Cold Case Files - I Survived: I Didn’t Stop Running

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

Cold Case Files presents the first episode of A&E’s new podcast, I Survived. One phone call turned Karen’s seemingly happy marriage into a violent nightmare. A prisoner in her own home, Karen outsmarted her husband and escaped with h er life twice. Today, she uses her experience for good, helping others survive and learn to heal. Fill in the gaps in your diet with RITUAL - the obsessively-researched vitamin for women! Get 10% off during your first three months! Visit www.ritual.com/COLDCASE to start your ritual today! Improve your sleep with OURA! Go to www.Ouraring.com/COLDCASE to get $30 off your new Oura Ring, for a limited time only! Find help and resources at www.RAINN.org 

Thank you for listening to this Podcast One podcasts. Now, on to the premiere. This episode contains descriptions of sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. I couldn't think of a better thing to hear for someone to tell you, I don't know how you did it. You survived. You did the right thing. Because they're already blaming themselves for being in that situation in the first place. And what you don't ever think about when someone is out to hurt you, that's because the plan's in their head.

In 1994, Karen Carroll, then Coleman, was working as an emergency room nurse and living in the Bronx, New York with her husband, Ron. I met Ron on a blind date. He was very different from most of the men I was used to. He had sort of a kind of like an edge to him. There was something attractive about the bad boy, but not quite the bad boy. He was spontaneous. He just liked life. And I said, oh, this was kind of nice. He was very easy to get along with. Then one day out of the blue, Karen answered a phone call that would change her life. This is I Survived, the podcast where we talk to women who've lived through the worst things imaginable and all of the tragic and messy and sometimes great things that can happen after survival.

I'm Caitlin VanMol. It was my father's day, and we'd gotten up. We were planning to spend the day together. Actually, we were going to go out and visit his dad. And he said he was going to go buy the Sunday morning paper. So we left the house, and about half an hour after we left the house, the phone rang. And I answered the phone. There was a woman on the phone, and she said, can I speak to Ron?

And I said, I'm sorry, he's not home, but this is his wife. Can I take a message? And I remember she went something like, oh my God, I have to talk to you. And then she started to talk. And that's when I found out that this is a woman that he actually had a relationship even before we got married. As a matter of fact, this is kind of like a soap opera, but on our first blind date, she was in the hospital giving birth to their son. You can tell when another woman's not lying to you because she just knew too many intimate details. She could describe my car. She knew when my husband had had, he ruptured his Achilles tendon. So she knew a lot of things. So I just knew that she wasn't lying. Ron had a whole secret life Karen knew nothing about. When she confronted him, it did not go well.

He got upset, first of all, I think, that this woman called. He was yelling at me. He couldn't believe that I would believe her over him. We argued for hours, back and forth. And finally, it was about 8.30 and I figured, you know, this is enough. I began to get a sense that if I pushed it any further, that something bad was going to happen. I just got a sense that he was going to hit me. I've struggled with getting a decent night's sleep my entire life, and I've never been able

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With Oura's personalized daily sleep and bodily insights, I wake up every morning with my own sleep study in the app on my phone and recommendations on how to improve my REM sleep. Oura's helping me to make some small, easy changes that are helping me to fall asleep easier and stay asleep longer. It's been super motivating. I'm kind of a perfectionist, so I've been working hard to improve my sleep score. So if you want to learn how more REM sleep

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his name, convicted rapist. Now that Harvey Weinstein has been convicted in the state of New York, Court Junkie, with the help of the Law and Crime Trial Network, goes behind the scenes to take a look at what exactly happened at trial. We delve into each day's testimony and get exclusive access to what the jury heard and didn't hear. Subscribe to Court Junkie on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. About 10 o'clock that same night, the phone rang. And it was this woman calling again. And her words to me were, are you okay?

