By CRIS BARRISH
The News Journal
09/19/2004
The images of being abducted, held hostage, raped and nearly stabbed to death keep flashing into prison counselor Cassandra Arnold's mind.
She sees and feels serial rapist Scott Miller pressing a metal shank around her throat. She smells his breath on her body. She hears him whisper, curse and scream.
Sleep comes rarely, and when it does, she is often jolted awake, her arms and hands trembling. In one dream last week, she was bleeding and wondering why, then looked at her mother, and saw blood in her mom's hair. "I was thinking it happened to her,'' Arnold said. "That was a nightmare from hell.''
Arnold's actual nightmare occurred during seven hours of captivity July 12, which ended when a rescuer hiding in her office ceiling at the state prison near Smyrna shot Miller to death. Now, more than two months later, the attractive, easygoing 27-year-old everybody calls "Cassie'' has begun the painstaking process of mental and emotional recovery. She is being treated by a therapist and a psychiatrist, and taking medication to get her through the days and nights.
Flanked by her mother, boyfriend and two attorneys at the lawyers' Wilmington office, Arnold broke her public silence Friday, spending four hours recounting July 12 and the aftermath, frequently sobbing.
She has not returned to work, and her attorneys said they plan to sue the state by month's end.
Arnold had harsh words for the prison system, saying staffing shortages and "lazy and incompetent'' workers have led to security breaches that endanger both employees and inmates at the Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna.
She criticized site Warden Thomas L. Carroll, her partner on a panel to improve prison culture, for not calling her on the phone during the crisis or agreeing to Miller's demand for a face-to-face meeting several hours into the crisis.
Soon after Carroll sent Miller a note saying he would meet the inmate after Arnold was freed, Miller raped her.
"He used to tell me I was his pride and joy,'' Arnold said of the warden. "He abandoned me.'' Carroll would not comment.
Arnold said Gov. Ruth Ann Minner's remark that "In prisons, you almost expect this to happen'' was insulting.
"If she knew it was going to be like that, she promotes understaffing and working in an unsafe environment and she does not value her employees," Arnold said. "I felt devalued. I felt like nothing.''
Minner spokesman Gregory Patterson has said the governor meant prisons are dangerous.
Arnold said she decided to speak out publicly to put a face on the critical situation facing employees and prisoners today at the prison.
"I want people to know there are lot more of me there,'' Arnold said, "and this horror could happen to them.''
Driven to help
Arnold said she became inspired to work with prisoners as a teenager, after seeing the movie "The Silence of the Lambs.'' The thriller featured Jodie Foster as an FBI agent probing the mind of fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter during interviews in his cellblock.
At the University of Delaware, Arnold said, courses she took in abnormal psychology reinforced her goal to work with inmates. She never considered being a police officer because she doesn't like guns.
"I didn't want to be the one that caught them,'' she said. "I wanted to keep them from coming back.''
After earning bachelor's degrees in psychology and art, she took a counseling job with a nonprofit agency. She was hired at the prison in 2001, and last year was promoted to senior counselor. Her salary is about $29,000 a year.
In recent months, Arnold said, lax security in the medium-high security unit where she worked alarmed her.
Sliding electronic doors were regularly propped open, the security door to her office area was often open, and a door to a guard booth once was open with a key dangling from a shoelace in the lock, she said. Just two weeks before her abduction, she sent an e-mail to a superior about an open security door, but never received a response, she said.
Corrections spokeswoman Beth Welch said commissioner Stanley W. Taylor would not comment. Previously, Taylor has said that the state has banned inmates from the office area where the counselor was held hostage and other security measures have been changed.
Welch said the department is continuing to conduct an internal review.
Arnold said she routinely observed guards who were exhausted by working two consecutive eight-hour shifts, the second shift on forced overtime because of staff shortages. About 15 percent of Delaware's 1,830 prison guard jobs are vacant, officials said.
Arnold discussed her misgivings with Carroll and other supervisors, but the situation did not improve, she said.
The counseling staff of about 15 added to Arnold's disillusionment. She said some were hard-working professionals, but others "were just going through the motions,'' forcing her to take on a larger caseload and their work.
So she enrolled part time this year at Delaware State University to pursue her other dream of teaching art.
"I was getting burned out,'' she said. "I was not going to die in the prison.''
Security doors open
Arnold planned to work a half-day on Monday, July 12. She began with her weekly Less Stress group session, an eight-part program she developed.
Miller was one of 12 inmates in the seventh week of the program. Miller, who was serving a 699-year sentence, had terrorized Wilmington in 1997 by sexually assaulting eight women and kidnapping another.
Arnold said Miller often gave constructive advice to fellow inmates. "He always was respectful of me,'' she said. "But he stood out because he always had a glare in his eyes.''
