And when a suspect confesses? The detectives get it in writing.
—
Mason and Rittgarn found Marie outside her apartment, sitting on the grass. It was late afternoon. They picked her up, took her to the station, and escorted her to a conference room.
From what Mason wrote up later, he wasted little time confronting Marie, telling her there were inconsistencies between her statements and accounts from other witnesses. Marie did not immediately push back, at least not in the way the detectives expected from someone telling the truth. She did not “take a stand and demand that she had been raped,” Rittgarn later wrote. Marie told the detectives she wasn’t aware of any inconsistencies. She went through the story again—only this time, in a way both detectives found telling, saying she believed the rape had happened instead of swearing it.
Tearfully, Marie described her past—the abuse, the instability—and the isolation she now felt being on her own.
From what Marie would remember later, the interrogation’s turning point came when the police said two people doubted her.
Peggy doesn’t believe your story, the detectives told Marie.
Jordan doesn’t believe you either, they said.
For Marie, both names came as a shock. She didn’t know what to think.
Why did Jordan say that? she asked.
But all she got was a cagey response: I don’t know. You tell me.
Rittgarn told Marie that her story and the evidence didn’t match. He told her the rape kit didn’t support her story. He said he believed she had made the story up—a spur-of-the-moment thing, not something planned out. From what Rittgarn could tell, Marie seemed to be agreeing with him. So he asked her: Is there really a rapist running around that the police should be looking for?
Marie, her voice soft, her eyes down, said no.
“Based on her answers and body language it was apparent that [Marie] was lying about the rape,” Rittgarn later wrote.
Without reading Marie her Miranda rights—her right to an attorney, her right to remain silent—the detectives asked her to write out the true story, admitting she had lied, admitting, in effect, that she had committed a crime. She agreed, so they left her alone for a few minutes. On the form, she filled in her name, address, and Social Security number. Then she wrote:
I was talking to Jordan on the phone that night about his day and just about anything. After I got off the phone with him, I started thinking about all things I was stressed out and I also was scared living on my own. When I went to sleep I dreamed that someone broke in and raped me.
When the detectives returned, they saw that Marie’s statement described the rape as a dream, not a lie.
Why didn’t you write that you made the story up? Rittgarn asked.
Marie, crying, said she believed the rape really happened.
We already went over this, Rittgarn told her. You already said there’s no rapist out there we should be looking for.
Marie pounded the table and said she was “pretty positive” the rape happened.
Mason didn’t know what to make of that. Hammered fist. Qualified response. Two different signals entirely.
Pretty positive or actually positive? Rittgarn asked Marie.
Maybe the rape happened and I blacked it out, Marie said.
What do you think should happen to someone who would lie about something like this? Rittgarn asked Marie.
I should get counseling, Marie said.
Mason returned to the evidence. He told Marie that her description of calling Jordan was different from what Jordan had reported. Marie, hands on her face, looked down. Then “her eyes darted back and forth as if she was thinking of a response,” Rittgarn later wrote.
The detectives doubled back to what she had said before—about being anxious, about being lonely—and, eventually, Marie appeared to relax. She stopped crying. She even laughed a little. She apologized—and agreed to write another statement, leaving no doubt her story was a lie.
I have had a lot of stressful things going on and I wanted to hang out with someone and no one was able to so I made up this story and didn’t expect it to go as far as it did….It turned into this big thing…I don’t know why I couldn’t have done something different. This was never meant to happen.
This statement satisfied the detectives. “Based on our interview with [Marie] and the inconsistencies found by Sgt. Mason in some of the statements we were confident that [Marie] was now telling us the truth that she had not been raped,” Rittgarn later wrote.
To Marie, it seemed the questioning had lasted for hours. She did what she always did when she was under stress. She flipped the switch, as she called it, suppressing the feelings she didn’t know what to do with. Before she confessed to making up the story, she couldn’t look the two detectives, the two men, in the eye. Afterward, she could. Afterward, she smiled. She went into the bathroom and cleaned up. Flipping the switch was a relief—and would let her leave.
As for Mason, he now had a written recantation, signed and witnessed. He figured this case was closed.
—
On Friday, Marie, shaken, called her case manager at Project Ladder. She told Wayne that she had spoken with police the day before—and the police didn’t believe her, they didn’t believe she had been raped. She didn’t want to go into any more detail on the phone, preferring to talk in person. But she said she wanted a lawyer.
After they finished talking, Wayne called Jana, a Project Ladder supervisor. Jana advised him to call Sergeant Mason.
So that’s what Wayne did. He called the sergeant, who told Wayne that the evidence didn’t support Marie’s story. He told Wayne that Marie had signed a written statement, admitting she’d made the whole thing up.
Wayne shared this with Jana, and suggested she call Mason herself. So she did. Afterward, Jana told Wayne to let Marie stay the weekend with her friends. They would deal with this on Monday.
After her confrontation with the police, Marie also called two other people, to find out what was going on.
You don’t believe me? she asked Jordan.
