A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  “Shit,” he thought. “I’m trapped.” He lunged to push the door open and escape, but the Korean man was on the other side, pressing his weight into the door. “I’m going to get locked in,” he thought. “Oh fuck, I’m going to get locked in here.”

  But the next second, the door flung outward. The Korean man had yanked it open. He was standing to one side, like a doorman at a hotel.

  He needed no such courtesies. He broke past the Korean man into the street. He sprinted at top speed, flying past houses, through the darkened city, until he reached his home about a mile away. He was gasping. The blood in his veins felt like battery acid. He had almost been caught. He had been an idiot.

  He had been the one afraid.

  “I can’t be making stupid mistakes like that and I definitely can’t be impulsive about it,” he told himself. “If you don’t plan to go to jail, you need to think this through a little bit more.”

  His enlistment was ending soon. He looked forward to going home, back to the United States.

  He could practice there.

  * * *

  * Pseudonym

  6

  WHITE MAN, BLUE EYES, GRAY SWEATER

  Monday, August 11, 2008

  * * *

  Lynnwood, Washington

  The 911 call came in at 7:55 a.m., the caller’s words leaving no doubt of the urgency. A young woman said her downstairs neighbor had just been raped inside her apartment. The attacker had fled maybe fifteen minutes ago.

  The dispatcher kept the neighbor on the line, taking in a flurry of details passed along from the victim—the rapist had a knife; he took pictures; the victim didn’t recognize him; he may have been in the apartment all night because he heard a phone conversation she’d been having. At 8:03, the caller reported that the victim had just found the knife in her bedroom; at 8:04, that the victim’s mom had just arrived. The apartment complex was about a mile from police headquarters, reachable with a couple of turns. As the dispatcher listened, they were already routing police to the scene, with officers arriving at 8:03, 8:04, 8:05.

  An ambulance was called. So was a K-9 unit, in hopes a dog could pick up the attacker’s track.

  Crime scene technician Anne Miles was the officer who arrived at 8:04, the second on the scene. She pulled up to the complex and made her way to the victim’s first-floor apartment. Inside she found an eighteen-year-old with wavy hair and hazel eyes, and asked her what had happened.

  This would be Marie’s first time telling an officer what took place that morning. But important as the moment was, Marie’s memory would erase it. She would remember shaking in a blanket in the corner as police arrived; she would remember talking to the ambulance crew; she would remember moving to the couch and sitting next to Peggy—but she would not remember a woman officer being there, detailed as her account to the officer was.

  Marie told Miles that she had awakened to a man with a knife. He pulled away her comforter and sheet and told her to roll over on her stomach. He straddled her, bound her, blindfolded her, gagged her, then ordered her to roll back over. He groped and raped her. It felt like he was wearing gloves. He told her he had worn a condom. She heard clicking and saw some sort of flash. He told her he had taken photographs and would post them online if she went to police. Then he left, through the front door. She heard it shut.

  Miles asked Marie if she could describe the man. Marie said she didn’t get a good look. Everything had happened so fast. All she could say was he was white. His eyes were blue. His sweater was gray. Miles asked if anything stood out about his voice or smell or anything else, and Marie told Miles again—everything had happened so fast, it was all a blur.

  Miles asked how long the attack lasted. Marie said she had no idea.

  Marie told Miles that the rapist had dumped her purse out on the floor. She didn’t know why.

  Miles’s job was to collect and process physical evidence, so with Marie, she began walking the apartment. In the bedroom she saw Marie’s purse on the floor and wallet on the bed. The wallet was missing Marie’s learner’s permit. Miles spotted it on the ledge of the bedroom window.

  Next to Marie’s bed, on top of a plastic storage bin, Miles saw a large knife with a black handle. Marie told Miles that the knife was from her kitchen—and was the one the rapist had threatened her with. On top of the bed Miles saw a shoestring—used, apparently, to tie up Marie. In the bedroom corner, on top of a computer monitor, Miles found a second shoestring, threaded through a pair of women’s underwear. “The string tied to the underwear was either used as the blindfold or was placed in [Marie’s] mouth so she couldn’t scream,” Miles would write in a report. Marie told Miles that the laces came from her own tennis shoes, out in the living room.

