Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [64]
Keller described to us a fraternity meeting mere days after the rape. The topic: the gang rape of a girl in the house—me. Other witnesses later corroborated this. A witness said William Beebe was present, curled up in a ball, sobbing, drunk, and possibly under the influence of drugs. George Allman, as he had said, called Beebe’s parents to come collect him. Keller also described a brawl breaking out at the meeting; punches were thrown. It was clear that the brothers were divided over whether to cooperate with any police investigation of the incident or to try to keep it completely quiet. As it turned out, this was a moot point, since the police investigation never took place.
During this brawl, according to witnesses, David Hazzard, the son of a United States senator, stated that he was embarrassed that such a thing could occur at his fraternity house and that they were all acting like a bunch of animals. He demanded to know exactly what had happened. Apparently because his father was a senator, people told him. Hazzard, by all accounts, slapped Nathan Burgos clean across the face. But when Rudman and Sclafani questioned Hazzard, he insisted he had not been there and had no knowledge of the incident.
Once the scuffle was over, George Allman allegedly asked one of the brothers, Peter Melman, to call his father and arrange for personal insurance policies for each member of the fraternity “in the event that this should ever happen again.” This story led my team to wonder if gang-raping a freshman was part of some rite of passage during rush at Phi Kappa Psi: a tradition of sorts. Peter Melman was approached by police on a number of occasions at the gated community where he now lives in Annapolis, Maryland. When they rang the buzzer to his gate, he answered, “I don’t have to speak with you and I don’t have to let you in.” He never obtained legal counsel of record. The cops spent days sitting outside of his complex, but he never surfaced. When they would ring his buzzer, he would simply repeat the fact that he did not have to speak with them. According to Worrell, it was Melman whose testimony could perhaps have provided the most information about what happened to me that night. Worrell wanted to get his hands on the purported insurance policies. If they had indeed been taken out, there was a clear action against the fraternity. Perhaps we shall never know. Melman, it was discovered, maintains steady friendships with Burgos, Hammett, and Messner.
Up to that point, Beebe had contended that I was in a healthy condition when the encounter between us occurred. Given the new theories about that night, this is hard to believe. Some witnesses suggested that Beebe, known to be socially awkward and unsuccessful with women, was goaded into “having a turn” after his late return from the Grateful Dead show with Tuck Hammett and another brother. One witness said Beebe dragged me screaming into his room, but that after raping me, while I was unconscious, he and a helper took me into the bathroom and tried to clean me up. After cleaning me up, they wrapped me in the sheet and deposited me on the sofa back in Beebe’s room. Who helped him?
The evidence of witnesses who came into the room and saw me bleeding, who saw Messner strut to the shower to wash my blood off, suggests that a cover-up plan must have been hatched. This begins to explain the empty house that Friday morning. Fraternity houses are known to be filled to capacity the mornings after a party, since no one goes to class, opting instead to sleep off the hangovers or continue to party into the morning hours. Our best guess is that everyone was instructed to get out of the house that night before I awoke—if I awoke—so that no one would be found culpable. Probably they hoped that I had ingested enough of the green drink to have no memory, or