By Scott Brinton
/> Gayle sits in the warm morning sunlight at her dining-room table, telling her terrible story. Her two young children can be heard laughing in the family room nearby. They're playing and watching the cartoon "Dora the Explorer."
Gayle is speaking about the man who raped her 12 years ago. The North Bellmore resident struggles to recount the details of the attack, but she persists. Gayle hopes people will begin to understand what it's like to be violated in the worst of ways, and to feel outraged enough to call on legislators to change the law, which she says keeps rapists on the street and victims in harm's way.
Gayle had considered giving her last name for this report. But the man who raped her is set to get out prison in 2008, and she's frightened that he might track her down and rape her again -- or worse, harm her children. "He's going to [rape] again," Gayle says. "That's the type of person he is. The police have told me that."
The self-described soccer mom was raped at 3 a.m. on a Thursday in April 1993. She was 32 and unmarried at the time. Her attacker broke into her apartment in a nearby Long Island community. Gayle believes that he had stalked her for more than a month before the attack.
Gayle's boyfriend at the time slept at her apartment most nights. But Wednesday was girls' night out, when she spent the evening with friends and came home alone. Several times before the attack, someone had rung Gayle's doorbell in the middle of the night and run off. She didn't think anything of it. She assumed kids were pulling a prank.
Once inside Gayle's unalarmed apartment, her attacker grabbed her while she slept, tied her up, violated her, stole her money and escaped. He left her a shell of her former self.
Subhed: Cruel twist of the law
Last year, DNA evidence revealed the identity of Gayle's rapist, and showed that he had struck at least once more after the incident. The man was arrested for raping an elderly woman and burglarizing her South Shore home in the mid-1990s. He received a 10-year prison sentence in that case.
In a cruel twist, Gayle's rapist will never face trial for the crimes he committed against her. In New York, the statute of limitations on rape is five years. Unless a rapist is caught within that time, the crime goes unpunished.
After learning her rapist's identity -- and that he would not face justice -- Gayle wrote to New York state Assemblyman David McDonough, a Republican of North Merrick. McDonough proposed a bill in the Assembly that would eliminate the statute of limitations on forcible rape, which carries a maximum 25-year prison sentence. In the past, the statute was intended to prevent false accusations of rape as well as prosecutions that depended on fading memories. But McDonough notes that DNA testing now makes that argument moot. Hair, skin and semen samples taken at crime scenes are entered in county, state and federal DNA data banks, and can lead to rapists' convictions decades after their crimes.
Joy Watson is chief of the Nassau County District Attorney's Sex Offense and Domestic Violence Bureau. Watson says DNA testing "is similar to having fingerprints on file. There is a comparison done, and a match is done. It's science. It's not a question of one-witness identification."
According to the Washington, D.C.-based Rape, Abuse and Incest National Hotline, some 21 states have eliminated their statutes of limitations on rape. And 22 others have statutes longer than New York's, ranging from six to 20 years. Four states -- Connecticut, Kansas, New York and Pennsylvania -- have five-year statutes of limitations on rape. And three states - Florida, Utah and
North Dakota -- have statutes shorter than five years.
"There is no reversing a rape," says McDonough, who sits on the Assembly Republican Minority Task Force on Sex Crimes Against Children and Women. "You talk to [rape survivors] 30 or 40 years later, it's still with them. It's a crime that is as serious as murder, because it continues. The damage that is done by rape is there forever. It doesn't pass. It's not a mugging."
McDonough proposed the bill to do away with the statute of limitations on March 29, 2004, only to see it die in the Assembly Codes Committee. He re-introduced the measure in January, but holds little hope that it will pass the Assembly this year.
Politics may be holding up the bill. McDonough is a Republican in a Democratically controlled Assembly. But the Legislature's general inertia may be stalling the measure as well.
Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, a Democrat of Long Beach, believes the Assembly majority would support McDonough's bill. He does. "Who would be against a bill like this?" Weisenberg says.
But pushing through most any measure is tough in Albany. Weisenberg notes that he needed seven years to pass a law requiring criminal background checks of employees who work with developmentally disabled people.
The greatest -- and perhaps the only -- hope of getting a bill fast-tracked in Albany is for a public outcry, McDonough says.
Subhed: A never-ending crime
Twelve years later, Gayle's fear of her rapist is evident in her eyes as she speaks of him. After the rape, she says, "I wouldn't live by myself. I got an alarm. I got a dog. I never felt safe. I still don't feel safe."
Years of individual and group therapy allowed Gayle to get her life back together. But for a long time, she didn't believe she would get married or have a family. "I didn't even want to be touched by a man," Gayle says. "I never thought I would have kids."
She quickly adds, "At least for now, I know [the man who raped me] is still in jail. I have a lot of anger. [When he gets out,] I'll probably feel more fear and anger and resentment."
Detective Sgt. Richard Zito is a member of the Nassau County Police Department's Special Victims Unit, which last year investigated more than 700 rapes, statutory rapes and suspicious cases. Rape, Zito says, "is probably the worst crime. A lot of victims have a very hard time getting back to a normal life. It's something that's not going to leave you, even with counseling."
Janine Sadowski, a rape counselor with the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence, says, "It's like taking a piece of glass and shattering it. You put the pieces back together, but it will never be the same way."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation rates forcible rape as the second most violent crime after murder. According to the FBI, New York state reported 3,773 rapes in 2003, the majority of which occurred in cities. The FBI says that false accusations account for just 2 percent of all reported rapes.
Sarah Graham Miller, communications director for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Hotline, says some 60 percent of rapes go unreported. Often, she says, victims feel an enormous sense of shame, because they know their attackers, who may be close relatives, friends, trusted advisers or colleagues. Women ages 18 to 30 are most likely to be raped, Miller adds.
"Obviously, with advances in DNA testing and new ways to get [rapists] off the streets, we hope justice systems across the country recognize these new technologies," Miller says.
Gayle worries about what will happen when her rapist is released from prison. "In 2008, are they going to call me? Are they going to notify me" that he's out? she wonders. "Now I have kids to protect, too. It's not just me anymore. It never goes away."
Comments about this story? SBrinton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 203.
