When your opponent shows mercy, you yield.
This guy was acting insane. He was wriggling and moaning on the floor. There wasn’t any fight in him.
“What the hell is this guy’s deal?” she thought ”Was he yielding? What exactly does yielding mean?”
It was a split second decision. He was the one that broke into her house. He whimpered as she pushed the sword just a little bit harder to his skin.
***
Karen Dolley was prepared. At 43, she had trained herself to chase her fears.
When she woke on the night of Oct. 8 to the sound of a man’s voice, her preparation would be tested.
Karen had been watching season one of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in her living room on the east side of Indianapolis. Around 11:30 p.m. she slipped under the sheets wearing her softest striped pajamas that her mom bought for her. Moments later, she instinctively rose out of sleep when she heard someone speaking.
She tore out of bed, flicked on the light and saw the shadow of a man standing in her dining room.
Karen said she knew she had to act first. Bravery didn’t really have anything to do with it. She was trained to think aggressively years ago as a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a 17th-century reenactment group centered around medieval combat.
She lunged at his head.
She hit him over and over in his face, about 10 times. As she recoiled her fists she heard him muffle, “Call the police. Call 911!”
Backing up from her opponent, it crossed her mind that someone might be after him.
“Are we both in danger?” she thought.
***
She corralled him into her guest bedroom and reached into the bedside table for her gun.
Wrong drawer.
The whole time the man, who she said looked a little like Jesse Pinkman from “Breaking Bad,” wailed to call the police.
“That’s in the cards, bro!” she said, striding to the front room to grab the phone. When she came back into the guest bedroom, the man had curled up against the corner behind the bed.
“Shh, shut the light off,” he said.
Scanning the room, Karen struggled to find anything she could use to protect herself.
She spotted the sword. He had knocked it from its resting place on the wall. She unsheathed it, took her stance and squared her shoulders.
A million thoughts could have flooded her mind, but Karen was locked in this moment.
She could have thought about how the sword had belonged to her former boyfriend, a stalker and an abuser. She could have remembered the time he had used the sword on a person, how it had convinced Karen to end their relationship for good. She could have remembered when she dropped off his stuff at his mother’s house and how she had kept the sword around so he couldn’t hurt someone else with it. The irony of that.
Swords like this are used mostly for ninja movies in Hollywood.
It’s about two feet long, heavy and black. It has a straight blade with a square guard.
Weapon in hand, she dialed with the other.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“My name is Karen Dolley ... believe it or not, I have him at sword point.”
***
“Take your hand out of your pocket and put it in front of you, or I will run you through,” she told him.
She would have done it, too, she said. She put about five pounds of pressure on the sword, enough to make someone feel as though their skin might puncture, as she pressed its tip just above his right kidney.
The cops arrived two minutes later. As soon as Karen let them in, she hid in the kitchen.
The man, 30-year-old Jacob Wessel of Greenwood, Indiana, was arrested and charged with residential entry, a Level 6 felony. He had forced his way through the back door, high on an unknown substance, under the impression that he was being chased. Wessel had been booked in Marion County Jail in 2006 for possession and dealing of controlled substances.
The police eased him into the back of the patrol car.
It was 12:17 p.m.
The whole encounter had taken less than 30 minutes. Karen took a seat on her couch and stretched out her arms.
Her hands were bruised, but they did not shake.
***
She hadn’t heard him enter that night, which she found strange with her creaky wooden floors. It’s an old house; the French doors Wessel broke through are delicate and antique.
A wooden dining room table is now pressed up against those doors, blocking access from the inside and out.
The rest of Karen’s home looks lived in. She has played host to more than 20 news crews and reporters since the invasion. They call her the “Naptown Ninja.” Most cover the story like an episode of a sitcom. That’s how Karen would describe it, too. What she doesn’t tell them is that she is still a little shaken.
She is still working on turning off the light in the living room.
Though she doesn’t expect a crime like this to happen again, she still can’t sleep with her back to the bedroom door.
As she walks around her home, picking cat toys and lint off the floor, Karen grabs several sheets of paper from the top of her cat’s crate. The “kind of creepy” letter in her hand is from a stranger.
There are many letters, emails and Facebook messages, most of them from men and all of them criticizing her for how she handled the situation.
Maybe little girls aren’t taught to, or even “supposed” to, roughhouse. Karen said that’s why female fights seem wilder, savage even. Her time spent with the society taught her instead how to attack with control.
“I don’t want to hear ‘You should have ...,’ or, ‘I would have ...’” she said and added she has been trained to protect and do it a certain way. “Do you want to live in a house where you’ve killed someone?”
It doesn’t shock Karen that something like this would happen to her. Cousins and friends have written on her Facebook wall, “Jesus, this would happen to you.”
Today, Karen shows off her combat skills with the Naptown Roller Girls, a roller derby group of women with names like “Flannery O’Clobber” and “Caca Fuego.” It’s a dangerous sport and one Karen had plenty of reservations about getting involved with, but her experiences have taught her to keep chasing her fears.
“A lot of the time women tear each other down,” she said.
That’s what she was expecting of the derby, too. But the man-hating, tattooed, edgy “ne’er-do-wells” that Karen had predicted turned out to be most accepting of who she is.
“There’s no one type of derby girl,” Karen said.
At a Halloween derby event, Karen dresses as the Bride from “Kill Bill.” Complete with yellow jumpsuit, pointed black kitten heels and the sword in tow, Karen takes photos with derby fans, all unaware of the irony in her costume.
