by JEN BIUNDO
By 9 a.m. on June 22, the courtroom was packed with defendants waiting their turn before the judge. Attorneys milled about, swapping legal documents and work chatter.
Hays County prosecutor Chris Johnson approached Nicole Salomon, a slender, dark-haired young woman waiting in the front row surrounded by family. Looking her in the eye, he quietly told Salomon her options. She could privately give her victim’s impact statement to the judge, or she could deliver her testimony for the entire courtroom to hear.
“That’s on him, it’s not on you,” Johnson told her. “Let him be embarrassed by it.”
Salomon took a breath and walked toward the witness stand.
As the courtroom grew quiet, she turned toward a man in the audience and began to speak, her voice clear and strong: “You, Edward James Killea II, changed my life, and my children’s life, when you raped me.”
‘I’m someone’s daughter’
Two and a half years after the assaults she endured, Salomon is breaking the silence and telling her story under her real name.
“I want something good to come out of this,” said Salomon, who lives in Kyle with her two children. “If we speak out as victims, as women, against sexual violence and domestic violence, if we stop trying to hide it, maybe people will listen to us. Maybe rapists will be put behind bars. If I could save one woman from going through what it feels like, or support one woman emotionally, I’ll feel like what happened was for a purpose. I don’t want to stay quiet anymore.”
Now 34, Salomon’s own story stretches back nearly two decades. Before he became her husband, her abuser, or her convicted rapist, Edward Killea was Salomon’s first boyfriend.
They started dating when she was just 16, and married three years later in 1995. Killea was handsome, witty and charming, but deeply narcissistic, Salomon’s sisters recalled.
The first time he called her a bitch, Salomon packed up an overnight bag and left. When he apologized and promised to never do it again, she believed him. And so the cycle began.
Physical abuse often begins during pregnancy, and Salomon was no exception. While carrying their first child, he kicked her in the stomach, she said.
“I just cried,” she said. “I couldn’t believe what was going on, but I didn’t know how to leave when I was pregnant.”
He apologized, and swore it would never happen again.
In the escalating trajectory common to abusive relationships, the violence and verbal assaults grew progressively worse over the years, punctuated by “honeymoon periods” where things seemed to be on the mend. He never punched her with a closed fist, but there was pushing and restraining, she said. And often worse, there was the disrespect, the jealousy and the control.
Growing up in a devoutly religious family, Salomon, an oncology nurse, was raised to believe that a wife should fight to save her marriage.
“It wasn’t that I thought it was right,” Salomon said. “I knew something was wrong, but it just became a common thing.”
After learning he was cheating on her, they separated in 2007, she said. Though she took him back, she started finding the courage to take a stand.
In one fight, she recalls asking him, “What are you going to do when some man disrespects your daughter?” And in a moment of clarity, she realized: I’m someone’s daughter.
“As those words came out of my mouth, I thought, I’m showing my daughter that it’s okay that some man treats her like this,” Salomon said. “When I realized I was teaching my daughter that, I woke up. On January 2, I walked into the attorney’s office and I said, ‘I’m ready.’”
She filed for divorce.
Killea watched impassively, slightly hunched over and showing no reaction to her words, as his wife described the first time he violently raped her.
“I tried so hard to get away from you, I kept screaming for you to stop,” Salomon said. “I couldn’t believe this was really happening to me. I couldn’t believe that 16 years of loving you and trusting you could lead me to this point.
“You told me that praying to my God would not help me. You made me think it was my fault you were raping me.”
‘So unreal’
At first, the divorce seemed mutual, Salomon said, and her husband moved out without putting up a fight.
“The more that he realized I was really going through with it, the control got worse,” Salomon said.
Killea began a campaign to derail the divorce, sending flowers and promising to go to marriage counseling. Meanwhile, Salomon said, he was doing everything he could to control and isolate her, even calling her cell phone provider, reporting the phone as stolen, and getting the GPS location on the phone so he could stalk her.
The first attack took place a month later, on Feb. 2, 2008.
The rape stretched on for hours. As he assaulted her, he threatened to kill her and held his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t breathe, she recalled. When he asked her if she would stop the divorce, saying yes seemed like the only way to survive.
When he went into the other room, Salomon called Killea’s aunt, who sent his cousin and brother to come get him.
After the assault, Killea went to the 217 exit of IH-35 in Kyle and put a gun to his head, according to Kyle police records. He was arrested there and charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault, a first degree felony, taken to jail, then a mental hospital, and freed on a $15,000 bail.
He begged forgiveness, and swore it would never happen again.
“It was so unreal,” Salomon said. “I just wanted it to go away. I really thought this was my fault and I didn’t want anyone else to know about it.”
