Debbie Morris tells her story of kidnapping, rape and eventual forgiveness of attackers

At age 16, Debbie Morris was kidnapped, raped, tortured and almost murdered. Years passed before Debbie learned to forgive Robert Willie and Joseph Vaccaro, murderers and escapees from Angola Prison.
   
On a peaceful night in Madisonville, Louisiana, 16-year-old Debbie and her boyfriend, Mark Brewster, parked their car by the Tchefuncte River and sipped milkshakes. They paid little attention to the white pickup truck that pulled up beside them on the isolated riverfront. Suddenly, a revolver thrust through the driver’s window and pointed at Mark’s head. A strong hand jerked Debbie’s head back and a voice said: “Don’t do anything stupid! We’ve killed before and we’ll kill again.” Debbie felt the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun pressed against her felt cheek.
   
“I remember the helpless, sick feeling in my stomach as my whole world went suddenly spinning wildly out of control,” Debbie says. “I remember the heart-pounding terror threatening to explode in my chest. I remember mind-clenching panic.”
   
The two men, high on drugs, jumped into Mark’s T-bird and the nightmare began. They drove Debbie and Mark past Bayou Desire into the empty roads and pine forests. Across Highway 190, they turned onto Tantilla Ranch Road. They hit Mark over the head with a gun and shoved his body into the car trunk. Then Robert Willie raped Debbie.
   
“Things seemed to be going from bad to worse in a hurry,” she said. “I’ve got to be able to do something,” she thought, “But what? My body felt numb. Exhausted. Yet my mind raced furiously from one imagined scenario to another in search of some workable plan of escape.”
   
After filling the car with gas, the escapees headed toward Florida. Passing the Gulf Shores exit, Joe stopped the car in an isolated clearing. Willie marched Mark off into the woods. Debbie heard the sounds of a struggle, Mark’s muffled, frightened voice, and then a gunshot. Willie and Joe came back to the car without Mark. “I heard their spine-chilling, maniacal laughter followed by a pair of animal-like screams that set me shivering and shaking all over,” Debbie recalls. “That was when Willie pulled a big folding knife out of the front pocket of his dirty blue jeans. He opened it up to reveal an ominous-looking blade, at least four inches long. ‘I wonder what this would feel like sticking in that pretty skin of yours?’ he asked me.”
   
Joe stopped at the Florida Welcome Station and took free samples of orange juice. Debbie had had no chance to escape. She worried about Mark. Without warning, Joe jerked the car around and headed west again, back to Louisiana. “We’re headin’ home now, Blondie,” Willie told Debbie. “When we get there, we’re gonna let you go!”
   
“Please!” Debbie panicked and cried. “You have to let me go!”
   
“Stop that! Stop that cryin’ now!” Joe demanded. “I can’t stand it when a girl cries. Just stop it!”
   
“I can’t help it,” Debbie sobbed. “Let me go! Please!”
   
Vaccaro grew visibly upset. “Shut up, girl,” he screamed. “I said, shut up!”
   
At that Vaccaro lashed out with his right arm, and with his right fist still gripping the stock of his pistol, he punched Debbie in the chest with the back of his hand. Hard.
   
“The sudden blow knocked the air out of me,” Debbie said. “It reminded me how helplessly unpredictable my situation truly was … my captors were still very much in control. What am I going to do, Lord?”  Debbie prayed. “You have got to help me get away!”
   
Debbie remembers: “I’d never in my life felt the kind of hatred I felt right then. I wanted to see Robert Willie rot in hell for what he had done to Mark and to me.”
   
At some point that afternoon, Vaccaro told Debbie: “You sure are nicer than our last girlfriend. I sure hope what happened to our last girlfriend don’t happen to you!  Everythin’ was fine and the next thing I knowed she was … dead.”
   
Debbie remembers: “It was like Vaccaro was having some kind of flashback and seeing it all in his mind. It was giving me the chills.”
   
“She was all cut up and stabbed in the chest. It was terrible,” he continued.
   
“Shut up!” Willie shouted. Vaccaro got quiet. They headed north toward Franklinton and stopped the car. “Get in the back seat,” Willie ordered Debbie, “and take off your clothes!” Again, Willie raped Debbie. Debbie prayed, “Please God, you gotta help me get out of here alive!” She wondered when the nightmare would end.
   
“We gotta find us some more drugs,” Willie said. They decided to try to find an old friend, drug dealer Tommy Holden. After hours of searching, that afternoon, on Fitzsimmons Road, Vaccaro finally spotted Tommy. They flagged him down. They drove to Holden’s cockroach-infested trailer in the middle of nowhere, and Debbie watched the three of them smoke pot and drink beer. Debbie prayed for a way to escape, and she begged them to let her go. The emotional stress and two days without sleep had caused Debbie to lose any hope of an escape.
   
