This week’s featured missing person is Jordan Kathleen Tompkins, who was 25 when she disappeared from Bandera, Texas on April 22, 2022.
Jordan is white, with blonde hair, brown eyes and pierced ears. She may wear wigs. She was last seen wearing a black top and bright pink sneakers. If still alive, Jordan would be 28.
This is part 5 of a series of posts about what happened after I was raped.
I stayed in Virginia till the end of the week, then flew home to Ohio. No arrests had been made and I hadn’t heard anything of note, though I spoke to Austin every day. At one point he said he was riding the bus himself pretending to be an ordinary rider, hoping to spot the rapist.
As my time at Jeff’s following the rape passed my initial numbness wore off and I felt increasingly depressed. A lot of it was from people on my blog making more comments questioning my story. I got a police document, basically a record saying a report of rape had been made, and offered to email it to one person and she refused to even look at it. Over the weekend Jeff and I went to DC together in his car and visited the crime and punishment museum and the zoo. Then I flew home to Ohio and went back to work.
In Ohio I really started falling apart mentally. My entire body itched all over; I was tormented by it and scratching myself raw. That was from stress. My online haters continued to question my story and accuse me of being a liar. I really wanted the police to make an arrest but they were not making an arrest and had little to say to me. I know Austin said something about distributing posters about the crime. There was nothing to do but wait.
The attack happened on June 16. By early July it had gotten to the point where I couldn’t really function. I asked my psychiatrist to increase my medication doses. He instead decided to admit me to a facility. This facility was not a hospital but more like a halfway house for crazy people. Some of them were staying there as a step down after being released from the state mental hospital. It was not locked, not fenced, and I could have walked away from it if I’d wanted to. I stayed in this facility for five days, basically chilling out in a stress free environment while they kept an eye on me. There was no internet. I slept like 18 hours a day and spent my waking moments reading or playing video games on my laptop.
By the time I met with my psychiatrist after five days, I felt much better. He decided I was okay to go home and so I returned home and resumed work. I put up a blog post addressing the haters. (Ironically some seemed to think I wasn’t be acting traumatized enough for a rape survivor. They didn’t know I had had to be put in a facility.) On my blog I said I was not a liar and that I would happily email that police report to anyone who asked in order to prove my honesty. No one asked to see it but the hateful comments stopped.
I resigned myself for the long haul as no arrest had yet been made. I knew the police were still working on it. A few months later the local cops came to see me with another photo lineup the Virginia police had asked them to show me. Once again I was unable to make a firm identification.
I continued to see my therapist and do the best I could to cope with the situation. By the end of the summer I felt kind of normal again. I felt fortunate that the rapist had been a stranger, and that I hadn’t been attacked by a person I trusted like so many women are. I also felt fortunate that the rape had happened far away from home, because that meant home was still safe and I wasn’t going around seeing things that reminded me of the attack or worrying about bumping into him again.
In January, six months after the rape, I lost my job. Basically I had become a terrible employee in the aftermath of what happened and missed a lot of work due to the mental effects of the crime. I had hated that job anyway; it was menial and poorly paid and I didn’t really care when they fired me. I took the opportunity to move out of my parents’ house and in with my boyfriend.
My boyfriend’s roommate, who owned the house they lived in, had always been a mean and nasty person. His name was Watts. Six weeks after I moved in with them, Watts told me his girlfriend was going to buy a gun for him to carry. He couldn’t buy a gun himself cause he had a felony drug conviction, but she could buy it and he would then carry it and have use of it.
“You can’t do that,” I said. I explained that it was illegal for him, as a felon, to carry a gun even if it was registered to someone else.
Watts then asked me, if I had had a gun on me, would I have shot Rollo. I said I didn’t know. It’s hard to imagine myself shooting anyone, even him. Watts told me he had no sympathy for me for what happened because “You brought this on yourself.”
I started crying and screamed at him, a lot of foul language. I went into my boyfriend and my’s bedroom where he’d been asleep but had been awakened by the argument. “I can’t stay here anymore,” I said.
My boyfriend hadn’t heard what caused me to start screaming obscenities at Watts, but as I am a very mild mannered non-confrontational person he knew Watts must have done something very bad to set me off. He didn’t try to convince me to stay, just said, “I know. Want me to help you pack?”
I went back to my parents’ house. My boyfriend later confronted Watts about his saying I had brought the rape on myself. Watts said he didn’t even mean it, he was just mad because I’d been “telling him what to do”, by which he meant telling him he risked arrest if he carried his girlfriend’s gun around. Watts declared me “permanently banned” from the house cause of how I’d cussed him out.
As soon as he could arrange a different housing situation, my boyfriend moved out of Watts’s house and in with another roommate. Eventually we moved in together. We never spoke to Watts again but later I heard he went back to prison.
In June 2010, it was coming up on the first anniversary of the rape. Out of the blue Austin called me to announce they had identified him, using DNA from my rape kit.
The man who attacked me was a serial offender as I had thought. After he raped me, he was arrested for raping someone else. The DNA taken from this other victim’s rape kit turned out to match my own. Austin said the rapist was in jail awaiting trial for the other offense. He said he would keep me updated and was going to go try to get a statement from Rollo but doubted he’d be willing to talk.
I looked the rapist up online, now that I had his real name. (I still think of him as Rollo though, to this day.) I found an article about the other attack and it was extremely similar to my own. It looked like he had a whole system worked out, luring women he encountered on the bus. His victim had escaped from him and she knew his true name and told the police. He had turned himself in after a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was homeless when I encountered him and had a long arrest record, mostly for petty offenses related to his homelessness. Something like 30, 35 arrests.
At first, I was absolutely delighted that he had been identified and was in jail and no longer in a position to hurt anyone else. A few days later though I started feeling really depressed and anxious again because I had sort of started to put it all behind me but now it was popping back up and I had to face the possibility of testifying against him.
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