And I said, yeah. And she said, did you tell Ron what I said? And I said, yeah. And she kept saying, are you okay? Even though Karen felt threatened earlier that day, Ron had never gotten physical with her before. Ron, what I said? And I said, yeah. And she kept saying, are you okay? Even though Karen felt threatened earlier that day, Ron had never gotten physical with her before. He had gotten physical with his ex, but Karen didn't know that. So she was confused why this woman was asking if she was okay. But I was trying to talk to her so that he kind of wouldn't know it was her on the phone because I didn't want the argument to start again. So after a few minutes, I hung up the phone.

And after I hung up the phone, Ron turned toward me, and he had this weird look in his eye, and he said, oh, so now the two of you are plotting against me. She calls you up on the phone, you believe everything she says, so now it's you two against me. And I'm kind of wondering, what's he talking about? And he says, he says, so I'll tell you what, I'm going to punch you in your face and I'm going to break your jaw. He said, then I want you to call her on the phone and tell her all about it. And I just very

nonchalantly said to him, if you put your hands on me, it won't be her I'll be calling. It'll be the police. And I meant it, but that's just what I said. And he sort of chuckled and he kind of turned away from me and he turned toward the nightstand that was on the left side of the bed. And when he turned back to me, he had a knife in his hand. The knife had a brown wooden handle and a blade that was about six inches long and it was jagged on the edge. And he stuck this knife right in front of my face. And that's when he started screaming at me and he kept saying, Who'd you say you were gonna call? Who'd you say you were gonna call?

And I just sort of stared at the knife and I just remembered saying to myself, Don't say anything. If you don't say anything, he'll calm down. Then after a while, he closed the knife. And as he's turning away from me, I guess to put the knife back in the drawer, in my mind, I was thinking, okay, now you have to get out of here, but how are you going to do this? So I sort of eased my legs off the side of the bed, put my feet on the floor, and I just very casually turned to him and said, I'll be right back. I have to go to the bathroom. And I reached on the floor because my pocketbook was on the floor, and I picked up my pocketbook. And when my feet hit the floor, the next thing I remember is I

was running out the front door. I remember going down the stairs and out the front door, and I didn't stop running until I was two blocks away at the police station. Karen didn't return home for two days. When she did go back, it was with a police escort. Ron was upstairs watching TV. He was upstairs watching, of all things, the O.J. Simpson trial, because that was actually going on at this time. And I heard them talking to him,

and a few minutes later he came down with a duffel bag in his hand, and he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and and he just stared at me with this like look of hatred, and like my blood boiled, the chill just thinking about it. And then he walked out the door, and off the police went, and off he went, and I kind of thought that that was going to be the end of it. She took out an order of protection against him, but two weeks later, he broke in through a side window. So Saturday morning, I woke up, walked over to the bedroom door, opened the door, and when I opened the door, Ron was standing in the doorway. He was naked, except for a pair of green plaid boxer shorts. He had nothing else on. I think I just was like shocked, and I just said, what are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here. That's when I think I started to get nervous. And that's when I noticed the knife and the ropes. All he said to me is, you're going to listen to me now. And then he said, lay down. And I just said, no. And before

I could get the no out good, he punched me with a closed fist square in the middle of my chest. And then he got on the bed on top of me. And he put one knee on this part of my arm and another knee on that part of my arm. And then he took those two ropes that he had and he tied my wrists to the headboard. I went to scream. And at which point he took the scarf that I was wearing on my head off my head and shoved it in my mouth. And he got a pair of black pantyhose out. He cut them in half. And then he tied my ankles with the pantyhose. He walks around to the foot of the bed. He steps out of those boxer shorts, climbs up on the bed. He takes the knife and he cuts off my underwear. And that's when he got on top of me. And that's when the rape happened. The thing that just held me

together was, I just kept saying, keep your eyes open and watch everything, because the police are going to want details, and you're going to have to tell them. No one knows how they'll react in a situation like this until they're in one. But as an emergency room nurse, Karen was in high-stress situations all the time. And this training helped her stay focused and observant. The first detail I looked for was time. And so I was being raped on the bed, and directly past my husband's body, straight ahead of me, was a wall unit. So I looked ahead, and I could see the time. It was 9.38.