Salomon went to the hospital for a rape exam and spoke to a counselor, but couldn’t process what had happened. Over the next two months, overwhelmed, in denial and worried that her children’s father would commit suicide if sentenced to jail, Salomon began trying to forgive Killea.
She tried to push forward with her life and with the divorce, but began melting down and having panic attacks. Nothing seemed clear anymore.
“It made me mad when one of the DA’s said, ‘I think you needed that second attack to wake you up,’” Salomon said. “I needed to wake up and see I was going to be one of those women you see on TV, murdered.”
As Salomon spoke in front of a rapt courtroom audience, Killea’s sister began angrily heckling her from the second row. The bailiff shouted for order in the court, but Salomon ignored the uproar, steadily telling her story of the two months after the first rape.
“You manipulated your way back into our lives and you made me believe you were the man I fell in love with 15 years prior,” Salomon said. “ I didn’t realize that forgiving you was the biggest mistake I could make.”
“When I realized you were going to rape me again, I knew I had to fight for my life.”
‘My gut sank’
On April 6, Killea showed up and offered to watch the kids and make some repairs while Salomon went grocery shopping. When she returned, he wanted to show her the fan that he had fixed in the master bedroom, she recalled.
“As soon as I walked into the bedroom, my gut sank,” Salomon said. “I tried to run out the door and he grabbed me.”
Investigators would later discover that Killea had hidden rolls of duct tape around the bedroom, along with rope and razor blades. As he choked her and tried to duct tape her hands and mouth, their three-year-old son watching through the door, Salomon fought for her life.
In the end, it was the oven timer that saved her. The buzzer rang, and she began frantically trying to talk her way out of the attack.
“I said I needed to go feed the kids,” Salomon recalled. “I said the oven would catch fire and the fire department would show up. I said I wouldn’t press charges. I was trying to tell him whatever he wanted to hear.”
Playing normal, she fed the children dinner then took them to clean up the back porch. When Killea stepped outside she made her move, trying to slam the back door. Knowing he would quickly overpower her, she ran for the front yard with her son and screamed for her daughter through the open door.
Killea grabbed her by the hair as she clung to the door frame with her arms and legs, screaming for help. Her neighbors came running.
“I was pleading, screaming,” Salomon recalled. “I begged for them to help me.”
As Killea dragged her inside, her neighbors kicked in the front door. She grabbed her children and took off through the back door. Another neighbor helped her kick down the back fence to escape.
The cops showed up, and Killea was arrested again. This time, Salomon wouldn’t try to forgive him.
‘I’m not ashamed’
After an emotional day in court, Salomon went to her rape self-defense class at Texas State University – it was a good way to work out some aggression, she said with a laugh.
“Yesterday, I can’t tell you how good I felt,” Salomon said. “I told him what I had to say. I wanted him to know I wasn’t scared of him, and I’m not ashamed.”
In part because Salomon chose not to press charges from the first rape, Killea got off with a plea bargain, confessing to attempted sexual assault and attempted aggravated kidnapping with an admittance of family violence. He received six months in jail, starting July 6, and ten years registered as a sex offender. It doesn’t feel like justice to her, but it’s a start.
There are still loose ends: Killea refused to sign the divorce papers, and until the contested divorce is finalized, Salomon is still his wife.
“Every time someone calls him my husband, it’s worse than a scratch down a chalkboard,” Salomon said. “I’m married to a rapist. I’m married to my rapist.”
She’s tried to heal by pushing forward with her life and focusing on caring for her kids. Her counselor, Katharine Collier, of the Hays Caldwell Women’s Center, has been a lifeline to her over the past two years.
Though the sentencing has given her some closure, she still struggles with nightmares, fear and guilt.
“It’s been living hell,” Salomon said. “Everything in my life has been touched by this. The shame and the guilt – just a horrible amount of shame – is the hardest thing. I was so scared to tell my story and so scared of what other people would think.”
It’s been especially hard for her to be a victim of marital rape, a poorly-understood crime which wasn’t even illegal in every U.S. state until 1993, despite being reported in as many as 10 – 15 percent of marriages.
Now, Salomon can only hope that sharing her story will help other women.
She wants them to know that rape and domestic violence can happen to anyone. She wants them to listen to the gut instincts that tell them they’re in danger. She wants them to know they should never tolerate disrespect or threats from their partner.
She wants them to know that there are resources out there to help women escape from abuse and heal from rape. And most importantly, she wants them to know that they can break the silence.
“Maybe if someone could shine a spotlight on it, it wouldn’t be so shameful to talk about,” she said.
If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, call the Hays Caldwell Women’s Center Hotline at 396-HELP or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1?800?799?SAFE.