What are you talking about? Jordan answered. What the hell are you talking about? Of course I believe you.
That’s not what the detective said.
Of course I believe you. You know that.
When Marie called Peggy, she got a different answer. Peggy said yes, she had doubts about Marie’s story. Peggy said that when Marie called her on the morning she reported being attacked, Marie’s first words weren’t “I’ve just been raped.” Her first words were “I’ve just been robbed.” Marie didn’t remember saying that. But her purse had been dumped out on the floor. Marie supposed she might have said something about her learner’s permit or wallet. Peggy also brought up the fight over the bike, and how Marie had gotten mad when Peggy wanted quiet time. Maybe this story was a way of striking back.
To Marie, that was hard to hear. She thinks I made up a story of being raped because of that?
—
On Monday, August 18, Jana and Wayne met with Marie in her new apartment, across the street from her old place. It had now been one week since Marie reported being raped.
Jana related what Sergeant Mason had told them about Marie taking her story back. Marie told Jana she had been under duress. The police had kept her in the station for so long, she signed the statement just to get out of there.
So should the police really be looking for a rapist? Jana asked.
Yes, Marie said.
Then you need to tell the police that, Jana told her.
Wayne didn’t believe Marie—and would say as much later, in his case notes. Having heard the police’s depiction of the evidence, Wayne was now convinced Marie had not been attacked. He told her that if she lied to police about being raped, she would be making a false statement. That would be a crime, grounds for kicking her out of Project Ladder. She would lose her housing.
But Marie didn’t back down. So the three set out for Marie to recant
her recantation—to tell detectives she had been telling the truth the first time.
At the police station they learned Mason was out for the day. But Rittgarn was there. Rittgarn wanted a second detective in the room, so he hunted up Sergeant Rodney Cohnheim and asked him to sit in. Cohnheim supervised the Crimes Against Persons detectives. He had been out of town, at a training seminar in Dallas, when Marie had reported being raped. Rittgarn briefed Cohnheim about the case and Marie’s recantation four days before. Then they brought Marie to an upstairs conference room while Jana and Wayne stayed downstairs.
Marie told Rittgarn she had been attacked, that she wasn’t making the rapist up. She began to cry, saying she kept having a vision of him on top of her.
Rittgarn wasn’t moved. Later, when recounting Marie’s words in a written report, he would put the word “him” in quotation marks.
Rittgarn said they had already gone over this. Marie had already admitted to wanting not to be alone. She had already admitted to lying. She had already admitted to staging the evidence.
I want to take a lie-detector test, Marie said.
If you take a polygraph and fail it, I will book you into jail, Rittgarn told her.
The threat rocked Marie. Reeling, she pulled back. She said maybe she’d been hypnotized into believing she had been raped.
For Rittgarn, this was too much. He would write in his report: “This is the fourth ridiculous story” Marie had come up with: she was raped, she blacked it out, she dreamt it, she was hypnotized. He told Marie that if the police hooked her up to a polygraph, they wouldn’t ask: Did you dream it? Did you black it out? Were you hypnotized? The question would be: Were you raped? And if she answered with a lie, Rittgarn told her, he would not only book her into jail, he would recommend that Project Ladder pull her housing assistance.
This time, Marie backed down.
She said she had lied.
The police took her down the stairs. Wayne and Jana were waiting for her.
So, one said.
Were you raped?
—
Later that week, the state Crime Victims Compensation Program wrote the Lynnwood Police Department to ask for information about Marie’s case. The letter requested the offense report, follow-up reports, and anything else that might help determine if Marie was eligible for coverage. “The goal of the Crime Victims Compensation Program is to prevent further hardship and suffering by providing benefits to eligible victims of crime as quickly as possible,” the letter said. The program covered everything from mental health counseling to medical expenses and lost wages.
On August 25—two weeks after Marie reported being attacked—the Lynnwood police called the program’s law enforcement records coordinator and told her to never mind. This was a case of false reporting, the police said. Marie was not a rape victim. She was a woman who lied about being raped.
—
For Marie, these two weeks had been a spiral. Before she recanted she had quit her job at Costco, unable to stand there, looking at people, lost in her head. She had tried. She’d worked a day or two, offering up free food samples to shoppers. But then she’d walked out, gone home, said she wouldn’t be back.
After she recanted, her losses mounted. The normal life she wanted—the freedom from the rules dividing adolescents from adults—faded from reach. Project Ladder gave her a 9:00 p.m. curfew and doubled the number of times she had to meet with staff.
Jordan sat with Marie on her porch and heard the phone calls coming in from Marie’s friends and old classmates. With every ring she cried harder. She knew why they were calling. They were calling to say they didn’t believe her and couldn’t understand why she did what she had done.
When the police announced that Marie had taken her story back, Marie’s best friend from high school—the friend who had taught her photography, the friend who had touched up that picture of Marie emerging from the surf—created a web page about Marie and how she had lied about being raped. The police hadn’t named Marie. But Marie’s friend did. She even posted a picture of Marie, copied from Marie’s Myspace page. When Marie saw the web page, she lost it, trashing her apartment. She alerted Peggy, and the two went to the friend’s house.
