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Rebecca Mills missed the first phone call from the Utah State Board of Pardons and Parole, telling her that her attacker would never be set free.
Fifteen years after Mills was raped by former Ogden resident Jason Brett Higgins, the 31-year-old woman was busy Tuesday with school and work, fulfilling dreams that once had turned into nightmares.
"Before this happened I had a chance in life," she said. "I really did. And it just ate at me and ate at me and ate me. I just couldn't get control."
But in recent years — and now with the Board's decision that the 38-year-old Higgins will serve natural life for the rape of eight women and girls in Weber County — Mills said she is ready to again take control.
She was afraid to face Higgins at his parole hearing last month. She didn't want to remember being attacked a week after her 16th birthday. She didn't want to hear his voice.
"He gave me a life sentence," she said at the hearing, and she asked the parole board to give Higgins the same.
When she finally heard the board's decision, she cried.
"It's like I got my life back," she told The Tribune on Tuesday. "I went there and I took my life back from him."
When the serial rapist was sentenced in February 1998 to a minimum of 30 years in prison, the judge called him "a monster rising from a black hole" to prey on the innocent.
In all, there were eight victims, ranging in age from 14 to 52. The rapes plagued northern Utah from October 1996 until February 1997. Higgins attacked almost all of them from behind, including a teen walking home from a pep rally and a woman walking alone through a cemetery.
The attack in the cemetery ultimately led to his arrest. An Ogden police officer noticed Higgins' car parked askew, with expired registration. After the attack was reported, the plate pointed back to him.
In a decision handed down Monday, the board listed the "extreme cruelty or depravity" and the extent of the injuries his victims suffered among the factors against Higgins' chances to be paroled.
Mills graduated a year early from high school, about the time Higgins was sentenced. Eventually she turned to drugs to cope with the emotional pain, she said.
"I planned on going to school before I was ever attacked. I had scholarships," she said.
Mills has been sober for more than two years now. She's studying to be a nurse.
"I'm kind of fulfilling all of my dreams I had before," she said. "He stole my younger years. I kind of feel like I'm 16 years old again, which is pretty cool."