A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Before tucking in, Marie visited for a few minutes with her upstairs neighbor, Nattlie, a fellow eighteen-year-old in Project Ladder. Nattlie lived directly above Marie in their three-story building, where each apartment was accessible from the outside. By the time Marie went back downstairs, it was after nine o’clock. She walked inside, locked her front door, and settled in for the night.

  Her phone rang at 9:49 p.m. It was Jordan. (In days to come he would check his call history to provide police with the precise time.) Marie and Jordan talked for about fifteen minutes. Afterward, Marie strummed one of her guitars for a bit before getting into bed.

  At 12:30 a.m., Jordan called again. This time, the two stayed on the phone for hours. It was now Monday, August 11, and Marie and Jordan talked until four thirty, the call ending only when the battery on Jordan’s phone died.

  At 4:58 a.m., Jordan called again.

  Marie and Jordan talked until a quarter of six.

  Then Marie went to sleep.

  4

  A VIOLENT ALCHEMY

  August 10, 2010

  * * *

  Westminster, Colorado

  Early one morning in August, an older woman sat hunched on a bed in Room 24 of the emergency ward of St. Anthony North in suburban Denver. She was eating yogurt and sipping water from a clear plastic bottle. Her hair was dyed red, the color fading. She wore a white, long-sleeved hoodie with a rainbow splashed across its front. Her thin legs stuck out from a pair of blue shorts.

  At 8:04 a.m. there was a knock, and a woman with long blond hair and wide blue eyes entered the room. She wore a blue polo shirt and khaki pants with a police badge resting on her hip. She glanced at the woman on the bed. She thought the older woman looked almost like a lost child, her eyes red, her cheeks streaked. She knelt and introduced herself. Her name was Detective Edna Hendershot. “I know that something terrible has happened to you,” she told the woman. “I’m here to find out about it.”

  Sarah had already told her story to the neighbors she did not know, standing in the cool air outside her apartment in the light of early morning. She had already told the young officer who drove her to the hospital in his squad car. She had already told the other woman sitting quietly with her in the hospital room, a victim’s advocate the police had assigned to her for support.

  She summoned herself. She would tell her story again.

  Sarah had moved into a new apartment at the beginning of the month. After days of sorting and storing, of figuring where to put the couch and how to decorate her bedroom, of unpacking boxes of clothes and shoes and kitchen utensils, she decided to rest. She spent Monday morning dozing by the pool. She walked a trail that circled the apartment buildings. That evening, she had read her Bible in her apartment. At around midnight, she changed into her nightgown and fell asleep to the sound of an oscillating fan.

  At around three thirty, she was startled awake. A heavy weight pressed into her back, pushing her hard into the bed. It was a man, straddling her with his legs. He had pinned her arms to her side. She cried out, a sound that seemed to die in her throat. “Just be quiet,” the man said. “I won’t hurt you if you do everything I say. But I do have a gun and can use it if I have to.”

  The man wore a white T-shirt and sweatpants, Sarah told Hendershot. A black mask covered his face. He bound her hands behind her and stripped off her underwear. He ordered her onto the bed. He instructed her to pose. He took pictures with a camera. If she didn’t do it right, he would correct her. “If you don’t do what I say, then these pictures are going to be all over the Internet. Everyone will see them,” he told her.

  For three hours, he forced Sarah to submit. He would rape her, then rest. Take pictures, then rest. Sarah called them “sessions.” She could remember nine of them. She would tell him that he was hurting her. “Just relax,” he’d say. At one point, Sarah told Hendershot, she pleaded with the rapist to stop.

  “I’m not a bad person,” she told him.

  “No, you’re not a bad person,” he answered. “But you left your window open.”

  When he finished with her, the dawn light was creeping into her jumbled apartment. He set to work eradicating evidence. He cleaned Sarah’s body with moist towelettes. He ordered her to brush her teeth and her tongue. He had scooped up some of her bedding. “I’m not leaving any evidence here for the police to find, so I’ll have to take some things with me,” he told her.

