Author: TomsWrite

One hour before a hitman attacked her with a claw hammer, Susan Kuhnhausen sat in a hair salon reading a poem in Oprah magazine.

“I will not die an unlived life,” it began. “I will not live in fear.”

She had no idea how prophetic those words would become.

On the evening of September 6, 2006, the 51-year-old emergency room nurse finished her shift at Providence Portland Medical Center and stopped at Perfect Look salon on East Burnside Street. She mentioned to her stylist that she was going through a tough divorce—her husband Mike had finally moved out after nearly 18 years of marriage.

An hour later, Susan drove home to her blue Cape Cod in southeast Portland’s Montavilla neighborhood. In the mudroom, she found a note from Mike by the microwave.

“Sue, haven’t been sleeping. Had to get away—Went to the beach.”

She walked toward her bedroom. It was strangely dark. Had she forgotten to open the curtains that morning?

Then a man stepped out from behind the door.

He was 59 years old, with long hair tucked into a tan baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. He wore yellow rubber gloves. In his hands was a red and black claw hammer.

He swung.

The first blow caught Susan on the left temple. For most people, the sight of an intruder with a weapon would have meant one thing: run.

But Susan wasn’t most people.

For nearly 30 years, she had worked in the emergency room. She had helped crack open patients’ chests to perform heart massages. She had disarmed violent, injured men. She had administered IVs to people thrashing from drug withdrawal. And every nurse at Providence trained regularly in self-defense—learning how to slip out of headlocks, how to take someone down, how to survive.

As the man came at her, Susan did something counterintuitive. Instead of retreating, she rushed toward him. She knew from training that a hammer swing has less force at close range. She slammed her body against his, pushing him against the wall.

He spoke the only words she would hear him say that night.

“You’re strong.”

In that moment, Susan knew. This was no burglar. He hadn’t asked where her money was. He hadn’t asked about a safe. He was there to kill her.

“It became quickly clear that his intent was murder,” she later said. “And I fought.”

Susan tackled him. She wrestled the hammer away. She hit him in the head—three times, maybe four—with the claw end. Her father had been a carpenter. He always told her a hammer could be used for self-defense. The claw end worked best.

But the man grabbed the hammer back. Susan reached for his throat and squeezed. His face turned red, then purple, then a darker purple with a blue tinge.

“WHO SENT YOU HERE?” she screamed.

He said nothing.

She let go, thinking he was done. She tried to run. But as she fled into the hallway, he caught her from behind. He spun her around and punched her in the face, splitting her lip. She fell to the floor.

He stood over her with the hammer raised.

“I looked at the floor,” Susan remembered, “and I thought, I’m going to die today.”

She doesn’t know how she did what came next. Somehow, she pulled him down to the floor with her. She bit him—on the arm, on the thigh—hoping that if he killed her, at least her teeth marks would link him to her death.

Then she threw her leg over his body, climbed on top of him, and hooked her left arm around his neck.

“TELL ME WHO SENT YOU HERE AND I WILL CALL YOU A FUCKING AMBULANCE!” she yelled in his face.

He growled at her.

Susan leaned forward and squeezed harder. His face changed color again. He tried to flip her, but her years of training held. She pressed down until he stopped moving.

The fight had lasted approximately 15 minutes.

Susan grabbed the hammer and ran to her neighbor’s house. The neighbor called 911.

“We have an intruder in the house next door. The intruder was in the bedroom with a hammer. The woman who lives there thinks she may have strangled him. He was down when she left.”

“Does she need an ambulance?”

“No, she’s a nurse. She says call an ambulance for the guy. He may be dead.”

Police arrived to find the intruder dead in the hallway. His name was Edward Dalton Haffey. He had a long criminal record—including a 1994 conviction for arranging the murder of his ex-girlfriend, for which he served nine years in prison.

At first, investigators thought Haffey was a burglar who had picked the wrong house. But Susan knew better. She had suspected from the moment he said “You’re strong” that someone had sent him.

In Haffey’s backpack, police found a day planner. On the week of September 4, two days before the attack, someone had written: “Call Mike. Get letter.”

Inside a folder was a phone number. It belonged to Mike Kuhnhausen.

Further investigation revealed that Mike had hired Haffey—who once worked as a custodian at an adult video store Mike managed—for $50,000 to kill Susan. Mike had wanted her dead so he could inherit their $300,000 house. He knew she had removed him from her life insurance policy, but he figured the house was still worth the gamble.

On the day of the attack, Mike had driven to the Oregon coast and checked into the Lincoln City Inn, establishing an alibi. The day after learning Susan had survived, he bought a .357 Magnum revolver at a pawn shop. Then he wrote a suicide note: “All I ever wanted was to be loved and every time I had it—I fucked it up.”

Police arrested him on September 13. He denied everything at first.

But the evidence was overwhelming. Haffey wasn’t the first person Mike had approached about killing Susan. He had solicited three others before finding a man desperate enough to say yes.