So I made myself do that. And then I said, watch what he does. Because after the rape, he got up, he walked over to the hamper. He reached in the hamper, pulled out a T-shirt, wiped himself off with the T-shirt, put the T-shirt back in the hamper. So I thought to myself, there's DNA on the T-shirt. He walked over to the bed, and he took the gag out of my mouth. And he says, I need some money. Where's your pocketbook? Now, I think that made

me angrier even in the rape because I'm thinking, you break into my house, you rape me, and now you want to take my money. And I'm thinking, I don't care what happens. I'm not letting him have my money. So I wouldn't answer him. He smacked me in the face. I still wouldn't answer him. And then he started rummaging through the room. He rummaged through the bureau. He's looking under the bed. He's looking in the chair. And right when he got to the closet door, which is where I remember my pocketbook was,

that's when I said, wait a minute. My pocketbook's not here. It's at Brenda's house. I'm just lying through my teeth. But then I said, but you have to let me call her. We're going to go shopping and I don't want her to come right now. So you have to let me call her. And he thought about it for a moment and then he took the knife and he cut the pantyhose, but he cut them at the ankle so that even though my ankles were released, they were still tied to the bed. I'm thinking, okay, just distract them

because as long as the pantyhose is still tied to the bed, when people see that, they'll believe me. I thought that I'd be able to dial 911 and pretend that I was talking to Brenda so that I could get help. But in effect, he was standing right in front of me with the knife pointed right at my neck. And he said, okay, now call Brenda. She said, hello. And I said, Brenda? She said, yeah. I said, listen, I can't go shopping today, so don't come over.

And she's like, Karen, what are you talking about? And then I said, listen to me. I can't go shopping today. Don't come over. And she said, are you OK? And I said, no. Then she said, is Ron there?" And I said, yes. And then very casually she said, let me talk to him. So I handed him the phone. I said, here, she wants to talk to you. And I thought, good, he's talking to her. Now's my time to escape. And then it dawned on me. When I had gotten home that night, I locked myself in with the deadbolt lock. The key to the lock was in my pocketbook. My pocketbook was in the closet. Plus, I knew that there was no way I could get across the bedroom, open the closet door, reach in, get my pocketbook, get the key out, get down the stairs, unlock the door.

I just knew that I couldn't get away from him. And the first time I ran, he didn't follow me, but I was convinced he was going to follow me this time. And he still had the knife. Meanwhile, Karen's friend Brenda is still on the phone with Ron, trying to talk him down. I could see him sort of hunch over a little bit, and then I heard him start to cry. And the only thing, he was sort of mumbling, the only thing I did remember hear him saying was something to the effect of, well, I guess this means that I can never come back home now. And then he said a few more things to her. And then he said, okay, goodbye.

And he hung up the phone. And then he turned around and he looked at me. And he said, Brenda said she'll be by later. And then he said, are you okay? That's when I got really mad and I just said to him, I said, you'll have to kill me before I ever let you touch me again. That's when he started to laugh. And it was this real creepy kind of laugh.

And he said, well, you know what? Monday you're going back to court. And you're going to tell the judge you changed your mind and I'm packing my stuff and I'm moving back in and you're not going to tell anybody about this because if you do, he said to me, I will kill you. We all want to do the right thing to keep our bodies healthy. But even if we try really hard to eat kale salads and drink green smoothies, we're still most likely not getting all of the essential nutrients we need on a daily basis. Enter Ritual, the obsessively researched vitamin

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And as soon as I heard the refrigerator door open, I picked up the phone and that's when I dialed 911. I was frantic and I was whispering, you've got to send the police to my house. My husband's in the house. He has a knife and he just raped me. I have an order of protection. I'm just babbling, but I'm sort of, it's a hysterical whisper because I didn't want him to know I was on the phone. The woman on the phone was calm and she said, OK, ma'am, I want you to calm down. I remember her saying, is he still in the room? And I said, I think I said, no, he's downstairs. He has a knife. And she's saying, OK, well, the police are on their way. And after I hung up the phone, that's when I remembered.

