by Jon Krakauer
CHAPTER SEVEN
For the first several days after Zeke Adams allegedly tried to rape Kerry Barrett, she seldom left her off-campus apartment. When she finally emerged and ventured back onto the grounds of the university, she had a chance encounter with Kaitlynn Kelly, a smart, feisty junior she had known since the fall of 2009. “She was crying,” Barrett said, “which was unbelievable to me, because Kaitlynn is the toughest girl I have ever met. So I knew something very serious had happened to her.” When Barrett inquired why Kelly was upset, she confided to Barrett that three days earlier she had been raped.
Kaitlynn Kelly lived in Turner Hall, a three-story, all-female dormitory on the UM campus. On September 30, 2011, a Friday night, she attended a party at a house in the Rattlesnake district, a quiet residential neighborhood northeast of downtown Missoula. Kelly arrived at about 9:30, knocked back some shots of tequila and cheap whiskey over the next five hours, and then took a taxi back to the university early Saturday morning with a gay friend named Greg Witt.*1 Once they were back on campus, Kelly and Witt sat down on a bench in front of Jesse Hall, near her dorm, so Kelly could smoke a cigarette before returning to her room. When she searched her purse and realized she’d left her cigarettes at the party, Witt offered to beg a smoke for her.
Around 3:00 a.m., two freshmen walked by, Calvin Smith*2 and Ralph Richards,*3 who were stinking drunk. When Witt asked if they had a spare cigarette, Smith—a tall, beefy eighteen-year-old—replied that neither of them were smokers, then sat down next to Kelly. Richards sat next to Witt.
Greg Witt, who is convivial and forward, struck up a conversation with the two younger students, and the subject turned to sex. Kaitlynn Kelly remarked that Calvin Smith was “a cutie.” Witt suggested to Smith and Kelly that they ought to hook up, because she hadn’t slept with anyone in over a year and, in Witt’s humble opinion, getting laid would be good for both of them.
Egged on by Greg Witt, Kaitlynn Kelly invited Calvin Smith up to her room, and Smith responded enthusiastically. According to Kelly, Smith said, “Let’s go!” and they started walking across a parking lot to her dorm. In a statement the UM dean of students asked Kelly to write a couple of weeks later, she described what ensued:
Calvin had his arm around me as we got to the door. I swiped us both inside [with her student key-card]. Calvin and I went up to my room. We walked in and saw that my roommate and her boyfriend were asleep in her bed. I told Calvin that we could not do anything because they were here. He said, “It’s okay, we’ll be quiet.” I said no.
Calvin then proceeded to lay in my bed. I got in next to him, tapped him to move over so that I could fit, and he moved over. I believe at this point I fell asleep. I woke up to Calvin repeatedly violently penetrating my vagina with three of his fingers. I tried to pull his hand away with my right hand, telling him, “stop, no” multiple times. Calvin continued to penetrate me despite my efforts to pull him away and tell him to stop. Then he proceeded to violently penetrate my anus with the same force and motion. I again tried to pull his hand away. He then stated, “it’s okay, I just want to make you squirt.” He then sat up against my wall and pulled me by my arm over to his penis. He then forced me to perform fellatio on him by pushing my head down. I was in pain and gagging. I finally was able to pull away and lay down. Calvin then got on top of me and tried to have sex with me. When he went to penetrate my vagina, I was in excruciating pain. I pushed him away with my right forearm and stated loudly that I had to pee. I got up and put on a pair of shorts, and then went to the bathroom down the hall.
Calvin followed me into the bathroom. There were no words spoken, but he peeked over the stall and stared at me. Then he left as I was still peeing. This was the last I saw him.
I came back into my room. When I entered, my roommate, Nancy, was standing and staring at my sheets with a horrifying look on her face. I then looked over and saw my sheets covered in blood….I started crying hysterically and I walked over into the study lounge across the hall. I sat on the couch and cried. My roommate came in and asked if I was okay and if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said I just wanted to go to sleep.
