A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Despite the benefits of gender diversity, female cops still have a tough time on the job. Some male cops—from patrolmen to police chiefs—remain hostile to hiring women, claiming that they are not strong enough or tough enough to be cops. In studies, between 63 to 68 percent of female officers report suffering some form of sexual harassment or discrimination in the workplace. The most common complaints from female officers involve hostility, a lack of promotion opportunities, and poor policies to deal with pregnancy and other family issues.

  But even departments that have put a significant focus on boosting the number of women in their ranks have found it difficult. Many women have little interest in a profession that—at least in popular culture—is all about guns and violence. The result is that no police department in the United States is even close to gender parity. The criminal investigation branch of the Internal Revenue Service may have the highest percentage of female law enforcement agents in the country, with 32 percent. And in some big-city police departments, such as Philadelphia and Los Angeles, women make up about a quarter of sworn officers. But overall, about a hundred thousand female officers fill the ranks of police in the United States—about 11 percent of the total. Police work remains a mostly male field, macho, hierarchical, and militaristic. Officeresses are rare.

  —

  Brought together by the hunt for the rapist, Galbraith and Hendershot bonded quickly. Both were outgoing. They cracked fast jokes and smiled fast smiles. Galbraith was younger and crackled with energy. Hendershot’s experience complemented Galbraith’s enthusiasm.

  Both women were at ease working in the testosterone-soaked world of law enforcement. Men accounted for about 90 percent of the sworn officers in Golden and Westminster, but neither Galbraith nor Hendershot felt unwelcome or intimidated. Both had grown up with brothers. Both had few close female friends and tended to get along better with men. Both took pride in being tough. “I don’t tolerate drama. If it’s drama, I’m like, ugh. If it’s emotional, ugh,” Galbraith says.

  Both also had the same experience breaking into police work. Get your foot in the door, prove yourself, and you were accepted into the brotherhood—just like any other cop. The woman thing didn’t matter so much. “It might be at the forefront when you first walk in the door,” Hendershot says. “But especially after you’ve established yourself for a little bit as a patrol officer, it just doesn’t come up. It just is.”

  They reveled in the dark though redemptive humor found in every cop shop, emergency ward, and newsroom. They shared details of crime scenes and traffic accidents. They swore. They swapped stories of disgust: wearing face masks stuffed with dryer sheets to ward off the scent of a rotting corpse, watching a guy masturbate during an undercover drug deal.

  “He answers the door, and all he’s wearing is a pair of black shorts, no shirt, and an ankle monitor,” Hendershot tells Galbraith.

  “Cute,” Galbraith says.

  “The epitome of sexy, let me tell you. Who can resist this?”

  Sometimes, they made a point of trying to discomfit their younger male colleagues—a kind of verbal hazing usually involving women’s body functions or sex organs.

  “It’s actually kind of amusing to see how much you can poke it sometimes, I’ve got to be honest,” Hendershot says to Galbraith.

  “And then they’re walking to HR,” Galbraith says.

  “Or running.”

  Both women laugh.

  Sometimes, their superiors worried about the male cops saying something offensive. Once, one of Galbraith’s superiors pulled her aside when he thought the conversation had crossed a line. He asked whether Galbraith was okay with the chatter. “I’m like, ‘God, yes. I started it.’ ”

  They did, of course, have problems as female cops. Galbraith was always having to tie her hair up in a bun to avoid getting it covered in mud or blood. Hendershot could never find a place to conceal her handgun. Neither thought they looked particularly good in a bulletproof vest. “It’s not glamorous. I’m not wearing cute shoes. None of it is what society puts forward as to how a female is supposed to look, act, think,” Hendershot said.

  The women were connected in another way, too. Cops often inhabit an incestuous world, where every officer knows every other, and marriages and friendships stay in the family. Hendershot’s second husband, Mike, and Galbraith’s second husband, David, had worked together at the Golden Police Department. David wound up working with Hendershot at the Westminster Police Department.