I had a wall phone in the kitchen, and it was the kind of a phone that there's a little red light, so when you pick up the phone upstairs, it lights up, extension in use, and I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, he knows I'm on the phone. And I just remember just laying in that room panicking. It seemed like an eternity, but it couldn't have been more than minutes because I started to hear sirens. And I heard a lot of sirens. Eventually, it dawned on me that he was gone, so I got up enough courage to go down and let the police in.

If Ron had seen the light, it didn't matter. Once he heard the police sirens, he fled the apartment. So now Karen needed to go to the hospital to have her evidence collection done. You might know this as a rape kit. But she was a nurse at her local hospital and didn't want one of her co-workers to have to do the exam. I mean, just imagine. So she asked to be taken to a different hospital, the one where she attended nursing school. And when I got there, I was crying.

I was a mess. The triage nurse, she knew me personally. So she started crying. They stick me in the emergency room in a cubicle and pull the curtain. And afterwards seemed like an eternity He takes a box off the shelf, opens up a box, and starts reading the directions. And that's when I knew that I was in trouble because he didn't know how to do this. And I also knew, with my limited emergency room experience, that if evidence is not collected properly, there's always a potential that it could not be used in court. And so I just looked at him and I said, listen, if you let me, I can show you how to do this. And lucky enough, he let me show him. Karen says that though this would have been a very bad situation for most people, it helped her feel more empowered and back in control. I was the nurse manager, the head nurse of the ER. So I'm used to sort of being in charge. And when I first walked in there, I was a patient. So I was feeling very much like a victim laying on the stretcher. But the moment it kicked in that I knew I'd have to show him how to do this, then again, I was in charge. So it was like I was going to be getting empowered. Now,

ideally, that's not what should happen. I mean, you don't want to go to a hospital and have the doctor read the directions on how to suture your cut. I mean, that just doesn't inspire confidence. But for me, I was no longer the patient. I was the nurse in charge. Ron had evaded police when they arrived at Karen's apartment. Detectives told Karen he would probably call, which he did about two weeks later. So Karen devised a plan. She told him his workman's compensation case had been resolved and he would receive three years back salary.

She gave him the date and time he should go to the courthouse to pick up his check. And apparently, from what I was told, he was sitting in the audience, and when they called his name, he stood up, and then saw that the detective that was on this side of the room, on that side of the room, and that's how they got him. But Karen still had a rough road ahead. Prosecuting marital rape cases was still pretty new. New York State made it illegal in 1984, just 10 years before Karen's assault. And it wasn't illegal in all 50 states until 1993. Given that Karen and Ron hadn't had any problems before the

phone call, a guilty verdict wasn't guaranteed. From talking with the district attorney who was in charge of my case, that this was only the second marital rape case that was going to be tried in my county. And the first one, I was told, ended in acquittal. So the man was not convicted of raping his wife. So people at large just believe because you're legally married that you don't have a right to your own body. So in other words, because you said I do, that means you can't say no. But Karen got lucky. The detective, the district attorney, and ultimately the grand jury all believed her. But not everyone supported Karen, especially her father-in-law. He would say things like, oh, how bad could it have been?

You know, come on. What happens between a husband and wife is nobody else's business. You don't have to go this way. You know, so he was minimizing it. And I kind of doubted myself a little bit. But once the trial date started and everything else, I was determined to go through with it, even though I was petrified. Karen realizes how hard this decision is for women who've been sexually assaulted to report or not to report.

My advice would be you need to talk about it and you need to tell someone. But I would never presume to tell anyone who they need to tell. But if you can find someone you feel close to and someone you trust, you can confide in. Or you can take the safe route and call a hotline. And if you don't want to speak to a hotline in your area, you can call the national hotline, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. And then you can talk to a total stranger and just pour your heart out because they're going to be objective.

