‘Put your hands on your head, turn around, and don’t look back.’
Vancouver author and actor Carmen Aguirre confronts old demons in her new memoir
Those were the chilling words Carmen Aguirre heard just before she was attacked by the ‘Paper Bag Rapist.’ For most of her life, she did look back, haunted by the ordeal. The Vancouver actor and playwright is now releasing a personal memoir that lays bare the story and conclusive face-to-face meeting with her attacker in jail years later.
It was the first hot day of spring, April 26, 1981. Two girls, giggling, talking about boys, shared a purloined cigarette on a wooded trail near their school in the University of B.C. endowment lands. Behind them a twig snapped. Then, the voice. “Put your hands on your head, turn around, and don’t look back.”
Thirteen-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her 12-year-old cousin Macarena were forced off Fairview Trail, kicked and shoved face down onto the mossy ground, a gun pressed to the back of their necks. Not allowing them to look the man in the face, the voice continued to speak, cool and “eerily unperturbed.”
“You have two choices,” he said. “Either you make love to me or I kill you.”
Carmen pointed out that it would be rape. She told him to go ahead and kill her. She would rather be murdered than raped.
The man who held the gun to their heads was John Horace Oughton, the “Paper Bag Rapist,” one of Canada’s most sadistic serial offenders. Before being captured in 1985, he would sexually assault and terrorize nearly 200 victims, most of whom were children, including two boys. Oughton stalked his prey relentlessly, choosing children in pairs, raping one, making the other one feel responsible. He blindfolded his victims, or put a paper bag over their head and used disguises, sometimes dressing as a police officer. He was the bogeyman.
For three hours, the psychological torture escalated. He told Macarena that Carmen was a hooker, that she’d planned the whole thing. That she wanted it. The voice calmly detailed exactly how he was going to chop Macarena up, piece by piece, and bury her in a plastic bag if Carmen didn’t comply. Macarena looked at her cousin and mouthed the words: “Please. Do it for me.”
Finally, Carmen said, “Okay.”
“I didn’t know yet one doesn’t get over childhood rape, one simply learns how to integrate it,” writes Aguirre in her new memoir, Mexican Hooker # 1.
She remembers, after the rape, hearing a robin singing in the trees, and the comfort it brought. She didn’t know that her life would be forever intertwined with that of her rapist; he would be with her in “every bedroom, in every relationship, in every moment” until, 33 years later through a restorative justice process, she gathered the courage to meet “this man who still held my life in his hands.”
Aguirre’s first memoir, the bestselling Something Fierce, detailed her life as a Chilean refugee, and her return to South America as a young woman to join the MIR, the resistance movement her mother belonged to.
If Something Fierce was the memoir of a revolutionary, Mexican Hooker # 1 was intended to be a memoir of an artist. As a Latina actress, rather than accept the conventional roles of maids and hookers Aguirre became a playwright, creating strong female characters and exploring issues of racism, sexism and the immigrant experience. She didn’t set out to do a memoir about the rape. But when she began writing, “There it was. The rape was at the centre of everything.”
It was during an intensive voice class as a student at Vancouver’s Studio 58 that Aguirre had her first flashback. She writes: “I ran through the coniferous forest, oblivious to the branches whipping my face, the underbrush drawing beads of blood from my shins. Shafts of light penetrated the tops of the towering rainforest trees as I tore my way through the dense greenery, carrying my sandals in my trembling hand, the soles of my bare feet pounding the pineneedle covered ground.” We’re alive, she remembers shouting, we’re alive!
After the class, Aguirre recalls feeling deliriously happy. “I skipped down Forty-Ninth Avenue whoo-hooing at the top of my lungs, arms outstretched, head thrown back ... was now cast out of my body, never to come back and bother me again ...”
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
After counting to 200 while the rapist retreated, the girls ran from the woods, sobbing, shaking, bloodied. They tried to flag down a car on University Boulevard. No one stopped.
