A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Lilly was frustrated, too. She didn’t put much faith in cops in general. A few months before the attack, she’d had a bad experience with the police in Lakewood. She liked to worship in front of a towering tree at a neighbor’s house. When new owners moved in, they called police at the sight of a strange woman chanting and dancing in their new yard. The cops told Lilly to leave. She filed a complaint against them for harassing her.

  On another occasion, after the break-in, she heard a sound at 3:30 in the morning outside the home where she was staying. She called police. A Denver officer responded to the call. When he knocked on the door, he lifted up his flashlight by his shoulder. Lilly thought he was holding the light in the same way in which the attacker had held his knife. She refused to let the officer in. The next day, she asked Hassell to investigate him as a possible suspect in the crime. Hassell declined.

  She was frustrated with Hassell. He was always telling her no. When she asked for a police artist to sketch her attacker, he refused. That’s why she had turned to her Russian friend. The police weren’t taking her seriously. “It’s not that important. It’s not that big of a deal,” she recalled them telling her.

  “It is a big deal,” Lilly protested. “I know what he looks like. I know how he moves. I know a lot about him. I saw his eyes. I saw his body. I’m an artist. I’ll help you.”

  About a month after the attack, she was gardening. She spotted a wood-handled knife stuck in the ground, near her back fence. She recognized it as coming from her own kitchen, a knife that she usually used to cut open watermelons. It must have been the knife the rapist had held. He must have stabbed it into the ground before he fled. Why hadn’t police found it before she did? Why did she have to call to alert them to such an important clue? She complained about Hassell’s “lack of response.”

  Lilly’s parents weren’t happy with Hassell, either. They hired a private investigator to sleuth around. The PI, a retired Denver police detective, turned up what looked like a scuff mark on top of the six-foot-high wooden fence surrounding Lilly’s backyard, but not much else. Nonetheless, the find was a clear signal to Lilly and her parents: Hassell wasn’t doing his job. One day, Lilly’s mother came down to the station. She confronted Hassell.

  Tell me the truth, she said. Do you believe my daughter?

  It was a tough question to answer.

  Hassell had grown up as a conservative Christian in a military household. His father, an Air Force veteran, repaired appliances. His mom was a schoolteacher. He’d gone to Cedarville College, a small Baptist school outside of Dayton, Ohio. Students at Cedarville were required to minor in Bible studies. Instructors taught creationism. The school’s motto was alliterative and unambiguous about its mission: “For the crown and covenant of Christ.” There was not much room on campus for people who believed in telepathy and tree spirits.

  Hassell also knew that women could lie about being raped. Early in his career, he had responded to an apartment where a woman said she’d been attacked. She fought the man off, she said, by dousing him with pepper spray. Hassell found pepper spray all over the woman’s bedroom. But other things bothered him. The woman said the man had ripped off her pants. But he found the jeans curled in a pile, as though someone had pulled them down and stepped out. Then he found a receipt indicating that the woman had purchased the pepper spray on the previous day. When he questioned her about his discoveries, the woman folded. She acknowledged that she made up the incident. Hassell also discovered that she had complained to neighbors about being attacked by a different man a few weeks earlier. He figured she had an “insatiable need for attention.” He cited her for filing a false police report.

  And yet, Hassell knew enough to know he didn’t know everything. Just seven miles up the road from Cedarville sat another private school that offered an education in what seemed like an alternate universe. Antioch College was the quintessential small liberal arts school. It stressed democracy, student governance, and social justice. Students were required to work in the community. Instructors did not give just grades; they delivered narrative evaluations. Antioch’s motto: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Hassell had plenty of opportunity to hang out with Antioch students. He realized that you could be different without being deranged. It made him hesitant to judge Lilly. “A lot of people that I worked with said, ‘She’s nuts.’ I didn’t think she was. I thought she had unusual beliefs.”