“I was in a lot of pain—it was extreme,” Kelly told me. “When I finally pushed Calvin off of me, I ran down the hall to the bathroom and locked myself in one of the stalls. It hurt so much when I was urinating that I was crying hysterically from the pain. He followed me into the bathroom, looked over the top of the stall, and saw me crying. I don’t think he said anything. I just sat there on the toilet with my head down, bawling. I ended up bleeding for three days.” After Calvin Smith left her dormitory, Kelly said, she returned to her room “and tried to pass out for a little bit, because I was really tired.”
Later Saturday morning, when she woke up after sleeping for a couple of hours, she became unhinged at what she saw in the light of day. “There was blood on the pillow I was laying on,” she later recalled in a tearful interview with Detective Connie Brueckner of the Missoula Police Department. “I looked up, and there was blood on my wall above my head. And then I sat up really quick. And I looked at my side and there was blood on that wall, to my right. I jumped out of my bed…and there was blood all over my sheets….So I instantly got up and I took the Germ-X wipes, and cleaned my walls really good. And then as I was sobbing I took all my sheets and my pillow case off and I put them in a white Walmart bag, or maybe it was a bag from the grocery store on campus, and I shoved them all in there and put them down the trash chute.”
After cleaning the walls and disposing of the sheets, Kaitlynn Kelly noticed that her jeans and belt were missing. “I was really confused why he took my pants,” she said. “I can’t get over that.” She went for a drive with her roommate, Nancy Jones,*4 to try to clear her head. “I didn’t understand what had been done to me,” Kelly reflected. “I kept asking Nancy, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘You were raped.’ ”
Even after Nancy put it that plainly, Kelly said, “It took me a couple of days to comprehend it. On Monday, Nancy convinced me to go into Curry Health Center to get a rape kit done.” At Curry a physician documented severe vaginal and rectal pain, vaginal bleeding, and abrasions to her inner thighs and vaginal vault. But Kelly didn’t want to report the rape to the police.
On Tuesday, Kaitlynn Kelly ran into Kerry Barrett and told her what had transpired. At that point, Barrett said, “Kaitlynn didn’t know who Calvin was, didn’t know his last name, didn’t know where he lived. And she was scared for her life, because it had happened in her room, and she didn’t know if he was going to come back.” Although Barrett urged Kelly to report the assault, Kelly resisted. “She worried she might get in trouble,” Barrett said, “because she’d been drinking and she was underage, only twenty at the time. And she didn’t think the cops would believe her story.”
Kerry Barrett, concerned that the man who raped her friend would never be held accountable, decided to take matters into her own hands. There was a security camera trained on the door Kaitlynn Kelly and Calvin Smith had used to enter Turner Hall. “So I called up campus security and asked them how long they kept the tapes from their cameras,” Barrett said. “At which point they kind of roped me into telling them why I wanted to know.” When Barrett disclosed what had happened to Kelly, a campus safety officer drove over to Barrett’s apartment and brought her in to review the security footage.
It didn’t take long for Barrett to identify Kelly on the video, entering Turner Hall with a large young man at 3:27 a.m. “We saw the guy who raped her enter the dorm with his arm around her,” Barrett said. “She looked very, very drunk. And then about half an hour later we saw the rapist go out the door with her pants in his hand.” Apparently, he took them as a trophy of his conquest.
Barrett hadn’t told Kelly that she’d gone to the campus police. She made it clear to the safety officer who’d shown her the video that Kelly didn’t want to report the rape, and she begged him not to contact Kelly. He agreed, promising that he would save the footage so it wou
ld be available if Kelly changed her mind.
A day later, Barrett confessed to Kelly what she’d done, explained that the video of the rapist was being preserved, and related that the campus police had assured her that Kelly wouldn’t get in trouble. After some deliberation, Kelly reconsidered and decided to report the assault to the campus police. Because the alleged crime was a felony, the UM police immediately turned the case over to the Missoula Police Department, which dispatched Officer Randy Krastel to Kelly’s dorm room to take a statement and collect whatever evidence still existed.
By now, five days had passed since Kaitlynn Kelly had allegedly been raped. “I’d thrown away my blood-soaked sheets because I was disgusted and I didn’t know what to do,” she told me. “But I gave the cops my bloody shorts, my bloody underwear, my bloody T-shirt. They also took my two-inch-thick memory-foam mattress that was soaked all the way through with blood.” Officer Krastel interviewed Kelly, Kerry Barrett, and Kelly’s roommate and took photographs of the crime scene.
