Transcript of Jennifer Thompson Cannino's Speech at Reforming Eyewitness Identification Symposium

• Pages: 251-264

Transcript of Jennifer Thompson Cannino's Speech at Reforming Eyewitness Identification Symposium¹

Page 251

My name is Jennifer Thompson, and my story took place twenty years ago on July 27, 1984. I was twenty-two years old. I was a college student. I had decided to live on my own wanting the independence that all of us crave at that age. And I was dating a dental student, was studying really hard, was making great grades, taught aerobics, and really just I think for the first time felt like I was kind of proud of myself, my parents were proud of me, and I was really doing well.

I had gone out with my boyfriend for dinner that night and went to a Chinese food restaurant and came down with a terrible headache around 8:30 and asked my boyfriend if I could just go home. I really didn't want to go out. I just wanted to go home and go to bed.

And so he took me home, and I was really having a bad headache; it was terrible. So he stayed for a little while, and the last memory I have of that night is of Michael rubbing my back while I went to sleep. And that was it.

Around 3:00 in the morning, I woke to a sound. And it was a sound that was like feet shuffling on the carpet. But I had had these moments before, and as most women probably have had and will continue to have where you feel like there may be someone in the room, and it's a bad dream or it's a nightmare of something and you're not sure if you'll be able to scream and you feel it right here, but you are afraid to open your eyes and yet you're afraid to go back to sleep. And that was really the moment, that's what was going on.

And then I heard the noise again. Again, it was feet shuffling on carpet. And when I turned my head to the side of my bed, I noticed there was the top of someone's head scooting along. But my last memory had been of my boyfriend, so it had to have been Michael. Michael fell asleep on the floor and is getting up to go home; he doesn't want to wake me and disturb me.Page 252

So I said, "Who is that? Who's there?" And at that moment, a man jumped on my bed and put a knife to my throat and I screamed. He quickly covered my mouth with a gloved hand. And it's little details that come back to you, Penny² will tell you the same thing, it's little detail, it might be a smell or the touch of something, and I'll never get over the feel of the knife rubbing across my mouth.

And he looked at me and he said, "Shut up, I'll kill you." I strained to look in his face because I was sure that I knew this person. I mean, I was sure this was just a bad mistake. Somehow this person has gotten me confused. It's 3:00 in the morning and I'm looking at the face and I'm thinking, "I don't know who this is. I've never seen this person before in my life."

I could smell alcohol on his breath. I could smell that really horrible odor of old tobacco. I thought, you know, "He's probably broken into my apartment, he's tried to rob me and I'll give him everything I have and he'll leave."

So I looked at him and I said, "Please don't hurt me. You can have my credit card, you can have all my money, you can have my car keys, you can have anything here you want; please don't hurt me." And he looked at me and he said, "I don't want your money." And at that moment I knew; it was that moment I knew he was going to rape me.

What's really weird is like the week before, my sister, who also went to the same college as myself, had taken a walk, and she looked at me and she's three years my younger and she said, "You know, Jennifer, what would you do if someone raped you?" And I said, "Urn, well, I think I would try to stay really calm. I would try to look at them. I would try to talk them out of hurting me." And she said, "Oh, not me, no, I would scratch them and I'd bite them and I'd hit them and spit on them, and if I could, I'd vomit. That's what I would do." And I said, "Well, Janet, you know, rape's not about sex; rape's a tool to have power and control over another person's life so that you know they can kill you or they can let you live. I would stay calm." I had no idea that five days later, I'd have to put that plan into play.

And I'm twenty-two years old; I had never ever been in trouble. I had never hit another human being. And I'm laying on my back with a knife to my throat and I'm thinking to myself, "How am I going to getPage 253 out of this? I'll grab a lamp and I'll hit him on the head, that's what I'll do, and I'll knock him out. Then I'll run to the phone, I'll call 9-1-1, and they'll come and they'll save me."

But I'm on my back, and there's a knife at my throat, and I have very little clothing. And he straddled me, and I can't physically fight him. So I decided at that moment two things. One is, "I want to survive, and if he's going to kill me, he is going to have to catch me. I won't lay there and let him kill me." The second thing is that, "If I survive, I will make sure he rots in hell." Those were my two thoughts.

So during the process of the rape, I studied his face. What an unnatural thing to do is to look in the face of the man who is going to rape you and kill you, and to look in his eyes and to study his nose and to see how short his hair was, and did he have a tattoo, or did he have a pierced ear, or maybe he had a missing tooth or something that you knew he couldn't disguise, that you knew if you survive and you go to the police department, you could say, "He had a scar across his face." I'm looking for that; I'm studying his face.

During the rape, he started to ask questions. He started to talk to me. He said, "I know it's been a long time for you, baby. Your boyfriend's over in Europe. I know you can't see me because you don't have your glasses on. You're from that town that burns witches, right?" I was from Winston-Salem, and he got Salem and Winston-Salem slightly confused. But I knew that he knew me. What an invasion of one's person: violating someone physically, violating someone emotionally.

I hated this man. I can't describe to anybody out there the depth of my hate. If I had had a gun, I could have blown his head off, I hated him that much.

After about fifteen minutes of raping me, he came up to kiss me. And by God, I wasn't going to kiss this man. And he looked at me and he said, "Relax, baby, I'm not going to hurt you." And I don't know why, I call this my God Moment, I don't know why but I knew this was my moment, and I looked at him, I said, "Well, I'm afraid of knives; I've always been afraid of knives. If you'll get off of me and you'll take the knife and you'll walk down my front steps, and if you'll drop the knife on the hood of my car and I can hear it clink, you can come back in." He said, "really?" And I said, "Sure."

During the rape, he had told me he had come through my back door. My chance was to get him to go through my front door and lockPage 254 it and then call the police. But it didn't work that way. He went to my front door and he dropped the knife out and he came back in after me and he said, "Let's go," and I wasn't going to go back in there. I would have died first.

And I said, "Well, I have to go to the bathroom. Can I please go to the bathroom?" He said, "Yeah, go to the bathroom." So when I went into the bathroom, I quickly turned the light on. It was an extra second of light maybe just to get another glimpse of his eyes. I took the time to stand close to him so I could see how tall he was. Maybe his feet were...