Editors Note: This article was originally published on November 12, 1997. Due to frequent requests, Agent News is re-running this series.

This four-part series focuses on the personal safety issues facing the real estate professional as illustrated by the disturbing experiences and subsequent coping responses of two Realtors who each were viciously attacked while showing homes to what they assumed were prospective buyers. One stayed in the real estate business, determined to educate other Realtors how to protect themselves from similar crimes. The other left the profession, too traumatized by her ordeal to return. Also included in Mark Spencer's informative series are life-saving tips for how Realtors -- who assume considerable risk every day -- can avoid becoming the next tragic statistic. Parts 1-4 will run in installments Monday through Thursday this week. Click Here to read Part 1.

Paula Herrington

"She's good with people," Paula Herrington's mother said when her daughter was returned home after spending two harrowing days with a kidnapper. "She gets them to talk and to listen."

Herrington's people skill may have saved her from a fate worse than the sexual assault she suffered during her abduction -- but they also may have gotten her into trouble in the first place. Herrington's trust in other people kept her from detecting any warning signs indicating that the man to whom she was showing houses had plans to harm her.

In 1994, Herrington adopted a new strategy for attracting new clients. She used a glamorous photograph of herself in a magazine advertisement listing her properties. What she attracted instead was a Michigan man who called her from a pay phone, arrived at her office, and talked Herrington into riding in his Jeep Cherokee because the air conditioning was already running.

Herrington showed the man seven properties during a two-hour period. The last one was in the country. After taking one look, the man said, "This might be it," and asked to go back inside for a second look. Then the "nice guy" turned vile, calling her names and producing a gun and several ropes, with which he tied Herrington's hands and feet. He told her he was dying of a brain tumor and needed money. He told her he wouldn't rape her.

Those weren't the only lies he'd tell her during the next two days.

He carried Herrington's bound body to his Jeep, filled with real estate magazines from other areas of the country. Only later would Herrington discover she was the last of seven rape victims in a crime spree that started in the West and spread all the way to Michigan. Herrington's attacker was arrested in the Ladies and Lace topless club in Ogden, Utah, after he brandished a gun. Upon his arrest, Herrington's attacker told the arresting officer he'd get a promotion when the police learned about everything he'd done.

In the subsequent trial, the defense accused Herrington of willingly accompanying the man because of her troubled marriage. She was compared to Susan Smith, the woman who drove a car containing her two children into a lake. The jury didn't buy the comparison and reached a guilty verdict in just 13 minutes. Herrington's attacker was sentenced to 35 years in prison based on her case alone.

Paula Herrington with her son Jay

Herrington returned to work, only to find that she couldn't do her job anymore. She resisted scheduling appointments. She began working with a partner to avoid visiting properties alone. But when she did go out to show homes to prospects, every closed closet door brought back a flood of anxiety.

"I was in denial," Herrington says. She received both individual and group therapy and has gradually come to terms with her experience. "This is my best year," she says. "The first year I got by, and then during the second year, the suppression wasn't working anymore, and it really hit hard."

Herrington was shaken so badly by her experience, in fact, that she ultimately decided to leave her memories behind in Southern California and moved with her husband and 2-year-old son, Jay, to a Dallas suburb. For this interview, she preferred to meet at McDonald's so her son could eat and play -- and so that other people would be present. Herrington was joined shortly before the interview by two other mothers and their children.

Paula Herrington with her son Jay

But Herrington's trust in others is gradually being restored. A trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., helped her realize that millions of people have suffered a fate worse than her own, she says. Herrington hopes that talking about her ordeal will help. She plans eventually to follow in Joan Malone's footsteps, warning other agents how vulnerable they are.

And Herrington did something else to put her nightmare behind her: She wrote her attacker a letter. (The letter in its entirety will be published in a related story Friday.) "I had to let it go," she says. "I knew if I held onto the anger and grief, it would eat me up inside."

And she's begun to think about returning to the real estate profession. "I might do something to help manage an office -- something in titles, something in escrow," she says. But for Herrington, the prospect of showing homes again remains an impossibility -- for now.

Click here for: Part 4

Click here for: Part 1

Click here for: Part 2