A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Lynnwood, Washington

  For Detective Galbraith, this was a call to look forward to. She would be helping another police department tie up a major case, extending a hand from four states away: Hey, look what I have for you. Or at least that’s what she figured.

  When she called the Lynnwood police—it was Thursday, March 3—Galbraith identified herself, then provided Marie’s name and asked if the department had any case reports involving her. Told yes, Galbraith asked for a copy.

  Fax us your request on letterhead, the Lynnwood police said. They wanted to confirm that Galbraith was a cop. So Galbraith grabbed some stationery emblazoned with her department’s police shield and typed: “Please forward this CR to my attention at your earliest convenience. We have 4 similars with a person in custody. Thanks in advance!—Stacy.”

  About twenty minutes later, Galbraith received a fax from Lynnwood’s records department. She looked at the cover page—and looked again, seizing at what was scrawled across the bottom. There, written by hand, were the last words she expected to see:

  Vic was charged w/ false reporting in our case.

  False reporting. The woman in the photo. “Vic was charged.”

  Galbraith startled at the words.

  Her heart sank. Then she let out a curse, knowing just how wrong the charge was.

  Galbraith told the officers around her: Hey, listen to this. Then she went through the file. The investigations in Colorado had generated thousands of pages of records, documenting leads chased, lab work conducted, canvasses completed. The fax from Lynnwood included only forty-four pages. Galbraith pored over what little there was. She read what Marie had told police that first day about being attacked; Galbraith knew—because of O’Leary’s photos—that Marie’s account was true. The images matched Marie’s words.

  She wouldn’t be helping fellow investigators solve an open case, Galbraith realized. She would be notifying them of an unthinkable mistake, about the worst any detective could make. As she reviewed Lynnwood’s investigation—seeing where the doubts started, how they spread, how Marie had buckled when challenged and even taken a plea deal—Galbraith could only imagine what the woman in the photo had gone through. And she could only imagine the days ahead for the Lynnwood police.

  —

  Sergeant Mason was heading to work when he got the telephone call letting him know.

  Two months before, he had been transferred from the Criminal Investigations Division to the Narcotics Task Force, the field he knew best. He was still picking up classes outside of work. He was wrapping up a course in criminal justice procedure at Skagit Valley College, earning an A to go with all the other As lining his college transcripts.

  It had been two and a half years since he had closed Marie’s case, and in that time he had not once second-guessed himself: “I had no indication that how the investigation concluded was anything but 100 percent correct.”

  Mason’s investigation had gone sideways with a call from Peggy, saying she suspected Marie was lying. Now a call from Rodney Cohnheim, a fellow Lynnwood sergeant, informed Mason that Marie had been telling the truth. She had been raped. The man who raped her had been arrested. The police who arrested him had found photographs that verified Marie’s story.

  Her unbelievable story.

  He had confronted a woman who had been assaulted at knifepoint, convinced her to recant, and charged her with a crime. In his car, alone, he absorbed the news. The shock was so profound it reduced the surrounding details to fuzz. Most likely he pulled off the road, although he doesn’t remember: “It’s the law. I’m sure I did.” Most likely Cohnheim offered support: “I’m sure he did. But it didn’t register.”

  He went into the station and met with higher-ups. Everyone around talked about reopening the investigation and extraditing O’Leary and notifying Marie and reimbursing her costs and expunging her record—and for Mason it was all but a hum, everyone around feeling horrible, not sure what to say to the detective in the middle of it all.

  As his colleagues set to work, Mason thought about the case, retracing the steps he took, mulling where he lost his way. The phone call from Peggy. The Project Ladder manager saying Marie wanted to change apartments. Marie, when asked to come in, saying: Am I in trouble? None, alone, meant much. But at the time they seemed to add up. He’d been a cop for more than twenty years now, and for the first time, he questioned whether he was qualified for the job. Like every cop, he’d experienced trauma; he had seen death, faced danger. And he had acquitted himself. He had pulled through and moved on. This was different. And though in this moment he thought about himself and all he had to answer to, he thought more about Marie. If he could get something like this so wrong, should he keep doing what he was doing? Maybe it was time for him to quit.

