Ellis assumed that a crime occurred as the victim recounted it. But as she examined a scene, she focused on the evidence—whether contradictory or confirmatory. Her job, as she saw it, was to uncover the truth, whatever it was. “We report what the evidence shows us. Not what you’re telling us. You want evidence to scream, ‘Liar liar.’ Not you.”
So far, though, Ellis had not found much evidence of anything in Sarah’s apartment. She noted that a screen had fallen to the ground under a window near the back door—but that could have happened at any time. On the couch, under a window, there was the depression that looked as if it could have been made by someone stepping on a cushion. But she had found no indication of forced entry. No pry marks on any of the doorframes. No broken windowpanes. She discovered no fingerprints on the windowsills or couch or in the bedroom. Illuminating the apartment had revealed only a small amount of body fluids, restricted to the bed.
One thing, however, did stand out. On the railing surrounding the back porch, Ellis noticed strange impressions—a row of small, hexagonal marks. Like a honeycomb, she thought. She took pictures to make sure they were preserved.
But she was not certain what could have caused them. Maybe a mover’s blanket tossed over the railing?
What a weird pattern, she thought to herself.
—
Two days after the rape, Hendershot met Sarah at the Westminster police station. They sat across from each other in an interview room, a desk between them. Hendershot turned on her tape recorder. She hoped enough time had passed to allow Sarah to recall additional details. She started slow: What was Sarah’s life like in the days and months before the rape?
Sarah told her story. She had divorced late in life, after decades in a loveless, angry marriage. “I just decided I wasn’t going to live like that any longer,” she said. She found new love with a man twenty years her senior. He had a large family. She had no children. They attended church together. She sang in the choir. They spent nights out at Denny’s. They married in October 2009 and moved into an apartment big enough for two. Then, he was diagnosed with cancer. Eight weeks after her wedding, Sarah buried her husband. Her decision to move into a smaller apartment at a new complex was the first step toward acknowledging the reality of widowhood. She signed the lease on July 28, 2010. The rapist had struck thirteen days later.
And what about the rape? Hendershot asked. “We talked about how you were ready for bed and you went to bed about midnight. And then what do you remember happening next?”
“I just remember, um, there was someone on top of me. I was on my back. I mean I was on my stomach, I was on my stomach,” Sarah said. She stopped, flustered. “Do we have to go through the whole sequence again?”
Hendershot understood. She had worked more than a hundred rape cases. She knew how difficult it was to talk about rape—so difficult that it stopped many women from reporting at all. One of the top reasons was the fear of not being believed. Younger cops were often puzzled. You want to catch the guy? Why not spill the details?
Hendershot had a standard comeback: “Tell me about the last time you and your wife had sex. Tell me right now,” she’d say. Those who didn’t let out an embarrassed laugh reacted with shocked silence. They got the message.
In the interview room, Sarah went over the basics again. But she added new details. For instance, she remembered that the attacker had placed thigh-high stockings on her legs. But she couldn’t recall their color or where they came from.
“How did they get on you?” Hendershot asked.
Sarah could not describe how.
“And how come you don’t see them?” Hendershot asked.
“I think I was, I think I was on my stomach.”
Sarah remembered, too, that the rapist had asked whether she had high heels. When she told him no, he came back from her closet with a pair of her own shoes.
“I had this image of what they might have been, but I’m still not sure,” she said. She did not know what pair of shoes he had grabbed, nor if he had taken them when he left.
Hendershot was not discouraged. She kept probing. She tried to get Sarah to give her a better description.
“What about by his eyes? Do you remember anything by his eyes?”
“I certainly don’t remember anything, really, about his face, I really don’t.”
“Okay. So no eye color?”
“Um, I couldn’t tell.”
“Any facial hair?”
Sarah shook her head no. “I could not tell you, I can’t.”
If Sarah’s visual memory was lacking, her aural recollections were precise. She knew that the rapist carried a gym bag because she remembered the noise of zipping. She knew he had gone to the bathroom because she heard him urinating. She couldn’t describe the camera he had used, even though he had pointed it directly at her. All she could remember was the sound. Click. Click. Click.
But more often, Sarah’s story rambled, a jumble of moments and memories, unordered by time. She would struggle to piece together the sequence of events. She told Hendershot that she knew the time that the rapist left because she had seen some little girls playing outside her apartment. She thought for a moment. She had called the cops at around 7:00 a.m. Why would children be outside at that hour? “No, that doesn’t make sense,” she said, almost to herself.
Sarah grew frustrated at the lacunae of her story. “You know, most of the time my eyes were closed,” she told Hendershot. “Part of the time, ’cuz he was forcing me. Part of the time, I just didn’t even want to look.”
Hendershot reassured her. “If you don’t remember, that’s okay.”
Sarah’s fractured world did not alarm Hendershot. She had learned that people who got hurt in traumatic events often had altered memories. Many could no longer recall events in chronological order. Trauma can warp the brain. A car accident. A tree falling close by. Seeing your buddy shot on the battlefield. In those terrifying seconds, the rush of adrenaline and cortisol created a violent alchemy. The mind became an uncertain eyewitness of its own experience. Events were unlinked from the time when they occurred. Memories got buried. Images could arise days, months, even years later, unwanted and unbidden, picture-perfect in clarity, like a landscape suddenly illuminated by lightning.
