New Year's Eve fireworks: the Ann Leybourne incident

American Handgunner, July-August, 2004 by Massad Ayoob

Situation: The serial rapist has made his first and last mistake: he has chosen an armed victim tonight.

Lesson: Surprise favors the victim who knows how to fight back, and if he's close enough to take your gun, you're close enough to take his.

New Year's Eve, 1973, an hour and a half after midnight. Much of Chicago is still in revelry as Ann Leybourne, 25, returns from a party at a friend's place in nearby Northbrook. As she parks her car in front of her home at 2241 North Bissell Street. She doesn't realize she's in the focused stare of a deadly stalker.

The city's thousands of cops are looking for him, but not by name. They know him only by the sobriquet they've given the offender they seek: "The Friday Night Rapist."

Bobby Ellis, 36, has a long and violent criminal history. His rap sheet includes armed robbery and home invasion, but he glories in rape. He's not a big man, five feet seven and about a hundred fifty pounds, but he makes up for it with victim selection ... and with terrifying aggression he augments with a weapon. As the young woman gets out of the car, he determines that she is small enough to easily overpower. When this is over, people will describe her as "tiny" and "petite." The head of the school where she studies full time will call her "a very shy, demure little girl." That's the sort of victim who appeals to Bobby.

She steps out of her red Maverick, and as she's locking its door she spots the sinister figure ten feet away. He whips an ugly little blue steel revolver out of his brown velvet pants, levels it at her before she can respond, and closes the gap quickly. He thrusts the stubby gun barrel viciously into her neck. "Don't scream or I'll kill you," he snarls.

He orders her into her car, demanding she kneel on the floor in front, facing the passenger seat. Seizing her keys, he takes the wheel. He drives with his left hand. His right hand holds the gun on her unwaveringly, the blunt tips of round lead bullets in its chambers clearly visible from the business end.

She knows this is as bad as it can be. She feels the cold chill of impending doom. He keeps looking at her. Kneeling, her right side is visible to him, so her dominant right-hand is useless to her under the circumstances. Ann lets her left hand slip into her purse, which has wound up on her left, concealed from her kidnapper between her hunched, kneeling body and the right front door.

Silently, invisibly, Ann Leybourne's left hand closes around the checkered wooden stocks of her Colt Detective Special revolver.

Desperate Dialogue

Ann Leybourne is not a violent woman. She tries to talk with her captor, to reason with him. "I'll kill you if you don't shut up," he screams at her. Moments later, she tries again. The gunman rages, "Motherf***er, I will kill you!"

Reason isn't working. She adds a panicky tone to her voice, hoping it will help him feel more in control, make him feel less need to be violent. She tells him she lives alone with her elderly mother who will worry about her. His sneer tells her that this is cutting no ice.

"I'm really, really afraid of guns," she whimpers in a tiny voice of exaggerated weakness. "I'll do anything you want if you just stop pointing that gun at me."

It works. He puts his revolver between his legs. His hand goes back to her, fondling her buttocks obscenely, sometimes holding her right wrist like an iron claw, sometimes grabbing her hair and pushing her face brutally into the car seat. She realizes that him setting down the gun is the closest to de-escalation she is going to achieve with dialogue. He can still grab his gun and murder her in an instant, but at least she has bought that instant.

She has only owned her own gun for about three weeks, but she has already learned pulling its trigger double action isn't easy with her small hands, particularly when she has to fire with her weaker hand. Her compact economy car is not the quietest in the world. As Ellis drives over bumps, she notices, the noise in the car is loud. At the next bump, she uses that noise to mask the sound of her thumb cocking the hammer of her revolver, which is still inside her purse.

The Friday Night Rapist pulls the stolen car into a deserted parking lot in the infamous Cabrini Green housing project, perhaps the highest crime area of the notoriously high crime city.

The car is coming to a stop. She has run out of time. Young Ann Leybourne knows that the moment of truth has come.

She has thought about this. She has chosen to survive.

As the Maverick stops, Ann Leybourne pulls the blue steel Colt from her handbag left-handed, aims it at her kidnapper's torso with studied deliberation, and pulls the trigger.

Death Battle

The blast of the snub-nosed .38 Special rocks the interior of the small car. A 158 grain lead bullet leaps the short distance from the two-inch barrel to the right side of Bobby Ellis' abdomen, tearing through him right to left and slightly upward, lodging in the ribcage after piercing his abdominal aorta.

It is a mortal wound, but not immediately so. Ellis has no drugs or alcohol in his system, but he is fueled with the adrenaline excitement of the capture of the prey and the sexual assault that is to come, and his reflexes are razor sharp. His strong right hand lashes out, and suddenly Leybourne's gun is gone from her hand.