Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [109]
11.
Denial and Acceptance
“I should not like to be wrong,” said Poirot.
“It is not—how do you say?—my métier.”
—AGATHA CHRISTIE, THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD
On July 29, 1985, Penny Beerntsen and her husband Tom left work early and went to the beach. Their ten-year-old son was playing at a friend’s house that day, but their eleven-year-old daughter came with them. The family lived in southeast Wisconsin, and the beach they chose was in a state park on the shores of Lake Michigan. It was a beautiful midsummer day, and toward the afternoon, Penny decided to go for a run. She jogged north along the water for three miles, then turned and headed back in the direction of her husband and daughter. When she was about a mile away from them, she glanced down at her watch; it was ten minutes before four o’clock. When she looked up again, a man was emerging from the sand dunes that rose up behind the beach.
An instant, like an atom, can sometimes split, explosively. Penny knew right away what the man wanted, and, in a flash decision, she made for the lake. She realized too late that the water was only slowing her down; by the time she got back to the shore, the man had caught up with her. When he wrapped his arm in a chokehold around her neck, two thoughts went through her mind. “I remember them very specifically,” Penny told me. “The first was that I needed to stay calm. And the second was, ‘I need to get a real good look at this guy, so that if I survive this, I can identify him.’”
The man dragged Penny into the sand dunes, told her he had a knife, and demanded that she have sex with him. She resisted, first by talking about her family—her two young children, her husband who would come looking for her soon—and then by fighting back. The two were face to face, and, Penny said, “I remember thinking that I needed to draw some blood, to leave some marks on him, and I tried to scratch his face. But whenever I would reach for him, he would straighten his arms, which were longer than mine. And then he started to strangle me.” The man did this three or four times, each time waiting until Penny began to black out and then asking if she was ready to have sex. When she refused and continued to fight back, he became enraged and started slamming her head into the ground, until, finally, she lost consciousness.
When she came to, the man was gone. She was naked and her hands were covered in blood. Her vision was blurred, and her speech was impaired, like that of a stroke victim. She began crawling toward the beach on her knees and wrists, keeping her palms away from the sand in case the blood on them belonged to her assailant and could be used as evidence against him. When she got to the water’s edge she called for help. A young couple on the beach spotted her, wrapped her in a towel, and, holding her up between them, started walking her back toward where her family had been.
About an hour had elapsed since Penny had looked at her watch and, in the meantime, her husband had grown concerned. Certain that something was very wrong, Tom Beerntsen called his mother and had her come pick up his daughter, then called the police, and then set off looking for Penny. Partway up the beach he found her—bloody, disoriented, staggering along between strangers. He picked her up and ran back to a waiting