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Northwest Living: Pieces of me
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Anonymous user Wed Nov 30, -0001 00:00:00 PST
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3 responses 0 comments Sixteen years ago this month, I turned 16 years old.

As I have every year since I was 8, I wrote in my diary that week. I hadn’t looked at that particular entry since, but I opened it last week and what I read almost
knocked the air out of me.

The excerpt I am sharing with you is significant because the story that
will follow is something I have never written about publicly:

“Dear Me, (I felt I was too old to be writing ‘Dear Diary’),
Well, I turn 16 tomorrow, the same age my mother was when I was born. She’s 32
now and my only wish for this birthday is that Scott (my former stepfather)
will really leave us alone. I can’t believe he found out where we live
again! I am scared because we don’t have a car and my mom rides her bike
to work and I just know one of these days Dustin (my brother) and I will get
a phone call that Scott has killed her. I swear I will NEVER marry a man
who beats me up on a weekly basis. I’m pretty sure I know what to look for
in a bad guy by now.”

I didn't know anything.

My first husband is a convicted rapist.

What you’re about to read is true. This is not what I now call a
“James Frey-ctional” story (referring to the author who embellished his
memoir “A Million Little Pieces”).
  
I met Louie the month before I graduated high school. I was working at a
kiosk in the middle of the mall. He had walked by a few times and finally ––
with his movie star good looks –– he came over to me, introduced himself and
proceeded to tell me that I was the girl he was going to marry. Six months
later, we were engaged. I was 18, Lou was 21, and he treated me like a queen.

Experts later explained that often times people with sociopathic
personalities (Louie) tend to idolize and dote upon certain people in their
lives, and the object of that affection (me) never sees the “real”
person, just the facade.
  
That wasn’t the case with me. I was intuitive, yet extremley insecure.
When the Kern County Sheriff’s Department showed up at our apartment at
3 a.m. a month after we got engaged and told Louie they were arresting him
for the forcible rape of a woman just hours before, I should have run fast
and far. Instead, I was paralyzed. What? I knew Louie had been out with a
friend, but why would he even be talking to another girl, much less touching
her, and  –– even more unimaginable –– raping her?
  
I listened through the kitchen door as he eventually told deputies that
he had slept with a woman that night at a motel, but it was consensual and he
couldn’t believe she had said he raped her. I threw up.
 
As he was being led out the door in handcuffs, he told me to call his
mother. At that point, I couldn’t even remember where the phone was
located.
  
I remember rationalizing that while he may have slept with someone else
there was no way my “perfect fiance’” who wrote me poems and picked me
flowers once a week and made me feel like I was the only woman in the world
every day could rape someone.
  
Besides (again trying to justify it in my head), the woman who accused
him was married, and she and Louie met at a bar, and I convinced myself that
they were both drunk and somehow her husband found out so she got scared and
said Louie raped her.
  
Resolving to stay with him and work this “thing” out, I bailed him out
of jail. In the process I lost all self-respect and disconnected myself from
what I called “the incident.”
   
Together we told a few friends and family members. An older female
relative simply looked at me and said, “Men cheat, Rachel. I’m glad
you’re giving him a second chance. He’s so handsome, sweet and
charming, after going through this I’m sure he won’t cheat again.” No one
could believe that Lou was being charged with such a heinous act.
  
A jury didn’t believe it, either, and months later, to our relief, Louie
was acquitted.

The day of my wedding, Sept. 11, 1993, my Maid of Honor, Jennifer looked at me in the bathroom and said, “You know,
it’s not to late for us to make a run for it.”

I was puking in a stall, knowing that even though I loved Louie and he treated me so well, I was
making a mistake. Who marries a man who just months before went through a
rape trial? You may be thinking what I’d be thinking if I read this: “What an idiot”!
  
Truth was, I was an insecure 19-year-old girl who didn’t think a lot of
herself, despite what I showed to the outside world.
  
To most people I had the world by the tail. I was just starting out at
KGFM and was a field reporter and part-time anchor for our sister stations,
KERN and KGEO. I was doing television commercials and going to college. Me,
Rachel Legan, a girl who grew up in an environment in which statistics show
should have led me to poverty or teen pregnancy, drugs and maybe even
prison. It appeared I was going to be successful, but deep down inside my
biggest fear was that Louie would stop loving me and cheat on me again. That
I wasn’t good enough for him, even though HE didn’t make me feel like
that. I made myself feel that way.
    
That part of me disappeared on Election Day 1994. I was doing live
radio reports from Republican headquarters when a cameraman friend of mine
asked me if Louie drove a green Dodge truck. Yes, I told him, why are you
asking? “Well,” he said, “this is going to sound kind of weird, but Carol (the
reporter in his truck) and I were listening to the police scanner when
Louie’s name came up as the owner of a truck with the license plate the
cops had run as a suspect vehicle in a rape and robbery in Campus Park.”
   
