Her first day of testimony ended. The next morning, June 9, she was back on the witness stand. In a building filled with trial horrors, this courtroom was about to go well beyond the normal—beyond what most people are brave enough to imagine, let alone recount. Some of her testimony from this day is not going to be recounted in this story. It got very gruesome. But in order to understand her courage it’s necessary to hear, as much as possible, what she lived through.
Butz’s mother sat listening to the testimony on one of the wooden benches, just as she had every day of the trial so far, other members of the Butz family tight on either side of her. She is a small woman, just like her daughter, who was only five feet two. One thought: If this woman can absorb, at the level of detail required for proof before a jury, the particulars of what happened to her daughter—can view the bloody crime-scene photographs, can listen to the 911 call from a neighbor leaning over her blood-soaked daughter and screaming, “Ma’am, please wake up! Please wake up!” (while, to the 911 operator pleading, “Please hurry, please hurry”), can hear the testimony about DNA evidence and what orifices it was recovered from—then no one else in this courtroom can dare turn away. Butz’s mother’s presence, too, created an imperative: This happened. You must listen.
Isaiah Kalebu, the man accused of these crimes, sat in a sealed courtroom on a higher floor, deemed so uncontrollable he’s been banned from his own trial, left to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television while strapped into a restraint chair and dressed in a thick green flop of fabric known as a “suicide smock.” (No ties, strings, sleeves, or other possible aides to self-harm.) Up to this point in the trial, Kalebu hadn’t been fighting his confinement in the upstairs courtroom, but this morning, of all mornings, he changed from his suicide smock into a dress shirt and slacks and requested that he be allowed to sit in the eighth-floor courtroom with his accuser. After his lawyers went up and talked to him, he retracted the request.
Butz’s partner began her second day of testimony with the awful silence of the man standing there that night, leaning against the dresser, staring, promising more. “So much had already happened. I was trying to imagine what else…” And: “I didn’t feel like Teresa and I could communicate. I didn’t feel like I could tell her ‘I love you’… I almost thought it would be worse, and I don’t know why, if he knew I loved her too much.”
He said to the two women: “All right, get ready for round two.”
The horror of what happened next made the court reporter’s eyes well up, made the bailiff cry, had the whole room in tears. The jury handed around a box of tissues. The prosecutor took long pauses to collect himself. The family and friends in the courtroom cried (though, truth be told, they had been crying throughout). The Seattle Times reporter seated next to me cried. I cried. The camerawoman who was shooting video for all the television stations in town cried—and later on hugged Butz’s partner as she left the courtroom for the midmorning break.
Perhaps it is enough to restate how one of the two prosecuting attorneys summarized the attacks in opening arguments at the beginning of the trial. Kalebu, this prosecutor said, “raped them every way imaginable. Vaginally, anally, orally. He wasn’t wearing a condom, and he ejaculated several times.”
Perhaps it is enough to listen to some of their conversations during the later phases of these attacks, as Butz’s partner recounted them on the stand.
The man asked the couple for lube before one of his rapes of Butz. When the women replied that they didn’t have any lube, he said: “Too bad for her.”
The man asked, at one point: “So are you guys lesbians or are you bisexual?”
Butz’s partner’s mind spun. Which would be worse? Which answer would make him more likely to stop?
“I remember what I said was, ‘Well, we’ve been together a long time, so I guess that makes us lesbians.’”
She felt that she deserved to ask him a question at this point, so she asked: “Have you seen us before?”
He shook his head no.
Butz asked: “What if we’d been an old man?”
He just shrugged.
Butz’s partner made up a story that someone was coming to pick them up at 5:00 a.m. to take them to a wedding in Portland. She asked him if they were going to make the wedding. He said yes. She said: “Please don’t hurt us. We’re good people.”
He said: “Yeah, you seem like you’re good people. I wish we could have been friends.”
Butz replied: “Yeah, I wish we could.”
“Which,” her partner said on the stand, “is exactly what she would do… Even in that moment, she wanted to make some sort of connection. She said, ‘Maybe we still can.’”
He asked: “Do I seem like a good person to you?”
“She put the tips of her fingers on his chest—I will never ever forget this—and said, ‘I am sure there is some good in here.’”
He said: “No more questions.”
“I just did what I had to do,” Butz’s partner said. “At one point, I felt the tip of the knife just kind of touch my arm. I said, ‘Ouch!,’ and he actually said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’”
She remembers thinking: “There’s no way he’d say ‘I’m sorry’ and be a murderer. We’re going to get through this. There’s got to be some level of compassion there or something.”
At one point, Butz made a play for the knife.