(RNN) – Lisa was sleeping in bed one morning last year when she woke up around 3 a.m. to find a man, convicted rapist Phillip Skulnec, crouching by her bed.
She'd been out with him earlier as part of a group, but had made clear she wasn't romantically interested. Terrified to suddenly find him in her room, she screamed and scared him off.
Skulnec hadn’t needed to force his way in. He had the keys.
Lisa’s landlords gave them to him.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Marri Properties of Calgary, Alberta, hired Skulnec as a building manager and entrusted him with the keys to dozens of apartments.
He'd befriended Lisa after doing some maintenance work at her apartment, the CBC reported. One night in February 2017, they and some other people went to a bar and then left for home separately. That's when he took took advantage of his access to the keys.
Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to “breaking and entering with the intent to sexually assault his victim” that night.
Lisa, whose real identity was withheld, told the outlet, “I’m sure he was about to get in my bed but I woke up and I screamed so loud.”
She said she was “lucky not to get hurt."
Ten years earlier, Skulnec brutally attacked another woman.
According to The Calgary Herald, he used a machete to chase the victim into his room, then tied her up and held her captive for 5 1/2 hours, raping her and using a bottle of rum to violate her, among other things.
Entering a guilty plea in 2012, he was told by a judge he "acted as a monster," The Calgary Sun reported, and sentenced to nine years in prison. With time served, he got out in July 2015.
While Lisa felt lucky not to get physically attacked the night Skulnec broke into her apartment, she was left with substantial psychological trauma.
"I just broke down and knew immediately that I could never go back to that apartment," she told the CBC. "He should never have had that job."
The outlet reported she and her daughters had to move. She developed anxiety and an ulcer, canceled a trip she'd won to Africa and lost time at work because of the stress.
She also now wakes up every night at 3 a.m.
Getting some kind of restitution has been yet another burden. The CBC reported Marri Properties, who is not believed to have known of Skulnec's conviction when they hired him, won’t compensate her for her trauma. They've instead stonewalled her inquiries and referred her to their insurance company.
The insurance company told her it doesn’t cover anything like her situation.
She also won’t have the comfort of knowing Skulnec's been put away for good.
For this latest conviction, he was sentenced to just one year in jail with another two years of probation.
The CBC reported that during his first prison sentence, he'd been denied parole, found to be too great a risk for reoffending. According to the outlet, the parole board concluded he was "hostile towards women."
Background checks for jobs such as Skulnec's are not required by law in Alberta. Lisa told the CBC she hopes that changes.
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