A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Galbraith pulled him to the side. She patted him down. She knelt down and raised his pants legs.

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

  It was him. He was the rapist.

  Galbraith turned to Grusing. Thumbs up.

  We have a warrant to search the house, Grusing explained to O’Leary. O’Leary said he wanted a lawyer. At that moment, Galbraith walked up behind him.

  “You’re under arrest for burglary and sexual assault, which occurred in the City of Golden on January 5, 2011,” she told him. At 8:35 a.m., Galbraith handcuffed O’Leary. She watched as another officer drove him away for booking in the Jefferson County jail. He was fingerprinted. A technician ran cotton swabs against the inside of his cheeks to obtain a complete DNA profile. In a photo room, he stripped naked so that a police photographer could take photos of every part of his body. At his first court appearance, on February 14, 2011, O’Leary was charged with sexual assault, kidnapping, burglary, and menacing. Bail was set at $5 million. The judge worried that O’Leary was “an extreme danger.”

  Galbraith was wearing new boots the morning of the arrest. Whenever she looked at them in the future, she would remember catching O’Leary. She had wanted to make the arrest herself. “I wanted to see the look on his face…and for him to know that we figured you out.”

  Golden crime scene investigator Amanda Montano led a team of eleven cops, FBI agents, and criminalists in the search of the house. Westminster’s Katherine Ellis had volunteered to help. So had Detective Aaron Hassell from Lakewood, and Detective Marcus Williams and criminalist Kali Gipson, both from Golden. They dressed in white jumpsuits with hoods, and wore blue surgical gloves and white booties. They looked like a biohazard team swarming the scene of a toxic wasteland.

  Room by room, the team combed the house. Marc O’Leary’s bedroom was in the northeast corner. Black curtains covered the windows. The bed was pushed against one wall, beige sheets bundled in the middle. The floor was clean. There was a dresser with a television set on top. Inside the drawers, everything was neat, orderly, in its place. His shirts and pants were stacked, three piles to a drawer. On the floor of the closet, several pairs of shoes were positioned side by side. Montano noticed that one pair were black sneakers with three distinctive white stripes. They were Adidas ZX 700 shoes. Just like the website said, Montano thought.

  She moved to the computer room in back of the house. Maroon curtains covered a window that normally offered a view of the Rockies. An L-shaped brown desk sat in one corner. On top were a computer, spiral notebooks, and an iPhone. Above the computer, hanging on the wall, was a framed clock with a military coat of arms. Underneath was an engraving, thanking Private First Class Marc Patrick O’Leary for his dedicated service to the 3rd Platoon “Cocks,” A-Company of the 503rd Air Assault Infantry Regiment—one of the units he had served in while in Korea. Military, just like the victims had suspected, Montano thought.

  Bookshelves rose above the desk. Montano wrote down the titles. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza. The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. A biography of Sigmund Freud. The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need. The Bible. Sexy Origins and Intimate Things.

  A stack of CD-ROMs in blue plastic cases sat on another shelf. On top of the pile: a pink Sony Cyber-shot camera.

  That’s almost too perfect, Montano thought.

  Throughout the day, Montano and the rest of the team sifted through O’Leary’s life. In the bathroom hamper, they found a black piece of cloth, knotted to form a kind of mask. In the kitchen, sitting in a basket, they discovered a pair of Under Armour gloves with a honeycomb pattern. Under the mattress, they found a black Ruger .380-caliber handgun. The magazine contained six rounds. A black-and-green Eagle Creek backpack hung in a closet in the computer room. It was stuffed with bags. One held a pair of clear, plastic high heels with pink ribbons. Another was a clear plastic Ziploc bag. Neat block letters, scrawled with a black Sharpie, revealed the contents. STOCKINGS. CLAMPS. DILDO. GAG.

  In the back of the closet, Williams noticed a small black guitar amp. He turned it around. Two plastic Ziploc bags peeked out of the back. Williams pulled them out. Montano placed the bags on the floor. Inside, she saw women’s underwear. Peach-and-white striped, bright pink, white, light pink, brown, silky baby blue, and white with colored flowers. There were ten pairs in all.

