A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Marie needed to appear in Lynnwood Municipal Court to enter a plea. If she failed to show for her arraignment, she could be arrested.

  A fill-in-the-blank form dropped in the mail seems a casual way to alert someone to the threat of a year in jail. But the means of notifying Marie was in keeping with how the decision had been reached. There had been nothing complicated about the charging process—no mandatory review within the police department, no sign-off by a prosecuting attorney. Sergeant Mason filled in the citation and signed at the bottom. It was his decision alone to charge Marie—and for Mason, the decision had been easy.

  Mason had no doubt Marie had lied. The law said her lie was a crime. Where there is a crime and a culprit, there follows a charge. “It was that straightforward,” Mason says.

  Penalties for false reporting can be severe. Research by Lisa Avalos, a University of Arkansas law professor, shows that while forty-two states, including Washington, treat false reporting as a misdemeanor, eight make it a felony. In Illinois and Wyoming, it carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. It’s six years in Arkansas. False reporting is also a felony on the federal level, where it can lead to a five-year sentence and a maximum fine of $250,000. And the United States seems downright lenient compared to the United Kingdom. There, the crime, called “perverting the course of justice,” carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

  For the police, it stands to reason that the punishment could be stiff. A false report wastes resources. In Marie’s case, patrol officers, crime scene technicians, detectives, a police commander, and an ambulance crew scrambled to the apartment complex, diverting them from other duties or calls. Later, at the hospital, a doctor and a specially trained nurse conducted a lengthy examination of Marie, which kept them from other patients. Mason and his colleagues had devoted more time to the case in the days that followed. And then there was the effect the case had on the public at large. Marie’s story of rape had been broadcast widely in the Seattle metropolitan area: A stranger had broken into a home and attacked a woman at knifepoint. That no doubt caused alarm, and the people who shared her apartment building and housing program would have been particularly rattled.

  In Marie’s case, the police had no suspect. But if they had, an innocent person could have been put through the crucible of being questioned by police. The suspect’s family might have been questioned. Maybe coworkers. Maybe neighbors. Worse, an innocent person could have been charged, even convicted. False accusations can produce waves of publicity, imperiling reputations. In 2006, three Duke lacrosse players were accused of raping an exotic dancer. They weren’t cleared until the following year; the case’s prosecutor, found to have withheld exculpatory DNA evidence, wound up being disbarred and jailed for a day. In 2014, Rolling Stone would publish an explosive story in which a student described being gang-raped by members of a fraternity at the University of Virginia. The student’s account was soon discredited by other media and the police—and the following year, the magazine retracted the story in its entirety. One journalism institute named the story “Error of the Year.” Rolling Stone wound up settling defamation lawsuits filed by both the fraternity and a university administrator who alleged that the story wrongly turned her “into the face of institutional indifference.”

  Marie’s case in Lynnwood had a recent parallel, just a few miles south. In March of 2008—five months before Marie reported being raped—a woman in King County, Washington, had pleaded guilty to false reporting and been sentenced to eight days in jail. But her story had done more harm than Marie’s. She had accused a specific person—a college professor—of rape, and had gone so far as to alter email messages from him, making it appear he had professed romantic interest and promised a higher grade if she met “a few conditions.” The professor had been arrested and spent nine days in jail before being cleared.

  For the Lynnwood police, the formal determination that Marie had made a false report meant the rape investigation was over: There was nothing to investigate. No more evidence would be gathered. The neighborhood canvass would go unfinished. At the apartments where no one had answered—six in Marie’s old building, seven in the building nearby—no officer would go back and try again. The evidence that had already been collected would now be disposed of according to department protocol. Once enough time passed, Marie’s bedding would be destroyed. So would the hairs and fibers from her bed, and the DNA swabs from the sliding glass door. So, too, would the rape kit.

  Even Marie’s account—the very story itself—would disappear from the official record. Every year the FBI collects crime data from police departments around the country. Law enforcement uses the data to plan budgets, researchers to study trends, legislators to draft crime bills. In its annual filing sent to the FBI, Lynnwood designated Marie’s rape claim as unfounded—the catchall tag for any reported crime deemed baseless or false. In all, ten rapes were reported to the Lynnwood police in 2008. The police labeled four as unfounded.

  On September 11, the day of her arraignment, Marie didn’t show up in court. Failure to appear is a crime, so the prosecutor asked the judge to issue a warrant for Marie’s arrest. The judge agreed. Now, Marie was looking at two potential charges—and the possibility of being arrested, handcuffed, and booked into jail the next time she came across a police officer.

  Lynnwood Municipal Court can be a confusing place. It’s busy, for one thing. In 2008 Marie’s was one of 4,859 misdemeanor cases. The court also handled 13,450 infractions, mostly traffic-related. For those charged or ticketed, the court can be a vertiginous hive, a swarm of suits coming and going. Key functions get farmed out. A private law office, Zachor & Thomas, prosecutes the cases. Another contractor, nCourt, handles payments made online or over the phone, charging extra for the convenience. As a case moves forward, fines, fees, and other legal obligations can multiply. Defendants like Marie are usually required to attend each hearing, even if that hearing proves to consist entirely of entering a postponement and scheduling the next hearing, at which the defendant might show up to learn that the matter is being postponed yet again.

