Missoula Read Free Page B

bedroom. When she left, Huguet was the only person remaining in the living room. Everyone else in the house seemed to be asleep.
    —
    HUGUET WAS AWAKENED about two hours later. It was still dark. She was lying facedown on the couch, and her jeans and underwear had been pulled down. “I remember waking up to Beau moaning, and a lot of pressure and pain,” she later testified. Donaldson was on top of her, penetrating her vagina from behind with his penis. “I opened my eyes, just partly,” she remembered. “Just from his moaning, I could tell it was him.”
    Although she was terrified, she forced herself to keep her eyes shut and wait for him to finish. Huguet is an elite athlete, and she’d taken self-defense classes. She was just five feet, five inches tall, however,and weighed 130 pounds. Donaldson weighed 230 pounds and played both fullback and linebacker for an NCAA Division I football team. She assumed that if he was willing to rape her while she was sleeping, he wouldn’t hesitate to harm her severely in order to keep her from resisting or calling for help. “He could have snapped my neck like a twig,” Huguet told me, “so I just lay there and pretended to be asleep.” Donaldson continued to rape Huguet for another five minutes before ejaculating inside her. He was not wearing a condom.
    When he’d finished, he tugged her jeans partly up, threw the blanket over her, and walked away without saying a word. Stunned, Huguet remained motionless until she was sure he was out of the room. Then, quietly, she gathered her shoes and her phone, tiptoed barefoot through the kitchen, exited the house via the back door, and started sprinting down a gravel alley to find help. When Donaldson had yanked Huguet’s pants to her knees, he had torn off the button and mangled the zipper, so with one hand she simultaneously cradled her shoes and tried to hold her jeans up, while with her other she speed-dialed her boyfriend, running as fast as she could at the same time.
    “I don’t know why I was calling him,” Allison said. “He had moved to Colorado. It’s not like he was going to be able to help. I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I called him twice, but he never answered.”
    Still running, Allison dialed her mother next. “When the phone rang,” Beth Huguet told me, “I looked at my clock, and it was four-eleven in the morning. There was this throaty sound on the other end of the line. Panicked sounds, with nothing coming out. I knew it was Allison, even without any words. I’ll never forget it. I’ll have that with me the rest of my life.”
    “Mom!” Allison eventually managed to blurt as she ran. “He’s chasing me! Help me! Save me! Mom!” Donaldson had somehow seen or heard Allison fleeing from the house and was pursuing her.
    “I’d only been on the phone with my mom for a few seconds when all of a sudden I heard someone behind me, and I realized Beau was chasing me,” Allison said. A few seconds later his hand brushed her back as he grasped at her from behind. “I was literally screaming into the phone, ‘He raped me!’ right when I felt him grabbing at me.My mom was telling me, ‘Run! Keep running!’ ” Allison knew that Donaldson owned several guns. As she tried to accelerate away from him, she said, “I thought he was going to kill me. I thought for sure I was dead.”
    Running even harder down the alley, and frantically pushing Donaldson’s hands away as he pulled at her, Allison ignored the pain as the gravel cut her bare feet. “I was hitting him as I ran,” she said. “I don’t know if I was actually speaking to him. I was just talking to my mom. And I was worried because the battery in my phone was low and I knew it was about to die.”
    Through her own phone, over the sound of Allison sobbing and gasping to catch her breath, Beth could hear Donaldson say, “No, Allison! Stop! Come back! I’m sorry. Don’t say anything. I’ll make it all right. Come back to the house