  —

  The investigators in Colorado not only helped solve the Lynnwood case from thirteen hundred miles away, they also helped close the case in Kirkland, Washington—with an assist from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS.

  In 2004, the NCIS created the Law Enforcement Information Exchange—LInX, for short. To protect Navy assets, this program aimed to gather investigative records from law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels. A search of those records could illuminate patterns or connect cases across jurisdictions. By 2011, at least 275 agencies participated in the Northwest alone, sharing more than thirteen million narratives of criminal investigations. That enthusiastic participation allowed the LInX program to achieve a power that the FBI’s ViCAP program never realized.

  After linking O’Leary to the rape in Lynnwood, Galbraith used this database to search for other unsolved cases in Washington State with similar markers. Up popped the case in Kirkland, where the sixty-three-year-old grandmother had been assaulted two months after Marie. From there, everything fell together. A search of O’Leary’s computer produced a hit on the Kirkland victim’s name. O’Leary’s DNA was compared to the genetic profile recovered from the grandmother’s shoelace. It matched.

  Before filing charges in the Kirkland case, a prosecutor in King County, Washington, wrote to Galbraith, asking her to review a prepared summary of the evidence for accuracy. Galbraith marked up the document and wrote back:

  FILE FILE FILE!!! Way BAD DUDE!

  Have a great weekend.

  —

  At the Lynnwood Police Department, the task of cleanup went to Commander Steve Rider and to Cohnheim, the sergeant who had sat in on Marie’s final, futile attempt to convince police the rapist was real. They needed to meet with their counterparts in Colorado, which figured to be humiliating, and to find Marie and tell her about O’Leary.

  “One of the worst things that we were ever going to have to do,” Rider says.

  They went to Colorado first. On March 14 the two men introduced themselves to the two detectives who had caught the rapist. Although the Lynnwood officers reeled at their department’s mishandling of the case, their approach to the aftermath left Galbraith with a sense of appreciation. “They were nice. They were nice. You could tell that they had that victim’s interest at heart in how they were going to try to fix this for her. They weren’t arrogant. There was no wall. There was no feeling of—we’re on defense. It is what it is, and now we act.” Galbraith and Hendershot gave a briefing on their cases and provided a copy of O’Leary’s fingerprints, obtained after his arrest.

  In Kirkland, the police had preserved their physical evidence, including the DNA that proved a match with O’Leary. But the Lynnwood police, upon concluding that Marie was a liar, had destroyed the bedding, the hairs, the fibers—even the rape kit, with all that evidence collected at the hospital when Marie did every awful thing asked of her in order to help the police catch the stranger with the knife. Any hope of a DNA match was gone. When they checked to see what was left, all the Lynnwood police found was a single card with some partial fingerprints lifted from the sliding glass door. That card, coupled with this copy of O’Leary�
�s prints, was Lynnwood’s only hope of proving O’Leary’s guilt through physical traces left behind.

  The same day they met with the two Colorado detectives, Rider and Cohnheim went to the Jefferson County jail to see if O’Leary would talk. But once he heard who they were and what they wanted, he requested an attorney, shutting down any questioning.

  The next day the two went to Lakewood, to the offices of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Together, in one room, investigators from all the agencies that had captured O’Leary in Colorado—Golden, Westminster, Aurora, Lakewood, the CBI, and the FBI—convened with the police from Lynnwood, the department that might have prevented the Colorado attacks had its detectives worked their case instead of closing it as unfounded. The meeting was not comfortable.

