The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

The investigation instantly turned urgent. Could the detectives connect O’Leary’s Mazda with the blurry image of the white Mazda in the surveillance footage from Golden? Aaron Hassell, the detective on the Lakewood case, raced back to his office. Lakewood patrol cars had cameras that automatically took pictures of every license plate they passed. The result was a searchable database of thousands of tag numbers indexed by time and location. Hassell typed in the license plate number from the Lakewood report: 935VHX. He got a hit. A Lakewood patrol car had snapped a picture of O’Leary standing by his white Mazda in the driveway of his house—only two hours after the August attack on the widow in Westminster.

  Hassell transmitted the image to Galbraith. Carefully, she compared O’Leary’s white Mazda to the surveillance tape. One freeze frame showed that her white Mazda had a broken passenger side mirror. So, too, did O’Leary’s truck. Both vehicles had ball hitches on the back. Both had smudges on the back in the same place—perhaps a bumper sticker that had been torn off.

  “That’s our guy,” Galbraith said.

  Hendershot discovered the Lakewood patrol car had snapped its picture as O’Leary was headed to a nearby branch of the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles. DMV records showed O’Leary sat for a driver’s license mugshot about four hours after the Westminster attack. The photo showed a six-foot-one man with hazel eyes. He was thirty-two years old and 220 pounds. He wore a white T-shirt. The physical description closely matched the descriptions provided by the victims. And the Westminster widow had told Hendershot that her attacker wore a white T-shirt during her assault.

  Hendershot did not want to be too hasty. “I’m encouraged, I’m excited,” she said. But “I haven’t made my decision yet, that yay, we’ve got the guy.” Over the next twenty-four hours, more than a dozen investigators threw their collective effort and experience into finding out everything possible about O’Leary. O’Leary had no criminal record. He was not a registered sex offender. He had served in the army. Galbraith and her husband David once again faced each other on the couches in their living room. They used laptops to search for any references to O’Leary, each using a different search engine. Before long, David stumbled onto something. O’Leary had purchased a pornography web-site in September 2008. They wondered whether it contained photos of his victims.

  The investigators decided to try to get a sample of O’Leary’s DNA. Though the degraded DNA lifted from the crime scenes could not definitively match O’Leary’s DNA, it could show that a male from his family line had most likely committed the crime. If detectives could eliminate O’Leary’s male relatives, they could place O’Leary at the scene of the crimes with a high degree of certainty. “We still have to make that definitive identification,” Hendershot said.

  On the morning of Friday, February 11, FBI agents were surveilling O’Leary’s house. It was a small, single-story home with gray siding half a block from a gas station, an auto-body shop, and a carniceria in a beat-down neighborhood. A low chain-link fence surrounded it. Tall, winter-bare trees towered above the roof. Just after noon, the agents saw a woman and a man who looked like O’Leary leave. They tailed the pair to a nearby restaurant and watched them eat. When they finished, the agents raced in. They grabbed the drinking cups from the table. The rims would have traces of his DNA.

  While the agents were following the man believed to be Marc O’Leary, another FBI agent knocked on the door of the home. He planned to install a surveillance camera nearby and wanted to make sure that nobody was around. Unexpectedly, a man came to the door. He looked like Marc O’Leary. Confused, the agent fell back on a practiced ruse. He told the man he was canvassing the neighborhood to warn of a burglar in the area. The man introduced himself. He was Marc O’Leary. His brother, Michael O’Leary, had just left to get lunch with his girlfriend. O’Leary thanked the officer for the information and closed the door.

  Michael’s appearance was confounding. The investigators hadn’t known that Michael lived with his brother. Or that he looked so similar. They decided to run Michael O’Leary’s DNA, collected from the restaurant glass, against the DNA found at the crime scenes. Analysts at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation got the samples. Usually, a DNA analysis took months. But in this case, they worked through the night. By two p.m. on Saturday, they had a result. The DNA from the cup matched the DNA collected from the victims. An O’Leary man was responsible. But which one?

  Galbraith ruled out the brothers’ father—he was too old and lived in a different state. But investigators could not yet rule out Michael as a suspect. It was possible that Michael had committed the rapes. Or even that Michael and Marc had worked together. They needed more information.

  Galbraith hastily typed up a search warrant to enter the brothers’ home. It was dark outside when she finished. She called the judge who was on duty for the weekend. He insisted on a fax. Galbraith rushed to a Safeway near her house to send the warrant. The judge signed it at ten p.m. on Saturday.

  She knew exactly what she was looking for. She trusted her victim’s memory. The dark mark on his leg.

  She emailed a crime analyst at another police department, “I so want to see this guy’s leg! BAD.”

