Missoula

by Jon Krakauer

  “My husband wondered, ‘Why do the police want to talk to Hillary? What kind of trouble is she in?’ ” Hillary said. “But I knew immediately why Detective Baker had called. I knew it was about Beau.” When Hillary McLaughlin called Baker back, he explained that he’d heard she’d been sexually assaulted by Beau Donaldson in 2008 and he hoped she would be willing to provide him with a recorded statement of what happened that night.

  McLaughlin wasn’t sure she wanted to revisit what had been such a disturbing event. “My brother-in-law at the time was a U.S. marshal,” she said. “So I asked him, ‘What should I do?’ He goes, ‘I think you know what to do. You need to do the right thing.’ ”

  After this conversation, McLaughlin was inclined to let Detective Baker interview her, but first she wanted to tell her father about the assault and get his opinion. “I’m very close to my dad,” she explained, “and I really wanted to tell him face-to-face, but I was supposed to do the recording the next day, so I had to tell him over the phone. When I called him, of course, his first instinct was ‘I’m going to kill Beau Donaldson! I’m going to drive down to Missoula and I’m going to kill him!’ But then my dad calmed down and said, ‘I think you need to make that statement to the police, and you need to do it right away, because it might help that other woman he raped. And it might keep him from raping anyone else.’ ”

  On January 26, 2012, Hillary McLaughlin told her story to Detective Baker. And then she waited anxiously for whatever was going to happen next.

  What happened was that she had an epiphany. She suddenly understood that she’d been deceiving herself when she thought she’d put the attack behind her. In fact, Beau Donaldson was still just beneath the surface of her consciousness, creating all kinds of havoc, and he’d been lurking there ever since he’d tried to rape her.

  “Before Beau attacked me,” McLaughlin said, “I’d never been an anxious person. But around the time he was arrested, I realized that since 2008 there had been a huge spike in my anxiety level. I used to be a very active runner and loved running outside. Now I’m afraid to run outside by myself.” Indeed, she said, ever since the attack she’s been terrified to be alone. Whenever she was by herself and had to walk from her house to her car at night, she would call her husband, Robert, and ask him to keep talking to her until she was safely inside the vehicle with the doors locked. “He did it,” McLaughlin said, “but he never understood why I was so scared.”

  Hesitantly, Hillary McLaughlin admitted that she was also afraid of the dark. “I was twenty-one years old and afraid of the dark,” she said, looking astonished. “It got to the point where I wouldn’t even stay at my house by myself. If Robert was out of town for training or something, I would stay at my sister’s or my parents’. And it’s not like I live in a scary neighborhood. I live in a nice, safe neighborhood.” McLaughlin recalled a trip she and Robert made to New York. “We were walking down the street to get tickets for a Broadway show,” she said, “when a guy just kind of brushed my shoulder, and I lost it. I started crying uncontrollably. I was clutching Robert’s hand for dear life.” Things got so bad that Hillary finally told her obstetrician about her irrational fears. “I didn’t explain to her what happened,” she said. “I just said I had severe anxiety. I told her that I bolt, that I’m always scared, always looking over my shoulder. I mean, I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and I turn on every light in my house. If I hear one little noise, I completely freak out.”

  McLaughlin said, “I never put it all together until after Beau was arrested. My husband and I were talking one night, and I told him, ‘My anxiety has gotten so bad.’ He asked me when it began, so we started going back through events to try and figure it out. And that’s when I realized: Ever since that night in Missoula is when it began.”

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  *1 pseudonym

  *2 pseudonym

  *3 pseudonym

  *4 pseudonym

  *5 pseudonym

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On January 13, 2012, the day Beau Donaldson made bail and was released from the Missoula County Detention Facility, Allison Huguet received an e-mail from a deputy county attorney named Shaun Donovan, informing her that he would be handling the Donaldson prosecution. Donovan explained that according to the terms of Donaldson’s release from the county lockup, he would be required to wear a GPS monitoring device on his ankle and complete a chemical-dependency program. Donaldson was also forbidden to have any contact with Huguet or her family, to go within one thousand feet of her home, or to leave Missoula County.