  Miles asked if Marie had locked up the night before. Marie said she wasn’t sure. Miles checked the front door and saw no sign of it being forced open. Then she checked the sliding glass door at the rear of the apartment. It was unlocked—and slightly ajar. Miles stepped outside to the back porch and inspected the wood railing. Most of it was covered with dirt, but there was one stretch, about three feet wide, that appeared to have been brushed off, perhaps by someone climbing over.

  Miles searched for traces of DNA on the sliding glass door, swabbing the inside and outside handles. She photographed the apartment inside and out. She took at least seventy shots, capturing the details that might illuminate what had happened that morning: the porch railing, the learner’s permit on the bedroom window ledge, a knife block in the kitchen with one knife missing, the shoes without laces. The shoes were next to the living room sofa. On top of the sofa, leaning against the wall, were a couple of stuffed animals, a spotted cow and a dog with white paws.

  After leaving Marie’s apartment, Miles wrote up a two-page report, a simple recitation of the steps she had taken. Her report gave no hint of what she believed or didn’t believe; it kept to what she had seen and done.

  —

  The Lynnwood Police Department had seventy-nine sworn officers, serving a city of about thirty-four thousand people. In 2008, Marie’s was one of ten reports of rape the department investigated; with so few cases, the Criminal Investigations Division didn’t have a separate sex crimes unit.

  On the morning Marie reported being raped, the head of the division, Commander James Nelson, came to the apartment building and pitched in, going door to door to interview potential witnesses. The man in 203 said he hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual. He was the only resident Nelson managed to talk to. At apartments 103, 201, 301, 302, 303, and 304, nobody answered the door.

  Nelson also tried another apartment building nearby. He interviewed three residents and noted the same response from each: “Did not see or hear anything suspicious.” Nelson got no answer at seven other apartments.

  At about a quarter after eight, the K-9 unit showed up. The dog “tracked to the south towards [an] office building however it didn’t lead to anything,” the officer reported. The dog also failed to pick up anything to the north, around a parking area.

  Later in the morning a second crime scene technician arrived to help. Like Miles, Detective Josh Kelsey wrote a two-page report. Unlike Miles, he wrote his eleven days later, well after Marie had recanted. Kelsey did a walkthrough and, in his report, recorded his observations: The shoes with the missing laces “were lying next to each other near the end of the couch and the bedroom door, on the soles as if placed there (not disturbed)….The bed appeared disturbed, but there was a small fan sitting upright at the head of the bed, next to the two pillows….I did not see any item that would have been used as the blindfold.”

  Kelsey dusted the sliding door for fingerprints. From the inside glass he managed to lift some partials, which he preserved on a fingerprint card. Although Marie had said the rapist left through the front door, Kelsey made no note of inspecting that door for possible prints or DNA. Neither had Miles during her earlier canvass.

  Kelsey inspected the bedroom with an alternate light s
ource, searching for the characteristic glow of body fluids. He didn’t spy anything on the comforter or blankets piled on the floor, but he did see two spots on the mattress. On the bed he also saw a couple of hair follicles and some fibers, which he collected.

  In all, Kelsey gathered and labeled eighteen items of evidence, removing from Marie’s apartment the physical exhibits of her young life, bagging every layer of bedding from pink comforter down to mattress pad, bagging her shoes, wallet, and learner’s permit.

  —

  Sergeant Jeffrey Mason, a Lynnwood police detective, arrived at about a quarter till nine. Outside the apartment were Marie’s Project Ladder case manager, Wayne, and her upstairs neighbor. Inside, Marie sat on the couch with her foster mother, Peggy. Marie was wrapped in a blanket. She cried off and on.

  This investigation would be Mason’s to lead. He walked over to Marie and introduced himself.

  Mason was thirty-nine years old. He had been promoted to sergeant—and transferred to the Criminal Investigations Division—just six weeks before.

