Authors: Emily Winslow
I feel like I should hide that I'm looking for information about Fryar. I'm not sure people will understand.
Gavin answered the downstairs phone when I got a call back from a librarian in Fryar's hometown. He asked me later, perfectly reasonably, “So, what was that about?”
The librarian had checked Fryar's high school yearbook for me. I wanted to see what had been written beside his picture, but it turns out that he's not even in the yearbook. Two other Fryars, also black men, but not him.
I tell Gavin that I'm “doing research.” That's become my go-to answer to strangers, too. This is all public information that I have a right to look at without explanation, but people ask. I say it cheerfully and a bit harried, using a tone of voice that's kind of smiley, and kind of “Don't get me started on how crazy complicated the whole story is!” The general response is commiseration and helpfulness.
Gavin's reaction to my researching Arthur Fryar is carefully neutral, as it had been when I first found out about the arrest and was Googling photos of him. I remember sitting in bed with my laptop and being like “Hey, honey! I found another one!” and making Gavin look at him.
For more than twenty years, this person who had impacted my life so hugely had been a blank to me. Getting his name, getting his picture, was a gift. I'm just opening it.
I tell my kids about life before the Internet. I remember encyclopedias, book indexes, card catalogs. When I was a teenager, my state had a phone number that linked to a late-night reference library where someone would look things up by request. It was a fantastical indulgence. Information then was almost exclusively written or printed, limited to the place where it was physically kept. Being able to acquire it by phone at, say, 11
P.M.
, had felt luxurious and even subversive, as if it were a naughty shortcut.
Now I can search for anything I want all night long. It's a dis
appointment to discover that the Internet doesn't have all of the answers.
Just because something is a public fact doesn't mean that it's findable, especially facts from before the Internet age. Newspapers, court records, yearbooks: they're still mostly in the physical realm, not digital. I'm still ultimately dependent on kind people with written records on the other end of a phone.
Some people are bored and annoyed with my requests, but most are delightful, kind, and tenacious. They chat and brainstorm. People in three different New York State County Clerk's Offices are checking things out for me. I keep track of their names and thank them effusively. Some records aren't where they should be; some have been destroyed. The supreme court offices suggest I talk to criminal court and vice versa, around and around. I can rattle off Fryar's date of birth by heart now, and the places he's lived, his milestone years. I feel like his life in upstate New York is coming into focus.
I make no phone calls to Pennsylvania, because I have nothing to even start with. His years there are opaque. Then the Internet surprises me and pops up what I'm looking for. My suspicion that the Pittsburgh years are the ones when he called himself Butch Johnson appears to be correct.
There are sites devoted to aggregating technically public information into tidy little background checks: demographic info, a lifetime's worth of addresses, even arrests and convictions.
Unsurprisingly, these facts aren't completely dependable. People with the same name get mistakenly linked, while single lives get fragmented into multiple listings. Even when the information is correct, it's out of context and garbled. But, it's a start.
Fryar's assumed name, Butch Johnson, was clearly a ridiculous amount of overcompensation: “manly” followed by a slang term
for “penis.” Amazingly, he's one of many using this combination of words for a name, so without more information it's difficult to narrow down the possibilities.
It's the middle initial that grabs me:
F,
which is Fryar's middle initial, too. It makes sense that someone changing his name, presumably changing his life, will still allow some old reality to seep through. You can't change literally everything. Generating fiction involves significant, tiring work. I had been taught in connoisseurship class that, when evaluating a portrait to figure out if it's a fake, look at the ears. Someone copying someone else's style will put effort into controlling the look of the eyes and mouth; but the seemingly unimportant details tend to be filled in on autopilot, and so reveal the unthinking assumptions of their creator.
The birth date is the other hint, the month correct and the year off by just one: this Butch F. Johnson is sixty-one, close enough to Fryar's sixty-two. Everything else fits so well that I wonder if Fryar is vain about his age, and lied somewhere about being thirty-nine instead of forty back when he lived in Pittsburgh. Forty is how old he turned two months after raping me.
I find four Pittsburgh addresses for this Butch F. Johnson, this Manly-F-Penis, and plot them on a map. Two of them are a half-hour walk to my college apartment. One is forty-five minutes' walk, the last an hour and fifteen. A fifth address, for the name without a middle initial, is forty minutes. The dotted-line routes on the screen stick out east and west from my old neighborhood, like spider legs.
Butch F. Johnson's closest address, twenty-seven minutes' walk from me, is on the same street where a Pitt student was attacked three days before me.
