CHAPTER 10
Anne Bridges had always been a “firm believer” in the idea that God speaks to us through what we call instinct, that gut feeling, or He whispers inside our heads. Anne always felt that was God sending directions for our lives. Yet, on the other hand, it’s up to us to interpret and either follow or take another road.
Free will.
There you go.
“Something in the back of my mind was telling me not to go back over to Jimmy’s on April seventeenth—but I got into my car and went, anyway,” Anne recalled with a bit of personal dissatisfaction about the decision.
Another sign happened along the way that early evening. Anne was driving down the main road leading toward Jimmy’s house when she saw her ex-husband driving toward her in the opposite direction. They passed each other. Both looked.
Anne pulled over. Her ex kept driving. For a brief moment she thought about turning around to see if she could catch up to him and have a conversation.
“I really should go and try to talk to him,” Anne said aloud to herself, sitting in her car, thinking of her ex. But after that brief flash of reflection, Anne decided to continue on toward Jimmy’s.
Anne pulled into Jimmy’s driveway. Paused a moment after shutting off her car. Looked up and stared. The house felt quiet, as if nobody was home. She got out. Smelled some food cooking as she walked toward the front door.
Jimmy must be out back grilling.
Coming around the corner of the house, spotting Jimmy on the porch by the grill, Anne took one look and immediately could tell he was intoxicated. Jimmy had this glossy-eyed stare about him. He swayed a bit while tending to the grill, a beer in one hand, barbeque utensil in the other.
I don’t know what he took, if he took any drugs at all. But he was wasted, that much I could tell. He never did drugs around me. When a friend of his came over, they’d go into another room. He knew I was raised in a law enforcement environment and I had no tolerance for it.
Look, I’ve done my share of partying—but it was alcohol. I don’t judge anyone. But Jimmy was doing a lot more than “partying.”
Anne walked over to Jimmy as he stood near the barbeque. “Hey, how are you?”
Jimmy seemed “real happy-pappy.” But definitely out of it, feeling no pain.
He smiled.
“Everything okay, Jimmy?” Anne asked.
“I’m feeling great, Anne. Just fucking fabulous.”
Anne knew in that first moment she did not want to be around Jimmy. She needed to leave. Go back home. Forget about this guy. He was not the same person she had known long ago. Rekindling the relationship had been a mistake. Something in Jimmy had broken between the time she knew him and now. Yet, with Jimmy, Anne also knew, you couldn’t come out and say, “Look, you’re blasted off your rocker and I’m out of here.” That would not go over well. So she had to ease her way into explaining she was not going to be staying very long.
As Anne stood watching Jimmy drink beers and grill, she kept thinking: I need to go home. I shouldn’t be here. This is all wrong.
Jimmy took a call on a wireless phone tucked in his back pocket. Anne stood and listened.
Thirty minutes went by.
“Jimmy, listen, I am really not feeling well and I need to go home,” Anne finally said.
Jimmy had his back to Anne as he tended the grill and talked, telling the person on the phone: “Hey, man, I gotta get going right now. I’ll catch you later.” Then he placed the phone down.
“My blood sugar is just not working with me today, Jimmy,” Anne said. Jimmy knew Anne was diabetic. “I feel weak. I should leave right now. I’m so sorry. I’ll call you later. Maybe I can come by tomorrow.”
Jimmy turned.
“And I could see his eyes narrowing, if that makes any sense,” Anne remembered.
* * *
Jimmy had a rugged, blue-collar, country look about him. Thick black mustache, receding hairline, long black hair around his ears, which brushed his shoulders. A wide, pushed-in nose, like a boxer’s. He was unshaven.
Staring at Anne, Jimmy glared. He was angry, Anne could tell. Seething about something.
After a moment Jimmy said: “So you’re going to leave me too, Anne—is that it?”
“To this day, I still don’t know what he meant by that,” Anne recalled.
She did not respond.
Whatever Jimmy was referring to, this statement lit a fire inside him. He hauled off and, with a backhand, cuffed Anne across her cheek. Her body flew into the carport wall next to where they stood. Jimmy was a strong, solidly built man. Anne was all of five feet six inches, just over one hundred pounds.
“I didn’t know how bad it was, but I knew how bad it hurt,” Anne said. “I saw photos later . . . and my face was black.”
A large welt puffed on the side of Anne’s face as she picked herself up off the ground after being hurled by the blow into the wall.
