She Survived: Melissa

By M. William Phelps and Melissa Schickel

From the bestselling author of The Killing Kind, a woman shares her story of survival after an attack during a home invasion.

A few days before her twenty-sixth birthday, Melissa Schickel returned to her Indianapolis home and went to bed. An hour later, she was yanked from her dreams into terror. An intruder held her down, brutally beating and stabbing her.

Melissa fought fiercely. The assailant fled, leaving her to face a long road to recovery from deep-seated fear and post-traumatic stress. She tells her exclusive true story as part of a compelling narrative by bestselling crime expert M. William Phelps. Her strength and courage will inspire all women with similar experiences to think of themselves proudly as survivors—not victims.

Praise for New York Times bestselling author M. William Phelps

“One of America's finest true-crime writers.” —Vincent Bugliosi, New York Times bestselling author of Helter Skelter

“Phelps is the Harlan Coben of real-life thrillers.” —Allison Brennan, New York Times bestselling author of Tell No Lies

“Anything by Phelps is an eye-opening experience.” —Suspense Magazine

“Phelps is the king of true crime.” —Lynda Hirsch, Creators Syndicate columnist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pinnacle Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780786034567

M. William Phelps

Crime writer and investigative journalist M. William Phelps is the author of twenty-four nonfiction books and the novel The Dead Soul. He consulted on the first season of the Showtime series Dexter, has been profiled in Writer’s Digest, Connecticut Magazine, NY Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Suspense Magazine, and the Hartford Courant, and has written for Connecticut Magazine. Winner of the New England Book Festival Award for I’ll Be Watching You and the Editor’s Choice Award from True Crime Book Reviews for Death Trap, Phelps has appeared on nearly 100 television shows, including CBS’s Early Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today Show, The View, TLC, BIO Channel, and History Channel. Phelps created, produces and stars in the hit Investigation Discovery series Dark Minds, now in its third season; and is one of the stars of ID’s Deadly Women. Radio America called him “the nation’s leading authority on the mind of the female murderer.” Touched by tragedy himself, due to the unsolved murder of his pregnant sister-in-law, Phelps is able to enter the hearts and minds of his subjects like no one else. He lives in a small Connecticut farming community and can be reached at his website, www.mwilliamphelps.com.

Book preview

Phelps

CHAPTER 1

BAD FEELINGS

It was Valentine’s Day. Melissa Schickel found herself in a rough spot. She and her boyfriend weren’t getting along. The last time they talked, the conversation had not gone well. Melissa was thinking he wanted to end the relationship.

Melissa had a profound stubbornness about her that she’d learned to embrace—as opposed to grappling with—over the years. She understood who she was and did not fight it. On Valentine’s night, 1992, Melissa had gone out to a hockey game. As she sat and looked on, not paying too much attention to the play, she contemplated the idea of going out to one of the bars she and her boyfriend generally frequented. Maybe she’d run into him. They could talk things out.

Don’t go, said a little voice in back of Melissa’s mind.

Her fear, deep down, was hitting the local hot spots and then running into the guy as he sat with his arm around another girl. It would be uncomfortable, to say the least. There would no doubt be a scene.

The guy had money. Melissa later described her socioeconomic status at that time as being from the wrong side of the tracks. In this way, she thought, they were not compatible. It would never work. She thought the relationship was doomed from the beginning.

And I figured that was what came between us.

She never went out to the bars that night. To forget about the guy not calling and the silence between the two of them, pigheaded Melissa got up the next morning and took off to Florida for a few weeks to visit family.

It was a nice little getaway in the middle of winter from a place—Indianapolis, Indiana—that could yield to snow piling up by the foot. In an age without cell phones and e-mail, Melissa never really considered not hearing from her boyfriend to be anything more than the two of them in a standoff. The time and space was good. She was hurt bad, but maybe this was the way it had to be.

She had no idea, of course, that the news awaiting her at home, after that brief visit to Florida, would alter her perception of life and how silence on another person’s part is not always what it seems.

CHAPTER 2

COLLISION COURSE

A life can be altered in an instant. Melissa would learn this firsthand as she arrived back home from Florida and went about her life.

