A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  He was a student of rape.

  One day, Evans stumbled onto a strange file stored on the hard drive of the computer that had been on O’Leary’s desk. It had a suggestive name: “Wretch.” It was enormous—nearly seventy-five gigabytes, big enough to store all the books on a library floor, big enough to store tens of thousands of high-quality photos and videos. And it was sealed tight. Evans discovered that O’Leary had used the software program TrueCrypt to protect the file from prying eyes—eyes like his.

  Evans became obsessed with discovering the secrets of the Wretch.

  Though encrypted, the Wretch provided clues. O’Leary had transferred images into the Wretch for storage. That act, the moving of a folder of photos, left behind a record. Evans found that O’Leary had named one folder “girls.” Within it were more folders—each one with a woman’s name. Evans found Amber’s name and Sarah’s name. He found Doris’s name mentioned 1,422 times on 211 different files.

  He found eight other names, too, names he didn’t recognize. He put them aside. They might help investigators track down other victims.

  “If you saw how meticulous he was, even with his underwear drawer, it was easy to understand” why he labeled the folders with the women’s names, Evans says. “He was really careful about everything he did.”

  Evans dedicated one of his computers entirely to hacking into the Wretch. As he waited, he applied his tools to the smallest things he had taken from 65 Harlan Street: the two memory cards from O’Leary’s cameras. Each was the size of a stamp.

  There, he found the evidence he was seeking.

  The photos of the victims.

  O’Leary had attempted to hide them. As far as Evans could figure out, O’Leary had transferred the photos from the camera into the Wretch. Then, with the images copied and stored in the safety of the Wretch, O’Leary deleted everything from the photo cards. Only he hadn’t succeeded. The names of the files of the images had vanished. But the electronic bits that formed the images themselves remained on the card until permanently overwritten by another photo. The most careful of rapists had again left behind traces—digital ones.

  Using software to recover deleted files, Evans rescued more than four hundred images of Amber, posed and photographed, her face a mask of fear. There were more than a hundred images of Sarah, forced to lie sprawled on her bed, her hands tied behind her back. There could be no mistake. The man in the photos was O’Leary. And he was raping the women in exactly the way they had described.

  As he scrolled through the photos, Evans sometimes had to stop. He would go outside for a cigarette break. He estimated he had seen millions of pornographic images—many violent, many involving children—in his twenty-five years in law enforcement. But the people pictured in them had been anonymous and unknown. Now, he knew the names of the terrified faces staring at him on his computer screen. “You couldn’t sit there and go through it all,” he says. “It just gets to be a little overwhelming. It is real. You know you have a real victim out there.”

  When Evans called Galbraith and Hendershot to deliver the news, they raced over to the lab to view the files and immediately identified their victims.

  Hendershot’s succinct assessment: “I can’t think of a more vile human being.”

  Hendershot noticed one picture where Sarah was wearing a pair of chunky red sandals. She recalled seeing them in a box when she had searched Sarah’s apartment. Sarah had said the rapist put shoes on her. But she couldn’t remember what they were. Hendershot decided to try one more time. She called Sarah. After chatting a few minutes, Hendershot asked her the same question she had asked before. Any chance that Sarah could remember the shoes?

  As a matter of fact, she could. Sarah told her that she had been looking at a photo album a few weeks ago and saw a picture of herself wearing red sandals. Her memory suddenly flashed: Those were the shoes the rapist had grabbed.

  Hendershot was amazed. Six months after the rape, Sarah’s traumatized brain had recovered a lost image. Her memory was still finding puzzle pieces, still fitting them together.

  Evans continued to unearth files that O’Leary thought he had deleted. He found eight photos that had been taken years before. They had been part of a bigger set, but most of the images had been overwritten as O’Leary had raped more women and taken more pictures. One more attack, and the eight images would have shared the same fate, vanishing forever.

  Instead, Evans managed to recover them. He reviewed the photos with Galbraith. They were pictures of a young woman. She wore a pink T-shirt. She had the same look of terror as the other women.

  Galbraith’s heart sank. Another O’Leary victim. But how would she find her?

  The last photo provided the answer. Marc O’Leary had placed the woman’s learner’s permit on her torso. Click.

  The image clearly showed her name. And her address.

  Lynnwood, Washington.

  13

  LOOKING INTO A FISH TANK

  Monday, August 11, 2008

  Before 7:55 a.m.

  * * *

  Lynnwood, Washington

  He arrived in the predawn hours, then waited outside her apartment, outside her bedroom, listening to her talk on the phone. The night was dry, letting him settle in. The wall was thin, letting him hear her voice.

  He liked trees, for the cover they provided, and this complex had plenty of them. Apartments didn’t offer him the privacy of a house, but still, there were advantages. All those sliding glass doors, for one thing—ridiculously easy to pick, when they weren’t left unlocked, which so often they were. And then there were the windows. There were times he could dwell in the dark and run his eyes across a building, every blind open, every light on. It was like looking into a fish tank.

  He’d spotted her a couple of weeks before. He’d been out driving, scoping out apartment complexes, looking for ones that fit his criteria. He wanted a complex that offered opportunities for concealment, ways to duck for cover. If the outside was open and bright, he’d be exposed. He wanted bedroom windows he could look through. He wanted the apartment to offer multiple escape routes. He didn’t want to get boxed in. Sometimes, appraising a complex, he’d go into an empty apartment, maybe a model unit, to study the layout and mark exactly what was where.

  He also wanted the complex to be at least a mile from his home. You don’t shit where you eat, he’d say. Her complex was four miles away, a ten-minute drive. And he found himself in Lynnwood a lot—to shop, like everyone else. Circuit City, Fred Meyer, Best Buy, Walmart. He ate here at Olive Garden and Taco Bell, and sat in the dark, smoky interior of Secret Garden, a local Korean barbecue restaurant. Just last week he’d been at the Alderwood Mall, shopping at Barnes & Noble.

  Lynnwood had plenty of neighborhoods that were mostly houses. And houses had their appeal. In addition to greater privacy, they offered greater predictability. With people in houses, there tended to be less coming and going. There were fewer people to account for. But an apartment complex was easier to prowl, easier to drive through or walk past or just stand in front of without being conspicuous. There, he could blend in. Still, he knew he couldn’t stay in one place for too long, even in a complex like this. So a couple of times he left his position outside her bedroom and walked around—just for a while, lest he raise suspicion.

  Then he returned, and listened. He knew she was on the phone because no other voice responded to her. He waited for her to fall asleep.

  She was eighteen years old. His preference was eighteen to maybe thirty. Monstrous as he was, there were limits to his depravity, or at least that’s what he told himself. Eighteen was as young as he’d go. He also avoided homes with children, because he didn’t want them caught up in this. His preference was single women, living alone. He also avoided places with dogs, because dogs barked. Dogs were worse than security alarms.

  Aside from her age, she wasn’t his type, not really. He’d realized that before, while peeping into her bedroom. But he spent so much time hunting (t
hat’s what he called it, hunting), hundreds of hours, maybe even a thousand, that he had conditioned himself to incorporate into his fantasies as many kinds of women as possible.

  He had been in Washington for two and a half years now. After leaving Korea he had moved here and joined the Army Reserve, tasked with training ROTC cadets. He reported to Fort Lewis but lived in Mountlake Terrace, north of Seattle.

  In Washington his early attempts were often as pathetic as those two in Korea. He couldn’t say for sure how many times he had failed.

  “I don’t even know,” he’d say.

  “Quite a few,” he’d say.

  “At least seven or eight,” he’d say, if pushed.

  One of those times, he went into a woman’s bedroom, knife in hand—and when she saw him, she ran right past him. Just like that. And he let her go. If he grabbed her, he might cut her, and he didn’t want to do that. All the work he had done, all the preparation, ran out the door with her, into the night. It was foolish, what she did. But a part of him respected it.

  Another time, he was prowling a condominium and saw a woman who looked to be in her sixties. But he couldn’t see her well. The backyard was exposed, so he watched her from behind a fence, in some woods maybe ten to fifteen yards away. He waited, then went into her home. She had the television on. He went into her bedroom and saw her asleep. She looked pretty old, enough to make him wonder. I don’t know about this, he thought to himself. He spent fifteen or twenty minutes debating. Then he went to the bed and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming. She looked so terrified that he worried she might have a heart attack. He pulled down the covers and realized he couldn’t do it. She was too old. He covered her back up. He told her, I made a mistake coming here. I’m not going to steal anything. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m sorry I scared you. Please don’t call the cops. I’m going to walk out the back door.

  And he did.

  But then he stewed. In the days and weeks after, he chastised himself: You’re wasting your life; you spend night after night prowling, preparing, and then, if a woman doesn’t fit your fantasy, you walk away. So he committed himself to expanding his fantasy realm. He sought out pornography featuring older women, then watched and watched. He made sure the next time his wiring would be different. The next time, his work would not be wasted.

  Her phone call went on and on.

  As she spoke with Jordan, Marie noticed something in the dark. But she didn’t think much of it.

  “It was outside my window. Just a shadow.”

  Maybe someone walking by, she thought. The shadow was there, then gone.

  By the time her voice died out, it was fifteen minutes before sunrise. He climbed over the railing, brushing the surface. On the back porch there was a storage closet. He walked past it to the sliding glass door. The door was unlocked. He went into the living room.

  He knew the apartment’s 644 square feet, the living room that opened into the small dining area that led to the bedroom door. Since spotting her two weeks back, he had broken into her home a couple of times so he could check the place out. He’d gone through her papers and searched the drawers in her bedroom to make sure she would have no weapon within reach.

  There was a learning curve to what he did. He put it this way: “As you become more proficient, you make fewer mistakes.” That’s a word he would use—“proficient.” He had an entire vocabulary for rape; his words dehumanized and often mimicked military lingo. A nest of apartment buildings was a “target-rich environment.” While conducting “surveillance” he wanted “multiple potentials to pursue.” He called his final prep—on the night of, when he would be just outside, inventorying mask, bindings, gloves—“pre-combat inspection.”

