Published in USA Today Feb. 7, 2020

Victim, Victor.

Tiffany Taylor barely survived a serial killer. Then she helped convict him.

Tiffany Taylor sits in her Jersey City apartment and thinks of the serial killer who wishes her dead. Outside, down the hall, two voices shout. Taylor rises from her puffy blue couch. She crosses the bare white linoleum floor. She tests the doorknob and the deadbolt.

They were locked the last time she checked — 10 minutes ago. They are locked now. Taylor smiles an embarrassed smile.

It’s not only the fear. When the killer attacked her, Taylor was pregnant. He nearly killed her baby. This makes Taylor angry. She is tired of this apartment. Tired of the nightmares. Talking about the serial killer gives her an idea.

Let’s go to his house. The same house where Taylor met him. The house where he grew up. We can drive there. Let’s see it. Now.

“I feel like he still has control over me," Taylor says. “I’m tired of this. I’m tired of hiding.”

Taylor was nearly killed by Khalil Wheeler-Weaver, a serial killer who murdered three women in New Jersey in the summer and fall of 2016. Rather than become his fourth victim, Taylor defied the odds. She escaped and became the star witness at his trial. Her testimony helped convict Wheeler-Weaver of 11 felonies in an Essex County courtroom in December. He faces multiple life sentences. 

Taylor, 37, grew up in a world of violence. She was raised in the Salem Lafayette apartments, a housing project in Jersey City riven by drug deals, assaults and chaos. 

“I had two boyfriends got killed right in front of me," she said. "One I had to wash his brains off the ground. He left it right on the doorstep. I had guns put to my head a few times before, by police and other people.”

It wasn’t easy to tell the good men from the bad. When she was 17, Taylor got a job at Jeepers, a children’s arcade at Jersey Gardens Mall in Elizabeth. Her manager was relentless in his sexual harassment.  

She is friends with pimps and drug dealers. When these men leave jail, Taylor sees them on the streets. She asks about their parents, and shares news about which of their friends are locked up or dead.

“My baby’s father came home, and I got pregnant,” Taylor says. “And then he got locked right back up.”

Together with her mother, Taylor moved at age 18 to Orlando, Florida. She studied music engineering and psychology at Valencia College, but her drive for a career never materialized. After two years, she got pregnant and moved back to New Jersey.

“I wanted to be in gymnastics, or an ice skater, or a singer on TV, or acting,” Taylor said. “But when I got pregnant I pretty much gave up on everything.”

By her mid-20s she had a daughter, a drug habit and a criminal record. Getting jobs proved difficult. She turned to prostitution. Taylor and her family are Jehovah’s Witnesses, so she refused to sleep with married men. When she could steal a man’s money without sleeping with him, she would do it.

One of the men she robbed was Wheeler-Weaver. She visited his house in April 2016 with her best friend, a prostitute who regularly met Wheeler-Weaver for sex. She sat on his back porch, drank beers and smiled for selfies.

Seven months later Taylor was homeless, pregnant again and living in a car with her mother. She subsisted on hustles and cons. Yet even after all the hard things she'd experienced, the coldness Taylor learned on the street did not quell her optimism. 

One man called her three times a week, asking to meet for sex. Even as Taylor planned to rob him, she remained a romantic.  

“Every time he called my phone he would say, ‘I’m your future,’ ” she said. “That sounded scary. Like a threat. But maybe it was nice, you know? Your future could mean a lot of things. Maybe your future means a house and a wife.”

The man used apps to disguise his phone number. In November 2016, Taylor agreed to meet him. What she'd planned as a simple robbery ended in the back seat of a car.

Taylor regained consciousness to find herself getting raped and strangled by Wheeler-Weaver. 

Taylor knows that working as a prostitute, taking drugs and robbing men place her in danger. She has also learned a rare set of skills. 

She learned to trust herself. In extreme situations, she is smart and cool-headed.

“I’m not surprised that something like this happened to me,” she said. “And I’m not surprised I got away.”

That survival instinct helped Taylor escape death. And it persisted at the Ritz Motel, where three Elizabeth police officers accused her of lying about the attack. 

They threatened to arrest Taylor for prostitution. 

"Cases like this are not infrequent," said David Lisak, a retired psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston whose research revolutionized police procedures regarding trauma victims and serial rapists. "There is still this belief that a prostitute, by definition, can't be raped — when, in fact, they are raped more frequently."

Many sexual assault victims never pursue charges against their assailants, especially after police officers treat them as suspects, said Sondra Miller, president and CEO of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center.

"The first assault is painful enough. But telling the story, and not being believed, just compounds the trauma," Miller said. "Survivors lose confidence in the entire system."

Even after the treatment she received by police, Taylor took her story to the Essex County prosecutor.

"It's unbelievably courageous," Miller said of Taylor's actions. 

Taylor believes her anger sets her apart. 

"People keep telling me I'm a hero," she said. "I was just mad. I wanted something to happen to him for what he did to me."

Jurors saw her rage. She hides her terror.

Three weeks before Wheeler-Weaver's trial, Taylor moved into an apartment tower. She found herself in the staircase. When she heard voices, she ran downstairs. She heard voices there, so she ran back up. She was trapped on the stairs for an hour.

During another panic attack, she ran across a six-lane highway.  

“I thought some guy was chasing me,” she said. “When I’m out in public, I don’t want to be out by myself. But I don’t want to be around anybody, either. I live a really paranoid life.”

To soothe her nerves, she sleeps with a Bible under her pillow.

“I’m depressed," she said, "and I always think the worst of everything.”

Taylor’s unborn daughter nearly died from Wheeler-Weaver’s chokehold. Five months after the attack, she was born, healthy. This April, she turns 3. 

When strangers visit the apartment, the toddler wraps her arms around her mother’s leg. Soon she is racing around, playing peek-a-boo and squealing with excitement.

Taylor smiles. When her daughter leaves the room, Taylor reveals what she’s thinking.

“After what he did to me,” she said, “I’m scared for both of my daughters.”

An hour later, Taylor arrived at the split-level house in Orange. Wheeler-Weaver is in jail in Newark, awaiting his sentence. But his mother and stepfather still live in the house, which is bordered by a vinyl fence beside an alley.

Taylor had no interest in meeting his parents. She didn’t want to scare them. She just wanted to see.

Climbing from the car, Taylor walked the alley. She found a hole in the fence. She looked inside and saw the back porch. She thought of the person she used to be. How it felt to dress nicely, to do her makeup and fix her hair. To smile for pictures. What it was like to trust.

"I feel like he still won," she said, "because I’m not the same person I used to be.”