The man who attacked the Central Park Jogger was a serial rapist and murderer who struck before and after. The survivors of his attacks speak for the first time. sarahw reports
Lourdes Gonzalez with baby Amanda, 1989. Photo: New York Daily News/Newspapers.com Lourdes: June 13–14, 1989 Lourdes Gonzalez couldn’t wait to tell Antonio the news: She was pregnant with their second child. It was a surprise only because they hadn’t been trying: Amanda, their first child together, was just 3 months old. A happy baby with wide eyes and full cheeks. One doted on by her parents and by her half-brothers, Tony, nearly 7, and Carlitos, six months younger.
They moved in together the following month. She brought Carlitos. He brought Tony. They knew life as a blended family would be hard, but mostly it was good. Amanda arrived in March after a healthy pregnancy. This new baby, ojala, would be born sometime after New Year’s Day. That changed in December 2002, when the New York Supreme Court vacated the convictions of the Five, acting upon the recommendation of the District Attorney’s Office. Earlier that year, a murderer and serial rapist named Matias Reyes had admitted that he, alone, was the rapist in the park, and DNA results confirmed his confession.
This wasn’t about one young, white affluent woman raped while jogging in Central Park, but about nine young women, some affluent, some less so, assaulted, raped, or murdered all around the Upper East Side. The story crafted within hours of that April 19 night was the splintered mirror image of the real narrative: that the man who attacked the Central Park Jogger was a serial rapist and murderer who struck before and after.
Tony told the man that the super, his father, wasn’t here. The man barged in, past Tony, who said the man was “too big for me to stop him,” and asked for some change. There was none. When the man fled, the boys left the bedroom. They discovered Lourdes still alive, frantic, already on the telephone. “Get help, get help!” she screamed. To the 911 operator, Lourdes said: “Give me the police please, it’s an emergency. I’m bleeding to death.”“Stay on the line, let me connect you to the ambulance.” When Lourdes was connected, she implored them to hurry. “I’m fading.
Herbach was Catholic, and this church was Episcopal, but the denomination didn’t matter. She wanted to say a prayer for her parents and have “a few private moments with God and myself” before going back to the office. She went through the main altar and on to the adjacent and smaller chapel. There she sat in a pew, read a missal, and thought about the beauty of the church and how peaceful it was. Her mind calmed. Her breathing relaxed. Then she checked her watch: 2:25. Five minutes left.
He forced her down a flight of stairs. When they reached the vestibule, he asked for money, and she gave him the cash she’d withdrawn from the ATM. She gave him the gold bracelet around her wrist, three gold rings, and a watch because he asked for all of those, too. She tried to keep back one ring, the one with her mother’s initials. He said she could, then went ballistic and began banging her head on the floor, continuing to strangle her.
Jackie Herbach at her wedding in 1989. Photo: Courtesy of Jackie Herbach She made a brief visit to the hospital, after which a cop accompanied Herbach to the church, to the park, but she didn’t see her attacker. She went to the 19th Precinct to look at mug shots. One looked familiar, and a cop said he would check it out.
Melissa: June 11, 1989 Melissa did not care much for her neighborhood. She’d moved to a first-floor studio apartment at 115 East 116th Street a few months earlier because it was cheap and she could live by herself. She was working as a researcher, saving up money to apply for graduate school in the biological sciences. She’d grown up in New York but had forged her own life, away from parents who offered little in the way of emotional support.
Over the next two hours, he raped Melissa three times. He slashed her about the eyes with a kitchen knife. He tried to drown her in the bathroom sink. He made her call her boyfriend, who mercifully was not home or did not pick up, because she had no idea what she would have said with her attacker right there with her. He asked if she wanted to do cocaine with him. He took her mother’s high-school class ring, and her own ring, but any jewelry that she told him wasn’t real he didn’t keep.
Melissa blocked out how she left the hospital and ended up at her boyfriend’s house. He listened to her at first, seemed to empathize. But that night, he made her sleep in the living room instead of sharing his bed. “I realized this guy is no good. It was unforgivable.” She moved to a friend’s apartment. She took several weeks of leave from her job, spending her days alone, fearful of leaving.