The accused rapist, Calvin Smith, had graduated from a small-town high school the previous June, where he’d distinguished himself as an athlete. Individuals who knew Smith have described him as “kind,” “easygoing,” and “goofy.” But he had never had sex before meeting Kaitlynn Kelly, and a look at what he has posted on a social media site suggests that he was a frustrated, involuntary celibate. On January 11, 2011, Smith posted a line from the animated sitcom Family Guy on his Facebook page: “women are not people god just put them here for mans entertainment.”
When a Facebook friend commented that the actual line is “Women are not people. They are devices built by the Lord Jesus Christ for our entertainment,” Smith replied, “Ahhh I wish I had that power.”
—
AFTER OFFICER KRASTEL visited her dormitory, Kaitlynn Kelly was asked to come downtown to the police station to talk to Detective Connie Brueckner, a highly regarded, eight-year veteran of the Missoula police force. The interview, which was recorded, lasted forty-two minutes. Brueckner was thorough, and asked probing questions, but she presented them in a sensitive, supportive manner. When Kelly admitted that she had agreed to have sex with Calvin Smith before they entered her dorm, Brueckner inquired, “What were you thinking at that time?”
“That it was going to be a good time,” Kelly replied.
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“Probably, maybe, have sex.”
“Were you okay with that idea at the time?”
“I was,” Kelly answered. “That’s why I let him in my room.”
“Did that change?” Brueckner asked. “That feeling?”
“Yeah,” Kelly said. “I guess when we got in my room. Because my roommate and her boyfriend were in the room. They were, like, snoring. Passed out. And I told him, ‘My roommate and her boyfriend are here. We can’t do anything.’ And he told me, ‘It’s okay. We’ll be quiet.’ ”
“What did you think of that?” Brueckner asked.
“Not okay,” Kelly answered.
Detective Brueckner assured Kaitlynn Kelly that it was understandable and acceptable for her to have changed her mind about having sex once they entered the dorm room. Then she asked Kelly, “If your roommate wasn’t there, would you have been okay with it?”
“No,” Kelly declared without hesitating. “As soon as we walked in the dorm, I was like, ‘No! I don’t want to do this.’…I told him, ‘You can just lay on my bed until the morning.’ ”
“And what did he say to that?” Brueckner asked.
“Well, he got on my bed and lay down,” Kelly answered. “And I got next to him and lay down.”
Detective Brueckner asked if she and Calvin Smith went to bed with their clothes on.
“Yes,” Kelly answered. “I don’t know what happened after that, but the next thing I remember is waking up with his fingers inside of me, with a stabbing motion, very roughly.”
“Inside your vagina?”
“Yes,” Kelly said.
Brueckner asked what happened to the clothing she had been wearing when she got in bed.
“When I woke up?” Kelly said. “I didn’t have pants on, but my shirt was still on.”
“And what happened when you realized that was happening?” Brueckner asked.
“I kept reaching for his hand and pulling it away,” Kelly explained, demonstrating with her hands. “I kept grabbing at his thumb and pulling, like, towards him. To get him off of me. But he kept, like, coming back.”
“Did he say anything?” Detective Brueckner asked.
According to Kaitlynn Kelly, Calvin Smith told her, “No, just wait. Just wait.”
“Were you saying anything?” Brueckner asked.
“I was saying, ‘Stop!’ ” Kelly insisted. “And then—”
“How loud were you guys?” Brueckner interrupted.
“I don’t think I was very loud,” Kelly replied. She paused for a moment before explaining, ruefully, “Because my roommate was there, I didn’t want to wake them up. I just wanted it to stop. And then he went in my rear, with his hands doing the same stabbing motion.”
A little later, Detective Brueckner again inquired why Kaitlynn Kelly hadn’t done more to alert her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend, who were asleep a few feet away in the same room. “I have to ask obvious questions,” Brueckner apologized, “because these are questions people would ask….You’re using a quiet voice when you’re telling him to stop. I can understand to some degree. But tell me what was your thinking there? Why weren’t you just screaming loud? It certainly would have stopped things.”
