In the winter of 1992, Ann Whedon lived with a feeling of impending doom.
She took unusual routes to work. She parked blocks away. Sometimes she wore a disguise. It didn’t do any good. On a cold Thursday afternoon, the doom enveloped her like a black cloud.
After a sales meeting at the appliance store where she worked in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kan., she walked to her truck. But when she opened the door, she saw a familiar pair of brown cowboy boots in the back of the extended cab.
It was Preston Collins, her former boyfriend. Weeks before, she had left him, concerned about his increasingly irrational behavior.
Angry, he had kidnapped her at gunpoint. She escaped, and now he was determined to exact his revenge.
She screamed and ran. He ran faster.
One hand squeezed her arm like a vise. The other brandished a pistol-grip shotgun he had strapped to his body under an overcoat.
He pointed the gun directly at her face.
“You’re going home now,” he yelled.
Then he fired.
The force of the blast caused the gun to kick and the shot to miss. It broke two car windows and blew out the front window of a nearby carpet shop.
It also knocked her to the ground.
He reloaded and leveled the gun for another blast.
Terrified, she covered her face and rolled into a ball as he fired again.
This time the shot found its mark. It blew her right hand off, took the thumb from her left hand and put a hole the size of a fist in the back of her left leg, shattering the bone. In addition, the blast left buckshot embedded in her muscles that would prove impossible to fully remove.
Lying in a pool of her blood, fighting to stay awake, she made a silent vow.
“I’m not going to let you kill me,” she said. “I’m not going to die.”
In the eight years since the shooting, that resolve has served her well. By all rights the attack should have killed her, or at least ruined her life.
It did neither.
Collins was convicted of attempted murder and is now in prison. Whedon has prospered. And while she wishes the attack had never happened, it might have been the best thing that ever happened to her.
Today she walks with a limp, has a silver hook for a right hand and pain as her constant companion. But she also has a whole new life that is in many ways better than the one before. Since the attack, Whedon, 55, has earned her social work degree at the University of Kansas and started a new job helping disabled workers. She even fell in love and got married.
“It changed my perspective, changed my outlook, changed my whole life,” she said of the shooting. “It left me alone with nothing. You end up with a whole new start whether you want it or not.”
Whedon spent three months in the hospital. Doctors gave her 50 pints of blood. The attack blew away her sciatic nerve and destroyed the lymph nodes in her leg. She was even paralyzed for a while.
Despite the problems, she has made the most of her new start.
Yes, Whedon is also now a teacher. But it’s what she teaches that often leaves people with their mouth hanging open. Every Wednesday night the woman whose life was blown apart by an angry boyfriend teaches batterers how to face up to, and conquer, their anger control problems.
“It’s an amazing story,” said Johnson County District Atty. Paul Morrison, who prosecuted Collins’ case. “She came out of (the shooting) with a real good attitude. And now she has positively affected the lives of other people.”
William Reese, who administers the class Whedon teaches, agreed.
“She has survived and done some wondrous things,” he said. “I am very, very, impressed by Ann’s courage. She’s a lesson for us all on how to overcome.”
Her brother, Chris Whedon, agreed.
“She’s my hero,” he said. “She has shown herself to be one of the more remarkable human beings for what she has come through. And I do know that she has been inspirational to other people. Just appearing before those people in the battering class and being a true physical specter of the outcome of jealously and rage, how can you not be inspired by that and want to calm down and control yourself?”
To the people in her batterer’s class, Whedon is more than a teacher.
“She’s more like a mother to us,” said Michael Woods, a 39-year-old Independence, Mo., man who recently graduated from the six-month court-mandated course. “You can have any type of problem. You can either save it till Wednesday night, or you can call her at home or at work. She’ll make time to talk to you.”
Jewel Fleming, 32, of Overland Park said Whedon is uniquely qualified to teach this subject.
“She’s been there,” Fleming said. “And you really don’t know what it’s like unless you’ve been there.”
But how can Whedon deal with abusers after what she’s been through?
“For me, going down there gives me an opportunity to help someone else not turn into this guy,” she said, referring to Collins.
After such a brutal attack, no one could have blamed Whedon if she gave up, withdrew from society or turned bitter.
For some reason, she didn’t. Her mother, Annie Whedon of Oskaloosa, Kan., said she didn’t raise any of her nine children to be quitters.
“We’ve always said you either lie there and molt, or you get up and do something,” she said. “And Ann has always gotten up and done something. She was always a very determined girl. Maybe I should say bullheaded.”
Her upbringing helped her survive the attack. So did three months of counseling, and a life that was rarely idyllic or pretty.
It is the combination of all of this–her current disabilities, combined with her bullheadedness and commitment to helping others–that have found expression in her batterers intervention class. They’re also invaluable in her new full-time job at the Rehabilitation Institute in Kansas City.