  August 14, 2008. Lynnwood, Washington

  In Sgt. Mason’s experience, when someone asked if they were in trouble, almost always, they were.

  When Mason, accompanied by Detective Rittgarn, went to pick up Marie at about three-thirty p.m., they found her outside her apartment, sitting on the grass. The three went to the Lynnwood police station, where the detectives escorted Marie 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 said she didn’t know of any discrepancies. But she went through the story again—only this time, saying she believed the rape had happened instead of saying it for certain. Tearfully, she described her past—all the foster parents, being raped when she was seven, getting her own place and feeling alone. Rittgarn told Marie that her story and the evidence didn’t match. He said he believed she had made the story up—a spur-of-the-moment thing, not something planned out. He asked if there was really a rapist running around the neighborhood that the police should be looking for. “No,” Marie told him, her voice soft, her eyes down.

  “Based on her answers and body language it was apparent that [Marie] was lying about the rape,” Rittgarn later wrote.

  Without reading Marie her rights—you have the right to an attorney, you have the right to remain silent—the detectives asked Marie 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, and then she wrote, in part:

  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 new 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. She pounded the table and said she was “pretty positive.”

  Pretty positive or actually positive? Rittgarn asked.

  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, her face in her hands, looked down. Then “her eyes darted back and forth as if she was thinking of a response.”

  The detectives
doubled back to what she had said before—about being stressed, 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 it 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…. I don’t know why I couldn’t have done something different. This was never meant to happen.

  This statement appeared to satisfy the detectives. Rittgarn would later write, “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.”

  To Marie, it seemed the questioning had lasted for hours. She did what she always did when under stress. She flipped the switch, as she called it, suppressing all 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 it would let her leave.

  The next day, Marie told Wayne Nash, her case manager at Project Ladder, that the police didn’t believe her. Recognizing the jeopardy she was in, she said she wanted a lawyer.

  The Project Ladder managers instead reached out to Sgt. Mason. He told them the evidence didn’t support Marie’s story, and that she had taken her story back.

  But now, Marie wouldn’t give. On August 18, one week after she reported being raped, she met with the two Project Ladder managers and insisted she had signed the recantation under duress. The three then went to the police station so Marie could recant her recantation—that is, tell detectives that she had been telling the truth the first time.

  While the program managers waited outside, Marie met with Rittgarn and another officer.

  Rittgarn asked Marie what was going on. Marie said she really had been raped—and began to cry, saying she was having visions of the man on top of her. She wanted to take a lie-detector test. Rittgarn told Marie that if she took the test and failed, she would be booked into jail. What’s more, he would recommend that Project Ladder pull her housing assistance.

  Marie backed down. The police officers walked her downstairs, where the Project Ladder representatives asked if she had been raped. Marie said no.

  After leaving the police station, Marie learned that she still wasn’t through. There was something else she had to do. The Project Ladder managers told Marie that if she wanted to stay in the program—if she wanted to keep her subsidized apartment—she would have to confess to someone else.

  Later that day a meeting was called at the housing complex, with all of Marie’s peers gathered in a circle. Marie, as directed, told her fellow participants in Project Ladder that she had lied about being raped. They didn’t need to worry, she told the group. There was no one out there who had hurt her and no one who might hurt them next.

  If there was sympathy in the room, Marie sensed it from only one person, the young woman to her right. The rest was awkward, excruciating silence.

  After the meeting, Marie started walking to a friend’s place. On her way, she crossed a bridge. She considered jumping. “Probably the only time I just wanted to die in my life,” she says. She called a friend and said, “Please come get me before I do something stupid.” Afterward, Marie hurled her phone over the side.

  Later that month, there was a final surprise. Marie got a letter, notifying her that she was wanted in court. She had been charged with false reporting, punishable by up to a year in jail. The criminal citation was signed by Sgt. Mason. Afterward, the paperwork went to a small law firm that Lynnwood had hired to prosecute misdemeanors.

  For Mason, his decision to file the citation required no complicated calculus. He was certain Marie had lied. The police had spent a lot of resources chasing that lie. The law said her lie was a crime. Really, it was as simple as that.

  There are no firm statistics on how often police arrest women for making false rape reports nor on how often prosecutors take such cases to court. Nobody collects such data. But leading law-enforcement organizations urge caution in filing such charges. The International Association of Chiefs of Police and the FBI stress the need for a thorough investigation before discounting a report of rape. Cops must work as hard to prove a falsehood as they do to prove a truth.

  In practice, many police departments will pursue charges against women only in extreme circumstances—say, in a highly public case where a suspect’s reputation has suffered or where the police have expended considerable investigative resources. This reluctance stems from the belief that in rape cases, the biggest problem is not false reporting, but no reporting. Only about one-fifth to one-third of rapes get reported to police, national surveys show. One reason is that women fear police won’t believe them.

