by Sid Holt
A week later, Galbraith, Hendershot, and Aurora detective Scott Burgess gathered around a conference table in the Westminster Police Department. They compared investigations. The descriptions of the attacker were similar. So, too, his methods. But there was a clincher: the woman in Galbraith’s case had remained as focused as possible during her ordeal, memorizing details. She recalled the camera that the attacker had used to take photos. It was a pink Sony digital camera—a description that fit the model stolen from the apartment of the Westminster victim.
Galbraith and Hendershot hadn’t known each other before the meeting. But the hunt for the rapist united them. As female cops, both women were members of a sorority within a fraternity. The average law-enforcement agency in America is about 13 percent female. Police ranks remain overwhelmingly male, often hierarchical and militaristic. But both women had found a place for themselves. They had moved up in the ranks.
The two bonded naturally. Both were outgoing. They cracked fast jokes and smiled fast smiles. Galbraith was younger. She crackled energy. She would move “a hundred miles an hour in one direction,” a colleague said. Hendershot was more experienced. She’d worked more than one hundred rape cases in her career. Careful, diligent, exacting—she complemented Galbraith. “Sometimes going a hundred miles an hour, you miss some breadcrumbs,” the same colleague noted.
Their initial attempts to identify the attacker faltered. Golden police obtained a surveillance tape showing the entrance to the apartment complex where Galbraith’s victim had been attacked. A fellow detective sat through more than twelve hours of blurry footage. He laboriously counted 261 vehicles and people coming and going on the night of the incident. There was one possible lead. In the predawn hours, a white Mazda pickup truck appeared ten times. Maybe it was the attacker waiting for the woman to fall asleep? But efforts to identify the vehicle’s owner failed. The license plate was unreadable.
As the weeks passed, the dead ends continued. Hendershot turned to the database meant to capture serial rapists by linking cases in different jurisdictions. It turned up only bad leads. Frustration grew. “Someone else is going to get hurt,” Galbraith worried to herself.
By late January, the detectives decided they needed to broaden their scope. Hendershot asked one of her department’s crime analysts to scour nearby agencies for similar crimes. The analyst turned up an incident in Lakewood, another Denver suburb, that occurred about a month before the rape in Westminster. At the time, police had labeled the case a burglary. But in fresh light, it appeared very much like a failed rape attempt, committed by an attacker who closely resembled the description of the rapist. The analyst shot Hendershot a message, “You need to come to talk to me right now.”
The report detailed how a forty-six-year-old artist had been accosted in her home by a man with a knife. He wore a black mask. He tried to bind her wrists. But when the man looked away, the woman jumped out of her bedroom window. She broke three ribs and punctured a lung in the seven-foot fall to the ground, but managed to escape.
Investigators at the scene uncovered a few, tenuous pieces of evidence. Thundershowers had soaked the area before the attack. Police found shoe prints in the soft, damp soil outside the woman’s bedroom. On a window, they found honeycomb marks.
Honeycomb marks. Hendershot seized on them. Westminster crime-scene investigators had discovered similar marks on the window of the victim’s apartment. Hendershot asked for a comparison. The marks at the two crime scenes were the same. They also appeared similar to prints from a pair of Under Armour gloves that a Lakewood investigator, on a hunch, had discovered at a Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Galbraith checked out the footprints left at the Lakewood scene. They matched the footprints in the snow outside her victim’s apartment in Golden. She sent images of the shoe prints to crimeshoe.com, a website that promised to move an investigation “from an unidentified scene-of-crime shoeprint to detailed footwear information in one simple step.” The site, now defunct, identified the prints as having been made by a pair of Adidas ZX 700 mesh shoes, available in stores after March 2005.
