But after two months, with all those leads exhausted, Keesee had to give up the case. He was being rotated back to patrol. Any follow-up would be Weber’s to handle. Between Christmas and New Year’s, the two detectives reviewed the investigation while going over the handoff. They concluded there was one last hope: DNA.
The investigation had produced a decent suspect. On the morning the grandmother had reported being attacked, a Kirkland officer, responding to the call, had pulled into the condominium complex at about five thirty. In the parking lot he spotted a man in the passenger seat of a Toyota, its engine running. When the officer walked up and tapped the window, the man gave his name, along with his date of birth. The officer called the information in to dispatch to run a computer check.
The man told the officer he lived in one of the units with a friend. He worked as a machinist. His roommate worked at the same shop. This morning he was grabbing a cigarette while waiting for his roommate to come out and drive them to work. The officer thanked the machinist for his time and began walking away. Then he heard back from dispatch. The machinist had a warrant out for his arrest. The warrant had been issued in June—for indecent exposure.
So the machinist was in the area and had a criminal sheet with a sex offense. He also wore a sweatshirt that fit what the police were looking for.
But the machinist said it wasn’t him. He said he had been in his condo since two o’clock the afternoon before. And when the police drove the grandmother by to eyeball him, she said she didn’t think he was the attacker, although she couldn’t be sure. Plus, he was six feet four, 240 pounds, hardly an average build. Nonetheless, he remained a suspect, unless and until he could be excluded.
At the Washington State Patrol crime lab, an analyst swabbed the shoelace that had been used to tie up the grandmother and detected male DNA. The sample wasn’t sufficient to develop a full genetic profile. But it would allow for Y-STR analysis, the testing that can narrow in on a paternal family line. The state didn’t do that kind of analysis, but some private labs did.
Weber asked the machinist if he would provide a DNA sample for comparison purposes. He agreed, allowing the detective to swab the inside of his cheek.
In July 2009, Weber sent those cheek swabs and the shoelaces to a private lab. Then she waited.
Given its limitations, the analysis would not be able to determine, for sure, that the machinist was a match. But it could say for sure if he wasn’t.
Six weeks later, on the last day of August, Weber heard back. The machinist was ruled out. The DNA belonged to someone else.
For Weber, that was it. There was nothing else to do. On September 2 she designated the case as inactive, and moved on.
—
Marie’s plea deal removed the threat of jail. But her sense of loss lingered. The months and years following that morning in Lynnwood hollowed her out.
She stopped going to church. “I was mad at God,” she says. With her withdrawal from church, her relationship with Jordan withered. “We stayed friends, but we didn’t talk like we used to.”
She lost interest in photography. She stayed in her apartment and watched a lot of television.
She shelved thoughts of college. She took jobs that made few demands. “I hurt so bad, this deep dark hole I was in. It was hard for me to do much.” She worked at a clothing store, handling the cash register, tagging, stocking. She worked at a collection agency, taking messages, doing data entry. She did sales at a store that sold discount items for parties.
The learner’s permit that the police had found in her apartment was supposed to be temporary—a step along her path to independence. But she never took the next step, never got her license. She took the bus to work.
Self-esteem gave way to self-loathing. She started smoking, drinking, gaining weight. She made bad choices, taking up with troubled people who stole her money.
She felt like everyone shunned her—and she wasn’t alone in sensing this; Shannon saw it, too. “All the people in her circle of friends and support people just didn’t want to have anything to do with her,” Shannon says.
Marie suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. That was the diagnosis she received from a specialist she consulted as part of her plea deal. Some days she’d declare herself happy as could be. Other days she was tired, dead to the world, unable to shake the thought that she had given up everything, that the normalcy she craved would never be hers.
As ordered by the court, Marie saw a counselor for a year. She dreaded it at first. Then she settled in. “In counseling, you’re not judged. It felt nice to tell my story when I’m not shut down.” The two were supposed to work through Marie’s life, building up to the lie she had told. But “a year was not long enough,” Marie says. Once she had covered everything else, Marie had time to talk just once about what happened that summer morning in Lynnwood.