While confirming that I have the correct street for the attack, I find an old news report that mentions a detail I'd previously missed: she'd been thrown down steps. Her attacker's mistake that day had been to try to assault her in the apartment building hallway. Three
days later, Fryar made the more effective choice to get me inside of my apartment. Struggling and screaming didn't matter in there.
Dan Honan has told me that Fryar lived in Penn Hills, near Wilkinsburg, when he was in Pittsburgh. Wilkinsburg is familiar to me, a predominantly black part of the city that I used to take a bus to on Sundays to attend a lively church. Perhaps he did live there, too, but these addresses that I've found closer to my apartment ring true to me.
There's no hint of dates in the websites I'm using, no sense of the order of these addresses, or even if they fall into the “Pittsburgh” range of Fryar's life at all. It's only a guess that the street where the Pitt student was attacked is the one a Butch Johnson lived on in 1992, though perhaps not for long after, if he didn't want his victim to run into him around the area.
If this Butch, at these addresses, was even him.
I've e-mailed that kind reference librarian in Beacon, Fryar's hometown, to ask if he has any ideas for further research into Fryar's early life now that I know that the yearbooks have nothing. He'd told me, in passing while we talked on the phone, that he'd been a freshman at Fryar's high school in 1972, Fryar's supposed graduation year. I've asked him to brainstorm with me, with the caveat that I don't want to contact or disturb the Fryar family in any way.
I think that I come across, in my more chatty communications, like an adult child looking for a birth parent, because of words like “personal” and “significant” coupled with a wariness of making actual contact with anyone related. I bet that the librarian will figure me out. Even a superficial Google of Arthur Fryar brings up our current case, and my Jane Doe is described as “a woman who now lives in the United Kingdom.” The librarian knows where I've contacted him from.
He's not the only person I'm being cagey with.
Our printer is being weird. I had asked Gavin to shake the failing ink cartridge, as we always do before giving in to replacing it, and now my printouts are gray and splotched. I show him the results so he can try to fix it, but that means that he sees the letters I'm writing: to county clerks, and to a couple who may have been Fryar's landlords a long time ago. I don't actively hide things from Gavin, but I wouldn't have shared these if it weren't for the ink problem. Only results will justify my efforts; as things are now, my scattershot requests to America about Arthur Fryar must look obsessive and odd, even to the person who sees me the most generously.
Trial, or the formal plea, is seven weeks away.
I check on what specific news reports rise to the top in search results. One article opens, “He chose them for their legs.” That, combined with the protection against describing us victims as we testify in court, must create a wrong picture in people's minds, of younger me, lovely then.
I worry about what to pack for court. I don't fuss much about clothes at the best of times, and the June date will make it even harder for me to look nice. It's easier to flatter myself with cold-weather clothes: good boots, well-cut jackets. I'm aiming to wear middle-season clothes, hoping that it won't be hot yet. I want to wear tights; I want to wear sleeves.
I need new shoes, but no place is selling the style that I can't get out of my head: black leather with a strong arch, a chunky heel, maybe a buckle. After weeks of idly shopping, in spare moments
when I happen to pass stores that look promising, I realize that I'm literally looking for the shoes I was wearing the night that it happened, the shoes that he roughly pulled off my feet.
Whether I need to prep testimony or an impact statement, Evan's caution about profanity on the stand has made me nervous. It's not that I want to swear; it just feels like a difficult thing, needing to let emotion run wild so that the jury will be moved by my upset, but at the same time needing to control my emotions tightly so that I don't offend them with my indignation.
I know that Evan didn't personally mind what I'd said; he'd prefaced his advice to me by pointing out that the defense attorney from the hearing had behaved like “an ass” and certainly deserved my response.
Kevin hadn't minded what I'd said either. I think it was okay because we'd been only in front of a judge. It's the same reason why Fryar could appear in a prison outfit and handcuffs at the hearing, but will probably be in a suit at trial. Judges are trusted to overlook superficial things. Juries aren't.
Bill told me that he'd been worried during my hearing testimony that I might faint, but that when I got angry he knew that I'd be okay.
That's the difference: Bill saw that being angry helped. Being angry was appropriate. A jury, though, or a more formal judge, is more likely to reward sadness in a victim and disapprove of anger.
I like not having to be angry, so long as others are angry for me. It's just that being in the same room with Fryar will make it difficult to not be angry myself. They need me to go powerless and soft for the jury and judge, with him
right there
.
It could be that there are deep cultural norms at work, about the way that women are expected to behave. It could also be this way because of how the court system assigns roles. The victim is hurt;
the judge and jury avenge. If I take on anger, that robs them of their assigned part. They're the ones who get to say “guilty,” not me.
It's easier to take on the gentle part if I see it as a job. It's right for justice to be meted out by persuaded, uninvolved parties. My job is to do the persuading, not the avenging.