  —

  On January 18, 2011, the detectives gathered again. The stakes were higher now, and the crowd in the room reflected it. The FBI, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Jefferson County district attorney’s office—all sent agents to meet on the second floor of Golden’s fire house, off the city’s historic district.

  One of the new faces was Jonny Grusing, a veteran FBI agent who worked out of the bureau’s Denver office. He was tall, thin, and fit, with a dry sense of humor—the consummate G-man. He had been based in Denver for fifteen years—an unusually long time for FBI agents, who rotate frequently through jobs in different cities. For much of his career, Grusing focused on bank robberies. Now, he was assigned to the Safe Streets task force, created after 9/11 to marry the skills of the FBI with the shoe-leather savvy of local cops. He had worked cases with most of the agencies at the table, and those in the room knew he was no bigfoot who would take over an investigation from local lawmen. “I don’t know of a department that we walk in or a jurisdiction where we walk in and they go, ‘Oh no, it’s the FBI,’ ” Grusing says.

  Grusing was in charge of bringing a potentially powerful tool to the hunt for the rapist: an FBI database of thousands of crimes called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP. The ViCAP database was designed to catch serial killers and rapists. It was based on the principle that repeat offenders—called serialists by the experts—had signature patterns of behavior nearly as distinctive as a fingerprint or a snippet of DNA. A serial rapist who used a favorite knife in one jurisdiction might use the same knife in another jurisdiction. When local investigators suspected that a serial criminal was at work, they would load as many of the crime’s details as possible into the ViCAP database. FBI analysts would then comb through the files of cold cases, hoping to find a match. At its best, the system would connect two agencies together, allowing them to share details as they hunted for the same criminal.

  Dawn Tollakson, a crime analyst from Aurora, had already entered details from the three rapes in Colorado into the database. Back in Quantico, analysts had compared Tollakson’s reports to thousands of others in the ViCAP database. Now, Grusing held the results: the analysts had found a hit. The Colorado attacker appeared to share many characteristics with a rapist who had terrorized University of Kansas students for almost a decade. He had raped or attacked thirteen young women between 2000 and 2008.

  The women had described the attacker as a white male, approximately twenty-six to thirty-five years of age. He was from five feet nine to six feet tall. He attacked in the early morning. He would straddle the women in bed. He used bindings to tie their hands. He dressed in dark clothes. He wore a black mask and gloves. He brandished a handgun.

  During the attack, his commands were short and direct. He spoke calmly. He would assault the women orally, vaginally, and anally. He carried a bag with him that contained lubrication and a video camera that he used to film the rapes. Afterward, he would have them shower to remove any evidence from their bodies. He told them to wait twenty minutes before leaving the bathroom.

  He attacked his first victim on October 1, 2000. She woke to find him standing in her room. She lunged to hit a panic button, but he pointed a gun at her head and told her to stop. Apparently spooked, he left without raping the woman. As he turned to go, he gave her a warning: “Do me a favor and lock your door next time.”

  On July 14, 2004, he raped a woman who woke to find him staring at her from the foot of her bed. “I have a gun, don�
�t say anything or I will kill you,” he told her. He carried a black bag that contained K-Y Jelly. After he finished, he ordered her into the bathroom. He forced her to brush her teeth.

  The last woman was assaulted while her roommate was away on Thanksgiving break. It was more violent than any of the previous rapes. The rapist punched the woman in the face. He shoved a sock in her mouth so she could not scream. He raped her several times. The woman could provide no description of the man. She had been too terrified to open her eyes.

  After the final attack, in December 2008, the man had disappeared. Now Grusing raised the question: Had he resurfaced, ten months later, in Aurora, Colorado?

  Grusing believed that he had.

  “He had warmed up to this level of proficiency. Like someone playing basketball or baseball, you can tell when they’ve been around and they’ve handled the ball before,” Grusing says.

  “We thought this was our guy.”

  —

  In turning to ViCAP, the detectives were betting on one of the FBI’s most forgotten programs.

