As a writer who makes his living from the true-crime genre, I am frequently contacted by people who have a story to tell, usually an unpleasant one that doesn’t have a happy ending. Such was the case, I thought, when Chelmsford, Massachusetts resident Jeannie McDonough, 47, e-mailed me recently to tell me how she, her husband, Kevin, and then-15-year-old daughter, Shea, had collectively joined forces to fight off a masked intruder last July 30 as he attempted to assault Shea. Imagine my further surprise when Jeannie told me that they had later learned that the suspect, Adam Leroy Lane, 43, was a suspected serial killer who, police said, had allegedly stabbed a woman to death a day earlier. Fortunately, the McDonough family lived to tell their story, and it had a reasonably happy ending, for them at least. It could have turned out much worse. Jeannie and her family are, naturally, concerned about how much can be said about their case without jeopardizing other ongoing investigations involving Lane and the other families that he has allegedly victimized and, as such, kept what she told me to a minimum out of respect for the police and the other families involved. Nonetheless, here’s what I pieced together from what Jeannie McDonough told me, as well as from other sources, about a case in which the victims survived.
It was a few minutes before 4 a.m. when Shea was awakened by a man’s hand that covered her nose and mouth, preventing her from breathing. Shea told People magazine that she thought it had been her brother—until the man, wielding a hunting knife, threatened to kill her if she made any noise. He was dressed in black, and was wearing a black leather mask that covered all of his face except for his eyes. It wasn’t until he had “pulled the covers down” around her knees that she began to panic. Shea began thrashing about on the bed, trying to shake loose from her attacker—but he was strong and his grip was tight. Fortunately, she managed to cry out a single time, but it was loud enough to awaken her sleeping parents in a nearby room. When they rushed into the room where Shea had been sleeping, they encountered a large, burly man standing over their daughter, holding a knife to her throat.
Kevin McDonough, 49, slightly-built, managed to pull the muscular intruder to the floor despite the knife he was holding, where he, with Jeannie assisting him, held the man in a choke hold while Shea used her cell phone to call 911.
“Who are you?” Jeannie asked the intruder despite the pain from the cuts sustained on her hands while attempting to wrest the knife away from the man. She said that he replied, “I’m nobody, just let me go.” But she and Kevin held onto him and waited for the five minutes or so that it took for the police to arrive. Those few minutes, she recalled, had seemed like eternity.
“I’m a pretty strong guy, but I felt like Hercules that night,” Kevin later told a reporter, according to The Boston Globe.
