Silence equates to death of the spirit within a rape victim. The mind is trapped in an underworld of self-imposed guilt, fear, shame and punishment from which there is little chance of escape. Emotional pain and suffering are a way of life dictated by a tortured past. Self-destructive impulses impair rational thought leaving the victim helpless to improve their lot in life. Silently acquiescing to having been raped is like choosing a quiet pathway to deaths' door. So began my nightmare.
I remind myself constantly that I am not alone each time I try to write of the terror which still consumes me and I am desperately trying to defeat the claws of silence that grip me. I have surrendered to the terror of the past so many times before that this narrative has become the single-most important step of my life. It is the first step of a man attempting to walk back through lifes' door. With little chance of escape from the self-imposed hell that I've lived through I am trying to learn to crawl to someone, anyone who can help me take such a step.
My biggest fear is that no one will care, my biggest fear is apathetic rejection to my plea for help at a time when getting up in the morning to face living is an abysmal ordeal. Choosing to live has become as difficult as not choosing to die. I am not suicidal but it is becoming increasingly more difficult to cope with living.
This will be the first time that I publicly "Confess" to having been raped and I'm facing a brick wall of fear. It took a nervous breakdown alone in a prison cell to recount the memories of having been raped as a child. I was literally riding an emotional roller coaster of horror so severe that I could barely breathe and I believe that I almost died in that cell.
I can recount with such detail the emotions, the sight, the smells, and the tears of that animalistic attack that I relive that moment every time I write to try to free myself of that pain. There have been very few times in my life since that day that I have not had a foreboding sense of being alone and helpless.
The sixties were very good years for child molesters because the cloak of ignorance and shame of anything sexual was tightly shrouded over the public conscience. A man in a uniform wearing a badge, a respected authority figure broke my mind and smashed my life on a Sunday afternoon. I have yet to be repaired or spared the ignorance and shame of that decade.
In 1975, another man that held reigns of authority over me attempted to rape me. This broken mind snapped just a bit more completely that September night and I ended his life in a brutal attack that cost me each day of the rest of my life.
The State of Massachusetts, the County of Norfolk chose to suppress the evidence of the attempted rape that I had been subjected to as thoroughly as my mind had repressed my childhood rape. They characterized the animalistic attack as a mere homosexual advance toward me. They chose to suppress evidence that I had discovered during my retaliatory attack, these were three photo albums containing photos of Mr. W.C. Dubbels engaged in various sexual activities with young boys.
My discovery of these photo albums occurred while Mr. Dubbels was still alive. The graphic photos exacerbated my fear, terror, hatred, anger, rage, and sense of betrayal to a frenzy within my broken mind and facilitated the finalization of the act of killing.
It is my belief that my repressed memories of having been raped as a child were very much in play that evening of September 3, 1975. I believe that my mind totally shut down during and immediately following his attempt to rape and the killing he'd triggered, suppressing the shame, guilt, and helplessness of the trauma I was experiencing.
It is, I think, ironic that I became the perpertrator, the murderer, as a direct result of being the immediate victim of the would be rapist. While the state purports to be a provider of therapeutic services to crime victims, there is no condition to which the state will even acknowledge a defendant to be a victim during the pre-trial race to prosecution.
The type of therapeutic psychological services required for a victim of a sexual attack can take a lifetime and are not the type of services available in prison. Racing to prosecute me for first-degree murder the state aggressively attempted to fulfill their assertion that I was competent to stand trial and criminally responsible for my actions. I spent close to four years, from the day this happened, in a maximum security state hospital and was medicated to intellectual muteness for my trial. From the beginning I have felt like a helpless child face to the pavement with an adults foot pinning my head securely down without mercy.
Both the child within me and the empty shell of a man that I have become are dying on the inside and I just can't take this much longer. My own silence is killing me and I want the rape to end. I need help very badly as my whole ability to trust people is seriously impaired and decayed. Who but other victims of the hell of self-imposed silence can I turn to?
My situation is one of desperation. I am after all, a man who has spent the past twenty-nine years in prison becoming less able to silently cope with an animalistic victimization by a police officer, a former boss, and the entire weight of the powerful State of Massachusetts.
I have no savior of understanding and compassion to turn to, I have no hope left within me, and I am struggling to mount the courage to fight back. I need help.
Being in prison has made the decision to fight back much more difficult because exposed weaknesses in this environment may open the door to attempted victimizations of another sort by predators of a different kind. As a result I may end up bearing the weight of other emotionally and possibly physically scarring battles by breaking victims' silence.
There are not support groups for me, there is just another lonely battlefront I have to learn to survive upon day to day. I am hoping and praying that I will ultimately overcome these obstacles and not only acquire the help to be released from these prison walls, but the prison walls within my mind placed there by those who have victimized me.
I need to establish friendships with those who know my torment and I need them now. If there is anyone willing and able to assist me I pray that you hear the voice within me and come forward.
I am not the murderer the state has created me to be for the public reassurance that they know all and all is well. Things are not well and the continued victimization of Robert John Shelley is not a proud act in the public interest, it is the cowardly act of protecting the mindset of ignorance and shame in public conscience which allowed child molesters of the sixties and beyond such prosperity in a society seemingly unable to talk about it or act decisively against it.
If those days are truly over and society is truly earnest about waging war upon child abuse then my victimization, my continued rape by incarceration in the name of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts must also be brought to an end. A war upon child abuse must recognize my victimization and my release must be demanded.
Much effort has been made to try juvenile murder defendants as adults. Conversely I argue, why shouldn't I at the chronological age of 19 years have been assessed as too immature to handle an attempted rape upon my person as an adult and been processed through the juvenile courts? Is the bloodlust for punishment in this nation so frenzied that in the haste to exact revenge there is no time to put forth a sincere effort to assess circumstance?
I am still the child being raped waiting to be rescued, waiting for someone to pull a grown man off my back, still waiting for the calvary to come. I guess that I am still waiting for that happy ending in a world where happy endings are being crippled by apathetic indifference to the plight of the individual.
The lawyers (Vampires of Tragedy) have financially vaporized my fathers' retirement because he has never given up hope of having this son of his come home. He is seventy-eight years old, he has done nothing to deserve being a part of this victimization. What, may I ask, have my mother, my sister, and my brothers done to deserve to be a part of this victimization?
I have suffered the indignity and horror of childhood rape, an attempted rape, the inner guilt of taking a persons life, several suicide attempts, a nervous breakdown, and twenty-nine hard years in prison away from my family. My family has endured my pain as their own.
Silence = Death and I refuse to remain silent. I am giving up my right to remain silent and I am requesting the counsel and financial, phycological, and emotional support of my fellow citizens that will also refuse to remain silent and demand that my victimization stops now.
I refuse to be a victim any longer,
I am, Robert John Shelley, W-36832, SBCC, P O Box 8000, Shirley, MA 01464 USA . . . dying: IN YOUR BACKYARD.
In 1966, at the age of 10-1/2 I was brutally raped by a Needham, Mass.
police officer. The fear & terror left me seriously mentally impaired and
that mans' actions and threats to kill my whole family suppressed all
memory of the rape until a 1990 nervous breakdown.
I added the photo of Richter's Drug Store in Minneapolis because Minnesota was the last time I was happy. I moved back to Needham, Mass in 1971 and all my happiness was destroyed - again.