  He had spent most of his career in Oregon, where he had begun as a dispatcher for Wasco County and worked his way up to the Oregon State Police. His longest stint was with a small police department in a town called The Dalles, where he served for almost nine years and received a medal of valor.

  Over the years he had taken dozens of training courses on all kinds of subjects. He’d gone to sniper school. He’d studied outlaw motorcycle gangs. He’d learned to interrogate suspects and interpret their body language for tells. But there was one subject he knew best, as attested to by the instructional programs listed in his personnel file: Indoor Marijuana Grows; Street Drugs; Polytesting Narcotics Screening & Identification; Reconnaissance and Interdiction Detachment (RAID, for short); Hidden Compartments; Mexican Meth. His courses ranged from aerial spotting—how to spy a pot patch amid other vegetation from hundreds of feet in the sky—to how to keep safe when moving in on a clandestine drug lab. His was a world of undercover buys and informants, in which officers navigated among drug users and dealers.

  Mason joined Lynnwood’s police department in 2003. Before his recent promotion he had spent four years in patrol and a year as a narcotics detective, earning praise for his dedication and dependability. Superiors appreciated his professionalism, from the quality of his written reports (“thorough and well thought out with few to no mistakes”) to his approach to police work (“pro-active”) to his leadership (“an innate ability to mentor”). “Excellent work habits,” wrote one sergeant, who commended Mason’s ability to work with minimal supervision.

  In his nineteen years in law enforcement, Mason had worked only one or two rape cases. He had received some sexual assault training, but it had been long ago, in the mid-1990s.

  When the two met, Marie struck Mason as forthright. “I didn’t have a lot of experience dealing with sexual assault victims,” he would say later. “But I didn’t go in with an expectation of how she might be acting. She wasn’t hysterical. She was very matter-of-fact—this is what occurred.” Speaking with Mason and a second detective, Marie covered much of the same ground she had gone over with Miles: the unlocked sliding door, the stranger with a knife, the rape in her bedroom. Mason told Marie he would need more details later, but for now, she needed to go to the hospital for a sexual assault examination. After that, he wanted her to come to the police station to give a full statement.

  After Marie left, accompanied by her case manager and foster mom, Mason walked the apartment, taking in the emptied purse, the underwear laced with a shoestring, the mattress—askew, about four inches out of line with the box spring. Mason also talked to Nattlie, the eighteen-year-old neighbor who lived directly above Marie. Nattlie said she hadn’t heard anything unusual during the night. Then, in the morning, at 7:52, maybe 7:53, she got a call from Marie, screaming, crying, saying someone had broken into her place and raped her. Nattlie grabbed her cell phone, ran down the stairs, and called 911 from Marie’s apartment.

  Although Mason was the lead investigator on the case, he would receive help from Jerry Rittgarn, another member of the Criminal Investigations Division. Rittgarn had a bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of Washington; he had previously served in the Marine Corps, specializing in helicopter avionics, and worked as a technician in the aerospace industry. He had been with the Lynnwood police for eleven years, the last four as a detective. One of his duties—backgrounding job candidates and recommending whether they be hired—testified to the department’s faith in his investigative abilities. In 2006 he had been named Lynnwood’s officer of the year.

  As was the case for other detectives called to the apartment complex, Rittgarn wrote up his report days later—after Marie had taken back her story. His report said he had looked at Marie’s wrists before she left for the hospital, and he hadn’t noticed markings on either. When Marie’s bedroom was examined with ultraviolet light, he didn’t see liquid stains on the sheet or bedding. He searched the apartment—bathroom, toilet, trash cans throughout—for a condom or wrapper, but found neither. He also looked outside, walking the side of a hill, to no avail.

  —

  Peggy and Wayne took Marie to Providence Regional Medical Center in nearby Everett. Providence had a center for sexual assault, with victim’s advocates and nurses specially trained in collecting evidence.

  By August of 2008, the specialized examination of rape victims—often referred to as “rape kits,” for the box in which the evidence is placed—had been around for thirty years. They originated by virtue of a victim’s advocate, a police microanalyst, and funding from a most unlikely source.