  He ordered Sarah into the bathroom. He told her to wash for twenty minutes. Sarah wanted to know when the time was up. She asked him to get her a timer.

  Where is it? he asked.

  There, on the kitchen counter, she told him. It was a white Sunbeam.

  He cranked the dial to twenty minutes and placed it on the counter by the bathroom sink. Then he closed the door and left.

  She stood in the shower, the water streaming down her body. She listened to each of the 1,200 seconds tick off, the timer whirring like a cicada in the summer. When it rang at last, she stepped from the shower. She dried herself off. And she began to catalog the damage.

  The rapist had stolen a green satin pillow from the bed—the one given to her by her mother as a keepsake.

  He had taken $200 from a safe beneath her bed.

  He had stolen a camera.

  He had changed her life forever.

  It was not an easy story to tell. Sarah sobbed throughout the interview. The advocate comforted her. Hendershot comforted her. After thirty minutes, Hendershot decided Sarah had had enough. As she stood, Hendershot told Sarah that a nurse was going to examine her. Perhaps, she said, the rapist had not succeeded in covering his tracks. Perhaps some of his DNA remained inside her.

  “I can only hope,” Sarah replied.

  —

  Driving to Sarah’s apartment complex, Hendershot ticked off the tasks in her head. Sixteen years of police work had burned a crime scene checklist into her. She needed patrol officers to canvass neighbors and search dumpsters. She needed a criminalist to search the apartment and the grounds. She needed a crime analyst to start pulling records on everyone who had access to Sarah’s apartment.

  All hands on deck, she thought to herself.

  Hendershot was raised in the sprawling middle-class suburbs northwest of Denver. She spent her childhood in Arvada, a close-in suburb of a hundred thousand. Her mother taught music at local elementary schools and played piano and organ for the Presbyterian church. Her father worked in Colorado’s state assembly building in Denver and got involved in local politics. She was the middle kid, sandwiched between an older and younger brother.

  Her parents did their best to make her ladylike. Her mother enrolled her in ballet classes and tried to teach her piano. The pair made regular trips to an arts center just blocks from home. None of it stuck.

  “I would go into the living room where the piano was, and my nice mom would be sitting there at the piano wanting me to play the piano. I would just be horrible to her. I know I was really mean about it, but I hated it. I wanted to be outside, running around and playing with my friends. I didn’t want to play the dumb piano.”

  Hendershot was the classic tomboy. She loved sports. She was a swimmer. She excelled at soccer. At a time when girls’ athletics was just taking off, Hendershot was already traveling across Colorado on competitive club teams. She competed in high school as starting goalie for Arvada High.

  Hendershot could never say exactly what drew her to police work. She didn’t have close family who were cops or criminals—the common motivators for many in law enforcement. It was something that was meant to be. “I don’t have a storybook answer,” she’d tell people. “I just always knew that it was what I was supposed to do.”

  Her career path wasn’t straight. After graduating from high school in 1988, she studied criminal justice at two colleges. But money was tight, so she started working and going to school part-time. She manned the register at a Wendy’s. She bussed tables and worked as a waitress for $2.50 an hour and tips at a local
Mexican restaurant.

  But she was determined to become a cop. In 1990, she got a job as a records clerk at the Adams County sheriff’s office, reviewing inmate files from the local jail. A year later, she quit that job to start handling emergency calls as a 911 dispatcher for the Arvada Police Department. She worked nights and took classes during the day, paying her own way through police academy. When she graduated, she didn’t stray from home. Westminster, the town next to Arvada, hired her as a patrol officer. She was sworn in on September 19, 1994.

  Westminster often gets called a bedroom community of Denver. And in some ways it is, a mostly middle-class, mostly white town of a hundred thousand. Knots of parents cluster each weekend on the sidelines of kids’ soccer matches. Big-box stores bunch together at major intersections. Ranch-style houses and apartment complexes sprawl in every direction around the Denver–Boulder Turnpike, which serves as the city’s spine. But like many inner suburbs, Westminster defies saccharine characterization. Gangs and drugs plague the neighborhoods that bump against Denver. There was plenty of crime for a young cop who wanted to make a mark.