  His trophies.

  The abundance of evidence astonished every cop on the scene. It was like finishing a jigsaw puzzle. The jagged pieces formed a clear picture: Marc O’Leary.

  “As a detective, you serve search warrants all the time. Sometimes you find good stuff. Sometimes, you find a little bit. But you don’t usually find almost every single thing that ties a case to every other case,” Hassell says. “There was so much stuff, you’re like, this is silly.”

  After the arrest, Galbraith drove over to Amber’s new apartment. It had been thirty-nine days since the rape. She wanted to break the news.

  Amber met her outside in the parking lot. Galbraith told her that the man’s name was Marc O’Leary. That he’d raped other women before her. That Amber had helped to solve the case. Her attention to detail. Her ability to draw him into conversation. Her instincts on his background. Her phone call to police. Galbraith rarely got emotional. But now, she felt overwhelmed—with relief, with satisfaction, with happiness. She began to tear up. I did this for you, she thought.

  Amber showed no emotion. She thanked Galbraith. She gave her a quick hug. And then she went back inside the apartment. Galbraith had wanted more of a reaction, even though she knew better. It wasn’t her emotion to have. A victim’s experience of rape was intensely personal.

  Hendershot called Sarah. They needed to meet, Hendershot told her. Sarah said she was busy running errands. She didn’t know if she had time to get together.

  “Well it’s really, really important,” Hendershot told her. “I’ll go anywhere you are. I don’t care where you’re at, I’ll go anywhere.”

  That evening, Hendershot drove to meet her at a Denny’s restaurant. Hendershot saw her in a back corner, eating alone. Sarah had no family nearby. Her husband had died. She had suffered, over and over.

  Hendershot sat down, and broke the news.

  “It’s over. It’s over. We have him,” she told Sarah.

  Both women sat in the booth, tears running down their faces.

  “That’s where I got my happy moment, if you will, was when I got to sit in front of her, and tell her that after all this, after everything that you’ve been through, you’ll never, ever have to worry about him again,” Hendershot says.

  —

  Michael O’Leary could not understand what was happening. He had driven up to the house at 65 Harlan Street and found it swarming with cops. A crowd ringed the police tape. News crews stood outside, the reporters speaking into cameras. He got out of his car and identified himself to a cop. He was handcuffed and placed into the back of a squad car.

  Now, he was sitting in a room in the headquarters of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Two detectives sat in front of him. One introduced himself as Scott Burgess. The other identified herself as Edna Hendershot.

  “So do you have any idea what this might be about?” Burgess asked.

  “Heck no. I have zero idea,” Michael replied. He knew that his brother had been arrested. But he didn’t know why. He’d seen a story on TV about a guy in Arizona arrested for shooting a bunch of people. The guy had reminded him of his brother: a loner, off-the-grid type. Had Marc been building a bomb or something?

  “You don’t get this kind of treatment for a traffic ticket,” Burgess told him.

  Burgess and Hendershot fired questions. How did he spend his days?

  He went to barber school each morning at eight, and worked at a furniture-delivery store in the afternoons.

  Had he ever driven Marc’s pickup anywhere?

  Yeah, once.
He had used the truck to drop off a television stand somewhere in the Denver suburbs.

  Did he use the computer in the back room?

  Sure. But he had his own account with his own password. He checked fantasy football scores. Sometimes, he perused a dating website called Plenty of Fish.

  Had he ever been to Aurora? Or Westminster? Or Golden?

  No. Yes. No.

  “Do you have any cousins that live in the Denver area, male cousins?” Hendershot asked.

  Nope. There was just his dad. And he lived in Arizona.

  Burgess asked a final question. Could he pull up his pants legs?

  Michael showed him a scar on his calf. It had come from a bicycle accident when he was a kid. What did that have to do with anything?

  “Are you guys gonna tell me what he’s been arrested for or what?” Michael asked.

  Burgess hesitated a second. It was a heck of a thing, telling this guy. He literally had no idea. Several women had been raped, Burgess told him. They had described their attacker as six feet tall, about 225 pounds. DNA had tied the rapist to the O’Leary family. And one woman had seen a birthmark on the rapist’s leg.