  Pierce Brooks was the father of ViCAP. A legendary cop, he had a square jaw, high forehead, and dead-serious eyes. During twenty years with the Los Angeles Police Department, he helped send ten men to death row. He served as technical adviser to Jack Webb, who played the fictional Sergeant Joe Friday character in Dragnet. And he became famous for tracking down a pair of cop killers, a hunt chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh’s 1973 nonfiction best seller, The Onion Field. “Brooks’s imagination was admired, but his thoroughness was legend,” Wambaugh wrote.

  In the late 1950s, Brooks was investigating two murder cases. In each, a female model had been raped, slain, and then trussed in rope in a manner that suggested skill with binding. Brooks intuited that the killer might commit other murders. For the next year, he leafed through out-of-town newspapers at a local library. When he read a story about a man arrested while trying to use rope to kidnap a woman, Brooks put the cases together. The man, Harvey Glatman, was sentenced to death, and executed a year later.

  The experience convinced Brooks that serial killers often had “signatures”—distinct ways of acting that could help identify them. An early adopter of data-driven policing, Brooks realized that a computer database could be populated with details of unsolved murder cases from across the country, then searched for behavioral matches.

  After Brooks had spent years lobbying for such a system, Congress took interest. In July 1983, Brooks told a rapt Senate Judiciary Committee audience about serial killer Ted Bundy, who confessed to killing thirty women in seven states. The ViCAP system could have prevented many of those deaths, he said. “ViCAP, when implemented, would preclude the age-old, but still continuing problem of critically important information being missed, overlooked, or delayed when several police agencies, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, are involved,” Brooks told the lawmakers. By the end of the hearing, Brooks had a letter from the committee that would result in $1 million for the program.

  The agency used the money to purchase what was then called the “Cadillac of computers”—an AVAX 11/985 nicknamed the “Superstar.” It had 512 kilobytes of memory. The revolutionary computer system took up most of the room in a bomb shelter two floors beneath the cafeteria of the FBI’s national academy in Quantico, Virginia. Also housed in the basement was another novel program: the Behavioral Analysis Unit, the profilers who would one day be made famous by Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. At the time, rank-and-file FBI agents saw the unproven unit and its ViCAP computer program as a kind of skunk works. They referred to the oddball collection of psychologists, cops, and administrators as “rejects of the FBI” or the “leper colony.” The basement was a dark, moldy warren of desks, bookcases, and file cabinets. “We were ten times deeper than dead people, down there,” one agent later recalled.

  An FBI agent named Art Meister modified the ViCAP system to hunt serial rapists. To Meister, a former Connecticut state trooper with dark curly hair and glasses, the upgrade only made sense. Research had shown that rapists were far more likely than murderers to be serial offenders. Studies had found that between one-fourth to two-thirds of rapists committed multiple sexual assaults. Only about 1 percent of murderers were considered serial killers.

  By the time of the Colorado rapes, ViCAP had amassed an enormous collection of violent and bizarre crimes—enough so that researchers once requested access to the database for an academic paper on cannibalism. (Meister turned them down.) But the program was eking along, a pale, unwanted child that had relocated from the FBI academy’s basement into a mini-mall off a two-lane highway in rural Virginia. It was chronically underfunded. The database itself was hard to use—a detective had to fill in ninety-five separate fields of information to input a case. It generated lots of noise: Cops disparaged it for creating a never-ending supply of bad tips. Most significantly, ViCAP had been surpassed by CODIS, the FBI’s DNA-matching system. ViCAP’s behavioral linkages could never equal the scientific certainty of a genetic match. And CODIS’s record of success was indisputable. It had linked up more than 346,000 crimes over the years. A 1990s review found that ViCAP could claim credit for linking thirty-three crimes in twelve years.