“I gave her the whole story,” Marie says.
She couldn’t tell if the counselor believed her or not.
12
MARKS
February 11, 2011
* * *
Lakewood, Colorado
Marc Patrick O’Leary.
That was the name on the driver’s license displayed on the laptop screen in front of Galbraith. O’Leary was just over six feet tall. He weighed 220 pounds. His hair was blond. His eyes were hazel. His face seemed square, heavy, like a clay doll. His lips were thick, his hair short. He had a prominent brow. He lived at 65 Harlan Street, in Lakewood. His birthdate: June 22, 1978. Galbraith did the math. He was thirty-two years old.
“It’s him,” she thought.
Galbraith felt a pang of regret. She hadn’t told her fellow investigators about the white truck because she didn’t consider it a strong lead. It was luck, just pure luck, that DiGiosio had found it. But sometimes, that’s what it took. Galbraith quickly explained the connection to the other cops around the table in the Westminster conference room.
A white Mazda in the vicinity of two of the victims.
The victims’ description of the attacker matched O’Leary’s driver’s license.
The cops in the room—Hendershot, Galbraith, Burgess, and Hassell—had lived blurred days in the month since Amber’s rape. They had dug in dumpsters and ditches, questioned college kids and cable guys, created a task force on the fly, and collaborated with each other’s crime scene investigators and crime analysts. They had exhausted themselves, certain that a serial rapist was loose. Now, with a suspect finally identified, they would work even harder. The conference room in the Westminster Police Department cleared out. The cops raced back to their offices to dig into one question.
Who was this guy?
Galbraith checked the National Crime Information Center, which showed no criminal record—not even a traffic ticket. She enlisted her husband, David, to search the Internet. Once again, they sat across from each other on their living room couches, each armed with a laptop. David got the first hit. Marc P. O’Leary had registered a porn site called teensexhub.net. The rapist had threatened to post photos of the victims online. As soon as David saw the link, he figured he wouldn’t be seeing much of his wife anymore. “Stacy’s a very driven person when she gets a major case. She’ll work thirty to forty hours straight to get ahead of it.”
Grusing contacted his counterparts in the investigative arm of the Defense Department to find out whether O’Leary had been in the armed services—something both Amber and Lilly had suspected. He got a quick response, but with little detail. O’Leary had enlisted in the Army. He had risen to the rank of sergeant. He had been honorably discharged from active duty.
DiGiosio continued her digging. The Lakewood Police Department, like more than 70 percent of law enforcement agencies in the United States, had invested in a crime-fighting tool called a license plate reader, or LPR. The small, high-speed cameras—they can take 1,800 photos a minute—are affixed to the front of patrol cars. As cops drive around, the readers snap pictures of every lice
nse plate passed. The information on the license plate—in addition to the date, time, and location of the photo—is automatically fed into a database. Over time, the database had proven far more useful than any log of stolen underwear.
As it turned out, one of the vehicles with a reader was driven by a cop who passed 65 Harlan Street on his way to work. So when DiGiosio typed in the license plate number, she got three hits. One picture captured O’Leary standing next to the white Mazda in his driveway. Another showed the right passenger-side mirror—bent just like the mirror of the white Mazda pickup in the surveillance video from Golden.
Later, Hendershot pored over DiGiosio’s discoveries at her cubicle in Westminster. One of the LPR photos captured the Mazda driving through Lakewood on August 10, 2010. That was the same day Sarah had been raped, Hendershot realized. She looked at the time stamp: 8:49:05 a.m. Only two hours after the rapist had fled the apartment. Then Hendershot found something even more astonishing. Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles records showed that O’Leary had his picture taken for a new license at 11:13 a.m. on the same day. In the picture, he wore a white T-shirt. Sarah had described her attacker as wearing a white T-shirt. It was an astounding chain of events. But Hendershot was still cautious. Who knew what more they were going to find out?