I have to trust that Evan has my back. I know that the others do, I know Bill does, but they don't have any authority in the courtroom.
I think that Evan will look out for me. He seems like a nice guy. Perhaps more to the point, he seems like an ambitious attorney. He'll want to do this job, which is partly to be my anger, right.
The two most relevant leads to Fryar's history are still dangling without resolution. I've found out that the drug crime that got his DNA into the system, and that put him in Otisville prison from 2002 to 2005, happened in Staten Island, but it isn't coming up in the court records there.
I find it interesting that Fryar had this drug case there in 2002, and that back in 1985 he had a driving-without-a-license fine there. Staten Island appears to bookend his Pittsburgh years.
The file for the 1976 rape case, in New York's Orange County, is being looked for by that enthusiastic, friendly woman in the county clerk's office, Mary. Today's the day that she asked me to call her back.
It turns out that she has found reference to the file, and requested it to be sent over to her. That was a week ago. What with Easter being this weekend and all, she asks me to call back in six days. She should have it by then. She doesn't know how many pages it is. It's disappointing to have to wait, but heartening that the file apparently still exists. I will get it, eventually.
I'm collecting all of these documents in a little folder on my iPad. I have two editions of Pennsylvania's “Sexual Violence Benchbook,” which describe the prosecution process; minutes from New York's
extradition hearings; guideline sentence forms from Evan; transcripts of similar cases from Kevin; Bill's notes from 1992, scanned by Dan. I also have the transcript of our hearing from January.
I recognize most of it. One surprising line to me is when I answered a question with a clear “yes” followed by a trailing “yeah, yeah, yeah,” as my patience waned. I think that's probably when I felt faint. A few questions later, what should have been a polite, alert confirmation of my name came out as a weary, almost sarcastic-seeming “sure.”
I notice a small discrepancy. In the transcript, when the defense asked Dan if the old detective from the case was even still alive, it says that Dan replied, “He's here in the courtroom as a matter of fact.” But I remember him saying, “He's here in the courtroom. In fact, he's right behind me!” with a head toss over his shoulder, back toward where Bill and I were sitting. (Remember, in the municipal court, those testifying stand facing the judge, their backs to the room.) I remember, because he said it with almost a little laugh. The defense attorney was being skeptical and persistent, and Bill was
right there
.
I check for how I'm quoted. The court reporter didn't redact “fucking,” which I appreciate, but she's mixed up my word order, I'm sure of it. Then I look above, and the way she's written the defense attorney's words seem off, too. She has him state his question positively, “You were able to see this man's face who did this crime; am I correct?” That's not how it went at all. He had phrased it incredulously, words as well as tone. He'd implied that my claim of clearly seeing his face was inherently ridiculous. That's what had upset me.
Those quotes aren't drastically different, but they remind me of how absolute the past isn't. The court reporter wrote her transcript from an audio recording; I was actually there. We should both be right. We should match. Maybe I'm interpreting, using the whole
experience, not just the words. She might have been simplifying and summarizing, or might have genuinely misheard.
I wonder if transcripts are assumed to be literally verbatim, or if it's understood that there's some insignificant leeway in them, in the way that statistics are considered to have an inherent but hopefully minor margin of error. From what I can see online, court transcripts are treated as definitive once they exist. But I also see a thriving business of errors and omissions insurance aimed at court reporters. More than one company's website reminds potential customers that “Mistakes happen.”
Another piece of the transcript that stands out to me is the judge's warning to Fryar to “Look forward. Continue to look forward for the duration of this court hearing, okay?” This happened while I was testifying. The judge suddenly interrupted, to tell Fryar off, commanding him to keep his eyes front, presumably off me. This admonition was reported in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
“The suspect . . . stood about 10 feet away, staring at the first victim until [the judge] asked him to look straight ahead . . . for the remainder of the proceeding.”
But Bill had told me, over tea afterward, that Fryar hadn't been looking at me at all. The judge had had his attention on me, and Bill and Dan had each been keeping an eye on Fryar, watching him while he listened to me. Bill thinks that he and Dan, right next to me, must have shot a glance to Fryar at the same time, and that the judge, noticing their eyes, had assumed that Fryar had done something to engage them. But he hadn't, Bill told me. According to him, it was a coincidence that he and Dan had both looked at that moment, triggering the judge to act. Anyone reading the transcript or the newspaper, though, even the judge himself, would see it otherwise, reasonably so.