  After five years on the street, Hendershot beat out competitors for a spot on the West Metro Drug Task Force. The elite unit drew cops from around the region to crack down on narcotics and gangs. She was the only woman on the squad. The other cops took to calling her “Ed.”

  Hendershot learned that her gender could be a kind of superpower. Both colleagues and criminals found her looks striking. When her supervisors were stumped on how to get close to a drug dealer, she’d volunteer for the job. “This sounds arrogant, but they would say, ‘Who can get to this guy?’ I’d say, ‘I can probably do it.’ It’s disgusting what you can get with a hair flip and a giggle.”

  She was good at working undercover. She could be the dumb blonde. Or the hot biker chick. Or the stressed-out mother in the middle of a custody dispute. When suspects asked her to do a line, or to take off her clothes, she had an excuse. “I’ll go home, and I’ll get beat up,” she’d say. Or “I’ve got court tomorrow with social services. I can’t be high.” Once, she worked a case involving a crooked deputy who was smuggling drugs and weapons to gang members in jail. Hendershot worked her way into the suspect’s confidence by befriending a gang member, who made introductions. After the dirty cop was arrested, Hendershot showed up on scene. The gang member—hardened, streetwise—was there, too, in handcuffs. He refused to believe that Hendershot was really a cop. “I took a lot of pride in that,” she says. “I was able to be so believable that he bought it.”

  Hendershot racked up praise. She was selected to serve as a field training officer, a position of trust where she mentored young officers. For twelve years straight, when Hendershot’s bosses filled out her performance evaluation, they gave her the highest possible mark for teamwork: “exceptional.”

  By 2007, things were changing in Hendershot’s personal life. She got married again—her first marriage had ended in divorce years before. Her new husband was Mike Hendershot, who had been a police sergeant in Golden and later became a commander at another agency in the Denver suburbs. He proposed to her under the Eiffel Tower. They had found a house big enough for their dog and two cats and moved in together.

  Hendershot decided to move out of undercover work—she had spent enough time on the squad that criminals might start to recognize her. But she was nervous about a new assignment. She wondered whether she’d ever be as good at anything else. Okay, great, now what? she thought to herself. I peaked before I’m forty. Yay!

  Her new post was in the Crimes Against Persons division. Here, suddenly, was a new world. Her victims were people who had been injured, raped, or killed. When she filled out paperwork as a narcotics cop, the victim was the “State of Colorado” or the “United States of America.” Now, she wrote down someone’s name. Someone with whom she had sat and talked, someone whose pain she had seen firsthand, someone whose death had sent a family reeling.

  It was a little overwhelming.

  “I literally had a physical reaction to that. Holy shit. This is a big deal. They are one hundred percent depending on you. It’s all you.”

  —

  After finishing the interview at the hospital, Hendershot drove to Sarah’s apartment on the city’s west side. It was 10:00 a.m., already hot. The buildings in the apartment complex were three stories tall, with orange panels and brick facades. They shared a pool, a clubhouse, and a trail. The renters were blue collar: health aides, cable installers, fast-food workers.

  Outside the apartment, Hendershot met Officer Chris Pyler, who had spent the morning tracking down witnesses. He had spoken with the neighbors who called the police after Sarah banged on their door for help. They, too, were new to the complex. They had listened to Sarah recount the details of the rape. The wife had trouble believing all of them.

  For instance, Sarah told the neighbors that the rapist had made her wash her hair. But Sarah’s hair had been dry. The wife also thought Sarah made odd remarks. Sarah had told them, “Oh, you just moved in here. This is the last thing you need.” The wife didn’t think that Sarah was lying, necessarily. She just thought she was behaving strangely.

  It’s not what I would have done, the wife told Pyler.