The carport and back porch area where Jimmy Williams hit Anne across the face and fired a gun next to her head. (Photo courtest of Anne Bridges Johnson)
However shakily, Anne managed to stand.
Jimmy had a pistol in the crook of his back. He pulled it out. Pointed it at Anne’s head. Then fired several rounds to the right of her ear, the sound of the blasts ringing in her eardrum. Anne could smell gunpowder and see the smoke from the barrel.
It was beyond comprehension to Anne that Jimmy had fired at her. The fact that he missed at such close range, however, spoke to how, if Jimmy had wanted Anne dead, he could have easily killed her in that moment.
“You’re going inside!” Jimmy screamed, grabbing Anne by the arm, pulling her in through the back door, his pistol pointed on Anne the entire time.
Anne was not going to argue with Jimmy. He was a madman—someone else entirely.
“You sit your ass on that fucking couch right there and you do not move, understand me?” Jimmy said.
Anne sat, the right side of her face and right ear throbbing. Her eardrum numb, ringing.
“Yes, Jimmy. I understand.”
Jimmy said nothing more. Instead, he walked toward the stairs leading up into the attic.
Suddenly an epiphany hit me as I watched him walk up those stairs while looking back at me to make sure I wasn’t going anywhere. Everything that other woman had claimed about Jimmy drugging her and holding her hostage, I knew in this moment, it was likely all true.
As Jimmy stepped off that last stair, and she could hear him up in the attic rummaging around, looking for God knows what, Anne was certain it was her turn.
Anne thought: I am in big trouble. I am in so much trouble. I have to get out of here. I have to do something.
Anne convinced herself it was time to make a move. She could not just sit and wait to see what Jimmy had planned. So she jumped up off the couch and ran out the screen door, the spring pulling back and slapping the door behind her, making a loud smack.
By now it was completely dark outside. A clear night, yes, with moonlight casting a subtle glow about the countryside, and yet pitch-black and desolate. Anne could hear chirping crickets and their melodic trills, but she paid no attention to it. What she heard and saw confirmed no neighbors were anywhere in sight. Anne Bridges was alone, running now from the carport in back to the front of Jimmy’s house, wondering where she could hide from a man planning on not letting her go.
Anne made it to the front yard and looked left and right for a porch or car light. Anything telling her a neighbor or passerby was around. She needed help. Her pocketbook was on the back porch, where her car keys were. She had not grabbed it. She needed to keep moving. Fast as she could. Find someone. Anyone. Get as far away from Jimmy Williams as she could.
To her left, Anne saw a house in the distance up on a hill, but it did not have any lights on.
“I should have run that way, anyway,” she recalled.
But honestly, in a situation like the one I found myself in that night, you just don’t know what you’re going to do until you’re faced with making those decisions in that moment. I was later judged. Some said I changed my story.
People should not put abused women in a category and judge. Say that abused women are low-income. Uneducated. That they cannot make good choices. That they do drugs. They drink themselves to sleep every night. That’s terribly unfair and judgmental.
I don’t do any of that. I have a bachelor’s degree in education. And that makes me so mad that so many people today place abuse victims into those categories. Victims of violent crime are victims. Period.
About halfway between the front porch and the road, Anne heard Jimmy’s screen door creak open and then slap shut.
“Anne!” Jimmy yelled. He was outside now. On the porch. Looking for her.
The porch where Jimmy Williams stood and fired at Anne. (Photo courtesy of Anne Bridges Johnson)
Anne staggered across this lawn and into the road, where she fell, dizzy and fading, her back bloody from shotgun wounds. (Photos courtesy of Anne Bridges Johnson)
She stopped. Turned.
Oh, my . . .
Jimmy had a shotgun in his hand, the barrel pointed directly at her.
Run. Run for your life . . . as fast as you can, Anne thought.
She turned and took off.
“Annie . . . stop!”
With her back to Jimmy, Anne ran in the opposite direction as hard and fast as she could.
Then she heard a blast that sounded like a cannon going off.
Light flashed behind her.
The loud crack of Jimmy’s shotgun echoed throughout the forest around his house.
Living in Alabama all her life, Anne was familiar with that sound.
Before she even felt the spray and burn of metal BB projectiles punch her in the back, shoulders, and lower body, Anne Bridges was on the ground, knees tucked into her chest, screaming out in pain.
Anne had just been hit directly across the largest portion of her body by a blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun.