The letter

Liz Seccuro tried as best she could to move beyond the trauma of one night 21 years ago that haunted her and changed her life—one that cost her everything, she says, and her alleged rapist, William Beebe, nothing. 

But last September it suddenly all came rushing back when Liz received a letter from him.

Liz Seccuro:  I knew within a nanosecond what was inside.  I didn’t even have to open it.

Edie Magnus, Dateline correspondent: When you say “I knew in a nanosecond what was inside”?

Seccuro: This was my rapist apologizing to me.  Plain and simple.  His conscience and karma finally caught up with him, and he is writing to say he’s sorry.

Michael Seccuro, husband: And she started crying. It started as a cry and it got to weeping.

Then through her burst of tears, Liz started reading...

Dear Elizabeth, In October 1984, I harmed you.  I can scarcely begin to understand the degree to which, through your eyes, my behavior has affected you in it’s wake. Still, I stand prepared to hear from you about just how, and in what ways, you’ve been affected, and to begin to set right the wrong I’ve done, and in any way you see fit.

At first it seemed like the validation she’d always been seeking.

Seccuro: He knows he did it.  I know he did it.  God knows he did it.  We’re all on the same page now.

But quickly these 3 little paragraphs unleashed a cascade of emotions.

Seccuro: Anger, regret, "Oh you stupid idiot."  Why didn’t you just admit to it then?  I was laughing, I was crying.  I just one big huge emotional, you know, grab bag at that point.

Magnus: Were you moved at all by his apparent anguish?  And his sincerity over making amends?

Seccuro:  I don’t want to seem heartless, but my answer is no.

Over the next several days, Liz carried the letter with her everywhere - even to the pool.

Seccuro: I would blast music and swim for hours.  And think about this letter.  I did this for days.  “What am I going to do?  What am I going to do?”

After a couple weeks of wondering whether to ignore him or respond, Liz decided to email him.

Seccuro: I remember saying, “I’m in receipt of your letter.  How can you live with yourself?”

And so began a remarkable correspondence between Liz and her alleged attacker.

Seccuro: I wanted to know who he was and why he did this.

She was intent on probing into the past.

Seccuro: I wanted to know who he was.  I wanted to know why he did this.

And he appeared just as anxious to answer

“Dear Liz, You asked me to write about how I lived with myself in the wake of this incident.  So I will... I always felt a tremendous guilt for the ways in which I imagined my conduct had damaged you, and for years too the only solution seemed to be the bottle, which worked less and less over time to assuage the guilt...”

Beebe wrote that his unrestrained drinking habit started well before the assault and only worsened afterward.

“After the incident, I was disgusted w/ myself... I took to understand that I’d caused an even bigger problem than I’d previously believed.  I felt like dying...”

Magnus: He doesn’t use the word rape initially.

Seccuro: No.  “Harmed.”  “The incident”  “What I did to you.”

Magnus: You wanted him to use it though, right?

Seccuro: Yeah.  I mean, why half apologize?  Own up to what you did.  Use the word.

But Beebe didn’t.

He did describe a sorry life. He’d never married, he wrote, nor had children—and his drunkenness had cost Beebe job after job, he wrote, before he finally committed to Alcoholics Anonymous years earlier.

“I did not know how I was going to set about repairing wrongs I believed I could never fully right, most especially in the situation with you, which haunted me most of all.  But I clung to the belief that what had worked in so many before me would work in me too...”

Repairing wrongs: Beebe was talking about the twelve steps AA members take in conjunction with staying sober.  Steps 8 and 9 deal with making amends to people one has harmed in the past.  That was why he’d reached out to her — the prospect of bring able to apologize, he wrote, was something he’d thought about for years. 

“It was the one thing that kept me coming to meetings, with the slimmest hope that somehow, some way, some day, we would be able to contact each other...”

Magnus: Do you give him any credit at all for having come forward after all these years and acknowledging what he did?

Seccuro: I think that it takes strength to admit to past wrongs.  I also think this is a man who has walked free for 20 years while I’ve struggled with this.

After all these years, she was still chafing that Beebe had never been held accountable at the time.  Why, she asked Beebe, had he abruptly left school just days after the assault?  Beebe explained that he’d been summoned to the office of the dean of students.

“He told me of the gravity of the situation from your point of view as he understood it, and from the University’s point of view regarding possible judicial proceedings... It was just too much to bear... A day or so later I withdrew from UVA, unwilling to step up to the plate.”

But Liz thought Beebe still wasn’t stepping up.  He still hadn’t used the word rape—and she was particularly put off when he implied in a subsequent email that at some points that night, all was calm—even pleasant between them.

“We started to make out in my room awhile...There was no fight and it was all over in short order.  When we awoke in the morning... you walked home.”

This relatively benign version of events left Liz furious.  Two and a half months after Beebe first contacted her, she fired off an especially embittered e-mail:

“I did not get to choose being raped and having my virginity taken from me so brutally,” she wrote.  “...I am angry that your account is so very different than mine, which is burned into my memory as if it happened yesterday... I feel raped and betrayed a second time. I have the most difficulty in your careful choice of words... ‘harm,’ ‘what I did to you,’ et al. Don’t really feel like coming clean to me. I suppose it’s a difficult word to utter, or even write, for you.”

A few hours later, Beebe responded.

“Dear Liz,  I want to make clear that I’m not intentionally minimizing the fact of having raped you.  I did.”

Magnus: What was it like to get that e-mail?

Seccuro: Some relief, sure.  But I mean, I knew all along what he was talking about from the time he sent the letter.

Magnus: Were you trying to get him to use the word so that you could then go to the police and get them to come after him?

Seccuro: No.  I needed the word for me.

It turns out she needed more than that.  And soon enough, the letter seeking forgiveness would be turned over as evidence of a crime.

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