Why did you do that? Marie demanded to know.
I don’t know why I did it, the friend told Marie.
The friend took the web page down, then and there. But Marie left as mad as she had come. The least she wanted was a straight answer, not some I don’t know why I did it. “After that we were no longer friends,” Marie says. “Your friend doesn’t do that to somebody.”
For Marie, there seemed no end to the fallout. Most painful, perhaps, was an edict she received from Shannon. Shannon’s home had long provided Marie with an escape or respite. Marie and Shannon would walk in the woods or drift on the water, then, at day’s end, crash at Shannon’s. Now, fearful he could become the target of a wrongful accusation, Shannon’s husband decided it would be best if Marie no longer spent the night. If she could make up one story, what would keep her from making up another? “When you become a foster parent, you’re open to that,” Shannon says.
It fell to Shannon to break the news: Marie could come over, but not sleep over. Saying it crushed Shannon. Hearing it crushed Marie.
Before August was out, Marie received a letter in the mail.
When she opened it, she realized her spiral wasn’t finished. With all she had lost, she now stood to lose more.
9
THE SHADOW WITHIN
Lakewood, Colorado
* * *
He signed the lease on June 24, 2009. He and Masha would begin their new lives at 65 Harlan Street, a two-bedroom, two-bath house in Lakewood, Colorado. It was a squat building with gray siding and a low chain-link fence, sitting on a busy street half a block from a gas station, an auto body shop, and a carniceria. Tall trees, summer-lush with leaves, towered above the roof. A beat-down neighborhood of small homes and boxy apartment complexes circled around. The rent was $1,150 a month.
The move, maybe, would turn his life around. His mom and stepdad lived nearby. So did his sister, who worked at a homeless shelter in Denver. He started hanging out with old friends from high school. They shot pool and played guitar together. Masha took a full-time job as a waitress at Olive Garden. He started working out at 24 Hour Fitness. They doted on Arias, their Shar-Pei. They shopped at King Soopers. They planned to have a baby.
But the beast wouldn’t rest. It had its own rhythms—he called them cycles. For weeks, months, he would feel normal, be normal. He would lift at the gym. Have dinner with his parents. Take his dog to the vet. But it never lasted. The monster would gather strength. The desire to control, to subjugate, would rise up inside him. His nights turned into treasure hunts, hours spent in his truck or on foot in neighborhoods, peering into homes, patrolling apartment complexes. The cycle would reach a boil. He would break into a house. He would rape. “There’s a definite rhythm,” he’d say. There’s “when I’m normal, and when I’m the rape guy.”
It didn’t always work out. One night, after weeks at a simmer, he pried open the window of the home of a woman in Golden, Colorado. The bar that secured the window clattered to the ground. He fled as she called police. Another time, he “over-reconned” the home of a divorced mother in Littleton, Colorado. One night, she opened her back door to let out the cat, and caught him lurking in the backyard. “You need to leave,” she shouted. By the time he crept back weeks later, she had installed an alarm system.
He was a student of rape. He learned from each failure. He discovered that he could gain useful intelligence from Myspace. He searched women’s profiles, seeking clues that they were older and alone. Women like that made easy prey, he thought.
That’s how he found Doris. Her profile showed she was sixty-five years old. She was single. She lived alone in a small neighborhood of twenty-six homes just off a busy road in Aurora. Behind her house stretched an apartment complex with long rows of two-story building
s. An alley ran down the middle of the rows. He would hunch down behind a low brick wall that separated the alley from Doris’s backyard. There, he watched her.
She didn’t come by the place all that often—mostly on weekends. He snuck up to her door once and found a key under the doormat. He figured she had left it for a neighbor. It was so predictable. He made a copy at a hardware store, then set the original back under the mat. She wouldn’t be any wiser. He let himself in. He checked to make sure that she didn’t have guns in the house. “Unpredictable shit happens,” he reminded himself. He learned her name. And which bedroom she slept in.
He raped her on October 4, 2009. Her questions about his family, her pleading for him to get help—they bothered him. He ended the attack earlier than he had planned. When he left, he took a pair of her underwear. He stashed them in the back of a black, fifteen-watt Career guitar amplifier that he kept in his bedroom at 65 Harlan Street. It was a trophy.
Masha was starting to annoy him. She didn’t ask too many questions when he’d return after a late night of stalking. But he was always having to make up stories to explain what he was doing. Out drinking. Or hanging with his high school buddies. He wanted total freedom. This wasn’t it. One night in February, he told her. “I want to be single. I want to be alone.”
Masha worked to save the marriage. She gave him space, flying to Georgia to stay with a friend from their time in South Korea. When she returned a month later, she found a pair of black lace panties stuffed between the cushions of the couch. She confronted him, angry. He told her the truth: He’d had sex with a woman while she was gone.
A False Report Page 12
