Victim returns to crime scene 30 years later, as an author

[flamingyouth]

Author Terri Jentz as a teenager. After her college freshman year, Jentz and a friend were brutally attacked in Redmond, Ore., by an ax-wielding man, whom she says has still not paid for his crime.

In the summer of 1977 two young women just out of their freshman year at Yale set out on a cross-country bike trip, west to east. Near Redmond, Ore., hot, tired and already bickering, they gave things a rest by pitching their tent in a state park.

In the middle of the night, a man in a pressed cowboy shirt walked up to their tent. He began hacking away at them with an ax; he ran over their tent with his truck. One of the women, a bright young Midwesterner named Terri Jentz, stumbled from the attack scene and ran through the dark, smelling the blood from her wounds, she remembered, "like copper pennies held in a damp palm." Only the chance arrival of a frightened teenage couple, who raced the two to the local hospital in their truck, kept the two women from bleeding to death.

Women across the country heard about it, and canceled plans to bike or camp alone. Walter Cronkite read the headline on the news. Robert Pinsky, later the U.S. poet laureate, wrote a poem about it.

Jentz's ordeal then became one more chip in the mosaic of violence in America. Her biking partner, half blind from the attack, couldn't even remember what happened. Terri Jentz tried to forget.

But she couldn't.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2003692500_jentz04.html

http://www.strangepieceofparadise.com/