At four feet, nine and a half inches, Melissa knew how tall she was exactly, because she had recently auditioned for a spot at Disney. MGM Studios theme park had held open auditions to play various characters. Melissa made the cut. However, she was not tall enough to play the main princess character, so they offered her work at Disney World playing Mickey, Minnie, Chip, or Dale. Thus, exemplifying the word petite, at 105 pounds, Melissa was just a tiny little thing. Hazel eyes, a natural blonde, twenty-five year-old Melissa Schickel was pretty, smart, athletic, and eager to take on the world as a young woman of the ’90s. She had been going about her days just outside Indianapolis with a profound sense of not really knowing what she wanted to do with her life. Florida and Disney looked good on paper, but did she really want to stand around all day, giving high fives to little kids and posing for photos, sweating her ass off in a felt costume?

Melissa was grateful for what she had, certainly. She never questioned the way things happened, and certainly never wondered about the course her life took. Yet, at this moment in time, she did find herself standing at a crossroads.

I had graduated Ball State University in 1988 with a BS degree in business (half in management, half in insurance), Melissa said. I had worked three jobs while going to school, so by the time I graduated, quite honestly, I was just burned out and wanted to find a job. Unfortunately, the economy was shaky, and even with a business degree I was finding it very difficult to find a job.

All she heard during the course of job interviews was You don’t have enough experience.

When she returned from Florida, Melissa felt she could think through things a bit clearer. There were no messages from her boyfriend. As much as she might have hoped he’d called or asked about her, she had not heard from friends that he was wondering where she had run off to, what she was doing, or had been trying to track her down.

But it was okay.

I still didn’t think anything about it when he didn’t call, Melissa remembered. I just figured he’d moved on.

In early March 1992, Melissa went out to one of the bars she’d gone to with her former boyfriend and other mutual friends quite frequently. As she sat, nursing a drink, every time the door opened and someone walked in, Melissa secretly hoped she’d turn around and see him. They could sit, chat, patch things up, and maybe move forward. She did love the guy. She thought he had strong feelings for her also.

The bar was in an affluent area of town, where her boyfriend lived. A friend of theirs moseyed over to Melissa and sat down next to her.

They had a drink and talked about old times. At one point the woman looked at Melissa and said, Isn’t it such a shame about Steven (pseudonym)?

The comment caught Melissa off guard. She had no idea what the woman was talking about.

Excuse me? Melissa asked.

Wasn’t it such a shock about Steven?

Steven who? Melissa asked. She was confused. Was the woman referring to her Steven, the boyfriend she’d been thinking about now since that Valentine’s Day decision to take off to Florida and run from the memories of him?

"Our Steven," the woman clarified.

What are you talking about? Melissa responded.

The woman took a pull from her drink. The car crash, Melissa.

"What are you talking about? What do you mean?"

You didn’t know?

What. Are. You. Talking. About?

As Melissa’s head began to spin, the woman explained that Steven had died in a fiery car crash.

Melissa recalled the entire bar, same as in a movie, spinning around her in slow motion as she was being told the man she loved was dead. It was as if she had been hit on the head. It all made sense. That was why he had never called. He was dead. No one from his family had called her because they really didn’t know about her, the two of them being, Melissa explained, from different sides of the tracks.

Leaving the bar, Melissa wondered how her life and the pain she was now experiencing—the sorrow and remorse and all those thoughts about what could have been—could get any worse. Could life deal her a more devastating blow than this one?

CHAPTER 3

LITTLE PRINCESS

Melissa landed a job managing a small independent video store in that affluent area of Indianapolis where her late boyfriend had resided. Living in Anderson, Melissa decided to move closer to the city and into Indianapolis. She found an apartment in a place she believed to be okay. It wasn’t the Fifth Avenue district, but it wasn’t a ghetto, either. She was content in moving on and living a low-key life.

If you would have asked me thirty years ago, Melissa recalled, if I could have mentally survived all I went through, I would have told you that you would have to lock me away in a padded room for the rest of my life.

This strange year of her life had kicked off after the midnight fireworks popped and banged in the New Year, 1992. Her boyfriend, the divorced father of a daughter, was dead. That video store job, which she thought seemed promising at first, didn’t turn out to be so great. So she quit the position and was now looking for another full-time job. It had been the customers and the area where the video store was located, mainly, that made Melissa uncomfortable and ultimately change her course.

I was very neurotic, she said. I was the only child in grade school and high school with ulcers. But you never know what you can handle until you are actually faced with it.

From there, as the hammer fist of life smacked her around a bit, showing Melissa that even the simple daily chore of a car ride can alter the lives of so many, she began working two to three part-time jobs to make ends meet. She was commuting to two different cities, keeping busy, not allowing the sting of depression to engulf her. Things started to look up by the time May of that same year came