  “I’m sorry to tell you that and I’m sorry to say that this is going to be something that is going to be difficult, I would imagine, for a family to deal with here,” he told Michael. “But we are very confident that Marc, unfortunately, is our suspect.”

  Michael said nothing. Burgess and Hendershot continued to ask questions, but Michael stopped answering. Minutes passed in silence as the two cops waited for him to speak.

  Finally, he found his voice.

  “This is just gonna kill my mom,” he said.

  “She’s not gonna be able to handle this, I guarantee you that, like, she’s done. Her life is over. This is just gonna eat her alive forever. It doesn’t matter, there’s nothing I can do about it, nothing anybody can do about it,” he said.

  He pressed Burgess. Were they sure they had the right guy? Maybe he was being framed?

  Burgess told him no. They’d found plenty of evidence at the house. “In my mind, it’s overwhelming,” he told Michael.

  Michael didn’t want to be disloyal to his brother. Blood thicker than water and all that. But this—this was too much.

  “I actually looked up to him and thought he was doing good. I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m just, I’m embarrassed like, I’m embarrassed to even show my face.

  “He might as well be dead. He’s gonna be gone forever,” Michael said. “I wish I could just like shoot him.”

  He told the detectives that his brother was involved in occult stuff. Astrology. Alchemy. Secret societies. His brother and his friends subscribed to strange beliefs about the world’s social order, he told the detectives. There were only two kinds of people: those at the top, and the rest in their thrall.

  “In their world, everything is broken down, like with alphas and bravos,” he said.

  The words resonated with Burgess. The rapist had made a cryptic reference to Amber about wolves and bravos. Now, the rapist’s brother was using similar words. Imagine laying that coincidence out for a jury. Could it be two different guys with the same secret philosophy? What are the chances? Here was a chance to fit another puzzle piece into place.

  Burgess asked, “Have you ever heard the term ‘wolves and bravos’?”

  “Yeah, wolves and bravos,” Michael said.

  “What’s wolves and bravos?”

  “The wolves are basically like alphas and the bravos are just like the majority masses of the people. They’re not physically fit, they’re not mentally fit, they’re not anything. They’re just on the next level down. That’s how they break it down, the same way wolves do, because that’s how wolves break down.”

  “Is that how he regarded himself? Was that the kind of stuff he was studying?”

  “They basically classified him as alpha and that alpha males in that society basically can have sex with multiple women, they don’t have to be tied down,” Michael said. “I don’t see how that ties into frickin’ going out and raping and stuff like that but I mean it’s just all way too deep to even try to think about, you know?

  “The dude’s fucking psycho,” Michael said.

  —

  As Montano stepped through O’Leary’s house, she was followed by another man—John Evans, a fifty-year-old computer expert. A civilian investigator with CBI, Evans knew that the rapist had threatened to post the victims’ pictures on the Internet. And that O’Leary owned pornographic websites. Evans’s job was to scoop up all the computers, hard drives, and cell phones in the house. Montano was searching for physical signs of O’Leary’s guilt. Evans was seeking digital ones.

  Evans had a long history with computers. As a young man, he had purchased one of the first computers made to use in the home, a Commodore 64. That was back in the 1980s. It couldn’t do much. Add numbers. Print HELLO. Show blocky graphics. But he fell in love with the machine with the clunky brown keyboard and glowing screen. At the time, it seemed like magic.

  He turned his hobby into a career. After serving in the Navy—he had worked in Antarctica for three years, wowed by the polar nights and then days without end—Evans moved to Colorado. He got a job as an animal-control officer—a dogcatcher, as they were once called—and then joined the Golden Police Department as an evidence clerk and a crime scene technician. Working mostly alone, in an office lined with shelves, he logged fingerprint cards and DNA swabs, pistols and photographs, bedsheets and torn clothes. His fascination with electronics led him to take classes in computer and video forensics, the analysis of digital media to use in court cases. He became a certified computer forensic examiner—the first in Golden and one of the few in the Denver region.

