said in a whisper, “I promise I won’t scream.”

“I never honestly expected him to do it,” Julie said. “Especially before he (let me go), he pushed me even harder and much more threatening at that point, and he said, ‘You better not scream.’ ”

After he removed his hand, a Vermillion Police Department report states she kicked him away and he warned Julie again not to scream.

She did. Her attacker ran from her room and out of the trailer.

“I would never view myself as this strong kind of brave person. I don’t do risky things…I even have a fainting problem with blood and needles,” Julie said. “I was shocked that I fought back when I did and didn’t just freeze and say ‘OK, do whatever you want to me, just don’t kill me.’”

While an investigation by VPD ensued in the weeks after the incident, Julie said she never publicly came forward about the attack until now.

“Other than the police, I don’t know if anyone knows the story from start to finish,” she said. “We say we should report it, but it’s not that easy.”

Of completed and attempted rapes, it is estimated that fewer than five percent of these crimes against college women are reported to law enforcement, said a 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics/Department of Justice study.

Despite never openly talking about the events surrounding the attack, Julie said her encounters with the local law enforcement and USD students was a constant reminder of what had happened.

Law enforcement

The South Dakota state patrol officer who first arrived at Julie’s door checked the trailer for the attacker, while four more officers responded and began to investigate the crime scene and search outside the trailer for evidence.

Julie said she remembered one officer came back and said her attacker was “long gone by now.” She said it bothered her to see the officers touch her bedroom door knob without checking for fingerprints, an item in her house she regularly wiped off with her shirt because of too much lotion on her hands.

Throughout the early morning investigation, a 20-year-old Julie was sitting on her bed, watching the men look through her home.

Kaytie, meanwhile, was still drunk and confused as the officers attempted to interact with her, she said.

“You feel it is almost like you are watching a movie, and you don’t understand that you are actually the star of the show,” Julie said.

A copy of the 1997 police report said the investigation revealed the intruder could have possibly entered through a back bedroom window, because its screen was removed and found outside the trailer.

Julie’s interaction with law enforcement follows protocol for the Vermillion Police Department in cases of reported sexual assault. Lt. Crystal Brady said when police are called in for such a crime, they would first meet with the victim, run through their story and determine if they have a chance for physical evidence to be collected.

In Julie’s case, that consisted of her trailer, but not a trip to the hospital for a rape kit, which can occur in some investigations.

Brady said the best time frame to collect physical evidence is within the first four days. The evidence is then sent to the state lab in Pierre. Once the victim’s story is recorded, what happens next is individual to the reported crime. Julie was brought to the police station, where she stayed until 8:30 a.m.

“The detectives were just drilling me with these questions,” Julie said. “I was so tired. I was traumatized. I couldn’t think.”

Julie said the police believed she was targeted for this attack, but at the time, she was so sleep-deprived she could not remember things she recollects now, like pink flamingo yard ornaments being stolen, a large dent appearing on her car one day and phone hang-ups.

“I wish they would have said, ‘You girls are tired, why don’t you get some sleep and come back in the morning?’” Julie said. “They never said that, so it was very easy for me to just tuck it away, and say, well, I can’t, I don’t want to think about it. The last thing I wanted to think about was that I was the target.”

In a case like Julie’s, where at the time, she did not know who her attacker was, Brady said police get as much information as possible to identify them. Julie was asked to describe the man for a sketch artist, and it was published with reports about the attack by media outlets like the Argus Leader.

The following Friday morning, Julie said she received a call from a USD counselor, asking her if she wanted to take time off from classes. Julie said she refused, but wondered how the university knew about her attack — she had never contacted officials.

Kim Grieve, vice president of student services, is the Title IX Coordinator at USD. Grieve said VPD and the University Police Department are in close contact, and the two entities should relay any information like a reported sexual assault involving university students to each other per protocol. She said she is unsure what the standard procedure would have been at the time of Julie’s attack.

“If we hear about a sexual assault we don’t have a choice, we have to do an investigation — on or off campus — if they are a student.