  In a message posted online, the court’s judge, Stephen E. Moore, says the court’s goal “is to correct behavior—to make Lynnwood a better, safer, healthier place to live, work, shop and visit.” The court’s “overriding value…is customer service. It is sometimes difficult for people who’ve been issued a traffic ticket or charged with a crime to think of themselves as ‘customers’ but they are.” Everyone—victim, witness, juror, or defendant—“may expect to be treated with professionalism and respect,” the judge writes.

  On September 12, Marie showed up at the counter at Lynnwood Municipal Court to ask about her case. She knew nothing of the hearing scheduled the day before. She had no idea there was a warrant out for her arrest. A clerk rooted through the paperwork and discovered that the hearing notice had, for some reason, been sent to an address in Seattle, not to Marie’s home in Lynnwood. So the court rescheduled the arraignment—and canceled the arrest warrant. But if not for Marie’s diligence—checking in, to see what was up—she could have been hauled in and spent the night in jail.

  When the arraignment was held, on September 25, Marie was represented by a public defender, James Feldman. Like the prosecutor, Feldman worked in Lynnwood’s court part-time, under a contract. He managed a small, private firm that did criminal and civil cases, fielding everything from domestic violence and DUIs to dog bites and slip-and-falls.

  When he reviewed Marie’s case, Feldman, who had thirty-four years of experience, was surprised she had been charged. Her story hadn’t hurt anyone—no suspect had been arrested, or even questioned. His guess was that the police felt used. They don’t appreciate having their time wasted.

  At the hearing, Marie pleaded not guilty. Her next court date was set for six weeks later, on November 10.

  —

  On October 6, 2008, a sixty-three-year-old woman in Kirkland, Washington, reported being sexually assaulted.

&n
bsp; Kirkland is just east of Seattle. Abutting Lake Washington, the suburb is dotted with art galleries, bronze sculptures, and marinas. The woman, a grandmother, lived alone in a ground-floor condominium in a two-story building. Her complex was a sun-dappled, forested enclave with towering trees, splashes of pink and purple rhododendrons, and trails covered with leaves, bark, and small pinecones. She told police she awoke at about four in the morning to find a man, his face covered by black mesh, holding a gloved hand over her mouth. His other hand held a knife to her throat. Don’t scream, he told her. He tied her hands, using the laces from one of her pink tennis shoes. He groped her. He took photographs. He placed the knife’s tip under one of her eyes and said he could cut it out. When she struggled, the knife sliced the web of her hand, between thumb and index finger. When she asked him why he was doing this, he laughed. He told her not to call the police. He said he would know if she did.

  The woman said the man had “white, white skin,” sloping shoulders, smooth hands, and bad breath. As for age, she couldn’t say. “He might have been forty. He could have been fifteen. I don’t know,” she told police. Nor could she distinguish his size. “His build was pretty average,” she said. “He wasn’t big. He wasn’t muscular. He wasn’t tiny. He wasn’t skinny.”

  The Kirkland Police Department assigned two detectives to the case, Corporal Jack Keesee and Audra Weber. The crime struck both as unusual, beginning with its level of cruelty and calculation. “You know, it’s Kirkland. You don’t expect those kinds of things to happen,” Keesee says. “We often refer to ourselves as Beverly Hills North.”

  For Weber, the case had elements of a locked-room mystery, the kind written by Edgar Allan Poe or Ellery Queen. The grandmother had taken pains to safeguard her home. A metal bar secured her front door. She placed rods in the tracks of her rear sliding glass door and bedroom window. How did the attacker get in? Weber wondered. The grandmother offered one possibility. She had been tired the night before and had fallen asleep with the TV on. Maybe when she woke up and turned off the TV, she’d gone to bed without remembering to lock the sliding door.

  For two to three months before the attack, the grandmother told police, she’d felt as if someone had been following her. Afterward, she had called 911 only to startle at the dispatcher’s voice. The voice seemed to be her attacker’s. He must have intercepted her call to police, she thought. He must have been telling the truth when he said he would know. She was so convinced of this that she refused to answer any of the dispatcher’s questions.

  Keesee conducted a long interview with the grandmother. At times, her answers went in unexpected directions.

  “Do you ever get a weird feeling about anybody?” Keesee asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And share that with me?”

  “Um, there are raccoons.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There are people that let their dogs out. They go back and forth.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know, there are small animals and chipmunks. Um, a couple times I’ve felt just creepy.”

  At the police station, Keesee heard skepticism from some of his fellow officers. They couldn’t believe this crime—so malevolent and serpentine as to be a candidate for one of those A&E crime shows—could have been committed in their placid suburb. “I had several people coming by my desk, saying, ‘Ah, come on. This didn’t happen.’ And my response was, ‘I don’t know that it didn’t happen.’…It’s human nature, I guess. Or maybe that’s just what happens in the cop world. Everybody lies. Everybody lies to cops.” But at no time did anyone tell him to stop pursuing the case. “It was just office talk that you get from time to time.”

