Jane Doe January is called Jane Doe January because she was raped in January. There is also a Jane Doe November. Both women were raped in Shadyside in 1992 by the same man, a stranger to them. Mystery writer Emily Winslow is Jane Doe of “Jane Doe January: My Twenty-Year Search for Truth and Justice,” HarperCollins ($26.99), a nonfiction account of her assault and quest to put her attacker behind bars.
Things start off with a frank description of her ordeal. In 1992, Ms. Winslow was a junior in Carnegie Mellon University’s elite drama program. Like many Pittsburgh university students, she rented an apartment in Shadyside. One day, while getting quarters from a nearby ice cream shop so she could use the apartment’s pay washer and dryer, she noticed a man watching her.
William Morrow / HarperCollins ($26.99).
When Ms. Winslow began walking back to her apartment building, she saw the man again. He followed her to her building and caught its pneumatic door before it could close and lock him out. Then he went up the stairs. Ms. Winslow knew he didn’t live there, but thought he was someone’s friend. When she went up to her apartment, he jumped out from the stairwell behind her, pushed her into her apartment, covered her mouth with his hand, shut the door and said, “Do you wanna die?”
Although she screamed when he took his hand off her nose and mouth, and although she begged for her life and to be let go, the man overpowered her on the “ratty renter’s carpeting,” his hand nearly smothering her.
All this brings the reader to page 12. What follows is 20 years of tenacity to get her attacker, a serial rapist named Arthur Fryar, punished for what he did to her.
The problem is that tenacity and everyday life make less compelling reading than action. Ms. Winslow does make some trenchant remarks about the human condition. On feelings: “Sins have to be committed, don’t they? Something that washes over you isn’t the same. It’s what you do that matters.”
On the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself”: “The commandment only works if I’m kind to me.”
But mostly, she details her interactions with the justice system, with select friends, and with her husband and children back home in England. These accounts aren’t boring — especially when she describes Pittsburgh — but they seem to have no direction, no point beyond the fact that they happened to her.
Along the way, Ms. Winslow describes how she became nearly obsessed with learning more about her attacker. She was able to gather an impressive array of data, considering that most of Fryar’s life was lived before the Internet and behind bars. Fryar was caught by happenstance when his DNA was identified in Ms. Winslow’s rape kit more than 20 years after the fact. She documents the twists and turns of the legal system as it grinds slowly toward a conclusion.
The narrative takes a desultory path to its climax, which is thoroughly deflating and available to anyone with access to an Internet search engine. Like many events, this attack and its aftermath seem to have no particular meaning or message beyond showing the reader that one can meet such injustices with the same grace as Ms. Winslow.
Laura Malt Schneiderman: lschneiderman@post-gazette.com
First Published: May 29, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