It's not easy to tell family always or even friends because some, even well-meaning, will say things that are going to hurt. Like, well, why did you do this? Or why did you do that? They're just trying to understand, but the questions can be really traumatizing.

After being indicted by a grand jury, Ron Coleman pled guilty. Karen wasn't going to be put through a trial, but the plea did come with a lighter sentence. The minimum sentence was three years, the maximum was nine. And he was sentenced in 1995. At the time, I thought it was amazing because in my mind, I was going to move away. I was going to change my name. He was never going to find me. And I had nine years to just set up a whole brand new life.

Okay, that's how I felt immediately after the event. But once I started speaking and became empowered, I was like, I'm not going anywhere. Because for me to move still gives him power over me. I like where I live. I like my job. I still live in the same house. So I decided not to go anywhere. When I look back on it now, I don't think nine years is enough. I was tied, gagged, and raped at ninth point by someone that I trusted and that I loved. I mean, that knife could have slipped. He could

have killed me. Anything could have happened. So is nine years enough? No. However, when you do research and you look at most sentences, most rapists don't get a lot of time. Some get probation. But looking back on it, not great. But at the time, I thought it was wonderful. Karen eventually met the other woman, the one from that fateful phone call, and learned more about Ron's other life. We did meet. We met at a bowling alley in Queens, and we actually bowled one game, and we met and we talked. I thought she was really very nice, and we never talked again after that. I did find out that had we had an actual trial that she was on the list to testify for the defense.

That I thought was interesting. But I also did not really falter for that because I believed that she was in love with him. And I'm not even sure what she was going to say, but she was going to testify for the defense. Even though Karen decided to stay in the same apartment, it was a while before she regained her sense of safety. For about the first year, it was probably a basket case, I slept with a butcher knife under my mattress. Not under the pillow, but under the mattress. Now, thinking about it, you'd have to get out the bed,

pick up the mattress, reach under it, but I just needed to know it was there, even when he was in jail. I put it under the mattress before they caught him, but even after conviction, I didn't move it for about a year. I used to shower with the shower curtain open. I would never stay home on July 9th because I just figured that's the day I was raped.

I just, as long as I'm not in the house, I'm going to be safe. And then one year, I just realized July 9th came and went and I never even thought about it. So it took a while. Ron was supposed to be the person Karen could trust most. And that kind of betrayal would damage a lot of people's ability to trust again. But not Karen.

What I tell people is that men did not hurt me. People did not hurt me. It was one person. So would I ever trust that one person again? No. But I believe that people are good people. I just don't think I'll ever get married again. And that's okay.

I'm 63. Who'll ever get married again. And that's okay. I'm 63. Who needs to get married again? But I am in a relationship with the man for like the last 20 years, and it's a good one. So we're okay. About three years after her attack and her not-so-great experience in the ER, Karen heard her county was starting a program to train nurses to do forensic exams on rape victims. And since I had to walk the doctor through my own exam, I figured, well, if I can do my own, I can show them how to do somebody else's. So I found out where they were meeting. I just walked in, sat down like I was supposed to be there, and they didn't kick me out. I then had to help coordinate a training, and we set it up so that we would train 30 nurses. 44 showed up.

We learned about evidence collection. We learned about mechanism of injuries. We learned how to document a chart objectively. There was a lecture from someone from the crime lab. There was a lecture from the police department. There was a lecture from the advocacy agency and also from the district attorney. So it was a very comprehensive and intense five days. Once she started working as a forensic nurse, Karen saw the lengths women will

go to in order to preserve evidence. So they have more than their word when they report their assault. I've had patients come in and said, and I figured they still have stuff in their mouth, so they'll spit it in the cup. They wouldn't swallow it. They'll spit it. Patients that know to bring in their clothes. Patients that know because they've seen something on TV that if they have to pee, they'll pee in a mayonnaise jar or a Tupperware jar and bring it with them to the hospital. So patients have done amazing things. One patient who was forced by the perpetrator to take a shower after the event, and she stood with her back to the shower, and there was semen in her belly button.

