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The slight blonde woman who greets me warmly at the door of her suburban Cincinnati home this breezy Thursday morning quickly offers me a cup of coffee and a seat at her kitchen table. Her husband, Brad, is taking care of their children, she assures me, so it's a kid-free zone. As we make small talk, Debbie, author of Forgiving the Dead Man Walking (Zondervan), casually mentions how she stashes all her Creative Memories paraphernalia in an upstairs "messy" bedroom. The poignancy of that image—Debbie devotedly documenting happy times in albums for Conner, 4, and Courtney, 1—floors me. After all, Debbie, 35, has spent the last 19 years of her life overcoming some of the most horrific memories imaginable.
At age 16, Debbie (then Cuevas) of Madisonville, Louisiana, and her boyfriend, Mark Brewster, were sitting in a parked car one hot summer night when they were abducted at gunpoint by career criminals Robert Willie and Joe Vaccaro. Several hours into the kidnapping, a gun-whipped Mark was led into deserted woods near the Alabama state line, tortured, shot, slashed, and left for dead. But the ride of terror continued for Debbie, who never knew from moment to moment if she would live or die. For a total of 30 hours, Debbie was repeatedly raped by her captors. Throughout that time, she also picked up some chilling clues that led her to believe they had brutally murdered a young woman several days before—Faith Hathaway.
I tell women who've been raped, "You've done the hard part. You've come through it and survived."It's the Hathaway murder that provided the backdrop for the 1995 award-winning movie, Dead Man Walking, with actor Sean Penn playing the Robert Willie character and Susan Sarandon as Willie's Death-Row spiritual advisor, Sister Helen Prejean. But unlike the movie victims and the real-life Faith Hathaway, Debbie, miraculously, was released. Her survival enabled authorities to save Mark's life—and her testimony enabled the State of Louisiana to put an end to Robert Willie's.
Unlike Mark, whose wounds were readily visible, Debbie's wounds were less apparent. The strength she'd developed as the child of divorced parents and an alcoholic mother had aided in her survival, but now it masked her fear, depression, and smoldering anger against Robert Willie, her mother, and even the God she'd committed her life to as a teen. "I felt abandoned by God," Debbie admits. "It took me years to realize I'd abandoned him."
That realization—and her journey toward forgiveness—hasn't been without its detours. Debbie recounts the painful process in her book, and has been able to share her story on programs as varied as Leeza, Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," and in the pages of Ladies' Home Journal and Marie Claire. A former public school special education teacher who's on hiatus and a MOPS (Mother of Preschoolers) coordinator for her local church, Debbie articulately tackles questions about God's grace, goodness, and power over evil in this cover interview.
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