Womans ex-boyfriends rape trial begins

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A Cedar Grove woman testified Tuesday in Kanawha Circuit Court that her ex-boyfriend crept into her house in the middle of the night, duct-taped her wrists and ankles, and raped her at gunpoint.


A grand jury indicted Kerry Lee Johnson, 53, of Elkview, on charges of kidnapping, burglary and sexual assault in July.


The alleged victim said that she and Johnson had dated, but she broke up with him shortly after Valentine's Day. Johnson wanted the relationship to go on, and continued to call her and drive past her house, she said.


She woke up around 2 a.m. on June 11 to find him standing in her bedroom doorway, she said. He had a gun and a roll of duct tape in his hands, she said.


"I started screaming and he rushed me," she said.


He dragged her out of the bed, forced her to strip naked and showed her a box of bullets, she said.


"He said, 'I'm going to use every one of them on you,'" except for the one he would use to shoot himself, she said.


He had cut her phone line, and held a receiver up to her to show her that she couldn't call for help, she said.


The woman wept as she recalled how she begged him to spare her life.


"Don't let my family find me dead like this," she said she told him.


Johnson picked her up by the hair and threw her on the bed, she said. He taped her mouth shut before binding her wrists and ankles, she said.


He then turned her over so he could assault her from behind, she said.


After he raped her, they went downstairs and sat in the living room, she said.


"I just thought, if I can keep him calm, then maybe I can survive," she said.


But when he asked her if she wanted to be with him, and she told him no, he blew up, and dragged her back upstairs by the hair, she said.


Again they returned downstairs, where he dozed on a recliner while she pretended to sleep on a couch, she said.


Twice she crept upstairs and dialed 911 on her cell phone, leaving the line open in hopes that that would summon police, she said. After waiting for more than an hour, she decided to risk talking to the dispatcher, pleading for help, she said.


When Kanawha County assistant prosecutor Dan Holstein asked her why she didn't try to get out of the house, she said that her doors were locked, and she was afraid if he heard her trying to leave he would shoot her.


"I knew I couldn't outrun a bullet," she said.


When police arrived she was taken to Women and Children's Hospital in Charleston, she said.


Under cross-examination by assistant public defender Katherine Kessell, the woman acknowledged that she and Johnson had vacationed together in Florida in May, several months after she said she had tried to end the relationship.


She also said that in 2004, she had voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric facility at the suggestion of her then-husband. She said she did so because he had convinced her that she was the cause of all of their marital difficulties.


At her doctor's suggestion, she took medicine intended to treat bipolar disorder, but she was never diagnosed as bipolar, she said.


The alleged victim also denied lying on an application to renew her commercial driver's license by failing to report her history of treatment for mental illness.


After the state rested its case, Bill Croye, the human resources and safety director for Medford Trucking, where both Johnson and his alleged victim worked as coal truck drivers, testified for the defense.


Croye, a former chief deputy with the Kanawha County Sheriff's Department, said he called both of them into his office and told them that their personal relationship should stay out of the workplace.


"We're here to make money, not to make love," he said he told them.


Croye said both were excellent employees, but that he would not have hesitated to fire them if their "roller-coaster" relationship caused problems at work.


Johnson's trial continues Wednesday in front of Judge Duke Bloom.