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SHATTERED differs from most true crime books in that it was written by the victim/survivor herself, Puglisi Sharp, with the help of Marjorie Preston, another survivor who is also a professional journalist. Sharp was raped, kidnapped, and held captive for sexual purposes for five days in the mid-1990s. She was chosen at random, taken from her own home in suburban Delaware, right in the middle of a spring afternoon when she had been planting rose bushes. The date was April 20th --- and it's a date that no one who reads this book will soon forget because of how indelibly it is branded on the mind of the author, who is also victim and survivor. This is intensely her story.
Sharp's story begins with her recounting, in her own words taken from both her police testimony and tapes she made for therapy, exactly what happened from the moment the man she calls repeatedly (and only) "the asshole" struck her down in her kitchen, to the time five days later when she was at last able to partially free herself so that she could dial 911. Everything is told in first person in a narrative style, as if she were speaking directly to the reader. She interrupts the telling of her chilling truth every few pages, in a cliff-hangerish way, to give us the history of her life with her husband, Nino Puglisi --- how they met, courted, fell in love and married. Having all of these reminiscences scattered among the hard facts like so many rose petals on a shard of ice is an irritating literary device that I wish her co-author had chosen not to employ.
Sharp does not know that her husband, Nino Puglisi, is dead until the morning after her capture, when she hears it on the radio from the place where she lies bound, gagged and hogtied, on the asshole's bathroom floor. He's sorry, her captor said, but the husband surprised him and so he was shot. She had kept her hopes up the previous night by believing her husband would have called the police and reported her missing. Now she knows that will not happen. She struggles to comprehend that her husband is dead.
As the days go on and she is still held captive, tied hand and foot, she hears on radio and television that she herself has become a suspect in her husband's murder. Debra and Nino's two children, fraternal twins named Michael and Melissa, are both off at school in their first year of college. It is when she hears that the children and her parents have planned the memorial service and graveside funeral rites for Nino that Debra finally becomes angry enough to risk death in the process of escape; up until then, she had been focused on doing whatever she must to simply stay alive.
Her escape seems almost miraculous, yet is due entirely to her own efforts, in combination with the fact that "the asshole," whose real name is Donald Flagg (she doesn't learn his name until after his arrest), wants to keep her alive. He wants to use her for sex and to sleep with her, and treats her more like a pet than a human being. Except, of course, when he's raping her. Within a couple of days she has figured out that he is addicted to crack cocaine and was using it at the time he took her and shot and killed her husband. Flagg has a job (working the night shift at a Chrysler plant) that he continues to go to while leaving her tied up at home.
The middle section of the book covers the year after Donald Flagg is captured, confesses, and is charged with eighteen felony counts for rape and murder --- all eighteen from this one case --- with special circumstances that could lead to the death penalty. He asks for and receives a public defender. It takes a year for the case to come to trial, and during this time Sharp and her son and daughter try to put their lives back together. She is by profession a nurse, an RN specializing in hospice work. It is this special training she has had in how to detach emotionally from her dying patients that Sharp, probably rightly, credits for much of her ability to survive those days she was held captive. However, she is unable to return to work and is diagnosed with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. This is the section of the book, in which she tells with such honesty and openness about her fight to think of herself as a survivor and not a victim, that I found most affecting.
The final third of the book deals with Donald Flagg's trial and the testimony for both sides, which we hear reported in Sharp's words in great detail. She wants Flagg to receive the death penalty and will be satisfied with nothing else; her daughter feels the same, as does her father and brother (her brother is a policeman). Her son, however, takes the position that the death penalty is itself a cruel and unusual punishment. The son attends only half of the opening day of the trial, which lasts for three weeks. Flagg's defense lawyers, a two-man team, plead him not guilty by reason of mental defect. He has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The concluding portion of SHATTERED is the most disturbing to read, because it is painfully clear that Debra Sharp is not satisfied with the jury's verdict. I will not reveal that verdict here. All who read the book will have to find their own way through the complex moral and judicial issues that arise at its conclusion. To say more in a review would be to spoil the book.
In an Afterword, Sharp tells of her current work with Victims' Rights groups. Though she does not directly say so, the implication is obvious: Hers is only one story -- there are so many more that are equally dramatic that have not been told.
--- Reviewed by Ava Dianne Day
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