[Star]

Okay, this is extremely close to home because this happened on my street!!! I don't know which house this was, I still haven't talked to my neibours to see if anyone knows anything. She did what I do every night. I don't smoke in the house so I go out in my backyard and have a smoke, day and night. It's pretty sad when you can't even feel safe in your own backyard anymore. scary!!

His face was an impenetrable void. It was expressionless, as though it was hewn from a block of stone. It did not reflect even the the faintest glimmer of emotion.

“It was so cold. It was like he was there, but wasn’t,” Debbie Hearn, 44, says. The hairs on her forearms stand on end and she self-consciously rubs them before speaking again.

“As if he was saying, ‘I have been programmed to do this.’ ”

But her attacker said nothing when he dragged her down into the backyard garden of her central St. Catharines home.

He uttered not a single word when he attempted to strangle her and then muzzle her screams.

He made no sound while he repeatedly seared her flesh with a lit cigarette.

Finally, when Debbie drove her knee into his groin with all the power her spirit could muster, her shadowy attacker broke his silence.

“Even then it was just a low groan. You could barely hear it. There were no words.”

Fear has been an ever-present companion since that night. She will not set foot in her own backyard alone.

Debbie’s son and husband, Norm, were both out last Saturday evening and she decided to make the most of her solitude.

“I don’t spent a lot of time in the back yard during the day because I am allergic to bees,” she says. “So what I do in the backyard I do at night.”

It was after 10 p.m. The daytime heat still hung in the humid air.

Debbie poured herself a glass of red wine and slipped into a rocker in the backyard of her Lowell Avenue home.

No distractions. No noise. It was just Debbie and the night.

“It was nice, perfect really,” she says.
“I was enjoying my time alone.”

full story: http://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/w...News+%2D+Local