Floyd witness trapped in LV limbo

Stacy J. Willis

Sunday, Feb. 13, 2000 | 8:38 a.m.

He's in her head now. In her sleep. There are nightmares. Most of the time, she sees his eyes.

"The way he looked at me," says Traci Carter of her alleged rapist, Zane Floyd. She shuts her eyes and shakes her head no.

Carter is visibly pregnant in her blue jail uniform. She's talking through dirty Plexiglas -- the jail's visiting booth telephones are broken.

She puts her hands on her swollen belly and changes the subject. "I think I'm small for seven months."

The baby isn't his. Despite widespread speculation to the contrary, she says it's her ex-boyfriend's child.

"I just know," she says.

Carter is the key witness against Zane Floyd, who awaits a March trial for a June supermarket shooting in Las Vegas that killed four people. Before the massacre, Floyd allegedly raped and assaulted Carter, an outcall entertainer, in his home.

But it was Carter who became the subject of a massive manhunt when investigators lost contact with her last fall. Now, the victim/witness sits in jail.

She was arrested three weeks ago after failing to keep up her weekly phone calls to authorities. She was held on $50,000 bail until a judge last week ruled that she may be sent to a halfway house -- she is expected to be moved this week.

Carter's testimony at Floyd's trial will speak to motive. Or perhaps to premeditation. Or perhaps it will be the testimony that puts him on death row.

Floyd, a frustrated ex-U.S. Marine who had recently been fired from his job as a security guard, walked into the Albertson's grocery store on Sahara Avenue and Valley View Boulevard early one morning in June and opened fire with a shotgun, killing four employees in a bloodbath that rocked the city. He was arrested at the scene, weapon in hand.

In the wee hours before his shooting spree, Floyd, 23, called Love Bound outcall service and ordered an entertainer.

Carter, then 20 years old, was sent to his duplex around 4 a.m. As usual, her boyfriend drove her to the address and dropped her off. She was welcomed by a hulking man with a shaved head, a goatee and a shotgun.

Inside the tiny duplex -- the adjoining half of which was occupied by his sleeping parents -- she says Floyd brutalized her for an hour, living out what he called "a sick little fantasy." The latter part of his fantasy including killing people. Carter turned 21 last month. She says, "I do wonder why this has happened to me. But life prepares you to handle things. I've got to look at everything positively. I'm just trying to stay positive."

Finding Vegas

Traci Rose Carter, who asked that her photograph not be used, knows she has been caught in Vegas' web. She is a pretty girl with nowhere else to go, no job skills and dangerous doses of guts and naivete.

She was 9 when her mother died. She never knew her father. She was raised by her grandmother in Portland, Ore.

At 18, Carter was busted for possession of marijuana -- "I was hanging with the wrong people," she says through the window at the Clark County Detention Center, as her attorney monitors the conversation. A year later, she and a girlfriend decided to pack up a few belongings and head for Las Vegas -- to be dancers.

They got a room at Lady Luck hotel-casino; started topless dancing at Crazy Horse Too and Cheetah's nightclubs, and then were able to move to the more spacious Budget Suites.

"I was making like $200 or $300 a night," she says. Her girlfriend wasn't having as much luck and returned to Portland. Carter stayed.

"Everything was going good until I lost my work card," she recalls.

Metro Police revoked her work card because of her drug conviction in Oregon, she says. Without it, she couldn't dance and didn't have any money. So a friend hooked her up with an outcall service.

"It was a last resort. That's when everything started to go downhill." Outcall services send girls to strip in private settings for a flat fee. Entertainers may earn tips for their services. Police maintain the services are fronts for prostitution. "It was scary. It sounds OK until you go, until you see the people. I didn't want to do it. I'm lucky that I have a pretty face and I'm young. I would talk my way out of it a lot," she says. Her attorney stops her from elaborating.

"I'd go and get a couple hundred (dollars) when I needed some money, but I didn't want to be known as that, as an outcall girl," she says.

"But Vegas has a way of trapping you in a lifestyle."

When her attorney asks for a list of names of people who should be allowed to visit her while she is in custody -- a list of close friends -- she enthusiastically gives him four names.

"But I don't know their last names," she says.