  With experience, he had also learned the dangers of calling a possible victim a liar. He didn’t feel like he had made the wrong decision at the start of his career—false reports took up time and energy. But now that he was a detective, he realized that informants might not feel comfortable sharing tips if they feared being arrested for lying. Lakewood’s top brass, in fact, discouraged arresting people for making a false report, except in extreme cases.

  And then there were the risks specific to sexual assault. Rape is already an underreported crime. Charging someone who has come forward—and not been believed—threatens to chill reporting further, allowing rapists to get away, maybe to rape again. It would fuel the myth that many women lie about being raped. In its training literature for police, End Violence Against Women International notes that false claims of rape often stem from “serious psychological and emotional problems….They are probably best handled with appropriate referrals for social services rather than prosecution for filing a false report.”

  Hassell developed a theory about what had happened in Lilly’s case. Lilly told him that she had drunk an herbal tea before falling asleep. He had done research online and found information to suggest that strong doses of the tea had been linked to vivid dreams. The way he figured it, it was possible that she had awoken from a powerful vision and dove from the window before coming to. It was a way to reconcile the lack of evidence with Lilly’s statements, without calling her a liar.

  He wavered though. The mystery footprints and glove prints couldn’t be easily explained away. And Lilly’s injuries were serious. Perhaps some monster had entered her home. Perhaps he was still out there. He had a hard time making up his mind.

  Still, with little evidence to go on, Hassell felt he had done everything he could.

  In October 2010, he stopped actively investigating the crime, but kept the file open, just in case new information surfaced later.

  His final entry: “No viable leads.”

  —

  Sharon Whelan was a good neighbor. She and her husband, Gary, had lived in the Lakewood neighborhood of Applewood for fifteen years. She taught arts and drama at local schools. He worked as a geologist. They raised three kids in their big five-bedroom home a block from the lake. They knew just about everybody. When a restaurant abutting the neighborhood tried to expand its size, they had helped lead the opposition. “It’s a tight place” was how she described her community.

  She kept special watch on her neighbor directly across the street, eighty-nine-year-old Kathleen Estes, a widow. Late one summer Monday, on June 14, 2010, Whelan looked up and saw a white pickup parked by the side of the road in front of Estes’s house. It struck her as odd. It was too late for workmen. And most people in the neighborhood parked their cars in garages or driveways.

  She called Estes. “There’s a truck sitting out front. Is somebody visiting you?”

  Estes hadn’t noticed the truck. Maybe it was somebody at another neighbor’s house? They had teenagers. Their friends were coming and going all the time. “I’ll watch it, too,” she told Whelan.

  A half hour later, Whelan was getting ready for bed. She glanced at the clock. It was 10:49 p.m. The truck was still in front of Estes’s house. But now, she saw a man in the cab. He seemed to be just sitting there, doing nothing. Her husband wrote down the license plate number. When Whelan called again, Estes decided to contact the police. She gave the dispatcher the plate number that Whelan’s husband had written down: 935-VHX.

  When a Lakewood cop arrived a few minutes later, the truck was
still there. But the man was gone. The officer walked around the pickup. It was a white Mazda. Nothing seemed unusual. He ran the license plate number. It came back clean. The officer knocked on Estes’s door. He hadn’t found anything wrong, he told her. Back at the police station, he created a brief entry about the encounter called a field interview report. He labeled it “suspicious vehicle.”

  Early the next morning, Whelan happened to look out her window. She noticed that the truck was gone. She stopped worrying about it. So did Estes.

  The neighborhood was back to normal again. And Whelan wouldn’t think about the white pickup until she saw a local news broadcast eight months later.

  —

  In early February 2011, a Lakewood police detective walked over to a cubicle belonging to Danelle DiGiosio, one of Lakewood’s crime analysts. He had been brought into the case to find more links between the attack on Lilly and the other rape cases. At a briefing, he learned that the rapist had stalked the women and taken underwear from their homes. He knew that DiGiosio had all sorts of databases she could tap. Could she look for any burglaries where someone reported stolen underwear? he wondered. And could she do it by tomorrow? The task force was having a big meeting to review all the evidence in the case.