My novels are all narrated in first person, by multiple characters. In one book, two of the narrators cover the same conversa
tion, and in my draft their versions had had slight variations from one another. Those variations were just little things, interpretations and transitions that worked better for the voice of each character relating it. In the copy-edit stage, when every word and punctuation mark comes under scrutiny, that had been flagged, and I'd “corrected” the versions to match exactly. My reasoning was that it wasn't worth distracting a careful reader when the differences in the conversations weren't a plot point. But, I still miss those contrasting tellings, which to me represent a larger theme in the way I structure my stories: everything is interpreted. It's natural for readers to trust that each narrator is giving them the plain and whole truth, and I like playing with that trust, showing how, despite each narrator being honest from their limited point of view, what they tell is not the plain and whole truth of what actually happened after all. It's the truth through their hearing and seeing and remembering. That's not exactly the same thing.
Which is all a long way of saying that while official documents appear to be neutral and precise, they may not be completely so. All memories, even official ones, are vulnerable to imprecision, error, imitation of error, and the filter of assumptions.
Aprill didn't stand with me at the hearing because she's not my detective; she's attached to Georgia. Even so, while Bill is the most important person on this case to me personally, Aprill is the most important objectively. She's the engine to the machine that's getting Fryar and others like him identified, arrested, and prosecuted. She's the star.
She started looking at cold cases in 2007 and since then has pursued about two a year, on top of her load of current cases. According to the 2004 law, only rapes for which the DNA analysis now indicates a previously unsuspected personâthat is, stranger rapesâcan be reopened in this way.
I've often thought how lucky I am that I didn't know the man, not only because of the help that fact has been with the police and the prosecution, but also because it meant that my rape wasn't any kind of betrayal. I never had to question my relationships, or wonder about the men who are my friends. Rape was done by “the bad man” out there somewhere, not by someone normal in my intimate inner circle, or even in the larger circles of my life. I didn't know him the least bit, not at all. He might as well have been a movie monster, not a person.
Even knowing how lucky I am, and how easily my situation could have been otherwise and is otherwise for many, I cringe when articles about acquaintance-rape swing to the other extreme and make stranger-rape out to be so rare as to be irrelevant. Compared to, say, date rape or too-drunk-to-consent rape, stranger-rape is admittedly far less frequent. But, though we may be rare like platinum, we're not rare like unicorns. We exist.
The nationwide backlog of unprocessed evidence kits exists for a lot of reasons: new backlog continually created as current demand exceeds resources; the accumulation of that backlog; and old cases from the eighties and nineties. Back then, the potential for DNA evidence was recognized before the technology and costs were practical. Most pertinent, before the FBI created their CODIS database (authorized in 1994 and activated in 1998), and then over time populated it, there was nothing to compare processed stranger-rape evidence to. In 1992, my then-useless evidence was collected anyway, and stored and looked after, when there was no present use for it, only future hope. I'm grateful to Pittsburgh for that.
Even though CODIS now offers a menu of over ten million criminal DNA profiles, Pittsburgh's old evidence is not automatically put in line for testing. The current workload in the lab is too great to allow for that. The problem is not limited to Pittsburgh; the
overall number of untested rape kits in America is unknown, but statistics from a sampling of cities add up to tens of thousands.
Besides the criminal profiles, CODIS also holds on to the unknown evidence profiles once they're submitted. Even if they don't hit a match right away, these unknown profiles get compared to the rest of the database weekly, in hope of matching someone newly added or of linking up with a new evidence profile from another case. I'd been desperate to get mine in there.
To get chosen, I'd had to nag. Even my persistence with Dan hadn't been enough, until Georgia's evidence was put through to the lab by Aprill and hit Fryar.
Bill wasn't told. He heard it from me, after I found him through LinkedIn, based on lucky remembrance of only his last name. As far as I can tell, Georgia's old detective hasn't been told at all. Well, perhaps he or she has been told now, in a request to testify at trial, but he or she wasn't at the hearing, and everyone was surprised that Bill was.
These old detectives are cut off from their cases. It was like that back in 1992, even when Bill was still on the force, just moved to a different department. I was told that my case wasn't his anymore, and that all contact from then on should go to the next person it had been handed to.
I don't remember if I ever spoke to that new guy even a second time. After he moved on, as far as I can tell, the case wasn't even handed off, just filed. Until CODIS and, really, until Fryar's DNA got added to it, there had been nothing for anyone to do.
I must decline an invitation to a summer party that's scheduled for the day that I'll be testifying, so in the RSVP I mention why, explaining succinctly both the crime and the prosecution. It's a practical fact to me now, not a secret, not a grand admission. I'll be in court. The trial itself is a public proceeding, after all, even if my
role in it is anonymous. The anonymity just means that the trial is mine to tell about, no one else's.