I became sick and dizzy as the camera guy said, “You know, it’s
probably just a case of mistaken identity.” Yeah, I agreed, but I knew in my gut as I called Louie and began questioning him.
     
He lied and said that yeah, he’d been in Campus Park that day
looking for new gardening clients, but the suggestion that he was involved
in a rape was ludacris.
   
I immediately called work, said I was sick and drove home. I told Louie
I was going to call the police to clear everything up because if they had
said his name on a police scanner then something was really wrong. He
promised he would call the next day because it was already midnight and he
said if the police had his license plate information then they obviously
knew where we lived and why didn’t they come question him?
 
Again I rationalized that while that was true, my gut said differently.
Hours later I drove to work after not having slept, trying to figure out what
I was going to do.
   
This couldn’t be happening again, could it? Why was this happening to
me?
 
Scanning the paper that morning I saw the story. A real estate agent had
been raped.
 
Oddly enough, that was my news assignment for the day –– get information on
the suspect or suspects and do a follow-up story. When I spoke with the
Public Information Officer at the Bakersfield Police Department, I told him
what had happened the night before; how Louie’s name was on the scanner.
The PIO was a friend of mine at the time, and asked me for Louie’s full
name and put me on hold.

When he came back to the phone he said, “Sweetie,
Louie is not the guy we’re looking for, that’s not the name I have
here.”

Relief and embarrassment washed over me as I hung up and headed to
Superior Court. I was also working on the Bruce and Jeremy Sons case at the
time, and Jeremy was in court. I got off work later than usual that night, and
when I got home I noticed that Louie, a “neat freak,” had left dishes in
the sink and that the back door was open. As I walked outside, two policemen
had Louie in handcuffs in our alley.

One of them asked me what I was doing there. How did I get there so quickly?

“I live here, he’s my husband’ I said.

I think he may have thought I was working as a reporter and was there to get the story on the man who
raped a Bakersfield real estate agent. I asked them if I could get in the
police car with Louie and they said it was alright. They let me go back in
the house and get him a jacket, which they searched before he put it on. I
knew right then that life as I knew it was over.
   
At the station, they handcuffed Louie to a little wall in a little room.
I asked to see the PIO , who explained that when he talked to me earlier he
was looking at a list of suspects for another crime and he was sorry for the
mix-up. I was in shock as officers said it would be alright for me to speak
to Louie because he wasn’t admitting anything to them. When they put me in
that little room with Louie he told me that he woke up that morning (of the
rape) just knowing he was going to do something bad. I asked him if he
raped that woman and for all of the details, and he told me, as he kept
touching his head and saying, “Something’s wrong with me up here Bubbas
(a name we used to call each other)”.

I asked him why over and over again. Wasn’t our life the greatest? Weren’t we the best of friends? Why, God?
Why would you do something like this, how could you hurt someone like that?
Oh My God, everything is ruined, we are not going to have the babies we talked
about or the life we planned. How? Why? Why?

He had no answer, he just kept touching his head. I asked to be let out of the room, and the officers told me that our conversation had been recorded and they had all they
needed. They then asked to look at the rings I was wearing. Louie had stolen
her rings, they explained, and they wanted to make sure I didn’t have them
on. The only rings I had on were my wedding ring and my one-year anniversary
ring. I was 20 years old and I wanted to die.
  
On my 21st birthday, Louie was sentenced to 38 years in prison. The judge
miscalculated the sentence, and he was brought back to court the next day and
given over 50 years in prison. I divorced him and haven’t spoken to him
since. It has been 12 years, and I still can’t really wrap my mind around
what happened. I felt that I, too, must have been “headsick” to have loved
a person who could hurt another human being like he did. Until recently, I
had even forgotten that I liked him. He was never mean or abusive to me in
any way, so the hatred I came to feel for him confused me, yet fueled me at
times.I felt awful for the woman who accused him of rape before we got
married, it is obvious that she was telling the truth. I felt awful for the
real estate agent, her family, Louie’s family, me, my family –– it was a
situation in which everyone lost.
   
I feel like I’m publishing my gut right now, but it’s a story I have
wanted to tell for a long time. I just didn’t have the strength until now.
   
The real estate agent, who I have met and talked with, was interviewed in
the paper after Louie was sentenced. She is an amazing person, and I have so
much respect and admiration for her. Her family and friends pulled her
through like mine did. I don’t know if I would have had the strength she
showed.
   
Sometimes I still feel weak just thinking about it. When that happens, I reach for Jake, my husband, and I know in my gut I will
never go through anything like that again.

E-mail Rachel at rlegan@liveradio.com.

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