NEW SECRET
I’m just a lurker, not a member.
My GF of two years has terrible nightmares where she relives the yeas of abuse from her stalker many years ago. I keep a bottle of water by our bed for when she does: it clears her head quicker. Her daily life is plagued with anxiety and insecurities. Physically, she has several large knife wounds on her body, and her clitoris and the lining of her vagina are significantly scarred by burning.
This occurred in a state with limited relationship statuses for who could be named on a restraining order. He was just some guy who’d asked if she needed a roommate, and then attacked her that night, and convinced her he’d killer her and himself if she tried to do anything about it. She fit the classic profile of sadist’s target: a “nice” girl from a nice family, with low self-esteem; so she was too embarrassed to ask for help, and was easily convinced she deserved the abuse. Although she did have him jailed several times, he would make bail, break back into her apartment, and promise to kill her if she filed charges. He also conditioned her not to cry so the neighbors wouldn’t call in as he tortured her. Besides the burning, torture took the form of beatings, strangulation, whippings, tying her up and leaving her in the closet for entire days, and watching her penetrate herself in the vagina and rectum with objects he’d retrieve from the trash. He threw her from a moving car, defecated and urinated on her, made her lie naked in an abandoned building and watched insects crawl on her for hours, destroyed her clothes, furniture and windshields repeatedly, and also tortured and killed a series of her pets. She was required to be wherever he expected her to be at all times, so that he could enter the apartment at any time, demand she strip and lie on the bed, and then hide in the closet and watch through its louvered blinds while another man, upon an arranged time delay, would enter through the back door and perform sex acts on her. Although she suffers PTSD and depression, she is still unable to cry all these years later.
Our relationship is sometimes more than I can cope with, especially with her resistance to seeking therapy; and, once sought, the numbers of absolutely useless therapists she’s tried. I myself went to therapy for the frustration and anxiety I‘ve experienced from being in a PTSD relationship, and was lucky to find a good therapist.
But not so good as to talk me out of what I’m writing to you about. I’ve been searching for her abuser for years. After many dead ends, I was able to find some peace in the possibility that he’d crossed the wrong person and was now long dead. But enough doubt lingered that I kept searching, and now know that he lives in a low-rent apartment complex in a faraway state. The state he lives in has capital punishment, which does put the idea of revenge in, balanced against the belief that this is the sort of crime that the police never solve unless its solution is obvious. It was a long time ago and we live very far away, and even if the police traced it back, I would put on the act of being one of those cranky guys who get all up about their civil rights and refuse to say anything on principle.
I fucking hate this world just for the fact that this monster is somehow allowed to remain alive in it. Please give me a way to see this differently, or some other way to bring him to justice.