  By this time he was maybe halfway around that learning curve. He’d slipped up before, catching the attention of police. In April of 2007 an officer in Mountlake Terrace had stopped him at five in the morning. The cop didn’t arrest him, but he took his name and wrote a report: “Subject prowling around apts and residences wearing dark clothing.” He gave the cop some bullshit story about his car breaking down and knocking on doors to use someone’s phone. But for the next couple of weeks he noticed cops driving by his home, going slow, eyeballing. Shit, he thought to himself. I’m on their radar. After that he shut down for a while.

  He knew that his fixations and his creeping about had also given people around him reason to wonder. He’d come home in the morning to Masha, his clothes dirty, as though he’d been crawling through something. He took classes at the Art Institute of Seattle, where he paid a fellow student, a photographer, to take pictures for a website. The student showed up to discover a photo studio with fetish gear and a metal cage with latch and padlock. Three women modeled naked. They were, in the photographer’s words, “dangerously skinny.” His marriage was unraveling. It was so bad he had asked for an open marriage. It was so bad she had agreed. Masha had worked to support them while he sat at his computer for hours on end pretending to do web design, while really he was beginning his foray into the porn business.

  Between the websites and the prowling, his obligations to the military suffered. He had become a no-show at battle assembly, the Army Reserve’s monthly training drills. It had been a year since he even made contact with his commanders.

  In the living room, just on the other side of the sliding glass door, he saw a pair of black tennis shoes—hers. He removed the laces and placed the shoes back down. A police detective would later note how precisely the shoes had been arranged, as though something in the tidiness didn’t square.

  He was just being neat, the way he was with everything.

  He threaded one of the shoelaces through a pair of her underwear. The other lace he planned to use for binding.

  He didn’t pack the same equipment every time. Sometimes he brought handcuffs or blindfolds; other times he made do with what he could find. Sometimes he brought a gun. On this occasion he would use a weapon he had spotted in one of his earlier canvasses of the apartment. As his fantasies evolved, so did his packing list. Tonight he planned a first for him. Tonight he brought a camera.

  Inside the apartment, he spent a half hour getting ready, maybe longer. Part of it was mental—talking himself over the cliff, to use his words.

  In the kitchen, he went to the knife block and removed a black-handled blade from the top row, far left.

  Then he walked to the bedroom.

  Around seven in the morning, maybe a quarter till, he stood in her bedroom doorway, the knife raised in his left hand.

  He watched as she awoke.

  Turn away, he told Marie—and she did. Roll over onto your stomach, he told her. When she did he straddled her, putting the knife near her face.

  Put your hands behind your back, he told her. He bound her wrists and covered her eyes. He stuffed cloth into her mouth to muffle any sound.

  That was an interesting conversation you were having, he told her, letting her know he had been there, listening and waiting.

  You should know better than to leave the door unlocked, he told her.

  Roll back over, he told her—and she did, and then he raped her, and while he raped her he ran his gloved hands over her.

  He found her purse, dumped it out, picked up her learner’s permit, put it on her chest, and took pictures.

  Marie heard the rustling, but couldn’t make sense of it. She recognized the click of a camera, a sound she knew well. Unable to speak, unable to scream, she prayed. She prayed that she would live.

  When he was finished, he said that if she told the police, he would post the photos online so that her kids, when she had kids, could see them.

  He took out the gag and removed the blindfold, telling her to avert her eyes and keep her head in the pillow.

  One of the last things he said was that he was sorry. He said he felt stupid, that it had looked better in his head.

  He left the room, walked to the front door, and was gone.

  —

 
On August 14, 2008—the same day Marie was taken to the Lynnwood police station and interrogated, pressed into saying she had made up her story—Marc O’Leary dropped into Lynnwood Gun & Ammunition, a store off Highway 99. He bought four boxes of ammo and a rifle.

  The following month he registered five more pornographic websites, including teensexhub.net and porninjector.com. The month after that he was in Kirkland, east of Seattle, raping another woman, sixty-three years old, his modus operandi almost identical to the rape in Lynnwood, right down to using the victim’s own shoelaces as binding.

  The next year he was discharged from the Army Reserve. While he had received an honorable discharge from active duty, for the Reserve the conditions were “other than honorable.” On a list of values—the rating binary, yes or no—he received a no on everything: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage. His evaluation report said: “cannot be counted on to accomplish any task, even those assigned to lower skill levels.” He had been unaccounted for for about two years.

  In the summer of 2009 O’Leary got on Interstate 90 and left western Washington. He drove east and south, going over the mountains to Yakima. Then he picked up Interstate 84 to Baker City, Oregon; Burley, Idaho; Ogden, Utah, and caught I-80 to Rock Springs, Wyoming. He continued east through Wyoming, almost to Nebraska, then turned south—home, to Colorado, where he would settle in the outskirts of Denver and begin anew.

  14

  A CHECK FOR $500

  March 2011

  * * *