Open wounds

IN June 1977, two college women -- girls, really -- set out on a bicycle trip across America. They planned to ride the BikeCentennial Trail from Oregon to Virginia. Unfortunately, their epic journey ended almost at the start: One week into their ride, while they camped alongside a river in central Oregon, a man drove a truck into their campsite, ran over the tent in which they slept, got out of the truck and began to hack them with an ax.

Terri Jentz, the author of the memoir “Strange Piece of Paradise,” was one of those young women. Both of her arms were broken, and one arm was badly hacked. Her friend, whom she calls “Shayna Weiss,” had her skull smashed in and suffered permanently impaired vision.

No attacker was ever arrested for what happened at Cline Falls State Park, and Oregon’s statute of limitations -- three years for anything except murder -- rendered any sort of long-term justice nearly impossible.

This is the starting point of Jentz’s powerful memoir. She had lived with this disturbing memory for 15 years and divided her life into “before and after” the attack. The “after” includes a career as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where she lives today. In 1992, she returned to Oregon to find the would-be murderer and bring some closure to the nightmares of her “after” life.

Jentz’s recollection of the night of June 22, 1977, was incomplete -- and understandably so. Around midnight, she was awakened by the screeching of tires, and then a truck was crushing her (years later, she would learn from medical records that its tire left a temporary imprint on her body), and then a maniac was attacking her and her friend with a hatchet or an ax (a seemingly trivial distinction that eventually yielded up a tantalizing revelation). All that Jentz could remember of her attacker was that he had a fit torso and was meticulously dressed in cowboy attire.

Jentz’s investigation yielded many discoveries, some not so tantalizing: Nearly all the official records of the attack -- interviews, physical evidence, crime scene photos -- had been purged. This was probably the result of normal (and unfortunate) administrative procedures, though Jentz later learned that her prime suspect came from a well-respected family in the community, and she couldn’t help but wonder if this had hindered the investigation.

Jentz was able to rustle up only a skimpy 30-page report, and even that took some effort. But if the state of Oregon had more or less “forgotten” the crime, the community in and around Redmond, near Cline Falls State Park, had not.

Nearly everyone she met in the area had some memory of the attack, and many were willing to help Jentz with her seemingly unusual quest: After all, even if Jentz found the attacker, he could not be prosecuted. Jentz was aided by the woman who helped get her to the hospital after the attack, as well as by the ex-wife of the man whom she suspected of the attack, and his former girlfriends. She was also helped by two victims’ rights advocates -- a married couple whose daughter’s remains were found 20 years after she disappeared. Although the local police who originally investigated the Cline Falls crime were standoffish, the local and state police at the time of Jentz’s inquiry were more sympathetic to her cause: This unsolved crime in some ways scarred the community as badly as it scarred Jentz and her friend. Jentz writes:

“The librarians in the Bend Public Library were astir. I had walked in and identified myself as one of the two girls attacked in the Cline Falls State Park in 1977. They all remembered the incident vividly, and at first they were incredulous that one of the characters in the oft-told tale could be, at this very moment, standing in front of the desk looking so bright-eyed and normal. My presence seemed to animate them, and they rushed to locate the news clips I’d requested from the archives.”

Jentz arrives in this small Oregon community to hunt down a psychopath, and damned if she doesn’t find one. And then another one. The first is known to have killed a 5-year-old girl and kept her skull as a candle holder. This convicted child molester, Richard Wayne Godwin, is in prison for that murder, and all clues about the attack seem to point in his direction. Furthermore, a female relative of his (one he’d apparently had a sexual relationship with, Jentz reads in a crime report) may have been at Cline Falls State Park the night of the attack and could have served as a catalyst for the maniacal attack on Jentz and her companion. But then, after numerous physical descriptions failed to match her own, Jentz realizes that this man couldn’t have had the meticulously dressed torso she’d so vividly remembered.

This doesn’t stop Jentz from intervening at Godwin’s parole hearing to oppose an early release. She thinks he’s not her attacker, but he obviously sounds like somebody who should not be out on the streets -- not even the dusty streets of central Oregon. Unfortunately, this laudable effort detracts from the book’s forward movement, and from Jentz’s original quest: finding the man who attacked her and her friend on that night in 1977, finding out why he attacked them and coming to terms with all of it.

Jentz’s story picks up when she discovers the second psychopath, a man she calls “Dirk Duran,” and relates accounts of how he beat women, tortured animals and generally scared nearly everybody in the area for decades. And got away with it. Through countless interviews with Duran’s friends, relatives and acquaintances, Jentz paints a startlingly vivid picture of psychopathology.

“And I was halfway up that fence in my bare feet and I remember, he was probably twenty-five feet from the fence, down on the ground, and he was kicking her, and she was just down there in a ball, trying to keep him from kicking her anymore in the head, and I just remember thinking he was going to kill her.” That account comes from a woman the author calls “Robin,” who said she watched Duran beat his girlfriend the morning after the Cline Falls attack.

The anecdotal evidence against Duran is compelling, though the sheer volume of it -- and the obsessive way in which it’s presented to readers -- says as much about the victim as it does about the attacker. Jentz’s narrative is at times forced and cluttered, though she also moves with great skill back and forth between the year of the attack and the years of her investigation and never descends into self-pity (though she does allow herself to embrace the contradictions that most victims feel).

As Jentz accumulated circumstantial evidence against Duran, she found herself unwilling to offer up any sympathy for him. Here was an extraordinarily screwed-up guy who was haunted by the Cline Falls attack -- whether he did it or not -- while many in the community believed he had done it. When Duran is eventually brought up on charges of threatening a man with a handgun, Jentz attends the trial with her scarred arm in full view and even goes so far as to highlight the scar with lipstick, to startle, shame and, in some ways, torture Duran with what may have been his own handiwork.

Readers will have to determine for themselves whether the evidence against Duran in the Cline Falls attack would have been enough to convict him -- though clearly Jentz believes that Duran is the man who attacked her and her friend on that fateful night at Cline Falls. But this true crime story isn’t exactly a whodunit. It’s more like: How in God’s name could anybody do it? Jentz, I’d wager, would be happy to see every murderer end up with a short stay on death row -- and her story makes it hard to argue against that point.

The strongest parts of Jentz’s story, though, are the connections she forged with her newfound allies -- women who were beaten and abused and yet managed to overcome these indignities with grace, courage and strength; police officers who lived in the community and dealt with violence daily, and who genuinely wanted to bring closure to an old case; the two victims’ advocates, tirelessly driving around in an RV, utterly fearless in their effort to help others live by uncovering the truth.

Jentz has bravely uncovered hers. *