Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [136]
The man guided Renee into a sparsely furnished studio apartment in a house on a hidden alley. “I’m not going to hurt you; I just want to talk,” he said.
Keeping the knife at her back, he politely introduced himself as Hy Doan. He told her he was from Vietnam and that he was a math student at the University of Akron. “He just kept talking off-the-wall, like we were friends or something,” Renee says.
They spoke for several hours, before Doan asked Renee about her sexual history. She didn’t have one. “I’m a virgin,” she said.
Doan didn’t believe her. His small talk became aggressive. At five foot five and 120 pounds, he was almost as tiny as his victim. Renee figured she could take him.
Suddenly, she jumped on his back and wrestled him to the floor. She got her hands around his slender neck and choked him until he appeared to pass out.
Renee jumped up and ran for the door. As she fiddled with the lock, Doan got up. Just before Renee could open the door, he grabbed her long ponytail and yanked her to his bedroom, ordering her to undress.
Afraid for her life, she sacrificed her virginity.
As Doan raped her, Renee stared through the doorway at the kitchen cupboards, which were filled with shiny packs of ramen noodles. “To this day, I can’t eat the stuff,” she says. “I can’t even look at it.”
When he was finished, Doan made her lie in bed and cuddle. He asked if she enjoyed herself. “He was talking to me like I was his girlfriend,” she says. “I think he really believed it was consensual.”
The sun was already peeking through the blinds when he allowed her to get dressed. He said he’d let her go home if she promised to keep seeing him. She gave him a fake phone number and left.
Renee went to a friend’s house. The girl talked Renee into going to Akron City Hospital. Police were notified. Doan was charged with rape and kidnapping.
Two months later, the case went before a grand jury. But Doan, who maintained the sex was consensual, wasn’t indicted. The jury didn’t buy Renee’s story. She knew too much about Doan’s home to have been there only once, jurors believed. They assumed the two were friends. “I was there for seven hours, memorizing everything in that house, to make sure I could prove to police that I was there and that this happened to me,” Renee says. “The legal system did nothing more for me, other than rub salt in my wound.”
It wouldn’t be the last time Doan wriggled his way out of a rape case because of a discredited victim. In the past twenty-five years, he has beaten at least six.
Detectives, prosecutors, and judges say Doan has developed the perfect M.O. for stealing sex. “It’s not rape,” says his lawyer, Jonathan Sinn. “It’s theft.”
SINN DESCRIBES HIS CLIENT as a “walking stereotype.”
“In court, he bows, talks about honor and family, and comes off as a naive immigrant,” Sinn says. “In reality, he’s very intelligent and understands everything.”
Doan’s victims all describe him as a petite, polite man, with rotting teeth and foul breath. Though his accent is heavy, making him hard to understand, he has no problem with English.
He was born in Saigon in 1959. It’s unclear when he immigrated to the United States. Doan did not respond to Scene’s numerous interview requests, though an anonymous man claiming to be a relative called on his behalf. “Hy does not want to talk to you, because he feels he paid for his mistake and has forgotten the past,” the man said.
A 1998 incident report states that he has a sister, Nicole, living in Fairlawn, Ohio. But when Scene contacted Nicole, she had trouble deciding whether she knew Doan or not. She also denied being related to him.
“Doan is like the last name Smith,” she says. “Just because we have the same last name don’t mean we are related. Maybe I helped him once. I help a lot of Vietnamese people. I’ve lived in Akron for a long time, and we are a small community.”
Still, amid her denials, Nicole was able to confirm that Doan graduated from the University of Akron in the early 1980s.