So people do some amazing things. She also started speaking publicly about her assault, and this, she says, helped her start to move on. I got a call from the district attorney on my case, and he said, I need a favor. And they were having this vigil against violence, they called it, and they needed a victim to speak. And I said, well, I've never done anything like that. He says, well, you just have to say as much as you feel comfortable talking about your experience. And I remember walking and standing at the microphone, the mayor of White Plains was on my left and the district attorney who was the big boss was on my right. And I'm standing in the middle and it's like 200 people. I'm thinking, oh, I don't know if I could do this. But I walked up to the mic. I just took a deep breath and

I started talking and I laughingly say, now I haven't shut up since. So that was kind of my therapy because once I did that, I started doing college take back the nights. People would come up and say, oh my God, this happened to me. It's just amazing. You never speak publicly about being raped where you don't have at least one person that will come up and tell you that it's happened to them and that they never told anybody. About twice a year, Karen speaks with inmates at her local jail as part of a victim impact program. She tells her story and then does a Q&A to help them understand the effects of their actions. And to me, it's empowering because it reinforces my belief that people

can change. And I feel that if I can help someone understand about how it felt to me to be the victim, that when they're out of jail, if they were on the verge of doing something that might put them back in jail, that they might think twice. In 2004, Karen received another unexpected phone call. I was at work and I had registered with a program they have in New York State that's called VINE, and that stands for Victim Information Notification Every Day. And you register by phone. And every time the inmate is moved or relocated even to another prison or when it's time for release, you would get a phone call. And within 15 minutes of the actual release from prison, you get a phone call and they will continue

to call until someone answers. And I was at work and I got the phone call after they had been released and I hung up the phone and I just started laughing. It was like a hysterical reaction and then I was fine. But I don't know that even if I were to sit down across the table from him, that he could ever offer an explanation that would make sense as to why.

And focusing on why he did this and that still would give him power. I will never forget what happened, but I don't dwell on it as much as I dwell on how the experience has changed my life and how it's led me to do other things. I think I will say this. I believe that five seconds of a dumb decision on his part, he lost seven years of his life being in jail. So as far as I'm concerned, he's paid his debt.

And as long as he leaves me and those I care about alone, I wish him no ill will. Karen wants to change the way sexual assault is treated. That, like any other crime, we start by believing the victim. Karen was believed when she reported her rape, and she's hopeful this will become the status quo. And then if you're a police officer, if you start with the premise that you believe it happened, then through the course of your investigation, you'll find out things that will either corroborate your belief or tell you, well, maybe, no, it didn't quite happen that way. Everyone assumes that women are more likely to lie about being raped, but the actual research shows that people are no more likely to lie about this crime than they are likely to lie about their car being stolen or the Social Security check being stolen out of their mailbox.

It's a very low percentage. What happened to Karen was horrifying. But as she says, she's turned the mess into a message. If this hadn't happened, I probably would not be a forensic nurse today. I probably would not be in the position to make sure that any patients I take care of will at least have someone that knows what they're doing. They won't have the doctor that opens up the box and reads the directions and never talks to them, right? You know, I've been involved in some public policy. I mean, I've testified up in

the Senate, up in Albany, down in Capitol Hill before the Congressional Caucus to try to get them to understand things. You do press conferences, you do TV shows, you do technical advice on law and order, special victims, so that at least some of the things people see on TV are correct. So there's all kinds of ways you can impact the world, but I probably would have done none of this if July 9th, 1994 hadn't happened to me. I now know that what happened to me in 1994 didn't happen to me because of something I did, but it happened to me because of everything that I will do. To talk to someone confidentially at the Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network, network, call 1-800-656-HOPE or 1-800-656-4673. You can also live chat with someone at rain.org. That's R-A-I-N-N dot O-R-G. I'm Caitlin VanMol, host and senior producer. We're audio engineered by Kelly Kramarik. Our producer is Scott Brody, and our executive producer is Ted Butler.

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