By the end of January 2011, the detectives had connected four rapes over a fifteen-month period across Denver’s suburbs. The trail started in Aurora, east of Denver, on October 4, 2009, with the sixty-five-year-old woman. It picked up nine months later and twenty-two miles to the west, when the rapist attacked the artist in Lakewood. A month after that the fifty-nine-year-old widow was raped in Westminster, some ten miles to the north. And then, finally, in January 2011 came the attack on the twenty-six-year-old in Golden, about fifteen miles southwest of Westminster. If you drew a map, it was almost like the rapist was circling the compass points of Denver’s suburbs.
Galbraith and Hendershot turned to DNA to identify the serial rapist. The detectives had thoroughly examined their crime scenes. Technicians had swabbed window panes, doorknobs, even toilet handles—anything that the attacker might have touched. But the man was familiar with the ways of law enforcement, perhaps even a cop. He knew to avoid leaving his DNA at the scene. He used wet wipes to clean up his ejaculate. He ordered the women to shower. He took their clothing and bedding with him when he left.
He had been punctilious. But not perfect. The attacker had left behind the tiniest traces of himself. The technicians recovered three samples of so-called touch DNA, as few as seven or eight cells of skin that can be analyzed with modern laboratory techniques.
One sample was collected from the kitchen timer in Westminster. A second came from the victim in Golden. And one came from the teddy bear in Aurora.
August 11, 2008. Lynnwood, Washington
A little before nine on a Monday morning, two Lynnwood police detectives responded to a report of rape at the Alderbrooke Apartments. A couple of other officers were already there, protecting the crime scene. A K-9 officer was outside, his dog trying to pick up a scent.
The detectives, Sgt. Jeffrey Mason and Jerry Rittgarn, found the victim, Marie, on a couch, in a blanket, crying off and on. She was accompanied by her foster mother, Peggy Cunningham, and by Wayne Nash, her case manager with Project Ladder.
Marie, who had turned eighteen three months before, told police she had been talking on the phone much of the night with her friend Jordan. After finally falling asleep, she was awakened by a man with a knife—and then tied up, blindfolded, gagged, and raped. The man wore a condom, she believed. As for what her attacker looked like, Marie could offer few details. White man, gray sweater. The attack seemed to last a long time, Marie told police, but she couldn’t say for sure. It was all a blur.
Marie said that after the rapist left she had managed, with her feet, to retrieve some scissors from a cabinet’s bottom drawer; she cut herself free then tried calling Jordan. When Jordan didn’t answer, Marie called her foster mother, then her upstairs neighbor, who came down to Marie’s apartment and called 911.
Mason, then thirty-nine, had spent his years mostly in patrol and narcotics. His longest law-enforcement stint had been with a small police department in Oregon, where he served for almost nine years and received a medal of valor. He was hired by Lynn-wood in 2003 and served on a narcotics task force. He was promoted to sergeant—and transferred to the Criminal Investigations Division—six weeks before the report of Marie’s assault. He had previously worked only one or two rape cases. But this investigation was his to lead.
Rittgarn had been with the department for eleven years, the last four as a detective. He had previously worked as a technician in the aerospace industry. Before that, he had served in the Marine Corps, specializing in helicopter avionics.
The Lynnwood Police Department had seventy-nine sworn officers, serving a city of about 34,000 people. In 2008, Marie’s case was one of ten rape reports the department fielded; with so few, the Criminal Investigations Division didn’t have a separate sex-crimes unit.
By the time Marie reported being assaulted, sex-crime specialists had developed protocols that recognized the challenges and sensit
ivity of investigating rape cases. These guidelines, available to all police departments, detailed common missteps.
Investigators, one guide advised, should not assume that a true victim will be hysterical rather than calm, able to show clear signs of physical injury, and certain of every detail. Some victims confuse fine points or even recant. Nor should police get lost in stereotypes—believing, for example, that an adult victim will be more believable than an adolescent.
Police should not interrogate victims or threaten to use a polygraph device. Lie-detector tests are especially unreliable with people who have been traumatized and can destroy the victim’s trust in law enforcement. Many states bar police from using them with rape victims.
