A Survivor’s Story She Was A Confident, Successful Young Woman Who Lived Alone In Her Own House. Then, One Night, A 14-Year-Old Intruder Changed Everything

Rivers mesmerize. They shimmer with sunlight, polish stones, restore souls. Ancient people believed rivers possessed the magic of transcendence. They promised spiritual passage; to the renewal of the Jordan, to the afterlife of the Ganges.

For Julie Shiflett, the familiar rivers of the Northwest are no less sacred than those ancient streams. She rafts the white water of the Wenatchee, swims in the quiet coves of the Spokane, hikes along the St. Joe - and finds solace. For her, too, rivers make all things new.

Julie Shiflett’s passage began in her East Central neighborhood more than two miles away from the Spokane River on a dark, sweltering night.

Just before midnight, on June 29, 1992, Shiflett jolted awake, as if startled from a vivid dream.

A street light shone through the lace curtains at her window. She recognized her neighbor, a 14-year-old the size of a man, emerging from the shadows.

This terrifying beginning would force her through the sharp edges of traumatic loss and its aftermath. Ahead would be difficult lessons on the seizing and relinquishing of control, the nature of healing, and the power of water.

But, oddly, lying in that Hitchcock-like scene in her bedroom near 12th and Freya, Shiflett’s first instinct was trust. Glimpsing the neighbor boy, she imagined there must be other kids in the living room, robbing her. Surely this boy, who she’d hired to mow her yard, would protect her.

Instead, he tied her hands behind her back so tightly with an extension cord they went numb. Suddenly, he was standing over her, holding one of her serrated kitchen knives to the back of her neck.

Her brain electrified. It switched first to terror. “Oh, my God, this man is going to kill me.” Then to survival.

Shiflett, a take-charge accountant, then 25, worked to untie her hands while the boy pulled off her underwear and raped her.

The fan whirred beside her bed; it was 95 degrees that week. She noticed no other sounds. At one point, the rapist sliced her finger with the knife. It bled, but she felt no pain.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she pleaded. “Please don’t hurt my cats.”

Certain vivid details remain. The next morning, after seven and a half hours in the hospital, she was starving. A doctor showed up with a bag of garlic sticks from The Olive Garden. She devoured one gratefully.

During that frightening night, the rapist threatened to kill Shiflett if she told anyone. He disappeared, and she lay in fear for 20 minutes. Then she dressed and crawled on her hands and knees through the dark house, past her wild-eyed cats. She ran across the street to a neighbor, who embraced her and called 911.

At Deaconess, she was met by her mother. She talked to the police. She began taking steps to prosecute, even made a decision to speak out publicly on behalf of rape victims. She told her story over and over in a monotone.

She describes shock. Professionals call it dissociation. “It’s almost like you’re a third watching what’s going on,” she says. “It’s like you’re detached from your body.”

She called her sisters. One sister fell to the floor screaming. Her 11-year-old nephew said, “Aunt Julie, I can’t believe some asshole did that to you.”

Shiflett didn’t howl with rage, or cry hysterically.

“I’m OK, I’m OK,” she reassured her family.

“No, you’re not,” her sister snapped.

AT AGE 5, SHIFLETT hopped onstage with a mike in her hand. She loved to sing. She competed in rodeos in junior high, goat-tying and barrel-racing.

Her family raised horses on 45 acres outside of Republic. Shiflett attended high school there, played the saxophone, guitar and drums. President of her senior class, she led a $16,000 fund-drive for a class trip to Disneyland.

“She always was a leader,” says her mother, Billie Krisher of Prosser.

Shiflett paid her own way through college, waiting tables at the Stockyards Inn, selling concessions at Playfair. She attended community college two years, then transferred to Eastern for an accounting degree.

By the time of the rape, she had passed the CPA exam and become a senior accountant at Coopers & Lybrand in Spokane. She sang “The Wind Beneath My Wings” at weddings. She loved camping, whitewater rafting and Elvis.

She bought her own house, where she planted a garden, jogged through the neighborhood, and felt free and independent enough to live alone, to sleep soundly in her back bedroom without pajamas.

Billie Krisher filled out a victim impact statement for the court in August, two months after the rape.

“I have lost my confident daughter,” she wrote. “(She) now crawls in bed with Mom in the middle of the night because of nightmares.”

Fear took over Shiflett’s life that summer.

Nothing seemed safe anymore.

She sold her house but bought another a few blocks away, then sold that one, too. She lost between $8,000 and $10,000.