  The detectives on the case wrestled with some doubts of their own. But ultimately the grandmother’s idiosyncrasies didn’t throw Keesee, who had ample experience with trauma as a domestic-violence detective and as a hostage negotiator. “Nobody acts the same,” he says. “I’ve done a countless number of death notifications. I’ve seen every possible reaction that you can imagine. The same goes with rape victims, sexual assault victims.” Nor was he thrown by any inconsistencies in her description of what happened. “Most victims will…the core issue, they’re firm on. It’s the stuff that happens around that they’ll deviate from. And that’s not unusual.

  “Until I found some reason not to believe her, I believed her,” Keesee says.

  —

  Shannon, sitting at home with her husband, learned about the Kirkland attack while watching the television news.

  Oh my God, she thought. I was wrong. The police were wrong. Marie must have really been raped.

  The Kirkland attack took place two months after and thirteen miles away from the one Marie had reported in Lynnwood. Shannon seized on the parallels—the breaking in, the binding of hands, the taking of photographs. She wasted no time. Shannon’s 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 telephone number, and called—immediately—to alert the Kirkland police to Marie’s story and all the similarities. The detective she reached said Kirkland would check into it.

  After that, Shannon called Marie. She told Marie about the newscast and urged her to call the Kirkland police herself, to share what she had reported in Lynnwood, to make sure that any possible connection would be investigated.

  Marie refused. She’d been through enough already—and, with the pending criminal charge, was facing more ahead. She couldn’t bring herself to reach out to the police—any police—to say anything more. But she did go online and look up what had happened to the grandmother in Kirkland. And when she read the story, she cried.

  For a detective, tying one unsolved crime to another can revive an investigation. Evidence multiplies. Patterns emerge. Detective Weber called the Lynnwood police not once but twice, to see if there might be a link. Both times Lynnwood told her: We have no crime to connect. Our victim was no victim. She admitted to making her story up. So Weber let it go: “I just kind of trusted their judgment, in terms of it’s their case, they know the details and I don’t.” Still, she was “kind of shocked” to learn they had charged Marie. She hung up the phone and thought: “Okay, I hope that works out for you guys.”

  “That’s so extreme to do that,” Weber says. She figured there must be some backstory; perhaps the woman in Lynnwood had a history of lying and wasting the police’s time. Keesee, Weber’s partner on the Kirkland case, also called the Lynnwood police and was told the same thing. He had the same reaction as Weber. Oh, that’s not good, he thought, upon hearing of the false-reporting charge. “Just because it’s on the books doesn’t mean you have to charge somebody with it,” he says.

  One of the Kirkland detectives got back to Shannon, to share what their department had learned. Lynnwood’s case was closed, so Kirkland was dropping Shannon’s lead. Shannon suggested the Kirkland police go talk to Marie for themselves. But the detectives never did. “That was the end,” Shannon says.

  Shannon was now more confused than ever. The way she had latched on to the Kirkland story made her realize: Maybe she hadn’t been so sure after all that Marie was a liar. “I did want to believe her,” Shannon says. “I loved her.”

  But Marie’s reluctance to follow up and reassert her innocence brought all the doubts back. The Kirkland case had given Marie a second chance to talk to police—different police, not the detectives in Lynnwood—and to insist she had been raped, to insist her case be reopened and connected to Kirkland’s. That Marie wouldn’t do it convinced Shannon anew. Marie had lied. She hadn’t been raped. Shannon was left to wonder, once again, what really happened inside Marie’s apartment.

  —

  In November, Marie went back to court. Sitting there, waiting her turn, she had no idea what the people next to her had been accused of. It could have been speeding or shoplifting. It could have been a hit-and-run or domestic violence. When Marie’s case was called, Fe
ldman, her public defender, told the judge that the defense had no pretrial motions to offer. And that was pretty much it for the day. Marie was told to come back next month.

  When she returned in December, her case was pushed back to January. She returned in January, to learn her case was being postponed until February. In February, the case was continued until March.

  Finally, the prosecution made Marie an offer. Called a “pretrial diversion agreement,” the deal amounted to this: If Marie met certain conditions for the next year, the false-reporting charge would be dropped. She would need to get mental health counseling for her lying. She would need to go on supervised probation. She would need to keep straight, breaking no more laws. And she would have to pay $500 to cover the court’s costs.

  To Feldman, this was a good offer. If Marie met the terms of the agreement, she could walk away without a record.

  Marie wanted this behind her.

  So in March she went to court, accompanied only by her lawyer, for what was her sixth appearance—and took the deal.

  —

  In Kirkland, Corporal Keesee worked the case. He went from condo to condo in the victim’s complex and in another complex nearby, asking if anyone saw or heard anything. He sought out maintenance workers and questioned them. He interviewed one neighbor who had been inside the grandmother’s home, helping her hook up a television two or three months before the attack. He interviewed another who reported that someone had tried breaking into her own home. He went to nearby businesses—a grocery store, a gas station, a drugstore—to track down surveillance video from the morning of the assault. He rounded up information on other attacks—in Seattle, in the nearby towns of Shoreline, Kenmore, and SeaTac—to see if there might be any connection.