Police, walking around Marie’s apartment, discovered that the rear sliding-glass door was unlocked and slightly ajar. It led to a back porch, with a wooden railing that was covered with dirt—except one part, about three feet wide, where it looked like maybe someone had brushed the surface while climbing over. On the bed officers found a shoestring—used, apparently, to bind Marie. On top of a computer monitor they found a second shoestring, tied to a pair of underwear, the apparent blindfold or gag. Both laces had come from Marie’s black tennis shoes, in the living room. Next to the bed was a black-handled knife. Marie said the knife was hers—that it had come from the kitchen, and was what the rapist had used to threaten her. Police found Marie’s purse on the bedroom floor, her wallet on the bed and her learner’s permit, for some reason removed from her wallet, on a bedroom window sill.
Mason told Marie she needed to go to the hospital for a sexual-assault examination. After Marie left, accompanied by her foster mom and case manager, the detectives helped process the scene. Looking for a condom or its wrapper, Rittgarn checked the bathroom, trash cans, and a nearby hillside but came up empty. The dog, outside, had tracked to the south, toward an office building, but was unable to lead officers to anything that might identify the rapist.
At the hospital, medical staff collected more than a dozen swabs from Marie. Labs were taken for hepatitis, chlamydia, HIV. Marie received Zithromax and Suprax, for possible exposure to sexually transmitted diseases, and an emergency contraceptive pill.
The medical report noted abrasions to Marie’s wrists and to her vagina. The bruising on her right wrist measured 6.5 centimeters, or about 2.5 inches, the one on her left, 7 centimeters.
During the exam, the medical report said, Marie was “alert and oriented, and in no acute distress.”
On the day she reported being raped, Marie phoned Shannon, her former foster mom, after getting back from the hospital. “She called and said, ‘I’ve been raped,’” Shannon says. “There was just no emotion. It was like she was telling me that she’d made a sandwich.” That Marie wasn’t hysterical, or even upset, made Shannon wonder if Marie was telling the truth.
The next day, when Shannon saw Marie at her apartment, her doubts intensified. In the kitchen, when Shannon walked in, Marie didn’t meet her gaze. “That seemed very strange,” Shannon says. “We would always hug and she would look you right in the eye.” In the bedroom, Marie seemed casual, with nothing to suggest that something horrible had happened there. Outside, Marie “was on the grass, rolling around and giggling and laughing,” Shannon says. And when the two went to buy new bedding—Marie’s old bedding having been taken as evidence—Marie became furious when she couldn’t find the same set. “Why would you want to have the same sheets and bedspread to look at every day when you’d been raped on this bed set?” Shannon thought to herself.
Peggy, too, was mystified by Marie’s demeanor. When Marie called her on that first day, before the police arrived, “she was crying and I could barely hear her,” Peggy says. “Her voice was like this little tiny voice, and I couldn’t really tell. It didn’t sound real to me…. It sounded like a lot of drama, too, in some ways.” At the time, Peggy had new foster children—two sisters, both teenagers. Not long before, Marie had accompanied Peggy and the sisters and Peggy’s boyfriend on a picnic. To Peggy’s mind, Marie had spent the afternoon trying to get attention—so much so that Peggy now wondered if this was more of the same, only more desperate.
After rushing to the apartment that morning, Peggy found Marie on the floor, crying. “But it was so strange because I sat down next to her, and she was telling me what happened, and I got this—I’m a big Law & Order fan, and I just got this really weird feeling,” Peggy says. “It was like, I felt like she was telling me the script of a Law & Order story.” Part of it was what Marie was saying. Why would a rapist use shoelaces to tie her up? And part of it was how Marie was saying it: “She seemed so detached and removed emotionally.”
The two women who had helped raise Marie talked on the phone. Peggy told Shannon she had doubts. Shannon said she did, too. Neither had known Marie to be a liar—to exaggerate, sure, to want attention, sure—but now, both knew they weren’t alone in wondering if Marie had made this up.