Her mother quit her job.

“Somebody needed to be with me 24 hours a day,” Shiflett says.

She quit walking and jogging. It felt too dangerous.

Hyperalert since the rape, she stopped drinking coffee. She couldn’t stand to augment her high-voltage anxiety with caffeine.

She couldn’t bear to listen to music. Too emotional. All that summer, she listened only to talk radio.

A counselor at the Spokane Sexual Assault Center told Shiflett that later on, once she began to feel safe, she’d finally grieve.

In the meantime, she funneled her anger toward The Spokesman-Review’s coverage of the rape. The first story on July 1 reported that the rapist had entered her house through a window covered only by a screen. Shiflett was certain the rapist had entered her house earlier in the day to unlock her bathroom window, then came back at night to prop up a stool, cut the screen and lift the sash.

The line about the screen, she fumed, made her look foolhardy, as though she were to blame.

The boy was charged with first-degree rape and first-degree burglary in July. A newspaper story described him as a victim of child sexual abuse. What difference did that make? she argued in a letter to the editor. She was the victim.

She testified in court, and in September the boy was sentenced to four years of juvenile confinement, followed by two years of parole.

Shiflett fended off her rage and anger by taking charge.

She trained police cadets on victim empathy, joined a crime victims group, and spoke on behalf of the Sexual Assault Center during a county funding request.

“Rape is not about sex,” she would explain. “It’s about violence and control.”

Breaking down, she reasoned, would be letting the rapist win. Besides, she feared being swept away. Once she started crying, she might never stop.

Her mother and sisters struggled to remain supportive and learned to keep their mouths shut.

“We were just caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,” says her mother.

By Christmas 1994 Shiflett’s rage sprayed like a faucet gone askew.

“I would get mad at my family,” she says. “The anger or the hurt was not proportionate to what happened.”

She drove to the Tri Cities for Christmas. She unwrapped gifts that reflected the old prerape Julie: a sheet of uncut Elvis stamps, an Elvis album, a big basket of gourmet coffee.

“Don’t these people know I don’t drink coffee?” she wondered.

“What are these gifts?” she asked angrily. “They have nothing to do with me.”

Her family didn’t understand. The old Julie had died the night of the rape.

SAFETY ARRIVED WITH a teddy bear and a brand new security system.

Shiflett moved into her mother’s sturdy brick house, miles and miles from her old neighborhood. A security company’s stickers gleamed on every window. A friend bought her real pajamas and a stuffed bear.

She entered individual counseling and bought a book written by a rape survivor. By Migael Scherer, it was called “Still Loved By The Sun.”

The following July, she took time off for a back-packing trip on the St. Joe River. She brought along a trusted friend, the new book and a journal.

While her friend fished, Shiflett waded into the clear, cleansing water, teeming with cutthroat trout, to a small island. There she read and gazed into the river.

It was back at the campsite, though, that she wrote in her journal. “ANGER AND RAGE,” she scrawled in big letters.

As she wrote, the emotions she’d stored for over two years began to surface.

“I want to rage on at everything, everything he has done to me, taken away from me,” she wrote.

The words on the pages grew larger and angrier. She started to cry. Tears streamed down her face.

Shiflett ran to the river. She picked up huge rocks, boulders, really, that she’d never again be able to lift, and heaved them into the water. She screamed and screamed, waving her arms and leaping up and down until she was exhausted.

Then she sat down and cried for half an hour. The river silently flowed over the rocks.

AFTER THAT, GRIEF came easier.

Shiflett entered a rape survivors group at the Sexual Assault Center. She kept writing in her journal and grieving. Melinda Stafford, the clinical supervisor and therapist who led the group, watched her soften.

“Julie is a doer and a thinker,” Stafford says. “It was hard for her to let go and let herself be a wreck.”

Today, at 29, Shiflett appears professional and accomplished, the director of accounting at Egghead Computer. She has the sort of blonde attractiveness that is at once delicate and firm.

She hardens her jaw as she stares hollowly out her living room window. She once again lives alone.

There’s a layer of scar tissue. Still a fierce need for control. A vigilance.

It led her to track her rapist down one night at a wrestling match, just to see if she’d still recognize him. And to once ask a friend to hold a serrated knife to her neck, to find out how it felt when her nerves weren’t jangled by terror.

“It takes a long time to heal,” she says. “I thought I’d be over this by now.”

As she talks, she scans the road for cars.

“Who’s out there?” she wonders. “What car is that? Will I be safe?”

