No Regrets

instead, to a state mental hospital to undergo more tests. It was conceivable that Judge Yencopal could place her on probation. Oddly, she simply disappeared from the headlines, and as the years have passed, I have been unable to find her. I wish I could say whether Christine is alive or dead, or if she ever managed to pick up the frayed threads of her life.
    One thing I know—Christine Jonsen’s dreams will never be free of what happened on the edge of the Columbia River. She threw her life away, too—as surely as if she had leaped after the children.
    Perhaps she wishes she had.

. . .Or We’ll Kill You
    If any one of us were to be totally candid, I think all women would admit to moments of fear that we might encounter a rapist or some other violent man intent on taking us away from all the people and places that make us feel safe. We know statistics are on our side, and that the chance of meeting up with someone infinitely dangerous are slim. And yet there are always times when the sun goes down and we are alone. Although we didn’t expect to be walking or driving down a shadowy street, sometimes circumstances work out that way. Or we are alone in our own homes, listening to every creaking floorboard or the wind riffling bushes so that they scrape noisily against the house.
    We wonder, “What would I do if I had to fight for my life? Would I panic or would I be able to use my head and make rational choices to save myself?”
    Some of us have taken self-defense courses, while others hide their heads in the sand and try to ignore the possibility that something bad might happen. How many of us carry Mace or even a gun? Some women always carry a pair of athletic shoes in their cars so that they can slip out of high-heeled shoes after work, and feel somehow safer that they can run if they have to.
    I can’t even count the number of women I’ve writtenabout who did
not
survive encounters with total strangers or with someone they had trusted. I can’t tally up the stories told to me by women who lived to tell about what happened to them.
    The story that follows was told to me by one of my readers, just a sketchy overview in an email at first, and then shared in minute detail when I asked her to tell me more. I found Kari Lindholm’s* story totally compelling and an experience that should be shared with other women. With Kari’s permission, the tale of her hours of chilling terror follows. By all rights, she probably should not have survived—but, somehow, she did.
    As you read this, think about what
you
would have done. More important, plan what you will do if you should ever encounter someone like the suspects in Kari’s case. Every self-defense expert I have ever talked to has told me that the women who live through an attack like this are those who have some kind of plan already programmed into their brains.
    “The women who don’t make it are the ones who freeze with terror—the ones who say, ‘This can’t be happening to me—it’s a bad dream.’” An expert on self-defense at a Nashville, Tennessee, conference told a roomful of detectives and postrape counselors: “The ones who survive are ready. They tap into a plan they have—just in case. They don’t lose those vital first seconds they can use to get away.”

 
    Kari Lindholm was happy with her life. At twenty-seven, she was a pretty, healthy young woman. She had a good marriage, and a job she loved. She and her husband, Ben,* were hoping to start a family. If there was any sadness at all in her life, it was that she had failed to conceive despite several months of trying.
    Because she was normally so upbeat, it was odd that on the night of September 20, 1980, Kari woke up from a terrible nightmare. “I dreamed that I’d been kidnapped,” she remembers. “But I was using some of the techniques I’d learned in my training as a counselor to help me get away.”
    In a sense, it was a familiar dream. Kari worked as a counselor at the Solano County Crisis Intervention Office in Fairfield, California. It was a twenty-four-hour facility, commonly referred to as “Sancho Panza,” named for Don Quixote’s right-hand man in Cervantes’ sixteenth-century novel. The effete Quixote, a member of the lowest rank of Spanish nobility, was a little nuts—but well-intentioned— and believed his quest was to save the poor, the orphaned, and the oppressed. Sancho Panza, a stocky commoner, was his partner, his “Tonto,” the one who had the