SOUTHERN EXPOSURE: OLD OR YOUNG, WE ARE ALL VICTIMS OF CRIME

Every time I see a report about another break-in I can practically feel a shudder run through the community. There is nothing worse than feeling like you can't be safe in the only secure place in the world -- home.

In August 1989 I went through a situation that gave me great insight into what the elderly of this community are feeling -- what it's like to be a victim.

In that month of that year I was a freshman at the University of Florida and thoroughly enjoying the first year of the greatest time in my life. As the semester was starting the usual anxieties about classes, books, job and generally being in school dominated my thoughts.

Around that was the fact that fall at UF is the greatest time to be there. Football season is about to start, people are coming back to Gainesville from summer vacation, meeting at the local hangouts and getting reacquainted. It's a wonderful place and time to be.

One weekend changed all that.

It started as an urgent and somewhat incomplete 5 p.m. newscast Thursday about two teen-age girls, their first time away from home and moving in together to start their college careers, who were found murdered in their apartment.

Some information was leaked out indicating they were brutally murdered, but no one was saying how the killer got in and killed them.

Murders aren't uncommon in Florida, we heard about them every day. But two students, people similar to me, had been killed. It changed everything. Suddenly their lives and deaths became personal and unbelievably sad.

The next day a young woman was found murdered in her country home, a short distance from the first killings. She wasn't a student, but she was our age.

Police were tight-lipped about the circumstances, but Gainesville is still a relatively small town and word got around that the situation inside the home was the same. And still no one would say how the killer got in.

Not knowing that was more unnerving than what facts were released. When information is withheld the imagination takes over. People were thinking this killer was some kind of master burglar who could get in anywhere. None of us were safe.

The student population became subdued. The usual electricity of the fall semester was replaced by reservation and fear. Some people began leaving, others armed themselves.

The next night two more students were killed, once again brutally. One was a man.

That was it. Students began leaving in droves. Half the student population -- nearly 30,000 people -- packed their cars and went home. The rest of us took to traveling in groups. We'd meet at someone's house, usually girls who were living by themselves, and sleep over. One night there were 15 of us in one small apartment trying to sleep.

You could tell by looking at the police how helpless and frustrated they were. Many cops take the protection part of their jobs to heart. It tears them up when someone is killing the ones they are trying to safeguard. A lot of the cops in Gainesville began neighborhood surveillances on their nights off.

No one slept a lot back then.

Just as quickly as the killings started they stopped. No one else was murdered. But the city sat in stifling anticipation waiting for them to start again. A while later a man was arrested. A few years after, as he was preparing to go to trial, he confessed.

I was out of school by then, working my first job as a journalist and about 60 miles from Gainesville. I didn't know it until the day he confessed, but I'd been holding my breath since that first day in August when the first victim was found.

When he confessed, I let out a shaky breath and started living again.

~David Angier is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.