Judge Gives Disfigured Woman Chance to Rebuild Face, Life

The woman with the long, chestnut hair curled up on a couch Thursday and wondered what was going to become of her face.

Catherine Mary Williams, 30, hoped that today a surgeon’s knife would restore her badly disfigured face into at least some semblance of what it had been before. “I don’t expect a miracle,” she said, “but I do have high hopes.”

Williams’ dreams of becoming a model were crushed when she was hit by a car and dragged along 1,500 feet of asphalt and railroad tracks. The accident injured the left side of her body and virtually destroyed the left side of her face.

Held on Hit-and-Run Count

The woman who hit Williams never stopped. She was arrested in her hometown of Fallbrook and served four months in Orange County Jail for hit-and-run driving.

Williams, who grew up in Buena Park, was 18. It was after the accident, she said, that she began a life of prostitution, drug addiction and thievery.

“I didn’t like the way I looked,” she said. “I felt real uncomfortable and intimidated, especially by other women. They looked so pretty. And I looked . . . .”

After the accident, Williams was hospitalized for several weeks. The first glimpse of her disfigured face, with a hole where her left ear had been, horrified and angered her.

“I was mad. I thought God was paying me back. I used to be the type of person who made light of people who looked different,” she said.

She was pain, she said, “but emotionally I was in the worst pain of all.”

In the hospital, another patient introduced her to heroin, she said. It masked the pain and put her in a fantasy world where nothing mattered except feeling good.

Williams continued using heroin and began working as a prostitute and stealing to support the habit. But, she said, money was not the only reason she sold her body.

“Prostitution gave me the attention I craved, “ she said. “To have someone pay for me made me feel like I was worth something.”

For 11 years, Williams was on the street and sometimes in jail. One day in January, her life changed.

It happened in North Orange County Municipal Court, where Judge Arthur D. Guy Jr. listened to her case in his chambers at the request of her attorney, Richard J. Curran. “After I heard her story, I knew she had been a lost soul for 11 years,” Guy said Thursday. “I saw that her disfigurement was so great it would have had a colossal effect on anyone. I kind of understood why she had done those things.”

Guy said because of Williams’ previous arrests and probation violations, the time she could serve in jail for the latest offense, being under the influence of drugs, was “quite impressive.” Instead, the judge listened to Curran’s recommendations and sent Williams to Hope House, a rehabilitation home in Anaheim.

Arranged for Conference

Then the judge went a step further. He arranged for Williams to consult with Dr. David Furnas, chief of the plastic surgery department at UCI Medical Center, where the judge is a trustee on the medical board.

“I asked her if someone were to offer help, would she take it,” the judge recalled of his first meeting with Williams. “I will never forget: tears came to her eyes when she said, ‘I have been waiting for someone to care.’ ”

Furnas, it happened, had treated Williams after the accident occurred. “The judge didn’t know that I had taken care of her,” he said. “But then life became difficult for her, and she got off track.”

Furnas said that after talking with the judge, he was prepared to donate his services. But after letters from the judge, Medi-Cal officials decided that the surgery was therapeutic, not cosmetic, and therefore fundable.

“I was most impressed with her attitudinal change,” Furnas said of Williams. She is “prepared to handle the responsibility” of caring for herself after the surgery, he said.

Furnas, who estimated that today’s operation will last about five hours, said it will go a long way toward “improving her situation.” But future surgery will be necessary to reconstruct an ear for her.

“All of this is overwhelming,” Williams said. “All of the support I have gotten from the people at this house, from the judge and the doctor helps a lot. I know that they are behind me.”

Eventually, Williams said, she wants to become a veterinarian’s assistant.

“I know now that a job will also make me feel better about myself,” she said. “I’ve been working a lot on accepting myself. It feels really good.”