Rape was a special case. The experience of rape, the feeling of helplessness, impaired memories in ways that seemed almost designed to frustrate investigators. To endure the terrible present of violation, many women looked away from what was happening to them, looked away from their attacker. They focused on a lampshade or a painting on the wall. Or they closed their eyes. That meant women could often not describe the rapist, or what he wore, or the room, the time, the surroundings.
Psychologists have documented the role that a powerful, central detail can play in the formation of memories. At a moment of crisis, the brain fiercely grasps on to something that will help it survive. In some cases, this is the actual threat, like when a cop can describe a weapon pointed at him in extraordinary detail but has trouble recalling the clothing a suspect wore. In other cases, though, the salient detail is not the immediate threat. Indeed, it can be something not tied to the anguish of the rape at all—say, a lamp on a nearby nightstand or a streetlight in the distance. By fixing on such a detail, the mind can shift away from the immediate horror to a cognitively safer place.
Rebecca Campbell, a leading researcher of sexual assault at Michigan State University, says that victims often describe their experience of rape using the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle. When solving a puzzle, the first thing most people do is flip all the pieces right side up. Next, they sort them into edge pieces, corner pieces, and body pieces. Then, they look at the picture on the box to figure out how to put the pieces together.
But rape victims have no way to solve the puzzle. They don’t have all the pieces. They can’t sort them in any meaningful way. And who can stand to gaze at such an awful picture, if they can even form the image? “A trauma memory doesn’t come tog
ether in a nice, neat, orderly memory,” says Campbell, who studies trauma’s effects on the brain. “It is scattered throughout the brain. Literally.”
It was Hendershot’s job to help Sarah piece together the puzzle. But at the end of the interview, she felt no closer to connecting a suspect to the crime. The rapist was smart. He had given away few clues to his identity.
As they wrapped up the interview, Hendershot decided to give Sarah some good news. The $200 was gone, but in the apartment, the cops had found the camera Sarah believed had been stolen. Perhaps she had just overlooked it when she surveyed her belongings after the rape.
“But there were two cameras,” Sarah said.
“There were two cameras—what do you mean?” Hendershot asked. She had thought there was only one in Sarah’s place.
“Well, there was a pink Sony, and then there was a bigger camera, mostly silver.”
The cops had found the silver camera, Hendershot knew. Where was the pink Sony? She dispatched police to Westminster’s pawnshops, to look for any reports of somebody hocking a pink camera. There were none.
Hendershot was setting up an interview with a Comcast cable guy who had serviced Sarah’s apartment complex when she got a call. It was a police sergeant from Aurora, a wealthier suburb thirty miles to the southeast of Westminster.
Through chatter among cops, the sergeant had learned details about the rape in Westminster. One of her detectives had a similar case, she told Hendershot. Perhaps they should compare notes.
Hendershot had just caught her first break.
—
Two weeks after Sarah’s rape, Hendershot sat down in a small conference room at the Westminster Police Department. Across from her was Scott Burgess, a detective from Aurora. Burgess had salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, pressed slacks, and a tie to work. He was a precise, careful man. On some days, he looped his tie once, twice, three, four times into an Eldredge knot. It was one of the hardest knots to tie. Ties.com gave it five out of five for difficulty.
Aurora’s police department had created a specialized sex crimes unit five years earlier. Burgess was one of its pioneers. “I was so lucky to get that draw,” he says. Like Hendershot, he loved the idea of helping other people. And Burgess understood victims. “One thing I learned is that there is no right way for a victim to respond to these assaults. I’ve had victims bring me to tears in an interview where you find out later that they’re false reports. I’ve also had victims that I would think to myself afterward, ‘There’s no way that this happened. You don’t come across like that after something so heinous.’ The thing I learned is there is no proper response.”
The lesson served him well when he had responded to the rape in Aurora in October 2009. The victim was a woman named Doris, a sixty-five-year-old divorcée who worked as a housemother at a local fraternity. She had been raped at her home in a neighborhood in south Aurora. When Burgess interviewed her the following day, Doris seemed “composed,” he told Hendershot. She had “a very matter-of-fact demeanor, was not emotional.
“I don’t recall any sort of an outpouring, or a breaking down,” he said. “It was just, ‘This happened. Now let’s see what we can do.’ ”
With Hendershot listening, Burgess reviewed the bullet points in his report:
• The victim was home sleeping on a Sunday morning at approximately 2:30 a.m.
• The suspect opened the door, straddled her back and shined a flashlight on her.
• The suspect directed her to roll over onto her back. She saw that his face was covered with a black mask or wrap that had a slit for his eyes.
• The suspect was a white male, approximately twenty years old, six feet tall, “big boned,” and strong without being muscular. He had light-colored, or no, body hair and was soft-spoken.
• The suspect told the victim: “I’m not going to hurt you, but I am going to rape you.”
• The suspect tied her hands together in front of her. The suspect used a ribbon that was loosely tied.
