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It can be a hard trip to justice overseas

Four years after becoming a victim on vacation, she wonders if prosecuting her assailant was just a waste of time.

By TAMARA LUSH
Published March 25, 2006

She had waited four years for this day.

Wearing her best black pantsuit, she walked into the Colonial-style, pink stucco building in the Bahamas and braced herself.

The courtroom was like nothing she had seen on TV. A Bahamian judge was there, in a white wig and flowing black robes. She swore on a Bible and on behalf of the Queen of England that she would tell the truth. She looked into the cold eyes of her attacker and told her painful story for what she hoped would be the last time.

"He told me he was going to kill me if I screamed again," she said. She didn't cry, not this time.

Her name is Diana. She is a 39-year-old mom from Kansas City. She was raped on a beach while on vacation. (The Times is withholding her last name at her request because of the nature of the crime.)

She is also an example of what can happen when an American is a crime victim in a foreign country.

Diana endured four years of bungled court dates, confusing information, and frustrating conversations with people who live in a country that is so close to the United States, yet so distant culturally.

Many victims keep quiet, try to forget about their horrific vacations and choose to skip the lengthy court process.

Diana wasn't one of those victims.

Yet, she wasn't seeking justice for herself.

"If it was only for getting justice for me, I would never go back," she said. "I didn't want him to get out and hurt other people."

But when Diana walked out of the courtroom in the Bahamas that day, she had reason to believe the past four years had been a terrible waste of time.

"The beach is all yours, ladies."

The boat captain anchored and told Diana and her four friends they could take the dinghy ashore.

The women were co-workers and had chartered a sailboat out of Miami for a week in January 2002, to escape the frigid Kansas City winter. The captain and a first mate were aboard to help them sail.

The first two days were idyllic: diving off the boat into the blue water, making gourmet meals in the galley and gazing at the stars in the night sky.

On the third day, the captain anchored a few hundred yards off a horseshoe-shaped beach.

They were the only ones around, and Diana wasn't exactly sure where she was - she wasn't the one who planned the trip - but she thought it might have been a U.S. territory. After all, they hadn't gone through customs or immigration.

Diana's pale skin was getting a tan from the sun, and her strawberry-blond hair was getting lighter. Her stressful job as a software architect was all but forgotten as she searched for shells in the sugar sand.

She was so focused - wouldn't that pink conch be great for her 5-year-old son, she thought - that when she looked up, she realized she was at least a half-mile from the others.

She noticed something else: a man, walking near a row of palm trees at the edge of the beach.

"Where did he come from?" she wondered.

The man called to her. He wanted to know about the boat, her friends, where she was from.

She took off her sunglasses, shielding her hazel eyes from the bright sun. She answered tentatively. Maybe he owns this beach, she thought. She didn't want to seem rude.

The man's voice dropped lower, and Diana slowly walked toward him so she could hear. He asked her if she wanted to see a nearby garden.

"No, I'm going to go catch up with my friends," she said, inching away. He grabbed her hand. When she tried to jerk away, he grabbed harder.

In an instant, he pinned her arms across her chest. He put his other hand over her mouth. She thrashed her head around and broke free of his grip, and screamed.

She could see her friends far down the beach.

Diana was physically strong, but he was stronger. Diana doesn't remember being dragged across the beach, past the row of palm trees or over a dirt road. She does remember going into the woods, the darkness of the trees replacing the bright sun on the beach.

"This," she thought, "is how I'm going to die."

She realized that she was still clutching her shells in one hand and her sunglasses in the other. She dropped the shells, then winged her sunglasses with a flick of her wrist.

"Maybe someone will find them and find my body," she thought. They landed where the trees met the road.

He kept repeating one thing: "I'm gonna kill you."

She couldn't cry, was too scared. "What did I do to you?" she asked.

He wrestled her shorts off.

"I'm a mom," she pleaded with him. "I have a little boy. I need to go home."

He ignored her.

The next thing she remembers is the screaming. Not hers. Then she heard loud rustling through the woods - and Daniel, the 17-year-old first mate, crashed toward them.

The attacker pulled up his pants and ran off. Daniel helped Diana to her feet. He later told her that he had heard her scream and that he had seen her sunglasses at the edge of the woods.

A police officer told her where she was: the Bahamas, on the island of Bimini. It was not a U.S. territory. Different rules applied.

As she retold her story to countless police officials, her mood swung wildly.

She feared that her boyfriend back home wouldn't want anything to do with her.

