When Rita started attending third grade in Level Green Elementary School that fall, she had no difficulty getting friends to come visit. The area was still moving from a farming community to a suburb, and with subdivisions still largely unheard-of in Level Green, the properties along Meadowbrook Road were some of the biggest in the area. Front yards alone often were a half-acre, while the back yards rolled down forever into a ravine that ran all the way into Murrysville. Adults valued the space for the greenery and the privacy. For kids, especially those with smaller back yards, a place like Rita's was an adventure waiting to explore.
"The Mullers used to have a dog," her mother said. "He told me that when it died about ten years ago they buried it out back so they could still feel he was around. I think that was its name."
As you'd expect, the next few days at school all Rita would talk about was her new dog. It was black with brown legs, but it looked like silver in the moonlight. It was as big as she was; no, it was ten times bigger. It was vicious like a wolf, but it was as gentle as a puppy with her. Eventually word got around Mrs. Cromer's class that Rita was making it up, that all she had was somebody else's dead dog, and the boys especially started teasing her. She stopped talking about it, but she would still draw doodles in art class and in the margins of her homework assignments, of herself with a giant dog. The teasing had pretty much played itself out by this time, and everyone just let her enjoy her pretend dog.
It wasn't like there weren't other problems to worry about, after all. There was a rash of thefts along Colbaugh Drive that October. At first it was just cars that had been left unlocked and along the road, but by early November someone was breaking the locks and even a few windows and rooting through people's gloveboxes, looking for wallets or other valuables.
Then it became home burglaries.
Level Green was a quiet community with some roots that go back to before the Revolution. Local folklore says that a young George Washington chased fleeing Indians through the Shades of Death following the Battle of Bushy Run during the French and Indian War, and that was probably the last time anything really exciting had happened in the community. There weren't many active farms left, but there was a lot of open space and the people who lived there generally led quiet lives that involved living in Level Green and driving 40 minutes or so to work in places like McKeesport and West Mifflin, or maybe 20 minutes to Monroeville and Murrysville if they were lucky. The burglaries got attention the way few things could, and they were all people were talking about at church and at school. A family came home from a day trip and found their valuables gone. One woman called the police to report someone trying to break into her house while her husband was away, and while the police didn't find a suspect, they did find a badly damaged back door where he had tried to break in. So by early December when the elementary school students were learning the words to Christmas songs like "Too Fat for the Chimney" and wondering if it would snow for Christmas, their parents were making sure that no child was going home to an empty house. Latchkey kids like Rita would go home with a friend and then their parents either would pick them up, or the friend's parent would drive them home personally before dinner after getting a call to verify the parent was home.
It was five o'clock on a Wednesday in early December when Rita caught a ride home to Meadowbrook Road with her friend's mother. It was already pitch-black outside, but the porch lights were on and so were the lights in the living room, so when Mrs. Kowalczyk dropped Rita off, she waited in the driveway until Rita walked to the door, unlocked it and waved goodbye before she drove off.
From what the police later were able to work out, the burglar already was in the house when Rita's mother arrived. She had come through the front door and called Mrs. Kowalczyk before she noticed anything amiss, and by the time Rita came in the door 10 minutes later, the burglar already had overpowered her and left her tied up in the basement while he ransacked the rest of the house.
This is where the police are less clear what happened. That the burglar tried to catch Rita is obvious. Terrified by the sight of a strange man in her house, she screamed and ran up the stairs to her bedroom, where she had always felt safest. She locked the door and ran to the corner, where she tried to hide behind a large wooden toy chest, only for the door to break as the burglar kicked it open.
One of the police investigators credits Rita with pushing the burglar through the window and then using the phone in her mother's bedroom to call 9-1-1. The burglar, who suffered several broken bones in the fall, claimed that the family's vicious dog, which he described as an 80-pound German shepherd, had come "out of nowhere" and attacked him once he broke into Rita's room. According to him, it bit him on the arm and was going for his throat when its attack pushed him through the window. His arm was bleeding, and badly, but medical personnel said it was cut by the broken window. And of coure, as both Rita and her mother told police, there was no family dog. (They later remedied that, with a large but very friendly St. Bernard named Clifford, whose bark was loud enough to frighten anyone.)
Rita was a celebrity at school once she came back that Friday. She didn't want to talk about it, and since the teachers insisted that no one push her to talk about unless she wanted to, her classmates more or less respected that silence.
All she did say is, "He would never let anyone hurt me."
Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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