That same year Goddard met a Northwestern University graduate, Susan Irion, who worked in public relations while volunteering with a fledgling group called Rape Victim Advocates. Irion was on call for twelve-hour shifts, during which she could be paged by any of seven emergency rooms to help guide sexual assault victims through medical exams and police interviews. Goddard hired Irion to be assistant director for the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. For two and a half years Irion trained hospital workers and police in use of the rape kits and in the complexities of trauma. Don’t be hostage to your expectations, she would teach. Sometimes trauma doesn’t look the way you think it should.
For expertise Irion turned to Jon Conte, a social work professor in Chicago who would later move on to the University of Washington and evaluate Marie. Irion also incorporated the lessons in Rape: Crisis and Recovery, a book published in 1979 by a psychiatric nurse and a sociologist who had provided crisis-intervention services for 146 rape victims admitted to Boston City Hospital. The authors discovered a range of emotional reactions among rape victims. Some were angry or anxious, some composed, some in shock. “I remember doing some strange things after he left such as biting my arm…to prove I could feel…that I was real,” one woman reported. Physical reactions included disrupted sleep patterns and lingering pain. “I am so sore under my ribs,” said another victim. “The pain just stays there; it doesn’t go away. I guess he really hurt me, although the X-ray didn’t show anything.” Some victims suffered nightmares, their dreams similar to the rape itself, the victim unable to get away. Some underwent a form of self-imposed isolation, rarely venturing out, missing school or quitting work.
By 1980, 215 hospitals in Illinois were using Goddard and Vitullo’s rape kits. From there they became standard issue across the country. The advent of DNA testing in the late 1980s made the kits especially powerful, by pushing forensic science beyond the limitations of blood typing and microscopy.
But valuable as the evidence can be, the collection process—lasting three to six hours—exacts a toll.
At Providence, Marie was joined by Jana, the supervisor with Project Ladder. Jana stayed with Marie during the exam, to help keep her calm. She rubbed Marie’s back. She told Marie this wasn’t her fault.
The medical team included a nurse who had received special training in these examinations—and was in a position to relate, having suffered sexual abuse herself. A victim’s advocate also stayed throughout, to provide psychological support and answer any of Marie’s questions. A medical report described Marie as “alert and oriented, and in no acute distress.”
A doctor evaluated Marie as the nurse assisted with all that was required.
They asked Marie to describe the assault.
They drew Marie’s blood.
They took a urine sample.
They collected vaginal discharge and smeared it on a slide.
They tested Marie for gonorrhea. They tested her for hepatitis, and chlamydia, and syphilis.
They tested her for yeast infection.
They tested her for HIV.
In each case, Marie was told that the test results would not be available until later. She would have to wait to know.
The team’s exam also included forensic work, to assist in any criminal investigation.
They collected each item of Marie’s clothing, to be inspected later in a crime lab.
They examined Marie, looking for signs of injury. Where injury was noted, they documented it.
“Trauma noted to wrists bilaterally,” they wrote in a report. They photographed her wrists and measured the abrasions—length and width, to tenths or even hundredths of a centimeter. The longest abrasion, red and raised, was seven centimeters, or two and three quarters inches.
While searching for genital injury they applied toluidine blue, a staining dye that creates contrast between healthy and injured tissue. “Abrasions to inner aspect labia minora,” they wrote in the report.
They swabbed the inside of Marie’s cheek to collect DNA. Forensic scientists would need Marie’s genetic profile to distinguish it from any other DNA profiles that might turn up in the swabs collected in the rape kit.
They collected four vaginal swabs.
They collected four rectal swabs.
They collected four swabs from the area in between.
The swabs were placed in a drying box, then secured with other evidence in a locker, pending release to the Lynnwood police.
They treated Marie for possible exposure to sexually transmitted diseases, giving her one gram of Zithromax and four hundred milligrams of Suprax.
They provided her with emergency contraception—having her take one pill then, at the hospital, and giving her a second pill to take twelve hours later.
They asked her to let them know if she experienced excessive bleeding. Or unusual vaginal discharge. Or if she stopped menstruating.
They advised her to return to the emergency room if she experienced shortness of breath. Or had trouble swallowing. Or suffered hives. Or thought of killing herself.
Peggy had stayed at the hospital with Marie after driving her there. She watched as they photographed Marie’s wrists. She held Marie’s hand.
But the exam wound up taking so long that Peggy left. She now had two other foster children—both teenage girls—and after three hours or so, she went home to take care of them.
After the exam, Marie changed into a new set of clothes she had brought with her to the hospital. By the time she left Providence, morning had turned to afternoon.
—
By 2008, when Marie reported being raped, sex crime specialists had developed investigative protocols with one dominant theme: Evidence trumps assumptions. The year before, End Violence Against Women International, a nonprofit organization that trains police, produced a comprehensive online course on investigating rape. One of its lead creators was Joanne Archambault, a retired police sergeant who for ten years had supervised the San Diego Police Department’s sex crimes unit.