  Sixty years old, heavyset, and rumpled, Shaun Donovan was a native Montanan with an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a Juris Doctor from the University of Montana School of Law. Early in his career he’d worked for Milt Datsopoulos, the attorney now representing Donaldson. From 1979 through 2010, Donovan had served as the county attorney in sparsely populated Mineral County, just west of Missoula. As the only lawyer in the office, he personally handled every case. In 2011, when the citizens of Mineral County decided, after thirty-one years, that it was time for a change and voted him out of a job, Donovan moved back to Missoula, where he became one of sixteen deputy attorneys toiling under County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg in what, by Montana standards, amounted to a large, frenetic law office.

  Because Beau Donaldson had confessed to raping Huguet while she slept, it would be all but impossible for Milt Datsopoulos to convince a jury that he was innocent. Shaun Donovan was therefore confident that the case would be resolved with a plea deal and would never go to trial. Soon after Donaldson’s arrest, however, Datsopoulos made it clear that he intended to demand a lenient punishment for Donaldson as part of any plea agreement. Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.

  In Montana, a plea deal that involves a negotiated sentence typically works like this: In return for a guilty plea from the defendant, the prosecutors recommend a sentence that the defendant and his attorneys are willing to accept as the maximum punishment; the defendant’s attorneys recommend a sentence that the prosecutors are willing to accept as the minimum punishment; and both sides agree to let the judge determine a sentence that falls somewhere within the range of their differing recommendations. After the terms of the plea deal are agreed upon and submitted to the judge, a sentencing hearing is held to allow each side to argue the merits of its recommendation in court. At the conclusion of this hearing, the judge issues a ruling and the sentence is imposed.

  In Beau Donaldson’s case, the plea negotiations (like most plea negotiations) resembled a slow-moving game of chicken. Each side threatened to halt negotiations and take the case to trial (an outcome desired by neither the defense nor the prosecution) unless the other side agreed to its terms. But as the case crept forward through the winter, spring, and summer of 2012, Allison Huguet became increasingly concerned that Shaun Donovan wasn’t firmly committed to a deal that included hard time at Deer Lodge. Despite Donovan’s many assurances to the contrary, Huguet and her family worried that he would cede to Milt Datsopoulos’s demands that Beau Donaldson be allowed to serve a short sentence at a minimum-security Department of Corrections facility, followed by probation, rather than being incarcerated at the state prison, a much harsher and more restrictive environment.

  According to Montana state law, the maximum sentence for a person convicted of sexual intercourse without consent (SIWOC)—the legal term for rape in Montana—is incarceration in the state prison for one hundred years; the minimum sentence is two years in the state prison. But the law allows for exceptions to the minimum. In Donaldson’s case, for example, if the judge determined that “no serious bodily injury was inflicted on the victim,” the minimum sentence could include no prison time at all. Indeed, in Missoula County it was common for defendants found guilty of rape to receive sentences that didn’t require them to spend any time behind bars.

  On April
12, to give Allison Huguet a better sense of what sort of punishment she might realistically expect Beau Donaldson and his attorney to accept in a plea deal, Shaun Donovan sent an e-mail to Allison and her parents, Kevin and Beth Huguet, summarizing the outcome of local rape cases over the previous decade. From 2001 through the first three months of 2012, sixty-seven men had been convicted of SIWOC in Missoula County. In four of those cases the defendants were sentenced to an average of fifty years behind bars. In forty-two cases, the defendants were sentenced to a mix of prison time and probation that ranged from ten years to sixty years of prison and probation combined. In the other twenty-one cases, the sentences included no incarceration whatsoever. At the conclusion of this e-mail, Donovan assured the Huguets,

  I remain committed to seeking a sentence that requires Beau to do some time at the state prison, to be on probation for a very long time after his release and to register as a sex offender for the remainder of his life….Please let me know if you have questions, want to talk or whatever.