“I want the right guy to go to prison forever, you know what I mean? But you can’t be narrow in focus. You can have that bit of excitement, but there’s still so much more work to do. I can’t imagine how horrible it would be to jump to the conclusion and convict the wrong person, right? I’m excited…but there’s still so much work to be done,” Hendershot said.
—
It had been a chilly morning for the two FBI agents on the stakeout. They sat in their car, parked down the street from O’Leary’s home at 65 Harlan Street. Cars whizzed past. The temperature hovered just above freezing. The sky was clear. It was Friday, February 11, 2011.
At 12:13 p.m., a man and a woman stepped out of the house. He was about six feet one, blond hair, maybe two hundred pounds. She had dark hair, looked to be about twenty. O’Leary and who? A girlfriend? The pair got into a Toyota Corolla and drove off. The agents followed. They were hoping that O’Leary would go for a sweaty workout. Or spit on the ground. Or do anything, really, that might result in his leaving body fluid in a public place. Such remnants were called “abandoned DNA”—genetic material left in the open. Even though the Fourth Amendment required a warrant to gather a suspect’s genetic signature from his home or body, the courts had ruled abandoned DNA fair game for police. The agents could collect it; the state crime lab could analyze it. If O’Leary’s DNA matched the partial profile from the rapist, they would know that the two men were at least related, if not the same man.
O’Leary and the woman drove a half mile to the Lookin’ Good Restaurant and Lounge, a Greek, American, and Mexican diner. The agents waited outside as the couple ate for an hour and a half. When they left, an agent rushed in. He stopped the busboy, who was collecting dishes from the table. After a quick talk with the restaurant manager, the agent walked out with the coffee mug that O’Leary had used. It would have plenty of abandoned DNA on its rim.
While the surveillance agents watched O’Leary, Grusing and a local cop ventured to the front door of 65 Harlan Street. They were dressed like civilians, slacks and shirts. They planned to install a surveillance camera to watch the house and wanted to make sure nobody was home. But when Grusing knocked, a man answered. Grusing recognized him immediately.
It was Marc O’Leary.
Holy shit. Grusing had prepared for the possibility of someone being home. But he hadn’t expected it to be the suspect he thought had just left. He fell back on the ruse he had practiced. His partner explained they were cops. Grusing pulled a police sketch from his pocket and showed it to O’Leary.
There’s been a bunch of burglaries in the neighborhood, Grusing said. Seen anybody who looks like this?
In reality, the sketch was from an FBI murder case. Grusing watched O’Leary closely. Did he suspect? O’Leary held the sketch and examined it. If he were the rapist, Grusing thought, he sure didn’t show it. He seemed to be thinking. But he didn’t seem panicked.
“No, I haven’t seen that guy,” O’Leary told Grusing. He handed back the sketch.
Can I get your name and birthdate? Grusing asked. O’Leary provided them. Still no signs of panic.
Anyone else live here? Grusing asked.
Just my brother, Michael, O’Leary said. He promised to share the news about the burglaries.
As Grusing walked away, he felt like the trick had worked. He had studied bad guys. He knew how they thought. Every cop they saw, every patrol car that passed, was a source of paranoia. “The bad guys always think somebody’s after them,” he said.
He knew, too, how they compensated. They simply got used to it. O’Leary would be suspicious of him. But it would be the same distrust he held of every cop who looked too closely at him. He would rationalize it as another close call. He would have no idea how close.
It didn’t take long to sort things out. The surveillance agents had been following Michael O’Leary and his girlfriend. Michael’s DNA was on the coffee mug. Could they use Michael’s DNA to compare to the rapist’s DNA? Grusing called the director of the state crime lab. Yes—it didn’t matter which male relative provided a sample to compare to the rapist’s DNA. They could do the analysis overnight, the director told Grusing.
The next day, at 2:15 p.m. on February 12, Galbraith got the results. The rapist’s DNA—the few dozen cells found on Doris’s teddy bear, Sarah’s white kitchen timer, and Amber’s face—matched the cells on the rim of Michael O’Leary’s coffee mug. The chance of such a match happening at random was one in 4,114 for white males. If you were a gambler, you’d bet that the rapist was an O’Leary man.