  In the mid-1970s, Martha “Marty” Goddard formed a nonprofit in Chicago called the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. At the time, rape, steeped in stigma, received little attention; what attention it did get often did more damage than good. Goddard, a self-described type A personality—she lived close to the office, worked weekends and holidays, spent hundreds of dollars on a gym membership but never escaped work long enough to go in the door—set out to change that.

  Part of her challenge was confronting how people wrote about rape. One of her board members picked up a greeting card in a store, brought it in to Goddard, and, “freaking out,” said, “Read this.” “Help stop rape,” the card’s cover said. The note inside was “Say yes.” Goddard wrote the card company with her own message: “You guys, I’m sure, think it’s funny. But it’s not funny.” The company, chagrined, pulled the card from shelves. Goddard saw a newspaper story in Chicago about a woman who had reported being raped. The story may not have named her, but with its careless cascading of detail—combining precise physical description with her job (waitress) and the place she worked (the exact restaurant)—it hardly needed to. Identifying her would be easy enough. Goddard went to the newspaper and met with an editor and some of his staff. At first they were defensive. Then they apologized. “And I gotta tell you, they never did it again,” Goddard says. For Goddard, such were her days: “One incident by one incident by one incident. It took forever.”

  Goddard also focused on the enforcement of sexual assault laws. She met with police, prosecutors, and emergency-room doctors and nurses, and discovered a problem in how rape was investigated. The collection of physical evidence was haphazard. If hairs, fibers, blood, semen, fingernail scrapings, clothing, and other evidence were gathered at all, they were often preserved or labeled improperly, jeopardizing their value. Police told Goddard of emergency-room workers rubber-banding two slides together, face to face, contaminating both samples. Sometimes slides wouldn’t say where the samples came from. The ER workers were trained to see a rape victim as a patient—not as a patient and a crime scene. Often, hospitals didn’t have replacement clothes available. Victims, their clothes seized as evidence, might be taken home in a marked police car—and emerge wearing hospital slippers and patient gown, tied in the back. Their neighbors were sure to wonder.

  At the Chicago Poli
ce Department, Goddard found allies for her cause, most notably Sergeant Louis Vitullo, a microanalyst who was head of the crime lab. Vitullo worked downtown, but lived an hour north of the city. Chicago made him nervous (he didn’t let his daughter go there alone until her twenties), which stood to reason, what with the blood and knives coming through his lab. In the sixties he’d worked on the investigation of Richard Speck, the infamous murderer of eight student nurses. Working with Goddard—“The crime lab eventually became my second home, I’m not kidding you,” she says—Vitullo devised a blue-and-white cardboard box that standardized the collection of evidence in sexual assault cases. The kit itemized swabs and slides to be gathered and provided labeled folders to be filled and sealed.

  So with Vitullo’s help, Goddard had a design. What she lacked was the money for parts and assembly. Foundations gave generously to medical research hospitals and symphonies. If they chose to fund women’s and girls’ programs, they might give to the YWCA or Girl Scouts. But they wanted nothing to do with the subject of rape. “Most of the foundation and corporate people were male,” Goddard says. “And they held the big money, so they held the purse strings. And it wasn’t loosening up.” Ultimately, Goddard turned to a friend, Margaret Standish. Standish ran the Playboy Foundation, the activist arm of Hugh Hefner’s publishing empire. The Playboy Foundation provided $10,000—and the use of Playboy’s offices as an assembly line, where volunteers, mostly senior citizens, were provided with foldout tables and free coffee and sandwiches while building the first of these revolutionary kits. “I took a lot of flak from the women’s movement—but too bad,” Goddard says. “If it was Penthouse or Hustler, no. But Playboy? Please, give me a break.”

  In September of 1978, twenty-six hospitals in the Chicago area began using the kits. The following year, 2,777 kits went to the Chicago crime lab for analysis. In the summer of 1979, prosecutors used one while trying a man accused of raping a Chicago Transit Authority bus driver. The jury voted to convict, after which the judge let Goddard’s committee ask jurors if the kit helped them reach a verdict. Nine said it did.