  DiGiosio almost laughed out loud. There were many things she could find using her data sets. But this wasn’t one of them. “If I found my favorite underwear missing, I’d say it must be stuck in a pant leg somewhere, or the washing machine ate it. Not in a million years would I think to report it to the police,” she told the detective.

  DiGiosio was used to being asked to do the impossible. She had grown up in a small town in the undulating, agricultural plains near Greeley, Colorado. It was a quiet, safe place. She played volleyball and basketball and ran track for the Valley High School Vikings in Gilcrest, Colorado. But she had her heart set on joining the FBI. She enrolled at the University of Denver, hoping to get a degree in criminal justice. But a professor told her she needed an edge to get into the agency, and suggested statistics. The FBI had started investing heavily in data analysis.

  Math was not DiGiosio’s strongest subject. “I was really good at English. I liked music,” she says. But she wanted a shot at law enforcement. If she had to study statistics, she’d study statistics. “I made myself like math,” she says. And she was intrigued by the power of statistics to solve problems in the real world. She called it “math with a purpose.” She graduated in 1999, but never applied for an FBI job. Instead, she got a job training other police officers in how to use maps for crime analysis. She got married, had kids, and decided that she preferred stability over teaching and traveling. By 2008, she was working at Lakewood—one of the few criminal analysts in Colorado with a full degree in statistics.

  At Lakewood, she filled her desk with computer monitors, pictures of her kids, and a coffee pot. Across the room was an enormous printer that produced city maps on rolls that looked almost like butcher paper. The printer was her weapon of choice. She used it to plot out car burglaries and convenience store robberies, helping cops figure out how to stop them. She might not have a database to examine underwear theft, she told the inquiring detective. But she could use her mapping software to help pull every report of every suspicious vehicle and person logged within a quarter mile of Lilly’s house.

  “It’s like finding a needle in a needle stack,” she said. “But that’s something I can do.”

  By the end of the day, she’d found her needle: a record of the call Estes had made eight months earlier, when she reported the suspicious white truck parked in front of her home. The location and timing of the report stood out to DiGiosio. The date, June 14, was only three weeks before the rapist struck Lilly’s house. And Estes’s home was only a few blocks from Lilly’s home.

  “Hmmm,” she wondered. “Why are you there at this time of night? You don’t belong there.”

  The next morning, February 9, 2011, Hassell and DiGiosio drove to the Westminster Police Department. When they walked into the room, DiGiosio was surprised. Some two dozen cops and FBI agents were gathered around a long conference table on the second floor of the station. Hendershot and Galbraith were there. So, too, Burgess and Grusing. It had been thirty-five days since Amber’s rape.

  The news was not great. Galbraith had pulled the cell phone records for her chief suspect, Frank Tucker, the college student who had been accused of sexual assault. He turned out to have been skiing in Vail when Amber was raped. And when he was brought in for questioning, he showed off the splotch on his calf that Amber had thought might be the birthmark she saw on her rapist. It turned out to be a circular, blue flame tattoo.

  The FBI’s ViCAP program had also failed to deliver. Grusing and Galbraith had talked with detectives in Lawrence, Kansas, who had investigated the chain of rapes that had plagued the college town. The possibility of a connection was tantalizing. But the Kansas investigators had run into the same problem now facing the roomful of cops in Colorado. They were able to connect the rapes, but they had not identified a suspect.

  Lewis, the analyst from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, reported on the results of the testing that Hendershot had requested—comparing Westminster’s DNA sample to Aurora’s and Golden’s. They had only one shot. The testing procedures had destroyed the few cells that had been recovered. But they found that the DNA samples were, indeed, linked. The evidence wouldn’t be useful in identifying a single individual. But now, the detectives had concrete proof of what they all suspected. The same man—or men from the same family—had raped Doris, Sarah, and Amber.

