‘Pure evil’: Torture victim takes stand, describes being raped, sodomized, shot, burned

The woman was 36 when she was kidnapped at gunpoint, sodomized with handguns, raped, burned, tortured for hours and shot repeatedly in a desolate field behind a trailer park in the early dark of Jan. 1, 2014.

For 90 minutes Wednesday, the Columbus woman testified to that ordeal in the trial of three men facing multiple felony charges in the horrific assault that shocked the city.

Now 41, she never broke down on the witness stand as she recounted what she endured after the three took her in her car from a New Year’s Eve house party on Garden Drive to a vacant lot at 988 Farr Road, where later they left her for dead as the cold dawn lightened the sky.

She did not say for certain what sparked such twisted violence, but testified she assumed the three suspects were offended by what she said during a freestyle rap session on the street outside the house party, where they sat in her 2007 Volkswagen Passat and traded verses before two of the men put guns to her head and ordered her to drive.

“They got upset I guess with what I was saying,” she said. “I guess they couldn’t take it…. It’s just words.”

She could not recall when she arrived at the Garden Drive “party house,” a private residence that’s used like an unlicensed nightclub, where people can get alcohol or other intoxicants and dance to music. She knew only that she got there before midnight, as the new year had not arrived.

She said her mother and a friend were at the party, but she sat in her car listening to the radio. At one point a man she in court identified as defendant Ketorie Glover walked up and said, “Hey sexy, do you want a drink?”

He went inside the house and came back with a gin and juice, and asked to sit in the front passenger’s seat, she said, adding that eventually a second man whom she in court identified as defendant Robert Carl Johnson came up, and Glover asked, “That’s my homeboy. Can he get in the car?”

Johnson got in the back seat behind her, and soon a second friend of Glover’s, whom the victim identified as Joey Garron, got in the backseat on the passenger’s side.

At that point, they “were just having a good time, just talking junk to one another…. We all took turns free-styling,” she said. During their rap competition, Glover pulled out a gun, but then put it away like he was joking, she said.

He wasn’t joking the next time he pulled the gun, she said: He put it to the side of her head at the same time Johnson put a gun to the back of her head, and they said, “B---h, drive!”

She looked into the yard of the party house, where she saw her mother dancing. “I’m never going to see her again,” she thought.

Soon after they left Garden Drive, Glover made her move to the front passenger seat, and he drove to the lot off Farr Road, she said.

“When I got out there, that’s when the torture started,” she said.

They ordered her to strip naked and give them oral sex, and then sodomized her anally and vaginally with two handguns – an assault they thoroughly enjoyed, she emphasized, as they stopped for a moment, and then resumed.

“They was really getting off on it,” she testified. “Like a kid on Christmas morning, they was really loving that part…. The only thing I could think of is, ‘Is this gun going off?’”

Then they each raped her, she said: “They passed me around like a piece of cake.”

Garron was the only suspect of the three who seemed less enthusiastic about the assault, as though he was “not into it,” she said. “I never seen him with a gun.” But he also participated in the rape, she said: “As far as I can remember, he got me, too.”

This went on for hours, she said: “It was like I was a piece of meat to them. They was having a good ol’ time. It was like pure evil…. It went to stuff you wouldn’t even think about anyone knowing. I was pleading for my life.”

Their attitude toward her life was “won’t nobody miss her,” she added.

They put her in the trunk of her car, but she pushed through the back seat into the passenger compartment and got out.

The sky was getting light. She was sitting naked on the grass. They took a can of gasoline from the trunk of her car, poured it on her, set it alight and ran, she said.

Remembering the childhood safety instruction to “stop, drop and roll,” she did that, and extinguished the flames, though she was badly burned.

Seeing she had survived, her three assailants returned.

As she got into the driver’s seat of her car, they lined up abreast outside like gunslingers in a Western standoff, and Glover and Johnson pulled their pistols and started shooting at her as they backed away, she said: “They ran. They left me for dead.”

As dawn broke, she cried for help. She saw a man passing and hoped he heard her.

The people who called 911 lived in an adjacent trailer park. They could not see her, and did not want to venture into the field.

Kim Dennie, then a Columbus police officer, was the first to arrive, having just come on duty after the morning shift change. She said the people who called police thought they’d heard someone back in the field behind them for about 30 minutes.

She found the victim sitting naked on a mound of clay. “Help me,” the woman pleaded, before falling backward.

Dennie could see the bullet holes, burns and other wounds. “I could see skin that was peeled back on part of her,” the witness said. “Just blood everywhere.”

The car also had been set afire, and still was smoking, so the officer called for medics and a fire truck.

Among the first to arrive was Lt. Oscar Gregory, who testified that the victim would have died there, had more time passed before she was treated: She was losing blood and couldn’t breathe because of a bullet wound to her chest.

“She was going in and out. She was naked. … It was bad, real bad,” he said. “She’d been out there all night long. It was cold that New Year’s Day.”

Gregory said the paramedics gave the victim “life-saving aid,” adding, “She was going out because her chest was full of blood.”

Once she started getting treatment and could breathe again, “her vitals started coming back,” he said.

Sgt. Benjamin Todd with the fire department testified the woman’s multiple injuries included an open fracture at her right knee, where she’d been shot.

A bullet wound to her upper right chest had collapsed her lung and passed out her back, he said. He noticed also that her blood pressure had dropped; she had another gunshot wound to her left abdomen; burns and lost skin on her chest, arms and shoulders; soot in her mouth from inhaling smoke; and cuts on her hands that appeared to have come from raising her arms to defend herself.

“The statement she gave to me was she was down on the ground with her hands up,” he said.

Though she was described as “combative” in a report, that likely resulted from the lack of oxygen, which can cause hallucinations, Todd said. In five to six minutes after she got medical treatment, she seemed clear-headed again, he said.

The victim remembered seeing Dennie walk up that morning.

“I just felt relief when I seen the officer coming,” she said. “She saved my life, pretty much.”

She spent weeks in the hospital, needing four or five surgeries and physical therapy. She anticipates more operations, she said Wednesday: “I still got three bullets in me.”

Defense attorneys questioned her ingestion of alcohol and drugs that night, and whether she was impaired. Investigators found cocaine and marijuana in the back of the car.

She said she had dropped her boyfriend off at work around 9 or 10 p.m., gone to a niece’s home to get some clothes to wear, and then headed to the party. She had decided she would try to have some fun after an argument with her boyfriend.

She recalled she smoked a “blunt,” a cigar with marijuana in it, while sitting in the car, and thought she’d had some cocaine earlier in the day. But she was not so intoxicated that the drugs and alcohol made her pass out, she said.

She didn’t lose consciousness until Dennie arrived and she knew she would be rescued, she said, telling Johnson’s attorney Angela Dillon, “If you’re losing blood, I think you’re going to pass out, too.”

The other defense attorneys are Adam Deaver, who represents Glover, and Anthony Johnson, who represents Garron.

Each suspect is charged with more than a dozen felonies that include aggravated assault, aggravated sodomy, aggravated sexual battery, rape, aggravated battery, kidnapping, hijacking a motor vehicle and second-degree arson.

The lead prosecutor is Assistant District Attorney Sadhana Dailey, aided by Assistant District Attorney Ray Daniel.

The trial resumes Thursday in the Government Center courtroom of Judge Arthur Smith III.

This story was originally published August 15, 2018 at 6:42 PM.