Archambault had built her career in policing on challenging assumptions. In the late 1970s she was working at the Educational Cultural Complex in San Diego, helping others find employment. Two police recruiters told Archambault that only men were fit for police work. “They pissed me off,” Archambault says—so much so that she applied herself. “I never planned to be a cop. I just planned to show them I could be hired.” Her training group at the police academy included 120 recruits; only four were women. To Archambault, the training seemed geared toward weeding women out. The pull-up bar, for example, was too thick for most women’s hands. Within a year, Archambault was the only woman left. She was hired by the San Diego Police Department in the spring of 1980, and after a stint as a patrol officer, worked in a half dozen other units, at one point becoming the department’s first female gang detective.
For Archambault, her twenty-three years as a cop became a study in the prevalence and corrosiveness of doubt. While investigating child-abuse cases she was stunned at how many mothers did not believe their kids. After joining the sex crimes unit she bristled at the advice she remembered seeing in a 1995 article published by the International Association of Chiefs of Police:
Generally, the actions and the appearance of a legitimate rape victim leave little doubt that a crime has been committed. Under such circumstances, the victim is highly agitated, emotionally distraught, often in a state of hysteria and may have sustained injuries, cuts, bruises or wounds. The victim’s clothing is often ripped or torn off as evidence that it was forcibly removed and if the rape occurs outdoors, the victim is generally thrown to the ground and her outer garments stained and soiled. Questions may reasonably be raised concerning the validity of rape charges in which none or only a few of the above manifestations exist.
Archambault knew that was wrong—utterly, spectacularly wrong. She believed that police departments didn’t attach enough importance to solving sex crimes; they didn’t give investigators enough training or reso
urces. The police’s priorities reflected the public’s. People outside of law enforcement didn’t want to talk about sexual assault. The public wanted the police to concentrate on gangs and murder.
The online course she helped create cautions that some victims confuse fine points of their story or even recant. Police, the course material says, should not get lost in stereotypes—believing, for example, that an adolescent victim will be less credible than an adult. To interrogate the victim is “totally inappropriate.” Nor should police use or threaten to use a polygraph device. That can destroy the victim’s trust in law enforcement; plus, a lie-detector test “is known to be unreliable when used with people experiencing crisis.”
Archambault has witnessed the impulses that can lead an investigation astray. During training she plays a 911 tape of a woman saying she was just raped in her apartment. In the apartment’s background, a stereo blares. The rapist tied her up, the woman says, over the music. When they hear this tape, police officers in Archambault’s class usually think it’s a hoax. They don’t believe that the woman could call with her hands tied. (She dialed with her toes.) And they don’t understand the loud music. (The rapist cranked the volume to cover any screams.) But the call was no hoax. The caller was indeed raped. “Research shows the more intimate the crime, the more people focus on the victim’s behavior, and of course, there’s no crime more intimate than sexual violence,” Archambault says.
In 2005, the International Association of Chiefs of Police published a model policy on investigating sexual assaults that dispelled the notions embedded in that article published ten years before. Archambault, at the association’s request, wrote the updated policy. Among its signature lines: “The victim’s response to the trauma of a sexual assault shall not be used in any way to measure credibility.”
—
After leaving the hospital, Marie went to the Lynnwood police station. Wayne drove. By the time they arrived, it was almost three o’clock in the afternoon.
Sergeant Mason escorted Marie to an interview room, where it was just the two of them. To Mason, Marie looked tired. She told him she’d had less than an hour’s sleep last night. She told him she had a headache.
Mason gave Marie some water. He explained why he needed her statement now: It was important to get as detailed an account as possible, as soon as possible. Information Marie provided now might lead to other evidence; other evidence might yield an arrest and protect the public.
Mason asked Marie to recall the past day, with a detailed description of what had happened inside her apartment.
This would be Marie’s fourth time describing the attack. She had recounted it to Miles. Later, still at the apartment, she had recounted it to Mason and Rittgarn. She had recounted it to the nurse at the hospital. Now she would be going through it again.
Marie told Mason she had spent much of the night talking on the phone with her friend Jordan. She said she awoke at 6:45 a.m., maybe 7:00, to see a man in her bedroom doorway, holding a knife. She described the man for Mason. Earlier she had told Miles that the man had blue eyes and a gray sweater. Now she told Mason that the man’s eyes were possibly blue, and that he wore a hoodie, gray or white.
Marie told Mason that the man appeared to be younger than thirty.
He looked to be five feet six to five feet nine.
He had a thin build.
Marie described being bound, her hands tied behind her back. She described the man lifting her shirt to take pictures. She described the man raping her for what she believed was about five minutes.
Marie recited—step by step—what she did after the rapist left her apartment.
She ran to the front door and locked it.
She ran to the sliding glass door and locked it.
She went to the kitchen, got a knife, and tried cutting the laces off her hands.