Traumatized

She had been making outcall visits sporadically for about six months before the night of June 2, 1999.

Carter has never told anyone -- not even her attorney -- the entire story of what occurred in Floyd's home that night. Not yet.

After the assault was over, she says, she "couldn't call her boyfriend to pick (her) up.

"I just ran. It's deep. I can't get into that," she says.

She told the outcall manager that she had been attacked, but she didn't want to get the police involved.

"After I got home, I just wanted to be alone. I found out what he did (at the grocery store), and it was like 'Oh, my god,' but I knew (the police) had him, and I thought what he did to me was one thing and what he did (at the grocery store) was another, so I thought they didn't need me.

"I just wanted to be all by myself."

A few days later, her girlfriends persuaded her to go the hospital for an examination; then she returned home to an eastside house where she and another young woman live together.

"When I try to talk about this I get anger instead of sorrow. I start getting really angry. And then it gets emotional, and I shut off. I keep quiet."

To date, she has had no counseling. "I would really like to speak to someone about it. I need some help."

Healing

After the district attorney's office made contact with her and explained that her testimony would be necessary, she was asked to call an investigator every week throughout the fall to assure him that she was still in Las Vegas and would be available to testify at the March trial.

Carter says she never had any intention of missing the trial.

"But I needed to go on living. I needed to put it behind me and go on. I put up a wall, shut down and tried to forget about it.

"But it wasn't easy to forget when I had to make the calls to the investigator every week. It was a weight on my shoulders.

"Sometimes I put it all out of my head, and I forgot to make the calls," she said.

In October, she found out she was pregnant. "It took me by surprise. I felt kind of bad that I didn't know earlier. At first I thought 'Oh, my God, I don't need any more weight on my shoulders.' It was too late to get rid of it, but I didn't know if I would have it anyway. Basically, I know that everything happens for a reason," Carter says. In November, she decided to leave Las Vegas temporarily -- to clear her head, to blow off some steam.

She says she and a girlfriend took off to the Bahamas without telling authorities.

"It wasn't that I was running. I didn't think it was a big deal," she says. "I was definitely going to come back ...

"I spent a month and a half in the Bahamas. It was great. I would've stayed longer, but then I heard that I was on the news in Vegas, that they were looking for me. So I came back. And then I realized it was a big deal."

Her attorney, Chip Siegel, says the district attorney's office wants a tight grip on her because of the high-profile nature of the Floyd case. Her testimony will be "a nice touch to have in a death penalty case," he says.

But, he says, when Carter was arrested on a material-witness warrant on Jan. 23, it put her in the unusual position of being both a victim and an inmate.

"The last place I wanted to be was in jail. I don't understand why all this is happening," she says. Carter has had no prenatal care in the Clark County Detention Center; in fact, she has seen a doctor only once during her entire pregnancy. Siegel is checking out the halfway house to be certain she will have such care there before he transfers her. "Jail is gross," Carter says. "The walls are nasty. There's nothing good about it. People don't care about you in here. People are depressed. The guards think you are a second-class citizen ... "I don't want to be in jail and have my reputation be this -- someone in jail, or a call girl. This isn't me. When my bunkies (cellmates) ask me what I'm in for I say 'stupid stuff.'

"But once someone put it together with news stories and knew who I was. She came and gave me a big hug and said, 'It's going to be OK,' and it felt good.

"It felt good to know someone cares," Carter says.

Looking ahead

She dreads sitting in the same courtroom as Floyd.

"I'm not going to look at his eyes. Hopefully not," she says.

In the last three weeks, she says, she has telephoned her grandmother in Portland six or seven times. "She supports me. My grandmother is my strength. She stands by me. She supports me no matter what else happens.

"She says basically every day makes you stronger. God only gives us as much as we can handle. I believe that," Carter says.

She wants to be a mother, but she doesn't yet know how she will support her child.

"I may go back to Portland. I want to go to school," she says. "Maybe I'll run a business someday. I've always wanted to get into real estate. I don't know. What matters is getting out of here.

"I just want to get to my grandmother," she says, and then rubs her belly and pauses.

"But I would probably dance a little again. I don't know. I'm still more of a tourist in Vegas, not permanent. I think I've had enough of it.

"But can you ever walk away from Vegas? I don't know."

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