  “We sat in a group of outstanding investigators that put together an unbelievably good case, solved this case for us, and we’re in the room looking at each other like we don’t even deserve to be here, our department screwed this up so bad,” Rider says. “They’ve got to be looking at us like, ‘How could you let that happen?’ ”

  The Lynnwood officers were struck by how well the Colorado agencies worked together—“just the spirit of cooperation,” Cohnheim says. They shared information. They held routine meetings. “They all knew each other,” Cohnheim says. “You could see that communication wasn’t forced or new.” In Washington State, the police in Lynnwood had scuttled Kirkland’s efforts to coordinate, even though the two cities were only sixteen miles apart. Despite Shannon’s tip—and her insistence the two cases might connect if only someone would look—detectives from the two departments never met in person. Nor did they write down and file whatever information was passed over the phone. The investigative files for both agencies offer not a word about contact between the two.

  In Colorado, Rider and Cohnheim witnessed the power of relationships. They also saw that the police in Colorado had investigative tools the Lynnwood police did not. When the two returned home to Washington, they made sure their department got an automatic license plate reader.

  One trial concluded, Rider turned to the next—the one he dreaded most. Now he had to tell Marie.

  —

  Extraordinary as Marie’s case was—a victim assaulted, then accused—others like it could be found around the country, reflecting, in some police departments, a dismissiveness toward reports of sexual violence that at times crossed into hostility.

  For Marie, vindication came through a photograph—an image, captured and saved by her rapist, confirming the truth of Marie’s story. For a thirteen-year-old in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, it took video. In 2001, the thirteen-year-old reported being abducted and sexually molested, then dumped at a shopping mall. “You were never there. You never got dropped off there,” a police detective told the girl. He told her he had watched surveillance video from the mall, which failed to back up her story.

  “You keep lying and lying and lying and lying,” he said.

  More than a week later, the girl’s parents reviewed the mall’s surveillance tape for themselves—and discovered footage showing that their daughter had been telling the truth all along.

  In Vallejo, California, Denise Huskins, a physical therapist, disappeared from her home in 2015. When she reappeared two days later, police detectives refused to believe her story of having been kidnapped and sexually assaulted, likening her account to the plotline of the best-selling novel Gone Girl. The police called her story a hoax, with one lieutenant saying Huskins “owes this community an apology.” Several months later the police discovered that Huskins’s account was true. They found video of her being sexually assaulted, along with other evidence. A disbarred lawyer who had gone to Harvard pleaded guilty to kidnapping Huskins and was sentenced to forty years. But even after that, Huskins continued to encounter abuse online, with one man posting on Facebook:

  You are going to hell for the bullshit u have done….Eat shit, whore.

  Huskins, in a Facebook post of her own, wrote:

  All I did was survive, and I was criminalized for it.

  In the United States, there’s no saying how many women have been accused of making a false claim of rape, only to have the claim later proved true. There’s no such statistic kept. But even Marie’s case—the extreme example where persecution becomes prosecution, where a victim is not only accused of lying, but criminally charged with it—does not stand alone. At least three other cases like it have surfaced in media reports since the 1990s.

  In Madison, Wisconsin, a legally blind woman, known as Patty, reported being raped at knifepoint in 1997. But the police didn’t think she acted like a rape victim should, according to Cry Rape, a book journalist Bill Lueders wrote about the case. The lead detective interrogated her—and deceived her. He made up a story about how the police had tested for latex residue from the supposed rapist’s condom, and the test came back negative. (There was no such test.) He told her the nurse had found no sign of injury. (The nurse had.) He confronted Patty about her history of depression and use of Prozac, and questioned just how blind she was. Patty buckled, saying she’d lied, and was charged with obstructing an officer. “What she’s being presented with is a world gone mad,” her attorney told a judge. “It is truly a Kafkaesque situation. I’m blind. No, you’re not. I was raped. No, you weren’t. There was physical evidence. No, there wasn’t.” Only after Patty was charged did police test her bedsheet—and discover semen, after which the charge against her was dismissed. In 2004 a convicted sex offender was tried and found guilty of Patty’s rape. A lawsuit that Patty filed against the police was dismissed. But city officials passed a resolution extending Madison’s “heartfelt apology and deepest regrets,” along with $35,000.

  In 1997, the same year Patty was raped, a teenager in New York City was raped on her sixteenth birthday. Detectives in Queens learned that the teenager, Fancy Figueroa, was two weeks pregnant—and assumed her rape claim was pretext. Figueroa, who has since made her identity public, pleaded guilty to false reporting and was sentenced to three days of picking up garbage. In 2003, a DNA check incriminated Figueroa’s attacker—a man who had gone on to rape two other teens. He was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to twenty-two years. In the years before her attacker’s arrest, Figueroa battled depression and moved to North Carolina in order to get away. “I felt they hurt me more than the rapist hurt me,” she said of the two detectives who accused her of lying. “He just came and left, but for six years nobody believed me. I lost my family. I lost my freedom. I lost a little of my sanity.” Figueroa’s mother described her conflicting emotions to the New York Daily News: “I feel happy that Fancy can close a chapter in her life, but to tell the truth I would have liked it better had it turned out she lied. It would have been better that she had never been raped.”

  In 2004—the year Patty’s rapist was convicted in Wisconsin, the year Figueroa’s rapist was convicted in New York—a nineteen-year-old named Sara Reedy worked as a gas-station cashier in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania. Reedy, who was pregnant, was paying her way through college. One night a man robbed the station of about $600 and, at gunpoint, sexually assaulted Reedy. Afterward, at the hospital, a detective interviewed her. “His first question to me was, ‘How many times a day do you use dope?’ ” Reedy would recall later. He accused her of stealing the money and contriving a story of sexual assault as cover. “And he actually went to the extent of saying, ‘Your tears won’t save you now,’ when I finally started crying. It was like a horrible Lifetime movie.” Reedy was arrested on charges of theft and false reporting, and spent five days in jail before bailing out. A month before Reedy was to stand trial, a construction worker was arrested while assaulting a woman in a convenience store in Brookville, Pennsylvania. He subsequently confessed to attacking a series of women across the state, including Reedy. The charges against her were dropped. Reedy, who elected to make her identity public, sued the police and received a settlement for $1.5 million.

  The dismissivenes
s at the heart of these cases has long roots. In her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller described going to a police station in New York’s Greenwich Village and asking for rape statistics. The precinct, she learned, had received thirty-five complaints that month—and made two arrests.

  “Not a very impressive record,” she told a sergeant.

  “You know what these complaints represent?” the sergeant told her. “Prostitutes who didn’t get their money.”

  For Brownmiller, the sergeant’s attitude reflected something profoundly troubling in law enforcement: “A police officer who does not believe there is such a crime as rape can arrive at only one determination,” she wrote.

  Recent parallels also abound, cropping up in media accounts and academic literature in the years since Marie was raped. From 2009 to 2014, the Baltimore County Police Department dismissed 34 percent of rape allegations as false or baseless. The percentage itself was troubling enough. More troubling yet was how it was reached. The department often deep-sixed complaints without even taking the elemental step of having a sex crimes detective interview the alleged victim, a BuzzFeed News investigation found.

  In 2014, a social work professor in Michigan published a study based on interviews with police in a “midsized city in the Great Lakes region.” One officer talked of cheating wives who have “been out all night, you know, blah blah blah, ‘Oh, I was raped.’ ” Another said: “We find that girls utilize the rape card to mess with people….They use it to get back at a boyfriend or they need attention, they’re having a bad week, you know, ‘If I cry rape my whole family will come to me and I need that.’ ” In 2016, the sheriff in Bingham County, Idaho, told a local television station: “The majority of our rapes—not to say we don’t have rapes, we do—but the majority of our rapes that are called in, are actual consensual sex.”

  —

  Marie was back in Puyallup, south of Seattle. Now twenty, approaching twenty-one, she had moved in with a former foster family, the same one she’d been with that first day of high school, back when everything seemed to be falling into place. But now, as then, something went sideways. Marie and the family got into an argument, so Marie moved in with another of her old foster families, who lived down the street.