On July 12 and the previous week, Miller had been agitated because he claimed a guard had put a sandwich in his cell, leading him to lose his job in the prison kitchen.
The session ended about 10:15 a.m. Miller left before she did, Arnold said, and she walked alone to her office. The two electronic security doors that led to her office area were "completely open,'' she said. "That occurred frequently,'' she said. "I was used to it and frustrated by it.''
Arnold said she could not believe Taylor, the prisons commissioner, had told reporters Miller accompanied her to the office for a private meeting.
"That's completely untrue,'' Arnold said. "In no way, shape or form did I ask Miller to come back to the office with me.''
Taylor has said previously that his account was based on an employee's report.
'The monster'
About 10:30, Arnold saw a "yellow streak'' in a bathroom and the door shut. She thought it was an inmate because they wear yellow jumpsuits.
Miller poked his head out, pointed to something, and she leaned toward him.
"He put his arm around my neck, and with his other hand put the shank to the right side of my neck and said, 'If you scream, I'll kill you right now.' '' Arnold said.
She yelled for help anyway, and he threw her against the bathroom wall. Co-workers rushed to the door, but Miller slammed it shut.
"He was shouting, his eyes were popping out,'' she said. "He turned into the monster he was in there for.''
Miller, who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 260 pounds, pushed the homemade metal knife against her neck and told her to cooperate or die.
After about eight minutes, she said, he dragged the 5-foot-7-inch woman down the hall, his arm around her neck, her feet off the floor, and called for Capt. Clyde Sagers, who was in her office.
Sagers came out, she said, holding his hand in his pocket as if he were going to spray Miller with pepper spray. Miller rushed in the office with Arnold and slammed the door. He pushed metal filing cabinets against the door and covered the windows.
Miller kept Arnold captive in the 10-by-10-foot room for seven hours.
Hostage negotiators stood outside and spoke with Miller, who demanded to be sent to a prison in Virginia so he could be near one of his children. He told Arnold again, several times, that he would kill her.
Arnold said she eventually calmed him down, and they discussed his hopes for a transfer. She also showed him paperwork showing the transfer was being reviewed, and he said: "I guess I acted too soon.''
The phone rang twice, but it was employees unaware of the unfolding crisis. She answered both times and hung up.
A corrections major called and said: "You're going to be all right, baby.''
"I'm really scared, and he has a shank,'' she replied.
Miller slammed the phone.
At 2 p.m., she tried to call her mother - "to tell her I was going to die'' - but the line was dead.
Miller then called for a meeting with Carroll. About 3 p.m., negotiators slipped a note under the door, saying Miller would get the opportunity to speak with Carroll after he freed Arnold.
Miller exploded. "They are going to ransack me before I ever get to see the warden,'' he shouted. He renewed his call for Carroll. Arnold yelled for the warden to come speak with her.
Miller tied her arms behind her back with a shoelace. He began stabbing boxes of paper with the shank. He paced and grumbled about the warden.
Frightening images
About 4 p.m., he put the shank at her throat and told her to be silent. He slowly removed her clothes, and began smelling and touching her.
"I don't have anything to lose,'' he said, staring at her naked body. She scanned the room for a weapon, but he pushed her face down on the floor and raped her.
Afterward he folded a napkin and wiped her off, then dressed and ordered her to stand.
She somehow freed her hands, but kept them behind her back and retreated to a corner.
Miller made a sudden turn, jumped on a cabinet, and began stabbing at the ceiling. Someone whispered, "He's got us.''
Miller leaped toward her. She heard one shot, then another. He forced her into a fetal position.
"I saw blood everywhere, and I thought I was shot,'' she said.
Still alive, the inmate held the shank inches from her face. "I grabbed it and twisted it out of his hand and threw it across the room,'' she said.
Two men from the ceiling jumped into the room, pulled the dead inmate off Arnold and rushed her to paramedics.
While being treated, she worried that she had become pregnant or contracted AIDS. She was given the morning-after birth-control pill, and medication to boost her immune system. Days later, she was relieved that both tests were negative.
Today, her journey of healing is a daily struggle filled with jarring reminders of her terror.
A yoga instructor, she has trouble doing basic exercises. "I'll be doing stretches behind my back and all of a sudden [it feels like] my hands are tied behind my back,'' she said.
Last week she saw a co-worker while grocery shopping, triggering a flashback that left her in a panic.
And every minute, it seems, the horrifying pictures blaze into her head. "It can come out of nowhere,'' Arnold said. "I can blink my eyes and see Scott Miller.''
Contact Cris Barrish at 324-2785 or cbarrish@delawareonline.com.