  Evans’s reputation as a computer whisperer spread. Other agencies began sending him their computer crimes. At first it was mostly around Golden. But soon, cops from around Colorado were asking him for help. Did your case have blurry surveillance video? Evans could enhance it. Need to crack open a hard drive? Evans could do that, too. Encrypted emails? Evans was the man to call.

  This was how Evans learned that computers contained black magic, too. Many of the cases he worked involved child pornography. That meant he had to spend long hours looking at the most disturbing images possible. He got to know the canon—the standard set of tens of thousands of photos and videos of sexually abused children that circulated on the Internet among the world’s perverts. It was never easy. Never normal. But he got used to it, like cops with dead bodies. “You build an immunity to it after a while. It was rough. At times, I just had to get up and walk away,” he says. Evans kept his eyes alert for new images. Ones he had never seen before. Those were the children he might still be able to save.

  In the back room, Evans inventoried each component of O’Leary’s computer setup. There were two computers, one on his desk and one stored in the closet with the backpack and the guitar amp. There was an iPhone. Two thumb drives on the bookshelves. The CD-ROMs. And two SSD memory cards in O’Leary’s cameras—the stolen pink Sony Cyber-shot and the Canon Rebel XTi, the same model he had mentioned in his exchange with the woman on Craigslist.

  Evans transported everything back to the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, located in an uninspiring office park in Centennial, one of Denver’s most southern suburbs. Funded by the FBI, the lab brought together federal agents and Colorado investigators to serve as a local crime lab for all things related to computer forensics. State law enforcement agencies would bring encrypted files, half-erased accounting records, Internet IP logs in hopes of turning up evidence of a crime. Evans, on permanent loan from the Golden Police Department as part of the FBI program, enjoyed the collaboration. “You try to help everybody out,” he says.

  At his desk in a long floor filled with cubicles, Evans had seven computers—PCs and Macs—each with two screens. They whirred away, unearthing digitized secrets. Evans looked like a stockbroker on the floor of t
he Wall Street exchange, but his fourteen screens showed losses, never gains.

  “We’re all looking at really bad stuff, all day long, every day.”

  O’Leary’s computer yielded evidence almost immediately. Evans found a backup of O’Leary’s iPhone that contained the notes he had taken while he stalked Amber. The notes dated back to September 28—more than three months before the rape. On that day, he recorded several entries over five hours spent outside the apartment. The last one was at 2:30 a.m. Amber “comes home, strips to undies and takes a really long time in the bathroom, sits down at her desk and starts writing,” he wrote. On November 10, he described watching Amber and her boyfriend. Amber “comes home with white BF about 10:30 to 10:45, BF in PJs, game over.” On January 3, he worried that Amber might be moving out. He could see boxes being packed in her house. He picked the lock on the door that night, to prepare for slipping into her apartment. “Got here about one, home alone,” he wrote one day before the rape.

  On the same iPhone, the investigators found evidence that O’Leary had been stalking another woman—a divorcée from Littleton. There was no sign that he had actually struck. Just that he was planning to.

  The iPhone also divulged O’Leary’s contacts. He didn’t have many. There was his brother, Michael. His mother and stepfather. Some local friends. And one number with a 602 area code. It was a woman from Arizona. Her name was Calyxa.

  Evans forwarded everything he found to Galbraith or Hendershot. He’d write a quick, familiar note: “Here’s a couple of interesting things found today.” Evans’s best friend was Mike Hendershot, Edna’s husband. They’d met at the Golden Police Department—where Evans had also met Galbraith. Evans, too, was part of the blue web.

  Among the files that O’Leary had downloaded, Evans found an electronic copy of a book on police techniques: the Rape Investigation Handbook. It had been written by two streetwise cops who spent decades investigating sexual assault: John O. Savino, an ex–NYPD officer, and Brent E. Turvey, a criminal profiler. The handbook was written in a folksy style, with lots of anecdotes. Many of them were profiles of rapists and their crimes. But the book also described investigative techniques. The analysis of touch DNA. The use of ViCAP. The characteristics of serial rapists. It seemed to Evans that O’Leary might have studied the book.