  Within days of reporting being raped, Marie had quit her job at Costco, unable to stand there, looking at people, lost in her head. Now, her losses mounted.

  Project Ladder gave her a nine p.m. curfew and doubled the number of times she had to meet with staff.

  The media wrote about Marie being charged, without identifying her. (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline read, “Police: Lynnwood rape report was a hoax.”) Marie’s best friend from high school—the one who had taught her photography and had taken that picture of her emerging from the surf—created a webpage that called Marie a liar, with a photo from Marie’s Myspace page, with police reports, with Marie’s full name. Alerted to the site, Marie went into a frenzy, trashing her apartment.

  Marie stopped going to church. “I was mad at God,” she says. She lost interest in photography. She feared going outdoors. “One night I did try to walk to the store by myself and felt like I hallucinated someone following me,” she says. “It freaked me out. I didn’t even get a half mile from my house. I ran home.” At home she avoided the bedroom, choosing to sleep on the couch with the lights on.

  “I went into this dark hole,” she says.

  Self-esteem gave way to self-loathing. She started smoking, drinking, gaining weight.

  For Marie, this was a familiar drill, one she could trace to her years of being abused as a kid and to her years in foster care, bouncing from home to home and school to school. Shut down. Hold it in. Act like nothing bad had happened, like nothing ever affected her. Because she craved normalcy, she would bury the hurt.

  Neither Peggy nor Shannon abandoned her, but things weren’t the same. Marie knew that both had doubted her story even before the police had.

  For Marie, Shannon’s home had long provided an escape or respite. Marie and Shannon would walk in the woods or take out the boat then, at day’s end, crash in Shannon’s home. 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. “When you become a foster parent, you’re open to that,” Shannon says.

  It fell to Shannon to break the news. Delivering it crushed her. Receiving it crushed Marie.

  In early October, less than two months after Marie was charged with false reporting, a sixty-three-year-old woman reported being raped inside her condominium in Kirkland, east of Seattle. The stranger wore gloves. He held a knife. He tied the woman up—with her own shoelaces. He took pictures and threatened to post them on the Internet. For the last two or three months, the woman told police, she felt as if someone had been following her.

  Shannon saw an account of the attack on the television news and was taken aback. Her father had been the chief of police in Kent, south of Seattle. She grew up with police, trusted police, knew how the police worked. She went to her computer, looked up the number, and called—immediately—to alert police in Kirkland to Marie’s story, to advise them of all the parallels.

  Shannon called Marie and suggested she also contact the Kirkland police. Marie never did.r />
  “I was just too scared,” Marie says. She’d gone through so much already. She couldn’t bring herself to meet with the police again and say anything more. But she did go online and look up what happened to the woman in Kirkland. When she read the story, she cried.

  A Kirkland detective eventually called Shannon back. Based on Shannon’s tip, Kirkland investigators had reached out to their Lynnwood counterparts and had been told the Lynnwood victim was no victim, the story had been made up.

  One of the detectives working the Kirkland case was Audra Weber. She remembers calling the Lynnwood detectives twice and being told they didn’t believe Marie’s account. “I just kind of trusted their judgment, in terms of it’s their case, they know the details and I don’t,” Weber says. But she remembers being “kind of shocked” to learn that they had charged Marie. She let it go and hung up, thinking, “OK, I hope that works out for you guys.”

  February 13, 2011. Lakewood, Colorado

  At eight-fifteen a.m., Galbraith knocked on O’Leary’s door.

  “Police. Search warrant. Open the door,” she shouted repeatedly. Seven cops stood behind her, pressed against the house, their guns drawn.

  After a pause, O’Leary opened the door. He looked confused and shocked as he stepped out into the bright winter sun. Two dogs, a small pit bull and a shar-pei, tumbled out ahead of him. He wore a gray hoodie, baggy gray sweatpants, and gray slip-on houseshoes. He was alone.

  Galbraith pulled him to the side and patted him down. When she got to his legs, she raised his pant leg to look.

  There it was, on O’Leary’s left calf: a dark birthmark the size of a large chicken egg.

  It was him. He was the rapist. Galbraith flashed a quick thumbs up.

  As an FBI agent confronted him, O’Leary immediately invoked his right to an attorney. Galbraith had maneuvered herself to stand behind O’Leary. At 8:35 a.m., she handcuffed him. “You’re under arrest for burglary and sexual assault which occurred in the City of Golden on January 5, 2011,” she told him. O’Leary was put in a patrol car and transported to the Jefferson County Jail.