Then came the police station, the questions about what she’d been wearing, why she took her cousin to the woods, whether she provoked the man, whether she was sure it was rape. Being escorted through the busy ER with a policeman yelling so everyone heard, “We’ve got a rape case here.” A doctor and nurse who never spoke to her as they “scooped semen” from her vagina for the rape kit. Finally hearing a doctor pronounce to her father that there had definitely been a rape. “A young girl raped at gunpoint,” Aguirre writes, was “guilty until proven innocent.”
The next day, Aguirre got up and went to school. That afternoon, she did her paper route, The Vancouver Sun; later that year, it would carry a story about the Paper Bag Rapist.
To carry on was a profound act of resistance.
Resistance has always been at the centre of her life, she explains. Her family fled Chile as political refugees after the military coup of September 1973. Raised in Vancouver, in a Chilean community of political exiles, Aguirre said: “To get up and to continue your life is a way of saying ‘You did not break me, you just made me stronger.’ I was raised by people who did not have the luxury of lying down in a fetal position. At that time the Chilean community was the poorest demographic in the city. We had come with nothing. Everybody worked. That included the children. Us kids would go at night and help the parents with the janitorial work. You keep going because you have no choice.”
Her own father found it too painful to talk about.
“Nothing could ever prepare you for the aftermath,” Aguirre said, “including dealing with adults who don’t talk to you about it because they don’t know what to say. All of that is traumatizing for a child. The more silence there is, the more shame and guilt
you feel.”
Aguirre did her best to move forward with her life. She was living in Argentina when Oughton was caught and convicted. She did not attend the trial; she had tried to leave the rape behind. But after the flashback in acting class, the school’s directors required her to get therapy. Suddenly, the rape, which had until then been “a satellite orbiting around ... fell in flames from the sky and landed in the centre of my life.”
“I had issues with relationships, especially with intimacy but I had no clue how to go about dealing with it. It was just too daunting,” Aguirre said.
She experienced post-traumatic stress disorder that included dissociation during intimacy, “chronic emotional pain,” volatility and triggers.
In her early 30s, she finally broke down completely.
“I had years of therapy and body work. I had to make a full commitment to healing.”
Aguirre doesn’t find it helpful to identify as a victim. “I’m not letting the rapist off the hook — of course he victimized me — but if I identify as a victim, how am I healing? How am I overcoming?”
In May 1995, 10 years after Oughton was caught, declared a dangerous offender and sentenced to life in prison, one of his victims made a public appeal for other survivors to come forward and attend his parole hearing.
Aguirre knew that she had to go.
Meeting the other victims in the pedophile wing of Mountain Institution in Agassiz filled her with “an immense sense of relief.”
As Aguirre heard stories of the other women, she finally understood that she was not alone, that it wasn’t personal, that Oughton was a psychopath. “If it hadn’t been me and Macarena, it would have been two other girls — or boys.”
For the first time, she felt compassion for “the child that was still cowering inside me.”
For years she had blamed herself “for being physically developed at the age of 13, for wanting to check out guys on the day it happened, for smoking a forbidden cigarette in the woods.”
The book spares no details of the rape, or its aftermath. Heartstopping and indelibly beautiful, the story Aguirre tells is exquisite and excruciating, honest and unbelievably courageous. The rape unfolds in bits and pieces throughout the story in the same way memory works — it invades and retreats, floods and recedes until its inevitable conclusion.
In the summer of 2014, Aguirre had an extraordinary fivehour meeting with the rapist in a prison chapel, led by restorative-justice experts.
“I had no hopes of anything,” said Aguirre. “He’s a psychopath, he is exactly where he should be. But it was important for me to look him in the eye.”
Under her steady gaze, Oughton became agitated, rocked back and forth, expressed no remorse. But, for the first time, Aguirre says, she saw him. Really saw him. And that, in turn, changed her.
“It felt like my heart was expanding in my body and radiating light. I felt lighter, as if I had a much bigger heart.”
A heart that was big enough to include the entire world: the child she had been, the woman she is now, and him.
John Horace Oughton, the ‘Paper Bag Rapist,’ was one of Canada’s most sadistic serial offenders. Before being captured in 1985, he would sexually assault and terrorize nearly 200 victims, most of whom were children, including two boys.