On August 12, the day after Marie reported being raped, Sgt. Mason’s telephone rang. The caller “related that [Marie] had a past history of trying to get attention and the person was questioning whether the ‘rape’ had occurred,” Mason later wrote.
Mason’s report didn’t identify the caller—but the caller was Peggy.
She called police to share her concerns. Mason then came to her home and interviewed her in person. When she told police of her skepticism, she asked to be treated anonymously. “I didn’t want it to get back to Marie,” Peggy says. “I was trying to be a good citizen, actually. You know? I didn’t want them to waste their resources on something that might be, you know, this personal drama going on.”
In addition, Mason had received a tip that Marie was unhappy with her apartment. Maybe she was making up the rape to get moved to a new one.
On August 13, Marie met with Mason at the Lynnwood police station and turned in a written statement describing what happened. The statement was only one page. But to Mason, there was one critical passage. Marie wrote that the attacker said she could untie herself once he was gone:
After he left I grabbed my phone (which was right next to my head) with my mouth and I tried to call Jordan back. He didn’t answer so I called my foster mom…. She came right away. I got off the phone with her and tried to untie myself.
This didn’t square with what Marie had previously told Mason. Before, she told the detective she had tried calling Jordan after cutting the laces. In this written statement, she described calling him while still tied up.
Later that day, Mason talked to Rittgarn, his fellow detective, and said that—based on Marie’s inconsistencies and based on what he had learned from Peggy and Jordan—he now believed Marie had made up the story.
The fear of false rape accusations has a long history in the legal system. In the 1600s, England’s chief justice, Matthew Hale, warned that rape “is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused.” Judges in the United States read the so-called Hale warning to juries until the 1980s. But most recent research suggests that false reporting is relatively rare. FBI figures show that police annually declare around 5 percent of rape cases unfounded or baseless. Social scientists examining police records in detail and using methodologically rigorous standards cite similar, single-digit rates.
The next morning, Mason went to Jordan’s home to interview him. Jordan told the detective that he and Marie had stopped dating a couple months back but remained good friends. He said nothing about doubting Marie’s story, according to Mason’s written summary. But he did say Marie had told him: When she tried calling him that morning, she had used her toes, because she was tied up.
Later that day—August 14, three days after Marie reported being raped—Mason called Marie, to ask if they could meet. He said he could come and pick her up to take her to the police station.
“Am I in trouble?” Marie asked the detective.
February 9, 2011. Westminster, Colorado
> On February 9, 2011, more than a dozen cops and agents from the FBI and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation gathered in a briefing room at the Westminster police station to discuss the state of the investigation.
The news was not great. After a five-week crush, there were few leads and no suspects. The analysis of the touch DNA produced mixed results. The samples narrowed the field of suspects to males belonging to the same paternal family line. But there was not enough genetic material to identify a single individual. Thus the results couldn’t be entered into the FBI’s nationwide DNA database to check for a match to a suspect.
Galbraith was hopeful. At least it was concrete now. The same person was at work. “It’s huge,” she said. “But not enough.”
As the meeting drew to a close, a young crime analyst from the Lakewood police department stood up. She had conducted a search for any reports of suspicious vehicles or prowlers within a quarter mile of the Lakewood victim’s home for the previous six months. She had turned up something. But she didn’t know if it was important.
Three weeks before the attempted rape in Lakewood, a woman had called police late in the evening to report a suspicious pickup truck parked on the street with a man inside. Police checked it out, but the man was gone. The officer filed a brief report on the vehicle. What had attracted the analyst’s attention was the location of the pickup. It was parked half a block from the Lakewood victim’s house, by an empty field adjacent to her backyard.
The pickup was a 1993 white Mazda.
It was registered to a Lakewood man named Marc Patrick O’Leary.