“YOU think, ‘it can’t happen to me’. But it did.”
In the early hours of the morning on November 3, 1984, Lisa McVey Noland was riding her bike home after working a double shift at Krispy Kreme doughnuts. It was 2am. She was 17 years old.
Earlier that night, she’d written a suicide note. After years of sexual abuse at the hands of a family member, she had lost all hope. This was it, she thought. But first, she had a double shift to work.
Lisa wouldn’t get home that night. In fact, a series of horrific events would change her life forever — she just didn’t know it yet.
“I always took the same route on the way home. It was always dark, but it seemed darker than usual that night,” she told the Crime and Investigation Network in the US. “I’m pedalling my bicycle on the sidewalk but a car blew a horn. I thought, ‘that was kinda odd. Why would a car go by and blow a horn? I’m on a sidewalk’.
“I got halfway down the street, I noticed a car was in the parking lot of a church. I looked back at the church and next thing I know, I was yanked off my bicycle. It felt like three or four guys jerked me off my bike.
“Then I felt a cold, steel barrel of a gun to my left temple. He dragged me across the street. I couldn’t see his face. He got me to the same car I’d seen in the parking lot. He threw me into the driver’s side. I remember seeing a huge knife sitting in the middle of the seats. He blindfolded me, bound my hands, my wrists and my feet, and took my seat and reclined it back.
“Shortly after that, he drives off. I’m like, ‘this is it, he’s going to kill me here’.”
Lisa Noland at the time of her rescue, in 1984. Picture: Fox 13Source:Supplied
Lisa is now a deputy sheriff. Picture: Fox 13Source:Supplied
Lisa says the experience changed her life forever. Picture: Fox 13Source:Supplied
Lisa was blindfolded and forced to perform oral sex before she was taken to an apartment. She was shaking with fear. Here, she would be brutally raped and used as a sex slave for 26 hours.
“I was deathly afraid that he was going to kill me,” she revealed in a 2011 documentary series, I Survived… “Here I was thinking about killing myself and now I was going to be fighting for my life.” She knew she had to “pull up the courage and determination to survive.”
Little did Lisa know, her captor was a notorious serial killer and sexual sadist, who by that stage, had raped more than 50 women in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area before he moved to Tampa and tortured eight women, dumped their bodies and sent the community into a frenzy of terror.
Lisa was to be Bobby Joe Long’s next victim. He would abduct, sexually assault and murder another two women after her. His reign of terror lasted eight months.
“I was held at gunpoint, he raped me over and over again, lost count,” Noland recounted on the 31st anniversary of her abduction.
“We’re in some type of apartment. It smells very new. He directs me to the bathroom, orders me to take my clothes off, and we step into the shower.
“His demeanour was very aggressive. I did what he told me to do. I was afraid if I didn’t he would kill me. Then he got in the shower and it was like night and day. It was like a fantasy for him. He started bathing me, started washing my hair, trying to touch me gentle. He would hold me for a second, and then all of a sudden become this aggressive monster again. One minute he was calm as a four-year-old child, next thing he was a raging bull.
“I remember that we had a conversation and at one point I asked him why he was doing this to me. He said he was doing this to me because he was getting back at women in general for a really bad breakup with another girl.
“This guy he knew what he was doing, he had me. I could’ve been dead. I could have been lying down in a ditch somewhere. I remember pleading with God, ‘whatever you do, just don’t let him kill me.’”
Police remove a victim’s body from the woods, where she was found.Source:Supplied
Remembering scenes from TV crime shows, Lisa knew the only way to survive was to be smart. Under her blindfold, she caught a glimpse of the colour (red) and numberplate on the car used to transport her to the crime scene. She counted the stairs in Long’s apartment, which, she noted, was located in a wooded area. She placed her fingerprints across the bathroom; the toilet, a mirror, shower curtains. She built his trust.
“And then right after that, he starts to soften up, he guides my hands over his face. Now I’m seeing what he looks like,” she said. “There were pock marks, a small, clean-cut moustache, small ears, short hair, thick eyebrows, kind of stout, but not overweight; a big guy.”
She talked to him “like a four-year-old.” And it worked.
“I had street smarts and I did everything I could to remember every detail of where I was and what happened,” she said.
In the 26 hours Lisa was held captive, she developed a relationship with Long, using reverse psychology to orchestrate her escape. And something truly remarkable happened. He let her go.
“About 3 o’clock in the morning he got me dressed, and he asked me, ‘what am I supposed to do with you?’
“This is how I played on his heart. I said to him, while I’m blindfolded and still tied up, ‘listen, I know you said you’ve done this to other women before because of the broken relationship. It’s unfortunate how we met, you seem like a nice guy. I can take care of you, I’ll be your girlfriend, and I won’t tell anyone how we met.’
“He said, ‘no, no, I can’t keep you, where do you live? I’ll go ahead and drop you off in the area you live in.’”
Lisa was the only victim of Long’s to survive. “I think he took sympathy on me but I don’t know why he didn’t kill me,” she said. “He drove off. I pulled my blindfold down, and the first thing I saw was this gorgeous, beautiful oak tree. That’s the moment I knew my life was about to change for the good. I saw the branches of new life.
“I had wanted to die before and now I wanted to live.”
Bobby Joe Long in a police mugshot.Source:Supplied
In that moment, Lisa knew she’d been given a second chance, and she embraced it. These days, Lisa is a proud sheriff’s deputy at Hillsborough County, not far from where she was abducted. A “protector”, is how she sees it.
“No one’s going to get hurt on my watch. That was my motivation to become a police officer. I’m no longer a victim.”
Long, meanwhile, remains on death row, 30 years later. Lisa helped police locate and arrest the serial killer in November 1984, when he received two death sentences, 34 life sentences and an additional 693 years.
“I want him to see the person I am, how strong I am, that he didn’t damage me,” she said.
“I already know the T-shirt I’m going to wear [to his execution]. It will have his name on the front — Long — and on the back — ‘Overdue.’ Long Overdue.”
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