But there is gray area about university, community public safety procedure. Brady said Julie’s case was an unusual scenario in this instance, because the VPD usually deals with the university the most when the victim is on campus.

One to two weeks later, Julie went into the police station again to look at eight mugshots of possible suspects — none of them were her attacker.

“(The two detectives) were visibly disappointed, because it was almost like before I ever got down to the station, they had already solved my crime,” Julie said. “I was afraid of making a mistake first of all, and at the same rate, I was terrified at being able to recognize him. I didn’t want to put an actual face to it.”

While the VPD checked in with Julie when she moved to a new apartment, she was told a month later they had no leads on the stranger who assaulted her.

Brady said attacks by strangers are not as likely as cases of sexual assault, as  police typically deal with one’s that stem from date rape or too much alcohol consumption between people who have met before.

“The majority of the cases we get here are not a stranger breaking into a house and leaving a whole bunch of evidence behind on a scene,” Brady said. “The majority of the cases we get are people that know other people.”

This ended up being true for Julie, too. Eight months after her attack, she realized she knew the man who attacked her — she had met him through Kaytie.

Brady did not join the VPD until 2000, so she never investigated Julie’s case, but she saw a similar crime reported in 2005.

She said a male stranger broke into a trailer while a woman was home alone and attempted to rape her. She fought back, and the man escaped but was finally convicted of his crime in 2012, seven years later.

“I always tell a victim, number one, our biggest concern is to make sure they are OK — physically and emotionally,” Brady said. “The most important thing is that they get out of this OK. Two is to catch the suspect.”

Moving forward

There have been many opportunities for Julie to tell others of what happened 16 years ago in the trailer adorned by pink flamingos bought by her mom when she first moved in. But none of those opportunities would feel like the right time.

After the death of her mother a few years ago, Julie created a scrapbook full of fabric that once filled her mother’s sewing room. Sifting through the textiles one day in December, she came across a strip of pink lace — the same pink lace she had used to sew the curtains for the trailer.

From that point on, fragments of the attack began coming back to her, she said. Not long after coming across the pink lace, Julie discovered a cutout of a newspaper article the Argus Leader had printed detailing the attack. In the top margin of the article, Julie’s mother’s cursive handwriting had inscribed the date.

“When I found the newspaper article, suddenly everything was associated with (the attack),” Julie said. “My mom always said that I should write, that I should publish a book.”

Not able to forget about the cursive handwriting on the newspaper article, Julie decided it was time to tell the world her story and how it had altered her life.

“It was like a beyond-the-grave sign from my mom that this is a really good story to tell,” she said. “I’m at the point where if someone wants to criticize me for something that happened so long ago, go ahead.”

Within a matter of three days, Julie had filled pages upon pages of notebook paper detailing just the night of the attack up through the next day. As the days progressed, she kept on writing, sometimes sitting at her dining room table and other times in her writing room.

There were days in which she’d drop her son off at school and write non-stop until it was time to pick him up that afternoon.

“I started with everything I could remember at first,” she said. “It was harder as the story got uglier. But I told myself my book was going to be done by April.”

And that’s exactly what she did. After days spent revising and seeking advice from her local writing group, Julie’s book, “The Flutter of Butterfly Wings: A True Story of Friendship, Love and Obsession,” will be featured in the Ankeny Authors Fair April 12, which features more than 40 area writers.

Readjusting her floral print dress, Julie glances at the poster announcing the publishing of her book. She quickly adjusts the easel the poster rests upon, making it stand upright.

“If they are reading this because something happened to them (victims of sexual assault), I hope it helps them look at the pieces and assess the situation better than I could,” Julie said. “I hope it helps them come forward instead of waiting 15 years.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Per the request of Julie Ann, her last name will not appear in this story. However, Julie is her real first name and Ann is her middle name. Kaytie, Julie’s college friend,  is a real person, but Julie declined to reveal her real name for privacy reasons.

Follow Megan Card and Trent Opstedahl on Twitter @meg_card and @Trent_Op

About the series

In this investigative series, The Volante assesses sexual assaults on college campuses and their reflection in university and national statistics.