In August 2007, Mike pleaded guilty to soliciting aggravated murder. At his sentencing hearing, Susan was allowed to address him directly. She held up photographs of her own bloodied face.

“You told police that you found out I was okay,” she said. “Do I look okay?”

Then she delivered a message she had prepared.

“You were willing for me to share your small, miserable life until death we did part—the sooner the better, as it turned out.”

She paused.

I am damaged by what you have done to me. I am damaged. But I am not destroyed.”

Mike was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Susan sued him for $1 million in civil court—not because she needed the money, but because she wanted to make sure he couldn’t afford to hire another hitman when he got out. The jury awarded her $1,053,783.

She never had to worry. In June 2014, three months before his scheduled release, Mike Kuhnhausen died of cancer in prison.

Susan had already changed her name to Susan Walters. She moved to a new house. She practiced at the shooting range. She lived with what she called “two life sentences”—the trauma of knowing her husband had tried to have her killed, and the weight of having taken another man’s life.

“I don’t know that you ever get over having killed another human being,” she said. “I’ve always said I don’t take any pride in what I did. But I also feel no shame.”

Her boss at the hospital offered her a different way to see it.

“They are not calling you a hero because you killed a man,” she told Susan. “They are calling you a hero because they want to believe that, given the same circumstances, they could do what you did.”

Today, Susan Walters is a victim advocate in Portland. She helped create Case Companion, a free website that allows crime victims to track their offenders’ court dates, sentencing, and release information. She has worked with WomenStrength and GirlStrength programs, teaching others what she learned the hard way.

“If you can’t run and you can’t hide,” she says, “you have to fight.”

“I didn’t choose my attacker’s death for him. I chose my life.

In August 2021, a woman stood on an Olympic podium in Tokyo with tears in her eyes and a silver medal hanging around her neck.

For most athletes, that moment would be the greatest achievement of their lives.

For Maria Andrejczyk, it was only the beginning of a much bigger story.

Maria was born in Poland and dedicated her life to athletics, specializing in the javelin throw. Like countless Olympic athletes, she spent years training through pain, exhaustion, injuries, and disappointment. Every meter thrown was earned through sacrifice.

At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, she came heartbreakingly close to winning a medal. Maria finished fourth, missing the podium by just two centimeters.

Two centimeters.

The distance was so small that it haunted her. Years of preparation had ended with no medal and no place on the podium.

Then life became even harder.

Only months after the Rio Olympics, doctors discovered a bone cancer tumor in her shoulder. It was devastating news.

The shoulder affected by cancer was the same shoulder she used to throw a javelin.

The same shoulder that carried her dreams.

Suddenly, her athletic career was no longer the biggest concern. Survival was.

Maria underwent treatment, surgery, and a difficult recovery. There were moments when nobody knew if she would ever compete again. Many athletes would have accepted retirement and focused on simply staying healthy.

But Maria refused to quit.

She fought through the pain. She fought through the uncertainty. She fought through every setback placed in front of her.

Years later, she returned to the Olympic stage.

At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Maria delivered the performance of her life. Her throw traveled 64.61 meters, earning her the silver medal.

It was more than a medal.

It was proof that she had survived cancer.

Proof that she had overcome disappointment.

Proof that she had come back stronger than anyone expected.

For most people, such a medal would become a treasured possession for life.

Maria kept it for only three months.

In November 2021, she came across the story of an eight-month-old Polish baby named Milosz Malysa.

The child was suffering from a severe heart defect and desperately needed life-saving surgery. The procedure was extremely expensive, and despite the efforts of his family and supporters, they still lacked a large portion of the money needed.

Time was running out.

Without the surgery, the baby’s future was uncertain.

Maria looked at the fundraising campaign and felt something inside her heart.

Then she looked at her Olympic silver medal.

The symbol of everything she had fought for.

The reward for years of sacrifice.

The proof of her greatest athletic achievement.

And she made an extraordinary decision.

Maria announced publicly that she would auction her Olympic silver medal to help save the baby’s life.

Many people were shocked.

Olympic medals are not ordinary objects. They represent decades of dedication, discipline, heartbreak, and triumph.

Athletes dream about them their entire lives.

Yet Maria was willing to give hers away for a child she had never met.

The story spread rapidly across Poland.

People were moved by her generosity.

The auction attracted enormous attention, and soon bids began to rise.

Eventually, the winning offer came from Zabka, one of Poland’s largest convenience store chains.

The company paid approximately 200,000 zloty, providing the exact amount still needed for Milosz’s surgery.

The fundraising goal was finally complete.

The child would receive treatment.

His life had been given another chance.

But the story was not over.

After purchasing the medal, Zabka made an announcement that stunned everyone.

The company revealed that while they had paid the full amount, they had no intention of keeping the medal.

Instead, they would return it to Maria.

