How Did This Climber Get Away with So Much for So Long?
Originally published on outsideonline.com
When Bonnie Hedlund first started dating Charlie Barrett in 2005, every day was Valentine’s Day.
She would come home from work to find her driveway sprinkled with rose petals, placed there by Barrett, an exceptionally talented rock climber and boulderer based in Northern California. Love notes were hung from trees with messages like “Keep going beautiful girl.” He put more notes inside Hedlund’s cabin, which sat on forested land near the Truckee River. When the weather was right, Barrett sometimes set up a romantic space on the porch, with a table and chairs, candles, dinner for two, and a mattress. He made CD mixes and wrote poems on beautiful stationery.
Barrett, then 21, was 12 years younger than Hedlund. When she was introduced to him by a mutual friend, she never thought of dating as an option because of their age difference. But then he started randomly showing up at her cabin, making his interest clear. He was attractive—tall and dark, with broad shoulders and a big smile—and attentive in a way she’d never experienced. Better still, some of their best times together happened in her favorite place: the outdoors.
“The climbing was phenomenal,” she says. “We would do amazing climbs nearly every day.”
Like Barrett, Hedlund was an accomplished sport climber and boulderer, and she had been ticking off difficult routes on the east side of the Sierra Nevada since the late 1980s, before the region became widely known as a bouldering destination. The couple, along with their core group of Tahoe-area friends, did routes together constantly. As the relationship grew stronger, Barrett moved in with Hedlund and her dog, a rescued wolf hybrid.
“It was some of the best times of my life,” Hedlund says. “Until it wasn’t.”
In January 2006, Hedlund says, she and Barrett went snowboarding and then had dinner at a friend’s house. When they got back to the cabin, Barrett began acting strangely. Holding his head in his hands, he bent over the kitchen counter and stood motionless. Hedlund thought that he was about to pass out; she asked if he wanted to sit. They’d never had a fight or even a serious argument, but she started to feel scared.
“When he stood up and looked at me, it was like he was a different person,” she says. “His eyes were glazed over and he started walking toward me, chanting gibberish.”
According to Hedlund, Barrett said over and over: “You are the prosecution and I am the defense.” He backed her into a corner. Then, so suddenly that she had no time to defend herself, he hit the side of her head with his fist, knocking her out. Barrett was six feet tall and weighed 165 pounds. Hedlund was five-two and 112.
After about a minute, she came to and saw that the cabin’s front door was open. Barrett had left, and he’d taken her dog.
Hedlund ran outside looking for Barrett, who had moved about 75 feet from the cabin and was standing in the middle of a busy state highway that ran past her property, holding the dog by its collar. Cars were honking and swerving while Barrett shouted at Hedlund that he’d been struggling to keep himself from hurting her. Now that he’d failed, he intended to kill himself.
“I don’t care what you do, just give me my dog back!” she yelled.
Barrett let go, the dog bolted, and Hedlund ran into the woods to retrieve him as Barrett headed toward his truck. She stayed there, hunkered down, until she saw that he’d driven away.
“I don’t know why I didn’t call the cops,” she says. “I had just never experienced anything like that before.”
The post How Did This Climber Get Away with So Much for So Long? appeared first on Climbing.