Unable to do so, she went to her bedroom and, using her feet, got a pair of scissors from the bottom drawer of a cabinet. With the scissors she cut herself free.
She grabbed her cell phone and tried calling Jordan, but he didn’t answer.
She called Peggy, who agreed to come over.
She called her upstairs neighbor, who came down.
As Marie spoke, Mason took handwritten notes. He didn’t record her.
When she finished, he handed her a form authorizing the hospital to disclose her medical records to police. She signed the release.
Mason also handed Marie another piece of paper. It was an “Incident Statement Form,” with two dozen blank lines that Mason asked Marie to fill in, writing down all that had happened. The form—which included, at bottom, a warning that it is a crime to make false or misleading statements to police—would be Marie’s fifth time describing being raped.
Marie told Mason she was worn out. Her head was throbbing. He told her to get some rest—then complete the form, then give him a call.
Before leaving the station Marie met with Josh Kelsey, the crime scene technician who had collected evidence at her apartment that morning. By now at least seven hours had passed since Marie had freed herself from the shoelaces. Kelsey took a dozen photos of Marie’s wrists and hands. When he wrote his report more than a week later, he noted marks on both wrists, adding: “The marks were red, but there did not appear to be any abrasions or bruising.”
Wayne drove Marie away from the station.
This same day Marie stopped at the apartment complex for a meeting with everyone in Project Ladder. Marie told the others what had happened. She told them they needed to be careful. She said they needed to lock their doors. She was able to speak for only a few minutes before she broke down and cried.
Marie spent the night at a friend’s home.
—
For at least twenty-four hours after the police were summoned, the investigation assumed a normal course. The police made no mention in any report of thinking Marie might be lying. And Marie had no sense that anyone believed as much. She felt supported—by police, by the people at the hospital, by her friends and her extended foster family, by the managers at Project Ladder.
On August 12—a Tuesday, the day after Marie reported being raped—Sergeant Mason faxed a request for Marie’s medical records to the hospital where the sexual assault examination had been conducted. That was standard practice.
But on this same day, Mason received a telephone call that would become enveloped in mystery, thanks to the cryptic summary he would later file in his police report. His report didn’t identify the caller, although he knew who it was. He summed up in two sentences what proved to be the most pivotal moment in the whole investigation: “I received a call from someone wishing to remain anonymous. The person related that [Marie] had a past history of trying to get attention and the person was questioning whether the ‘rape’ had occurred.”
Mason arranged to meet with the caller in person, in order to learn more.
7
SISTERS
January 6, 2011
* * *
Westminster, Colorado
In her cubicle in the Westminster police station, Detective Edna Hendershot settled in with her Starbucks usual: a venti upside-down skinny caramel macchiato. At 9:07 a.m., an email arrived. It had been posted to a listserv read by detectives throughout the Denver area. The subject line was pleading: “Sex Aslt Similars?”
The email described a rape that had occurred the previous night in Golden. The attacker had bound his victim’s hands. He’d made her shower. He’d threatened to post pictures of her on the Internet. At the bottom of the note was a personal plea: “Can Det Hendershot please contact me in reference to this report?” It was from a Golden detective named Stacy Galbraith.
Hendershot did not know Galbraith. But she had an ominous feeling that she knew what the email was about. It had been five months since Sarah’s rape, and fifteen months since the attack on Doris. She called Burgess, her counterpart in Aurora, and gave him the news.
It looked like the worst had happened. The
rapist had struck again.
Cops can be protective about their cases, fearing that information could be leaked that would jeopardize their investigations. But Hendershot right away recognized the potential in collaborating with Galbraith and Burgess. “Two heads, three heads, four heads sometimes are better than one, right?” she says. So did Galbraith. Her department was small—a little more than forty officers serving a town of about twenty thousand. It only made sense to join forces. “I have no qualms with asking for help,” Galbraith says. “Let’s do what we can do to catch him.”
We need reinforcement, Galbraith told Hendershot. Let’s bring in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Let’s call the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “This is much bigger than little Golden. This is bigger than Jefferson County,” she said. Hendershot was more cautious. Her superiors wanted to proceed more slowly. Let’s all meet at my station house, she told Galbraith. Me, you, and Burgess. We’ll lay out the facts. “We aren’t sure of anything,” she said. “We have a lot of investigating to do.”
A few days later, the three detectives circled up around a table in a conference room at the Westminster Police Department. Each detective carried a file. And each file told a very similar story.
The victims’ descriptions of the attacker overlapped. The women estimated his height somewhere between five feet ten and six feet two. They put his weight at around 180 pounds. Amber had gotten the best look at him. He had hazel eyes. His hair was blondish.
The rapist seemed relaxed during the attacks, almost like he was on Xanax. He talked to the victims. He seemed smart, educated. He could be introspective. He knew intimate details about their lives—things that only a close friend or partner would know. Crazy as it was, all the women described him as being, at times, gentlemanly.
A False Report Page 8