They explained that her act of kindness had inspired the entire country and that the medal belonged with the woman who had earned it.

The money would still go to save the child.

The medal would still remain with Maria.

For a moment, it seemed almost unbelievable.

By giving away her greatest achievement, she had somehow managed to keep it.

Not because she demanded it.

Not because she expected it.

But because her selflessness inspired others to respond with generosity of their own.

Soon afterward, Milosz underwent successful surgery.

Photos later showed a smiling child recovering and growing stronger.

A life had been saved.

Maria’s story spread around the world.

People celebrated her not only as an athlete but as a person whose compassion mattered more than any sporting result.

Yet Maria remained humble.

She insisted she was not a hero.

She simply believed that helping someone in need was more important than holding onto a piece of silver.

But what made her decision remarkable was exactly what she was willing to sacrifice.

The medal represented years of work.

It represented surviving cancer.

It represented proving doubters wrong.

It represented one of the proudest moments of her life.

And she was prepared to give it all away for someone else’s future.

That is what made the gesture unforgettable.

Maria eventually returned to training and competition, continuing to pursue excellence in athletics.

Her silver medal sits with her today, returned by the company that recognized its true value.

But the medal means something different now.

It is no longer simply a symbol of sporting success.

It is a reminder of compassion.

A reminder that the greatest victories are not always measured in distance, points, or trophies.

Sometimes they are measured in lives changed.

And the world was reminded that true greatness is not defined by what we achieve for ourselves.

It is defined by what we are willing to give for others.

Maria Andrejczyk threw a javelin 64.61 meters and became an Olympic silver medalist.

Then she showed the world that the most powerful thing she possessed was never the medal around her neck.

It was the heart inside her chest.

His name was Donald Knuth. And in January 1990, he did something that stunned the academic world.

He got rid of his email address.

Not as a protest. Not as a statement. As a calculation.

Knuth had been one of the most important figures in computer science since 1962, when he began working on what would become The Art of Computer Programming — a multi-volume masterwork that didn’t just teach algorithms, it defined how they should be analyzed, measured, and written. It became one of the most influential technical works of the 20th century. American Scientist named it among the books that shaped a century of science.

He’d had email since 1975. Fifteen years of it. And he’d watched what it did to thought.

So on January 1, 1990, he walked away.

His explanation was precise — the way everything he did was precise:

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

On top of things. On the bottom of things.

In nine words, he described the entire tension of modern intellectual life.

Knuth understood something most people haven’t named yet: there are two fundamentally different relationships to time and attention. One requires breadth — staying current, staying connected, responding fast. The other requires depth — going further down into a problem than anyone has gone before, and staying there long enough to find something true.

You cannot do both simultaneously. The tools that serve one destroy the other.

So he chose.

If someone needed to reach him, they sent a physical letter. He read them. He batched his replies — roughly one day every six months. Slowly. Thoroughly. On his terms.

The cost was real. He became less reachable in a world moving toward instant access. Students had to wait. Colleagues adapted. He accepted the friction completely.

The output tells you why.

In 1977, Knuth received the galley proofs for the second edition of his book. The publisher had switched to a new digital typesetting system. When Knuth opened the package and saw the pages, he wrote one line in his diary: “They look awful… I decide I have to solve the problem myself.”

So he did.

He spent the next several years building TeX from scratch — a typesetting system of such precision that it became the global standard for scientific and mathematical publishing. Today, TeX produces the majority of the world’s physics and mathematics literature. An entire domain of human knowledge is formatted by a tool one man built because a book looked wrong.

That’s who Knuth was. Not someone who complained about problems. Someone who sat down and solved them completely.

And the precision didn’t stop there.

In the preface of every book he published, Knuth offered a standing reward: $2.56 to the first person who found any error — technical, typographical, or historical. He called it “one hexadecimal dollar,” because 256 cents is exactly 100 in base sixteen. A programmer’s joke with a mathematician’s rigor behind it.

He wrote over 2,000 of those checks. The total value exceeded $20,000.

Almost none of them were cashed.

People framed them instead. Because a check from Donald Knuth, for finding a mistake Donald Knuth had missed, was worth more on a wall than in a bank.

That is what a standard looks like when it’s lived rather than stated.

To most people who’ve heard his name, Knuth is the academic who wrote the definitive books on algorithms — a figure from computer science’s past, a footnote in a textbook.

But behind that image is a man who made a single, clear-eyed decision: that the kind of work worth doing requires the kind of attention the modern world is specifically designed to prevent.

He didn’t complain about the noise.

He cut the wire.

He went deep. He stayed there. And from that depth, he reshaped how an entire field thinks.

There is a version of success that requires you to be everywhere, always available, always responding. Knuth rejected it completely — and built something that outlasted everyone who chose the other way.

He simply decided that some work is too important to be interrupted.

Then he proved it.

 

“The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost, Poet (1874 – 1963)