  The result was that ViCAP was rarely used. Only about fourteen hundred police agencies out of roughly eighteen thousand in the United States entered information into the database. It contained far less than 1 percent of the rapes and murders committed each year. The database was a tragically unfulfilled promise. Only about half of rape cases involved DNA. For the other half, where a serial rapist might wear a certain mask, or speak in a peculiar way, or tie a particular binding knot, ViCAP was the best, and only, nationwide tool to help in the hunt. “The need is vital,” said Ritchie Martinez, the former president of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts. “But ViCAP is not filling it.”

  —

  Hendershot was no computer expert. But she knew that data could help find a criminal as surely as a snippet of DNA. As Galbraith and Grusing chased the Kansas connection, she turned to a far more local resource: her department’s own crime analyst, Laura Carroll.

  Like Ellis, the crime scene investigator, Carroll was one of Hendershot’s favorites at the Westminster Police Department. Carroll had stumbled into the profession. She began college wanting to be a teacher, but ended with a degree in criminology. Being in law enforcement just seemed—well, more interesting. “It’s catching the bad guys, being part of the process in order to do good,” she’d explain. She wasn’t keen on running around in the streets with a gun. That seemed dangerous. So her first jobs were clerical: in police records in nearby Arvada, then as a clerk at Westminster’s municipal courts. The work itself wasn’t exciting, but she liked feeling like a part of something bigger.

  Then, she discovered her true talent. She got a job working in the traffic division of the Westminster Police Department, which required her to take courses in mapping and analytical software. She became a crime analyst, studying long rows of data and computerized maps. She alerted the cops to dangerous intersections, or streets where drivers were ignoring speed limits. She had become part of the crime-fighting team. She loved it.

  It was a lonely job, though. Most smaller departments didn’t have a crime analyst. Even a large department might have only two or three. Carroll realized it was critical to network with analysts at other agencies, so she began going to monthly meetings of the Colorado Crime Analysis Association. It was a simple affair: a bunch of analysts, most of them women, gathering together in spare conference rooms at different agencies to review cases and data patterns. But the conversations were a revelation. Data combined with collaboration was a powerful tool, she thought. “As analysts, we really try to communicate and work together,” Carroll says. “Crime has no borders.” She eventually became president of the association.

  Hendershot had first contacted Carroll to hunt down possible suspects in Sarah’s rape, based on Amber’s descrip
tion of the egg-shaped mark on her rapist. Hendershot figured it might be a tattoo—and she knew that Carroll had access to every tattoo on every criminal who had passed through Westminster’s jail. After an arrest, cops would detail each suspect’s tattoos—their size, shape, color, position on the body—and enter the information into a database. Carroll found thirty-two guys inked with a collective 124 tattoos on their legs. Two had leg tats that weren’t exactly egg-shaped but were close enough for Carroll to pull more reports. One of the guys didn’t match the physical description. The other was in prison at the time of Sarah’s rape. “Where do we go from here?” Carroll wondered.

  A week later, her answer arrived. At the crime analyst association’s regular monthly meeting, she laid out the details of the rapist’s attacks. Did it sound familiar to anybody? An analyst from nearby Lakewood remembered a burglary call. A man had broken into a woman’s house while she was sleeping. He had worn a black mask. The woman managed to escape and the man fled. Worth looking into, she thought.

  When Carroll got the report the next morning, she knew she was on the right track. Lakewood detectives had actually classified the incident as an attempted burglary and an attempted sexual assault. Their investigation had not turned up much. But Lakewood’s crime scene investigator did find footprints and glove prints.

  When Carroll showed Hendershot the report, the detective was intrigued. There had been a footprint in the snow outside Amber’s apartment in Golden. Hendershot sent a message to Ellis. Could she contact her counterpart at Lakewood and compare the prints?

  That afternoon, Ellis was eating lunch at her desk in the crime lab when she got an email from the Lakewood criminalist, an old friend. As the images of the glove prints and shoe prints filled her screen, she jumped up from her seat. She couldn’t believe it. She ran toward Hendershot’s cubicle. “Where’s Ed? Where’s Ed?” she shouted. Told that she was at a meeting, Ellis shot Hendershot a text message. It was urgent.