  Sergeant Trevor Materasso, the Westminster cop in charge of dealing with the media, realized that he was going to have to tell a crowd of reporters about a serial rapist loose in Denver’s suburbs. And he would have to admit that the police had no clue as to his identity. Thoughts raced through his head. How should police tell the public? What clues could they give that might help narrow down a suspect? What would he tell reporters when they asked the inevitable question: Did police think the rapist would strike again?

  DiGiosio listened as officers shared whatever evidence they had. She wasn’t sure she wanted to chime in with her own discovery. After all, it was just a report of a white truck parked near Lilly’s house. She hadn’t even bothered to tell Hassell about it as they drove to the meeting. She didn’t want to look foolish. Maybe the investigators would dismiss her because she was a crime analyst, not a street cop. Some might look down on her because she was a woman. Law enforcement was a man’s world. And even though Hendershot and Galbraith were there, the room was mostly tall white guys with short haircuts. “You have to be a different kind of female to be able to hold your own in this profession,” she says. “You have to be strong enough to hold your own, but not so strong that people call you a bitch. You have to find your place. You still have to be you.”

  Before the meeting, DiGiosio hadn’t realized how brutal the rapist was, nor how many women he had attacked. “It was news to me.” Now the meeting was starting to break up. Some of the cops stood talking in small groups. Others were leaving the room.

  DiGiosio decided to speak up.

  “I looked at suspicious vehicles and suspicious calls,” she told the cops at the long table. “I don’t know if this is a big deal or not. I found this one call. It was a person in a white truck.”

  Galbraith was talking with another police officer. She stopped mid-sentence. What had DiGiosio said? “White truck.” Galbraith flashed to the white truck from the videotape, circling Amber’s apartment complex on the night of the rape.

  “Do you have any details,” Galbraith said, getting to her feet.

  DiGiosio brought her laptop over to Galbraith. The license plate traced back to a 1993 white Mazda pickup truck.

  The truck on the videotape was a Mazda.

  Who’s the registered owner? Galbraith asked, her eyes racing across the screen, seeking an answer.

  DiGiosio had researched that, too. She brought up
another file. It was an image of the driver’s license of the man who owned the white truck.

  At the top was a name.

  11

  A GROSS MISDEMEANOR

  The last week of August, 2008

  * * *

  Lynnwood, Washington

  It looked like a traffic ticket. It was even on the same form used for traffic offenses—a one-page, fill-in-the-blank citation, with one box at the top labeled “Traffic,” another labeled “Non-Traffic.” On the page Marie held in her hand, the Non-Traffic box was marked with an X.

  The envelope came in the mail in late August, less than three weeks after she had reported being raped. When she opened it, she discovered she was being charged with a crime. “False Reporting,” the citation said, the two words written by hand in all capital letters. The form didn’t say what kind of charge this was—a misdemeanor? a felony?—nor what the penalty might be. But the citation listed the state statute she stood accused of violating, RCW 9A.84.040. With that and Google, she could answer her questions. False reporting was a gross misdemeanor, the most serious charge short of a felony. A conviction could land her in jail for up to a year.

  The text of the statute reads:

  A person is guilty of false reporting if with knowledge that the information reported, conveyed, or circulated is false, he or she initiates or circulates a false report or warning of an alleged occurrence or impending occurrence of a fire, explosion, crime, catastrophe, or emergency knowing that such false report is likely to cause evacuation of a building, place of assembly, or transportation facility, or to cause public inconvenience or alarm.

  Boiled down, Marie stood accused of creating a false scare, claiming she was raped when she knew she wasn’t.

  The news devastated Marie. She had given the police what they wanted—given them a written statement, given up her demand for a polygraph. And now this: Now any hope of moving on, of getting past it, was gone. She didn’t know the court system; she had no idea how long this prosecution would take or how it would turn out. But she knew she’d probably find out alone. Her friends were now few. They wouldn’t be lining up to accompany her to the courthouse.