  Twenty-seven minutes after she received Shaun Donovan’s e-mail, Allison wrote back,

  For me it is unsettling knowing that there is even a possibility that he will get no jail time or even a small amount of time even though he has confessed to such a horrible crime….I also trust that you know and hopefully the judge will know how deeply this has affected me and my family and understand that Beau has to be the one to pay for it.

  —

  ON APRIL 18, two weeks before Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating the Missoula County Attorney’s Office and the Missoula Police Department for bungling dozens of rape cases, Allison Huguet was contacted by a DOJ investigator who wanted to speak with her about the way the Missoula police and prosecutors had handled her case. When Huguet asked Shaun Donovan about the federal investigation, it turned out that neither he nor Fred Van Valkenburg was aware of it; by contacting Donovan, Huguet inadvertently tipped off the county attorney’s office that it was under investigation by the DOJ—a revelation that alarmed Van Valkenburg greatly and immediately caused his entire office to circle the wagons.

  Professing that the county attorney didn’t want to “complicate the resolution of the case against Beau Donaldson,” Donovan asked Huguet to check with him “before providing any information to anyone about the Donaldson case.” In truth, Van Valkenburg had simply decided that the best way to handle the crisis was to assert that the investigation was an abuse of the DOJ’s statutory and constitutional authority and to stonewall the feds.

  Allison Huguet agreed to contact Shaun Donovan before talking to the DOJ, but she said it seemed to her that the investigation might be good for her case and that “the added pressure will help everyone.”

  Donovan’s response was curt. He reiterated that if anyone from the DOJ contacted her again,

  Before you talk to them we have asked that they call me or Fred Van Valkenburg….Anything you say may get to Beau’s lawyer which is why we want to proceed truthfully but carefully….The “added pressure” from the investigation may do some good somewhere but it will not help our case against Beau in any way. It is much more likely to cause harm.

  —

  ALLISON HUGUET GRADUATED from Eastern Oregon University on June 16, 2012, and returned to Missoula a day later to live at her mother’s house and help with the wedding of her older sister, Sarah, who was getting married on June 27. Allison, her younger sister, Kathleen, and various friends held a bridal shower for Sarah on June 26, then went out on the town for a bachelorette party. They had originally intended to go bowling, because Allison had seen some of the ugly comments that had been posted about her online in the wake of Beau Donaldson’s arrest and didn’t want to go to a bar, lest she run into some of his friends. But their plans changed, and late that night, Kathleen, Allison, Sarah, and the rest of the bride’s entourage ended up at a notorious Missoula drinking establishment called Stockman’s.

  “It’s a big Griz bar,” Allison told me. “A lot of Beau’s friends work there.” A mural covering the lower half of Stockman’s front window depicts four grizzly bears and a half dozen Griz football players sprinting en masse toward the end zone. When Kathleen and Sarah Huguet went to the bar to order drinks, the bartender recognized them as Allison’s sisters and refused to serve them.

  Sarah Huguet and the bachelorettes were sitting opposite the bar, pondering their next move, when a group of men approached. One of them was a brother of Beau’s, Brady Donaldson, who was three years older than Allison and Beau and had attended school with Sarah Huguet when they were growing up in the Target Range neighborhood. “They were standing pretty close, just staring at us,” Allison remembered. “There was definitely tension in the air.”

  Among the members of Brady Donaldson’s retinue was Sam Erschler. Although Erschler was a close friend of the Donaldson brothers, Allison also considered him to be her friend. Erschler had facilitated Beau’s confession the morning after he’d raped Allison and had offered her emotional support. So Allison was surprised when an acquaintance named Norman* came over to the bachelorettes and, by her account, said, “God, I can’t stand Erschler. I was just over there getting a drink and he told me I need to stay away from you. He said you girls were nothing but trouble.”

  By now the Huguets and their friends had decided to leave Stockman’s. As they were moving out of the bar, Allison said, “I walked past Sam Erschler, touched his arm, and said, ‘You know, Sam, I don’t bad-mouth you to other people, and I’d appreciate it if you would do the same for me.’ ”

  “What are you talking about?” Erschler replied. “I’ve never said anything bad about you.”

