The little girl who got away is now a 32-year-old working mother of two teenage boys. She likes to camp and fish with her family, and she's handy, helping her husband remodel their vintage house.

But she rarely goes out alone and hates getting into her car after it's been parked outside overnight. She is haunted by guilt. All of it is understandable, considering that the little girl got away from Brian Dugan -- who murdered the girl who didn't.


He tossed her in the front seat, then chased Melissa, according to court documents. In that car, in those frantic seconds, Opal scrambled to unlock the passenger door but found the lock had been disabled. She lunged back to the driver-side window, jumped out and fell to the gravel, tripping Dugan, who had Melissa under an arm.

Opal ran. Melissa could not. Fifteen days later, five days after Melissa's 8th birthday, a LaSalle County deputy sheriff found her body in a ditch east of Mendota. Dugan was apprehended and pleaded guilty.

Brian Dugan took something from Opal Horton that day and stayed with her, emerging in her fears and guilt even as she tries to deny his presence. But today, Horton is a powerful symbol. For the parents whose children have not escaped, she is the wrenching image of what might have been. For those parents whose children are safe, she is a chilling reminder and an example of fragile perseverance, of carrying on.

"When Mike Ackerman hugs me," Horton said of Melissa's father, "it's not just a normal hug. It's like he's hugging Melissa too. I still don't talk to the Ackermans as much as I should because I always feel like, 'Do they look at me and feel awkward or sad?' I just don't want them to feel uncomfortable."

Two years before Dugan grabbed Opal and Melissa, he had committed a similar crime: the abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, of Naperville. His sentencing for the Nicarico crime is under way in a DuPage County courtroom. On Wednesday, Horton told her story in court for the first time, a few feet from Dugan.

She broke into tears walking to the witness stand and struggled to maintain her composure for the next half-hour. Assistant State's Attorney Michael Wolfe, who questioned her, paused twice to calm his emotions.

When Dugan got out of his car, "he walked closer, saying he couldn't hear us," Horton testified. She breathed deeply between questions. "I whispered to Melissa that we had to go."

But Dugan "grabbed me by the neck," she said, "and threw me through a window into the car, like a ball through the window."

Horton told the courtroom she doesn't remember exactly what happened next, just that she escaped and hid in a tractor tire at a John Deere dealership nearby until she heard a car take off down the road.

Shaking, she described how she poked her head out of the tire and saw Melissa through the car window. "I waited until I couldn't see the car anymore. I took off running, ducking so he couldn't see me."

She ran several blocks to the first house she saw, knocked but then left, afraid because she didn't know the people there. But she did know who lived in the next house, a teacher. Horton ran in and said, "Someone took my friend." The teacher called police.

For the next two weeks, Horton was questioned by police. On June 17, a female FBI agent who had befriended the little girl took her to a park and told her Melissa had been found.

"I was happy, then she told me something else," said Horton, again breaking into tears.

Later, Michael Ackerman took the stand. Wolfe asked him what his biggest concern was today.

"My biggest concern is Opal," Ackerman said.

At her home Tuesday night, Horton said that the days and weeks following her escape are jumbled in her mind now. She didn't return to school for the last few days of that year. She remembers boarding a small plane and looking down at rusted cars, trying to find the one in which she spent those few harrowing seconds. The pilot let her steer, and her mom got nauseous, Horton said.

She slept with her parents for months after her encounter with Dugan and said she could not go to the bathroom alone.

"When I was little," she said, sitting at her dining room table the night before she testified, "I thought I had to be 21 years old to go to the jail, and I thought that, when I turned 21, I would go there, go up to him and say, 'You didn't hurt me,' and I would spit on him. But when I turned 21, it was like I had an awakening that, 'Oh, why would I even think about him?,' and I don't. I just look at him and think, 'You're nothing.'"

She saw counselors two or three times, but they were men and she was deathly afraid of men. She refused to talk to strangers about the incident. Her parents tried to return her to a normal life, declining to discuss June 2 with her. By the next fall, her anxiety started easing, she said.

Horton used to dream about Melissa. In that dream, the two of them were in Dugan's car, while it was parked at a wooded park. He was asleep. "It's very vivid to me that we are together," she said. "She's alive and we're sleeping and we would wake up, sneak out and get away while he was sleeping in his car."

Her family remained in Somonauk until she was about 12, then moved several times in the Fox Valley area, Horton said. She had her rocky moments and got an apartment at 18 in nearby Sandwich, graduating from high school in 1995 while working two jobs. She worked as a waitress for 10 years.

"There were people who would ask questions about it," she said of her near-abduction. "I never had any problems telling the story because it was just that -- telling a story," that felt as if it hadn't happened to her.

She was a single mom of two boys and working as a real estate agent when she met Brad Wernsman, a custom homebuilder in the Yorkville area, in 2005. After a brief friendship, they started dating and were married this year. Horton works at a manufacturing company in the area. She said her husband has immersed her in his loving family and brought her closer to God.

Over the years, the initial shock of her ordeal subsided, but her anxiety is an everyday presence. She had the backyard fenced and ordered the basketball hoop put there so the boys could play with protection. For years, she refused to let her sons outside or ride bikes unless she was with them.

Once, alone at home with a son, she heard a noise and wanted to flee, so she created a game in which they crawled to the garage and then drove to her parents' home in her car. Six months ago, she panicked and banged her head on her car door when she started the engine and heard a voice from the radio.

"I always think people are out to get me," she said. "I'm notorious for hearing things."

Horton's parents told the two boys about their mother's experience, something Horton said she was unable to do, when the boys were about 6 and 4 years old. They asked a few questions but have not pressed her for details, she said. Today, the boys are 15 and 13.

Horton's fear of Dugan ended when she forced herself to attend his guilty plea to the Nicarico crime in July, she said. It was the first time she'd seen him since June 2, 1985.

"It was very empowering, actually. Seeing him, he was nothing. I would not say my life is ruined because of him, absolutely not. I don't know how to say it. He took a part of me, but I feel like that person's not here. She's gone."

But the guilt is powerful and the hardest thing for her to shake. It goes beyond thoughts of why Melissa was lost and not her. Horton said she often wonders how she might have helped if she had stayed in the car.

"You always feel like maybe you could have steered the car off the road," she said, "or gotten someone's attention, just so she wouldn't have to be alone."

As tortuous as it was to testify Wednesday, she said she was adamant about doing it. "As a parent, how can you not do as much as you can to get justice for your child?" Horton said. "Jeanine, she deserves justice. I've never met the Nicaricos, but would love to have a relationship, knowing that, I guess, somebody lived and can speak for her as a child."

As for Dugan, she has "no trouble saying he deserves the death penalty." After talking with her pastor, she said, she needs to "change my idea of forgiveness.

"Not that I don't have to forgive him. I just don't have to say, 'Oh, give me a hug.' I have to say I'm OK with it and move on and know that God has a place for him, as he does for me. It's not me forgiving him; it's God forgiving him. I'm not the one making this call."


From the archives

Read how Brian Dugan?s plea came out at

INSIDE: Testimony in Brian Dugan death penalty hearing PAGE 10

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