“Willie says we can’t let you go until I have sex with you,” Vaccaro told Debbie. “He doesn’t want to be the only one.” For the third time, Debbie was violently raped.
   
“What are y’all planning to do?” Holden asked Willie.
   
“You askin’ me what we need to do?” Willie replied. “I’m sayin’ we lock her in the trunk and set the car on fire!”
   
Debbie remembers: “When I heard that, I experienced a split second of absolute terror. I couldn’t imagine a more terrible fate than being burned alive while locked in the trunk of a car.”
   
For some reason, however, the two drugged men decided to let Debbie out of the car near her Madisonville home. “They stopped and let me out near the cemetery at the outskirts of town,” Debbie said. “I couldn’t believe they were letting me go. I thought to myself ‘they are going to pull up beside me any minute, drag me back in the car. Or they are going to let me get a little ways down the road so they can run me down and kill me with the car.’”
   
Debbie flinched when she heard tires squeal as the car took off and roared toward her. “Let them run me down,” Debbie thought. “At least it will be over with.” She didn’t look back. She tensed for the impact. But, to her amazement, the car accelerated right on past her.
   
“They’re going to stop any second,” Debbie thought. But they didn’t. Instead, the car disappeared around the curve and continued out of sight. Willie and Vaccaro had, for some reason, released Debbie. She kept walking until she reached town.  
   
During the long ordeal, Debbie’s family had begged the police to look for the missing teenager. But the police brushed them off. “This kind of thing happens all the time. She’ll probably be home soon,” they said. Before they could officially list Debbie as “missing” and put out an all-points bulletin, the teenager had to be gone for 72 hours.
  
For months, Debbie worked with the police in their search for Willie and Vaccaro. Debbie led the police to the place where the men had shot Mark. Amazingly, they found Mark still alive. He had a gunshot to his head, barely conscious, but still alive. Mark would need a lifetime of therapy to learn to do even the most simple of life’s tasks. Debbie also gave to the detectives the information she had heard from Willie and Vaccaro. She told them about their “last girlfriend,” the young woman they had claimed to kill. Police discovered the victim’s name was Faith Hathaway. They later found her decomposing body. Police also found and arrested Willie and Vaccaro in Arkansas. For his crimes, Vaccaro was imprisoned. Willie died in the electric chair.
   
In spite of her belief in Jesus Christ, the support of her family and her church family, Debbie’s life began to deteriorate. She quit high school. She moved around the country working odd jobs for living expenses. And she developed such a serious drinking problem that she experienced alcoholic blackouts.
   
After Willie’s execution, Debbie felt numb. “It’s over at last,” she told herself. But she felt spiritually confused. “As a kid and as a young teenager I believed in God,” she said. “I trusted Him. And then He let me down. Okay, maybe He saved me and gave me another chance at life. But what about all the pain and unhappiness I’ve gone through — where was the Almighty in all that? If He really, truly loved me like the Bible claims, why would He let me go through all the heartache and suffering?” Debbie claims she was angry, and she was angry at God.
   
Debbie also realized that “no punishment — not even the ultimate punishment (Willie’s execution), the ultimate justice — could ever heal all the wounds.”
   
Debbie’s mother finally convinced her to get professional help. She checked herself into a 30-day treatment program at a Baton Rouge hospital. And Debbie’s messed-up life began to change.
   
For a long time, Debbie walked the hard road of forgiveness. She asked God to forgive her for her attitude and mistakes following Willie’s execution. “As I came to know and feel God’s forgiveness, it was suddenly easy to forgive myself,” she said. “And what a new and incredible sense of freedom I felt!”
   
Debbie returned to church. She renewed her relationship with God and her family. She forgave the evil men who kidnapped and violated her — the men who had shot her boyfriend.
   
Some time later, Sister Helen Prejean wrote a book describing how she, a nun, had ministered to Robert Willie before his execution for the murder of  Faith Hathaway. The book became the popular movie, “Dead Man Walking.”
   
Before he died, Robert Willie showed no sign of remorse for his crimes.
   
“I couldn’t begin to articulate it at the time,” Debbie remembers, “but I knew I had to forgive him — not for his sake, but for mine.”
   
Today, Debbie Morris is  married and the mother of two young children.
   
She works as a public school special education teacher with a particular concern for troubled students considered most at-risk for future involvement in violence and crime.
   
Debbie Morris will be telling the story of her kidnapping and rape, as well as her incredible story of forgiveness, at Prison Fellowship Ministries (founded by Chuck Colson) fund-raising banquets in Huntsville Oct. 16 and in Birmingham Oct. 17.
   
Grammy-nominated vocalist, Wintley Phipps, will bring special solos. Tickets must be reserved by Oct. 13. For more information about the banquets, call 1-800-279-7351 or e-mail speakerseries@pfm.org speakerseries@pfm.org.