• The suspect had a large black backpack.
• The suspect assaulted her repeatedly. The suspect took pictures of her and threatened to post them on the Internet if she called the police.
• Afterward, the suspect dressed and stated that he was going to take the sheets.
• In the end, she was made to shower as he stood in the bathroom and directed her on how to wash. He told her to wait twenty minutes before getting out.
Doris had described the rapist as “nice” and “gentle.” During the attack, she had told him that she was sixty-five years old, too old to rape. “That’s not old,” the rapist had responded.
Doris told Burgess that just before the man began to rape her, he removed the pink curlers from her hair.
“I know I’m going to feel bad about this later, but I can’t help it,” he had told her.
“You should get help,” Doris told him.
“It’s too late for that,” he replied.
Doris said she tried to be sympathetic. He was still young. Maybe he had been abused as a child. It was not too late to change.
The man slapped down the idea. He had never been abused. His parents were loving. He didn’t smoke, drink, or do any drugs.
“If they knew what I did, it would kill them,” he told her.
He had to rape. It was a “compulsion,” he told Doris. He had been fighting it a long time. He had lost again and again.
“I can’t help this,” he said.
Doris told Burgess that the man had begun to fill the bathtub with water after he ordered her into the bathroom. For a brief second, she imagined the worst.
“I immediately thought he was going to drown me,” she said.
Instead, he told her to wash herself off.
“Give me twenty minutes because I want to be thorough,” he told her.
When she got out, the clock said 3:45 a.m. She was too scared to call the police. She dressed. She made herself a cup of coffee. She sat down at her computer. She browsed the Internet.
Finally, at 6:00 a.m., Doris noticed that she was bleeding from her vagina. She drove herself to an emergency clinic. They told her to keep driving, directing her to the Medical Center of Aurora, which had resources for rape victims. There, a nurse called the police. The hospital performed a three-hour forensic exam to salvage any traces of DNA that might remain on her body.
Burgess told Hendershot that he realized the case would be difficult. Doris recalled many details of the rape. But her memories didn’t reveal much about the rapist’s identity. “How do I even put this out to the department?” Burgess asked himself at the time. “I can’t even tell you really, confidently, what racial or ethnic makeup my suspect might be, because everything was covered.” He told Hendershot that he imagined the attacker as a kind of rape expert—“ultra-prepared,” as he described it. “This guy was very meticulous.”
Burgess’s report recounted his efforts. He sent patrol officers to canvass Doris’s neighborhood, a cluster of modest homes on a small cul-de-sac off one of Aurora’s main east–west thoroughfares. One officer dug through thirty trash cans and three portable toilets at a nearby baseball field. Another officer chased down a man seen walking near the crime scene with a weapon, only to find it was a BB gun. When police pulled over a man for speeding near the scene, they discovered a pink sheet, some towels, and two black bags in his trunk. The officer retrieved the sheets from Doris’s house. They didn’t match. For good measure, the officer called the man’s girlfriend. She backed up his story, explaining that she left the sheets in his trunk after doing laundry.
Burgess’s initial suspicion focused on the fraternity house brothers. Doris didn’t think so: “It’s not one of my guys,” she told him, saying that she would recognize the voice. Burgess, however, contacted the police who patrolled the campus to see if they had recorded any similar assaults. A police sergeant directed him to a single case, involving a student who was six feet one and weighed 160 po
unds. Police had stopped him for behaving strangely in November 2008. In the trunk of his car, they found police-style equipment—a flashing light that could be mounted on top of a vehicle, a baton, a Breathalyzer, and a 9mm Beretta. But the man had no criminal record. Burgess put the case, and his theory, aside.
Doris had provided a detailed description. But it was a description of a phantom: a masked man dressed in gray. There were no other clues. No eyewitnesses. No video surveillance.
On December 31, 2009, with the year coming to a close, Burgess wrote down the case status in capital letters: INACTIVE.
He wasn’t closing the case. There was a possibility that some other clue might trickle in. But he knew, inside, what “inactive” meant. “They’re not going to go anywhere.”
It was a crushing conclusion for Burgess. The case haunted him. He considered Doris’s rape one of the two or three worst cases he had investigated in his career. He would ask himself why she had been targeted. He was glad he could never reach an answer. “If you understand that, that’s a bad thing,” he’d say to himself.
Burgess left the meeting with Hendershot with new hope. The circumstantial evidence suggested one conclusion: the same person raped both Doris and Sarah. If Hendershot caught a break in her case, maybe he’d catch a break in his. Eight months after archiving Doris’s case, Burgess updated the file. The investigation was active again. All it took was one misstep by the rapist. One mistake, two crimes solved.
It was simple math.
—
In the weeks after Sarah’s rape, Hendershot played coach to a team of detectives, criminalists, crime analysts, and street cops. She had a half dozen cops check every trash can near the apartment in hopes that the rapist had tossed something as he fled. She had them scour the ditches and a retention pond, too. She ran names through Colorado’s sex offender registry: the cable guy who had briefly chatted with the victim while setting up her Internet; neighbors throughout the apartment complex; even the garbagemen. No hits.
A False Report Page 5
