Transcript of Penny Beerntsen's Speech at Reforming Eyewitness Identification Symposium

• Pages: 239-250

Transcript Of Penny Beerntsen's Speech at Reforming Eyewitness Identification Symposium¹

Page 239

Steven Allen Avery is celebrating his 366th day of freedom today. On September 11, 2003, he was released from the Stanley Correctional Facility in Wisconsin, having served eighteen years, one month, and thirteen days for a sexual assault and an attempted murder that he did not commit. I am the woman who identified him as my assailant when, in fact, he was not.

The story begins many years earlier on July 29, 1985. It was a beautiful sunny day. I lived in Wisconsin at the time, and as we often did, following work, my husband and my daughter and I went to a nearby state park to swim in Lake Michigan. Our daughter was eleven-years-old and our son was ten-years-old. He was not with us because he was spending the day with a friend.

We got to the beach and I began reading a book about Lizzie Borden, the infamous 19th century woman accused of murdering her parents with an axe. I remember saying to my husband after reading for a brief period of time, "I can't believe I'm reading such a gruesome book on a beautiful day. I'm going to go for a little jog on the beach."

And as was my custom, I jogged north into Point Beach State Forest. When I was still in the very public area of the beach, an area where there are homes, there was a guy standing approximately ten yards away from me. He had a leather jacket slung over his shoulder, and as I jogged by, he hollered, "It's a great day."

I turned and looked at him and said, "It's a beautiful day for a jog." I didn't think anything of this and continued jogging about three miles north. I then turned around, and jogged a couple miles back towards my starting point. And I looked at my watch because the previous week I had gone for a jog on the same route and there had been strong headwinds, so when I turned around, it took me considerably longer to get back to the public beach, and my husband was quite worried about me.

So I looked at my watch to make sure I was on schedule and it said 3:50 p.m. Within a minute or two of looking at my watch, I saw a manPage 240 wearing a leather jacket come out from underneath a half-fallen tree and head for me. I recognized him as the guy who had said something to me earlier in my jog.

I remember increasing my speed thinking, "I've got to get away from this guy," but he caught up with me, put me in a chokehold, was holding me with both hands and said, "We're going to go for a little walk into the woods." He pushed me up over the crest of the first sand dune. I remember when he grabbed me thinking two things: number one, I have to stay calm, and number two, I have to get a really good look at this guy. I'm a perfectionist, I thought I had a good memory, I thought I had an accurate memory, and I thought, "I really need to study this guy to see what he looks like."

It was approximately 100 yards from the sand dune area into the wooded area of the state forest. At one point when I tried to break free from him when he was behind me, he said, "Do what I tell you; I've got a knife." So I was in great fear that he had a weapon and could, in fact, kill me. When we got into the wooded area, my assailant turned me so that we were face-to-face. He exposed himself and started asking me to do sexual things for him. He began touching me indecently, and I was refusing to do what he asked of me. I kept talking about my husband and my children, saying anything I thought he needed to hear in order to let me go.

This was very frustrating; it was making him angry. He eventually pushed me on the ground, pinned my shoulders to the ground and was kneeling over me. He began saying things like, "spread your legs," and I kept refusing and I kept talking. He became very frustrated by my lack of cooperation, so he put both hands around my neck and began strangling me. He would strangle me until I just about lost consciousness, then he would release his grip so that I could speak and he would ask me, "Now are you going to do it?" I refused several times, and the ritual of strangulation was repeated.

Finally, I thought, "He's going to kill me; I'd better cooperate." So when he released his grip, I said, "Yes, I'll do it, but my husband and children are probably looking for me. I've been gone way too long." As I'm chattering on, I managed to get one leg up and kick him in the groin. It was not an incapacitating kick, but it absolutely enraged him, and he said, "Now I'm going to kill you; now you are going to die."

He then began beating me primarily about the head and face. At one point, he grabbed my nose, pulled it to the side and I heard thePage 241bone crack. The back of my head was hitting either a tree root or a rock behind me, so I was suffering a great deal of head trauma. Eventually he strangled me until I lost consciousness.

Now, it's amazing when you feel like you're maybe taking your last breath, the thoughts that go through your mind. I distinctly remember three thoughts. The first one was my ten-year-old son had left early that morning to go to a friend's house, and he had hopped on his bike and left so quickly that I hadn't had an opportunity to kiss him goodbye and tell him I love him. My second thought was that my daughter was at the beach with us, and her last memory would be of her mother's dead bloodied strangled body. And the third thought was that was my husband would now have to raise two young children on his own.

At one point I had attempted to scratch my assailant, thinking if I could get something under my fingernails or leave marks on his face, it would be a way of identifying him. I saw this blood on my hand when I came to. I was lying flat on my back, and I thought, "Oh, I didn't think I scratched him but maybe I did. This is evidence; I've got to preserve this." I was fearful that he might come back. I looked at my watch to try and get a fix on the time, but my vision was so blurry from the head injury, I was unable to see my watch even though it was there.

I attempted to stand up but was much too...