She knows her rapist is back in Spokane. Now 18, he’s out on parole.

She’s wary. She fears he may still be incapable of empathy, but she hopes his treatment helped.

“I don’t want to have anyone else hurt,” she says.

She still dreads the month of June. She hates crowds, the bathrooms at shopping malls, and the sound of fans. On winter nights, she sets the thermostat to 55 degrees so that the fan on her furnace won’t kick on.

“I grieve,” she says, “for the parts of me that are lost: the fun-loving, trusting, out-going part of me that’s gone. In a long-lasting grief, that’s what I grieve the most for and still grieve for.”

But she’s singing again. She plans to perform a favorite Reba McEntire song, “If I Had Only Known,” at a crime victims rights vigil at the Public Safety Building in April.

Shiflett still speaks frequently. She talks to sex offenders for the State Department of Corrections.

“What gets to the offenders is all the long-term effects it has on you and your family,” she says. “They just don’t think about it.”

She traces an imaginary circle around her with her index finger.

“I am the pebble. The ring around me is my pond,” she says. “The ripples are all the people who were affected by the rape.”

Above her mantel, Shiflett hangs a picture of Icicle Creek. A teddy bear nestles on her couch.

She power-walks along the Spokane River again, gardens - snowdrops and crocuses are already poking up - and dates.

“For me, it’s not about sex; it’s about control,” she says. “I’m not afraid of men.”

Last weekend, she ambled through an arts and crafts show at the fairgrounds in jeans, white athletic shoes and no makeup.

She shopped for a floral wreath to donate to the Sexual Assault Center’s upcoming auction - she serves on its advisory board - and dreams of her future.

She’s only now begun to envision one again. Her desire for marriage and children has returned. She also imagines building a log house, with high cathedral ceilings, lots of light and air.

As she shops, she examines potential furnishings: an elk antler chandelier, a cut-steel coat rack with prancing horses, a wood-carved rainbow trout.

She stops for a bottle of water and a pretzel.

“I have this theory,” she says. “We’re 65 percent water. That’s why when I get around water, it’s so natural and comforting. It’s like coming back to your self.”

There will be water by the log house Julie Shiflett will build, either the gurgle of a nearby creek or the view of a flowing river.

Such water heals, Shiflett knows. It soothes and restores.

“If you put a big, jagged rock out there,” she says, “the water eventually makes it smooth.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos

MEMO: About this story The Spokesman-Review ordinarily does not name the victims of sex crimes. Today we make an exception. Julie Shiflett, the survivor of a 1992 rape in Spokane, has become a local activist on behalf of crime victims’ rights and the needs of sexual assault victims. She regularly speaks publicly on her experience, to groups as diverse as police cadets and sex offenders. She shares her story to prevent others from being victimized.

Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. Survivors’ emotional responses vary As a woman heals from rape, she’s likely to experience a wide range of emotions. As with other types of grief, the process will be highly individual. According to Melinda Stafford, a clinical supervisor at the Spokane Sexual Assault Center, emotions may include anger, guilt, shame, fear, loss, betrayal and sorrow. “I can’t say, ‘First you’ll do anger, then you’ll do sadness, then you’re going to do guilt,”’ Stafford says. “Everybody’s really different.” Like combat veterans, concentration camp victims and others who survive violent trauma, rape survivors often develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Mental health professionals make this diagnosis when the person responds to the event with intense fear, helplessness or horror and shows the following symptoms: Persistently re-experiencing the event through upsetting dreams, thoughts or flashbacks, for example. Displaying numbness or avoidance, such as avoiding places, activities or people that trigger memories, and feeling detached, unable to feel emotions or unable to imagine a future. Anxiety, such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, angry outbursts, difficulty concentrating, hypervigilance, or an exaggerated startle response. The Sexual Assault Center, a program of Lutheran Social Services, offers a range of services to rape survivors, including crisis and legal advocates and individual, group or family counseling. For rape crisis counseling, call the Spokane Sexual Assault Center at 624-RAPE. Jamie Tobias Neely

2. Fund-raiser on Friday The Chocolate and Champagne Gala, an annual fund-raiser for the Spokane Sexual Assault Center, will be Friday at the Davenport Hotel. The evening includes gourmet chocolates, lacy desserts, espresso and champagne, as well as a raffle and silent and loud auctions. A jazz quartet will perform. The event will be from 6 to 9 p.m. Tickets are $30 in advance, or $40 at the door. Call 747-8224 or 325-SEAT.