  The woman’s skepticism was not surprising. When it came to rape, victims frequently encountered doubt—from police, yes, but also from family and friends. There was a sense both in police departments and among the general public that not all reports of rape were true. The problem was, no one knew just how many. Criminologists had spent decades trying to determine how many women lie when they report being raped. The answers were all over the map. A police surgeon in England concluded in a 2006 report that 90 percent of rape allegations were false—a widely criticized figure based on a tiny sample of eighteen cases. The feminist Susan Brownmiller, whose groundbreaking work Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape influenced a generation of activists, pegged the number at 2 percent—though that figure, too, had been sharply questioned.

  Researchers who specialized in sexual assault had settled on a range—somewhere between 2 percent and 8 percent of rape allegations were false. But this range was tied to a specific definition: it only counted those rape allegations where police could prove a woman had knowingly lied. In reality, that didn’t happen very often. Cops simply dropped cases where they had doubts, conducting no further investigation. The true percentage of false reports proved elusive—obscured by advocacy, different definitions of sexual assault, and the near impossibility of extracting concrete data from a crime shrouded in shame and secrecy.

  For her own work, Hendershot needed what she called “definitive” evidence before dismissing a sexual assault allegation as false. There was this guy who had come to an emergency room with a mutilated testicle. It was so badly cut up that doctors had to remove it. The man told the doctors that he had been attacked with a knife and raped. Hendershot spent weeks running down the leads that the man supplied, even driving to Wyoming to search for evidence. But then she found that the man was part of an online pornographic chat room where people engaged in genital mutilation. Hendershot charged him with filing a false report to police—but only after she watched a video of the man maiming himself with a razor and an elastic band usually used to neuter cattle. In other words, she set the bar high.

  After talking with Pyler, Hendershot walked into the apartment to check out the crime scene. She was relieved to see an old friend: Katherine Ellis, one of the senior crime scene investigators for the Westminster Police Department. Ellis had been on scene since 7:38 a.m., rushing out after she heard about the rape on a police radio installed in the department’s crime laboratory.

  The two had met years before, when both worked as dispatchers at a nearby police department. They had advanced upward through their careers together. Ellis’s path led her into crime scene investigations long before the field became popular on television. “I was CSI before there was CSI,” she would joke. Over the years, she had b
uilt a reputation for thoroughness. She took training courses at the elite FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. She had an eidetic memory. Years later, she could recall the case number of a criminal report by heart. She was a realist about her job. “It’s not glamorous,” she’d say. “It’s dumpsters and dismembered children and crawl spaces.”

  By the time Hendershot arrived, Ellis had already walked through the apartment room by room. Her notes reflected her obsession with capturing every detail of a crime scene:

  Unit is a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a kitchen, dining area, and living room….The entryway opens into the living room. The living room was located on the south side of the apartment. It was furnished with a piano against the east wall, a leather sofa along the south wall, a round coffee table in front of the sofa, a round end table on the west side of the sofa and a rocker glider. The sofa had a stack of newspapers and a folder for restaurant and grocery coupons on the west cushion, an indentation that could be a foot impression on the middle cushion and a Bible and prayer book open on the east cushion.

  Over five hours in the apartment, Ellis dusted for fingerprints on the windowsills, doors, and counters. She deployed cotton swabs across surfaces throughout the home: the living room window, the mattress topper, the bathroom sink and toilet. She took hundreds of photos of the disarray in the master bedroom, the living room, the back porch. She checked the apartment’s two outside doors and windows for signs of forced entry. She bagged up evidence—the pale-green flat sheets that the rapist had left behind; purple kitchen gloves found near the sink; a red, orange, and white comforter. She used a special lamp to check the mattress topper for genetic material.

  Hendershot told Ellis about the rapist picking up the white Sunbeam timer from Sarah’s kitchen. When Ellis got to the bathroom, she found it perched on the edge of the vanity. It was one item in the apartment that she knew the rapist had touched. She collected it as evidence to check for the presence of DNA.