Amanda, born in Paris but a New Yorker since she was a small child, spent her life surrounded by the arts. Her father was a musician. Her mother was an artist. She began drawing at 3, more seriously at 7. She studied dance at the Martha Graham school. She took photography classes at Bryn Mawr and later at ICP. She hung out in the downtown art scene in high school and that summer worked for an art dealer, translating Surrealist poems from French to English.
He darted at her. She felt the pinprick of a knife at her neck. He forced her into the apartment. He raped her several times and issued his ultimatum: “I have to kill you, or I have to blind you.” Amanda made a conscious decision not to fight back. As she explained, “I sensed this dynamic that if you ever pushed at him, talked back in an aggressive or combative way, rather than being completely yielding and soft, something would come up in him that was scary or monstrous.
Unnamed: July 27, 1989 She called 911 three minutes after the assault. The man had followed her into the lobby of her apartment building on 95th and Lexington. He wore a navy-blue shirt with white trim, a pair of blue shorts, and a gold chain around his neck. He told her that he would shoot her , demanded she hand over her purse, and punched her in the head. “I guess it’s worth reporting because a couple people recognized the guy,” the woman, 28, told the 911 dispatcher.
What happened next followed the same terrifying script, including the threat of “Your eyes or your life.” Meg, though, didn’t know she was part of a pattern. She knew about the Central Park Jogger case, but everything else that happened in the neighborhood? “I had no idea.” Later that evening, after the cops had arrested the man, and after the hospital examination, the cops asked Meg where she wanted to go. “The liquor store,” she said.
Two things stand out about Reyes’s confessions: His denials gave way to the truth with minimal prodding from detectives, but his answers depended entirely on what questions they asked him. And if they didn’t ask about a case, like, say, the Central Park Jogger, Reyes wasn’t about to volunteer information. Why confess to a crime no one knew you committed?
Reyes had already pleaded guilty to his crimes, including murder and multiple rapes, the month before. It ended more than two years of delays stemming from the then-novel scientific technique of forensic DNA analysis, which connected him to the crime scenes. At the sentencing, Reyes received a life sentence, the earliest possible parole in 33 and a third years, or 2022. But he did not go quietly.
When Casolaro called her at work, Melissa learned Reyes had confessed to raping the Central Park Jogger. “I was flabbergasted. And I hate to say it, but I felt vindicated, that there were other women before me.” Meg was similarly floored at the news, which she learned from a friend. “It was a big shock, because, like everyone else, I thought it was these boys. They were convicted. I thought that was that.
Jackie Herbach hadn’t put it all together until that fall, when she bought a copy of New York from a newsstand. Flipping through the pages of the October 21 issue in the elevator, she stopped when she saw the photo accompanying Chris Smith’s article “Central Park Revisited.” There was a reprint of the Daily News shot of Matias Reyes’s arrest 13 years before. “Oh my God, oh my God, that’s him, I thought. That’s the man who attacked me.
“It used to make me feel stupid on some level, that a 17-year-old could do this to a woman of 27 … I asked the cops, ‘What could I have done differently?’ They said, ‘You did everything right.’” She did not believe them at the time. Now she does, but she still wonders what would have happened if she had trusted her instincts when she first saw Reyes’s picture in newspapers and on television in August 1989.
Amanda Serrano today. Photo: Courtesy of Amanda Serrano It was the PBS documentary about the Central Park Five, directed by Sarah Burns, that finally made her understand the injustice with awful clarity. When she got to the part about her mom, the gallery of newspaper clips and a picture of her , it bothered Amanda for the same reason that she’s not happy about the upcoming Netflix series.
He continued to profess his innocence but took a plea deal for manslaughter the day after the article was published. Vega was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison, less time served. He was paroled in June 2018. “I think he was affected the most, to be honest,” reflected Amanda. She hadn’t spoken to Carlos for over a year. “Him, right there, a rock. I think he’s holding on to a lot of anger, but he won’t say it.
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