  “Seriously?” Allison said. “Did you not just tell Norman that he needed to stay away from me?”

  This caused Sam Erschler to fly into a rage. “I never said anything bad about you!” he screamed. As Allison walked away, he followed her out the door, shouting insults at the top of his lungs. “You fucking bitch!” Erschler yelled. “I never said anything bad about you!”

  Then Brady Donaldson started harassing the Huguet sisters, as well. “You may think everything’s fine right now,” he shouted at them, “but you guys just wait! In September, when this goes to trial, the gloves are gonna come off!”

  “Yeah,” Kathleen Huguet spat back. “In September. When your brother goes to prison and gets fucked in the ass and learns what it feels like to get raped himself!” By this time a large crowd had gathered on the sidewalk around the bachelorettes and Brady Donaldson’s friends.

  Donaldson started making threatening gestures, and he bellowed at Allison and Kathleen Huguet, “You need to get the fuck out of Missoula!” Someone else in Brady Donaldson’s group threatened to kill the Huguets.

  Erschler screeched at Allison, “Good luck on the fucking stand, bitch!” As the Huguets and their friends walked away, Allison recalled, “We could hear them screaming at us for blocks. I felt really bad that it ruined my sister’s bachelorette party.”

  —

  LITTLE PROGRESS WAS made on the plea negotiations between the Missoula County Attorney’s Office and Milt Datsopoulos, Beau Donaldson’s attorney, through mid-July 2012. On July 20, deputy prosecutor Shaun Donovan met with Kevin Huguet to give him an update. Three days earlier, during a conference with head Missoula County prosecutor Fred Van Valkenburg and Datsopoulos, Donovan had floated the idea of recommending a sentence of five years and allowing Beau Donaldson to serve it at a minimum-security Department of Corrections facility rather than the state prison. Donovan insinuated to Kevin that both Van Valkenburg and Datsopoulos thought it was a fair sentence.

  Anticipating that Kevin Huguet might not be thrilled with such a light sentence, Donovan explained that although it was a more lenient sentence than the Huguets wanted, he thought it might be the stiffest punishment Beau Donaldson would accept in return for pleading guilty. Furthermore, if they failed to achieve a plea deal and the case went to trial,
a sentence of five years at the DOC, or even less, might well be the outcome, because Milt Datsopoulos was a skilled criminal attorney with a long history of winning rape cases.

  Shaun Donovan pointed out to the Huguets that Datsopoulos would tell the judge and jury that Beau Donaldson had no prior criminal record; he didn’t use a weapon or act violently during the commission of the crime; he was a young man with a promising future; he had a supportive family; he accepted responsibility for his actions; and he would seek treatment for his substance abuse problems and his aberrant sexual behavior. It was understood that if the case went to trial, Datsopoulos was likely to do everything possible to impugn Allison Huguet’s character, because smearing the victim is one of the most effective tactics lawyers have at their disposal when defending rapists.

  Donovan also reminded Kevin Huguet that they needed to consider “the environment in Missoula.” What he meant by this needed no elaboration: Beau had been a celebrated and beloved hometown high school football star who now played for the Grizzlies; the Griz were heading into the 2012 season as the reigning co-champions of the Big Sky Conference; and any jury empaneled in Missoula County would almost certainly include a significant number of loyal Griz supporters.

  Shaun Donovan’s rationale for recommending a lenient punishment didn’t sit well with Kevin Huguet. He was furious that Donovan would even consider agreeing to a sentence of five years at a DOC facility. “We had been fighting Shaun for months about this very point. We wanted Beau to serve his time at Deer Lodge, not the DOC, where things would be easy for him, his family could visit whenever they wanted, and where all his buddies could come out and hang with him,” Kevin explained. “We knew that if he was sentenced to the DOC, he’d get probation and be out on the street in no time, because that’s how it usually works. So we were really adamant that we weren’t going to accept anything less than hard time at the penitentiary, and we weren’t going to back down from that.”