She was angry at the doctor who examined her. A nurse read a checklist from the rape kit. Check for intact hymen, it said.

"Well, we're not gonna find a hymen in there," she remember the doctor saying.

"You are done," Diana screamed. She got off the table and threw her shoes across the room.

She couldn't get through to the U.S. Embassy. As it turned out, the embassy had changed its number, and the police in Bimini didn't have the new number. Diana finally got through, but only after one of her friends on the boat called her mother, who worked for the U.S. government in Saudi Arabia. Through that connection, the embassy tracked her down.

"I don't want this in the newspapers or on TV," Diana told the embassy.

"Neither do we," she says they replied.

She felt little emotion when police told her they had caught the man who raped her. His name was Fredrick Francis, a 19-year-old who was well-known on the sparsely populated island. Officials told Diana that Francis had a criminal past.

She wanted to leave, but there were endless police reports and getting off the island wasn't that easy. Unlike Nassau or Freeport, Bimini doesn't have commercial plane service, only a few seaplanes to Florida a week.

Three days after the rape, Diana flew home. She arrived a day after a big ice storm. Her boyfriend met her at the airport, and hugged her tight.

Over the next year, Diana returned to the Bahamas three times to testify in court.

Diana was amazed at how disorganized and slow the process was; the Bahamas, as a commonwealth of England, uses British law. But some of the problems had nothing to do with legal procedure, like when the government wrote her a $300 check, reimbursing her for her flight - and the check bounced.

Other things were just different from the United States. Once, she asked a judge for a copy of her testimony.

"Why would you need a copy of that?" he asked, and refused.

Another time, Francis was permitted to question her directly.

"How come it has been so long and you could say it's me and I didn't been on no identification parade? You didn't come and pick me out. How come you could pick me out now?" "Because, sir, you frightened me so much. That moment is burned into my memory from the fear that I have. That's not something that I would easily forget."

After that initial flurry of activity in 2002, she heard nothing from the Bahamas.

Calls to the U.S. Embassy were useless, she said. Often, she couldn't even get someone on the phone.

Emotionally, she was still afraid of people. She refused to hug anyone other than her family. Handshakes were difficult. Being alone, anywhere, was terrifying.

Yet Diana's life reached some kind of normal, thanks, in part to a 12-week counseling program for rape victims. She and her boyfriend bought 4 acres of land and started renovating a house. They went on a camping trip to California. And on Jan. 29, 2003, she celebrated: she had lived one year that she had never expected to live.

A bonus year, she called it.

She reached another milestone, this one in her dreams. For months, she had nightmares that Francis was raping her, her friends and her mother. One night, she dreamt that she beat him so hard that he couldn't rape her ever again.

In May of 2005, she received a call from the new prosecutor on the case.

Fredrick Francis had been let out of jail. The prosecutor, SandraDee Gardiner, explained that Bahamian law allowed defendants to be released on bail if the trial process was going slowly.

Diana was stunned. "I know he's going to hurt somebody," she thought.

The trial was set in Freeport for March 13, 2006. Diana arrived the day before, on a Sunday. She felt unsafe, knowing that Francis was out of jail. She had come with her boyfriend - now her husband - and met with Gardiner to go over details of the case.

"Are you sure (Francis) is going to show up for trial?" she asked the prosecutor.

Yes, Gardiner said. He's back in custody.

"Why?" she asked.

Francis had been charged with killing an Austrian couple, the prosecutor explained. They were staying in a hotel on Bimini and were robbed and shot to death in July. Police described the crime scene as "brutal." It happened one month after Francis was released.

Diana walked into the courtroom that Monday, depressed and half-defeated.

She didn't feel better after testifying.

Under cross-examination, she acknowledged that she had never picked Francis out of a lineup. No officers asked her to, she said. There was also some question as to whether her shorts and bikini bottom from that day had been tampered with; the evidence bag hadn't been sealed properly.

"All I've worked for has been screwed up," Diana thought as she walked out of the courtroom.

A few days later, on Thursday, March 16, she received a call from Gardiner, the prosecutor.

"Mr. Francis had a change of heart and he decided to plead guilty," she said.

Francis had been sentenced to five years in prison. Diana told the prosecutor she hoped that they could resolve the murder cases before his five years were up, so he wouldn't be set free once again.

The prosecutor laughed. "I'm sure we will resolve it in five years."

[Last modified March 25, 2006, 20:05:03]