Dream ~ Act ~ Plan ~ Believe

I’m telling you my life story in themes. I’ve started with the more tragic portions of my life so you, my readers, can develop a better understanding of where I came from, and how these have shaped me into the person I am today. It is our trials that cause us to grow, and how we handle them determine the type of person we become.

I first told you about my highly tuned perception, and then about how I began to attract to me the things I feared, and about how intruders shattered my vision of a safe home, about nearly being abducted by a masked man, and finally about being watched.

When my story continues I believe I am sixteen or seventeen, and in high school. I really should look up the year, but that doesn’t really matter.

Have you ever been startled awake by a sound that you tried to dismiss as nothing. Perhaps you laid there not totally convinced? That’s how this installment begins…

One summer night I was woken by the sound of someone trying to get in my bedroom window. Now I sleepily tried to talk myself into believing I was dreaming. I said, “Leisa you were dreaming. Just go back to sleep.” But then I heard it again, and this time it was so very obvious. I was not dreaming. My heart was racing when I realized that someone, yes someone, was definitely trying to get in my bedroom window!

I contemplated screaming.

I contemplated laying quietly in my bed and hoping that he wouldn’t be able to get in.

In the end I opted to quietly try to sneak out of the bedroom and go for help.

So I quietly crept out of bed, and glanced at the crack under the door. I could tell that the other side of the door was dark and that I could safely open the door and not reveal that I was aware of the intruders presence. After all I didn’t want him to know I was aware of my presence. I wanted to have the advantage. Not him.

Silently I opened the door and discovered that I was not alone in my fears. My brother and father were in the hall discussing the intruder. They heard him jump the fence and sneak into our yard.

My dad called the sheriffs office, but the intruder escaped. We learned from the officers that a man had been pulling girls out of bed at knife point and raping them. I was lucky, they said, because he had been raping many girls in our area.

From them we learned that he always threatened to kill the girls if they screamed, but in each case if the girl screamed he was frightened away. So now I at least had a plan if I should ever meet my attacker, and a deep gratitude that I was a light sleeper.

We also learned that they had a prime suspect in the case. A man convicted of rape and paroled a few months earlier. But they didn’t have enough evidence yet to arrest him and no one could ID him. I don’t recall now if he wore a mask or not, or if it was just the lingering darkness that shielded his identity.

Over the course of several months I was woken by the sound of this man trying to sneak into my bedroom many times. This occurred on at least fifteen different occasions. He was persistent. But I was equally persistent in my determination to stay safe.

I recall one night we were standing in the driveway talking to a couple of deputies when one of the officers asked, “Does your neighbor have a dog?” “No, he died sometime ago,” we said. Instantaneously we heard the sound of footsteps running away as my stalker realized that the deputy was aware of his presence. They brought in dogs, but he escaped.

But that wasn’t the only time he watched me when I was outside the relative safety of my home…

At the time I was working as a waitress. I arrived home from work very late one evening and realized that I didn’t have a house key with me. I knew my dad was asleep on the sofa, just inside the front door, so I decided to quickly make my way to the door and knock. No sooner had I stepped towards the house I realized I had made a mistake. The rapist stepped out of the shadows and seclusion of my neighbors driveway and began approaching me.

I ran and he chased me. I reached the front door and pounded on it with obvious alarm. My father opened the door in time and the stalker fled.

I was preyed upon for months. I felt like I was being hunted.

We lived at the top of a very long and dark cul-de-sac. There were no street lights, and most of the neighbors turned their porch lights off when they went to bed. In an attempt to capture the rapist the police would drive up the street with their lights off. But it was no use. We had plenty of escape routes from our back yard. It was lined by several fields. The stalker would simply watch down the hill for a car to begin up the street and he could run through the fields to any number of streets and easily escape.

My parents asked the neighbors to leave their porch lights on, but most of the neighbors dismissed it as “Leisa’s active imagination.” After all, “things like this didn’t happen in our neighborhood.”

Finally, he tried breaking in another neighbors home as well and people began to listen and I slowly began to get over my fear. I always feared seeing his face, but that fear turned to a desire to confront my would be attacker face-to-face. I began to look for the opportunity to rip-open those curtains and see him. But the chance never presented itself.

You see, he finally tried getting into the wrong house during broad daylight. A local girl was talking to her friend on the phone. She saw someone trying to break in, pretended she didn’t notice, and relayed the information to her friend on the other end of the line. Her dad, a police officer, happened to be home at the time and he quickly went to her house and found him trying to break in.

Naturally the man ran, but the police called in the dogs and they captured him cowering in some bushes. He was convicted and sent to jail again.
But that wasn’t the end…

Some time later I was driving home at 1:00 in the morning and heard that he had escaped from prison. A girlfriend smuggled in clothing and he was somehow able to change into priests clothing and walk right out of the jail.

I began to fear that he would again come after me, and finish what he was never able to complete.

Several months later he was again apprehend. They captured him eating at a local McDonalds after a tipster recognized him from the news stories and called it in.

I was once again free from him, but not free from the threat of rape…

Related Articles:

• My Life Story - Part 5; Someone's Watching Me
• My Life Story - Part 4; You Get What You Think About
• My Life Story - Part 3; Intruder Shatters My Vision of Being Safe at Home
• My Life Story - Part 2; The Law of Attraction at Work
• My Life Story - Part 1; My Highly Tuned Perception

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