During the investigation, Grusing and Galbraith met regularly at his office in a turn-of-the-century red-brick building in the middle of Denver’s dusty stockyards. It had once housed the Denver Union Stockyard Company and had the feel of a bank, with Ionic columns, wide staircases, and aged wood paneling. The FBI office on the top floor felt more like a men’s club. The agents had decorated the inside with taxidermy of illegally caught game seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service—a javelina here, an elk head there. The men’s bathroom featured a white porcelain urinal the size of a small refrigerator. The metal venetian blinds behind Grusing’s desk were bent—the victim of an impromptu interoffice football game.
Now, the two discussed a new set of facts. A day before, they hadn’t known that Michael O’Leary existed. Now, they knew he was almost Marc’s twin. The two men looked alike—they were almost the same height, and were maybe ten pounds apart. Since the rapist wore a mask, the victims would have a hard time picking between them in a lineup. And Michael was military, too. He had served in the Army. What if Michael had been driving Marc’s pickup to commit the rapes? Or what if they were working together, taking turns?
They still believed that Marc O’Leary was the rapist. But they both knew that a good lawyer would have no trouble making a case for reasonable doubt. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. None of the victims can say for sure which man assaulted her. And neither can modern science. Our legal system says it is better to let ten guilty men go free, than to convict an innocent man. You must acquit.
They needed more.
That evening, Galbraith wrote an affidavit asking a judge for a warrant to search 65 Harlan Street. She listed all the evidence that pointed to Marc O’Leary: his physical appearance, his time in the military, the DNA match. She cataloged the crimes and the lives ripped apart. Using the dry language of a legal document, she wrote down all the things that she hoped to find in the house to prove his guilt:
• Items missing from the victims in the cases described above: Pink Sony Cybershot camera, nightgown with blue and yellow floral pattern, women’s panties, green satin pillowcases, green sheets, a solid pink fitted sheet and two mat
ching pillowcases, a pair of white “granny panties,” hot pink sheet, snowflake pajamas, black silk-like bindings.
• White T-shirt (possibly with coloring on the front), gray sweatpants with holes in the knees, greenish khaki pants, gray hoodie, black mask, cap or combination thereof, gloves or other item with a honeycomb pattern or imprint, black Adidas shoes with white stripes.
• Zippered bag or backpack, items of rope, string, twine or other material that could be fashioned as a ligature; dildo, personal/sexual lubricant, water bottle, wet wipes, thigh high nylons or stockings, vibrator, black camera.
Galbraith finished late that evening. The on-duty judge didn’t want to read the affidavit in an email. He insisted on a facsimile. Galbraith raced around town until she found one store open late, a Safeway, that had a fax machine. The judge signed the warrant at ten o’clock on Saturday night. The raid was set for the next morning.
Galbraith knew that finding the evidence at O’Leary’s house would help the prosecutors build their case. But she needed only one thing to be certain that Marc O’Leary was the rapist.
She emailed a crime analyst at another police department: “I so want to see this guy’s leg! BAD.”
—
At 8:15 a.m. on Sunday, February 13, Galbraith knocked on the side door of 65 Harlan Street. It was a clear, cold morning. Snow covered the yard. The circling trees stood winter-bare.
“Police. Search warrant. Open the door!” she shouted. Grusing and six officers from Golden and Lakewood stood behind her, pressed against the south side of the house. They wore bulletproof vests and khaki pants. They had guns drawn.
Galbraith heard noises from inside the house. The door swung open. Marc O’Leary stood in the frame. His dog, Arias, and Michael’s dog, a pit bull, tumbled out ahead of him. Seeing the cops, O’Leary started to kneel.
Outside, outside! Galbraith ordered.
He looked dazed as he stepped out into the slanting midwinter sun. He wore a gray hoodie, baggy gray sweatpants, and slip-on house shoes. He told Galbraith that his brother, Michael, had gone out last night and hadn’t returned. He was alone.
A False Report Page 17