“I don’t know,” Kelly said. “To tell you the truth, I just don’t know. I was very scared.”
“Did he ever make any threats to you?” Brueckner asked.
“No,” Kelly replied.
“I don’t mean to ask you that question to make you feel bad,” Brueckner persisted. “It’s just—it’s easy to think through things now and go, ‘I could have done this,’ or whatever. But things were happening.”
“I feel really bad about throwing my sheets away,” Kelly said, breaking into tears as she realized how inexplicable her silence must seem to someone who hadn’t been in her position. “I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to forget about it, like it didn’t happen. It was really hard for me to even report it.”
In fact, psychologists and psychiatrists who study sexual assault report that victims frequently react to being raped much the way Kaitlynn Kelly did. In a 2012 presentation in Baltimore, David Lisak—a clinical psychologist and forensic consultant who is an expert on the subject of acquaintance rape—explained to a room full of prosecutors, defense attorneys, police officers, and health-care professionals that when people are raped, the experience is so traumatic that it often causes them to behave in a wide variety of ways that may seem inexplicable. “How many people have ever heard a rape victim say, ‘I felt paralyzed’?” Lisak asked the room. “How many have ever heard a rape victim say, ‘I wanted to scream, and I couldn’t’? How many people here who treat trauma victims have heard them say, ‘I had a nightmare last night; I was trying to run away and I couldn’t move’?”
When a rape occurs in a dorm room, Lisak said, investigators often determine that the victim could have gotten out of bed with apparent ease and fled the room. But “the fact that they didn’t immediately make a break for it, or the fact that they didn’t scream—none of those things necessarily mean that this was a consensual encounter.”
After Lisak spoke, his colleague Russell Strand, a sexual-crimes expert who heads the Family Advocacy Law Enforcement Training Division at the U.S. Army Military Police School, told the same room full of people a story about a military couple who threw a party at their house. One of the guests, a soldier, became too drunk to go home. The husband and wife escorted him down to their basement and offered him a couch to sleep on, where he promptly passed out, after which they went back upstairs and fell asleep in their own bed, with
their four-year-old son lying beside them.
In the middle of the night, the wife woke up to discover that the drunk party guest was lying next to her with his fingers in her vagina, masturbating her, as her husband and son slept in the same bed. She was horrified but said nothing. She lay there in silence for the next fifteen minutes while he continued to penetrate her with his fingers. Defense attorneys for the assailant built their case around the fact that she could have immediately stopped the assault by waking her husband but had remained mute instead.
Prosecutors took the case to trial, regardless, put the wife on the witness stand, and addressed the issue, head-on, by skillfully framing their questions to elicit an honest explanation that would resonate with the jury. According to Strand, one of the prosecutors began by telling her, “Help me understand what you are able to remember about your experience.”
“Well, his fingers were in my vagina,” the woman said.
The prosecutor asked, “What were you thinking when you woke up and realized, ‘His fingers were in my vagina’?”
She answered that she was thinking, “Oh my God, I hope my husband doesn’t wake up….He would have killed this guy, and my four-year-old son laying next to me, his life would have been ruined, my life would have been ruined, and my husband’s life would have been ruined. So my first thought was ‘I hope he doesn’t wake up.’ ”
This testimony, Strand said, caused the assailant’s case to fall apart, and he was convicted.
—
AS DETECTIVE CONNIE BRUECKNER continued interviewing Kaitlynn Kelly, Kelly became unglued. Brueckner tried to comfort her by praising her for reporting the assault. “What happened isn’t okay,” Brueckner offered. “I can see that you’re upset. You are a strong gal, and you probably have very good judgment most of the time….There’s some Kleenex there if you need it.”
Then Brueckner pointed out that the case was going to be tricky to prosecute because both Kelly and Calvin Smith were drunk. “I’m sorry he didn’t hear you [when you said no],” Brueckner said. “But the good thing coming of this is, you’re not stuffing it someplace where it is going to come back later in your life….You’ve got a good, supportive family. And there are great services on campus….And you can move past this, I’m sure. It’s much better to do that now than try to deal with it five years from now.”
