A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Weiner spoke first. He painted a picture of a cool, methodical sociopath bent on increasing violence. He described how O’Leary had started with Doris in Aurora. How he failed with Lilly in Lakewood. How he bought a gun after stealing cash from Sarah’s Westminster apartment. How he threatened Amber with a similar-looking gun in Golden. This was a man who treated rape as a job—a job he said he loved. This was a man who should be put away forever. The way Weiner figured it, O’Leary deserved a minimum of 294 years.

  The night before, Weiner had provided the judge with blown-up photos of the victims, partially redacted to protect their privacy. “Look at the faces of those victims, the pain and the torture that they went through. What he took from these women and the manner in which he took them can never, ever be replaced,” he told McNulty.

  At the time of his arrest, O’Leary had been planning another attack in another Denver suburb, Weiner told the judge. Investigators had found his surveillance notes. “Like a wolf, he was a predator,” Weiner said.

  O’Leary’s victims went next. Galbraith and Hendershot read statements from Amber and Sarah.

  The rape changed her, Amber’s statement said. She installed three locks on her door. She fastened them the moment she came home. She used to sleep with her windows open to catch the summer breeze. Now they were always closed. Holidays churned up terrible memories. Colors she once loved—the colors she had decorated her bedroom with—now reminded her of the rape. “I’m still in the process of forgetting this incident and moving on, but I am lucky to a point that the person who did this has been found,” she wrote. “I don’t need to live in fear anymore.”

  Sarah had just been getting back on her feet when the attack happened. Her husband had died. She had moved into a new apartment. The rape stole even more from her. She thought her phone was tapped. She believed hackers had infiltrated her email. She became frightened when she saw an upstairs neighbor with a similar build to the man who raped her. She called them the “losses in her life”—loss of freedom and safety, loss of trust, loss of a sense of peace. “This event has not defeated me. I was knocked down temporarily, but I’m back on my feet again. I may not do all of the things that I like to do. I’m much more vigilant, but I’m still alive and I’m living my life.”

  When Hendershot finished reading Sarah’s statement, she turned to McNulty. She had an unusual request, one she’d made only a few times in her career. Could she offer a comment of her own? The judge said yes.

  Hendershot turned to the bench, but kept her gaze on O’Leary, hoping to catch his eye. “Sir, this crime has had a profound impact on my life, both personally and professionally,” she said. “Mr. O’Leary demonstrated a level of arrogance and disdain that is incomprehensible. With each assault there was no recognition of society’s values and no ethical or moral compass.” Hendershot asked the judge to put O’Leary away for life.

  The women O’Leary had attacked in Lakewood and Aurora rose to speak. Lilly told the judge that she was a spiritual person, dedicated to prayer and worship and service to all of creation. But after the attack, she struggled to find that self. She couldn’t be alone in her home. She had violent thoughts. She withdrew from friends. She hired armed guards to protect her home. She racked up medical bills for tens of thousands of dollars. She had no insurance. Collection agencies called constantly. People showed up at her door in search of payment. “I had trouble sleeping. I had a lot of nightmares. I had a lot of trauma,” she said.

  She told the judge that she believed O’Leary needed help. She called him a “confused human being.” But she also thought he needed to go to prison for life. By speaking for justice, the women he had attacked were triumphing over his savagery, Lilly told McNulty. “I’m recovering, everyone is recovering. It has—you know, it’s created changes. We’re doing the best to reinvent our lives.”

  Doris, now sixty-seven, stood next. The fraternity housemother recounted the terror she felt during the attack. Afterward, she purchased a security system. She armed the alarm each time she showered. She described repeated trips to her doctor’s office to take tests to make sure she hadn’t been infected with HIV. “Each time the wait for the results brought a scary, anxious, uneasy feeling.” Outwardly, she had resumed a normal life. But her psyche still needed repair. “No one would come out of this emotionally unscathed,” she told the court.

  Near the end of her statement, Doris turned to O’Leary—and asked him, directly, how he had found her. “Why were you in Aurora? Do you have a friend or relative in my neighborhood that I should be worried about? Is there any reason I should still be afraid?

  “How did I make myself so vulnerable?” she asked the man who had raped her.

  —

  For the defense, the first to speak was Marc O’Leary.

  “I’m standing here because I need to be in prison,” he began. “I know that probably more than any person in this room. I’ve known it for a while.

  “I am a sexually violent predator and I’m out of control.”

  He wanted to apologize, O’Leary told the court. And he wanted to explain.

  He described suffering periodic, uncontrollable urges to attack women. He had struggled against them ever since childhood. He had a loving family, a lucky existence. “I was, for lack of a better word, enslaved to something I’ve detested my entire life; and yet I was, you know, unable to disobey in the end, and in the end, I lost. And I lost more than my own life in the process. I’ve destroyed many others.

  “I don’t know what caused it,” he said. O’Leary didn’t cite Jung. He didn’t cite the duality theosophy in his books on the occult. He kept it simple. “It sounds cliché, I guess, but it’s really kind of an actual Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in real life.”

  O’Leary told McNulty he didn’t expect pity. But he hoped people could understand—if not him, then others like him. “A lot of people would describe me as a monster,” he said. “Things are a lot more complicated than that.”

  O’Leary turned to Doris, to answer her questions. He found her name on a social-networking site, he said. That was it. She had no reason to be afraid of anyone in her neighborhood. “The terrible reality of it is that, you know, it was—for me it was just an opportunity, which is disgusting, and I know that, but that’s—you know, that’s the truth.

  “You didn’t do anything to me.”

  As O’Leary spoke, his mother sat and listened. She believed that Marc was guilty. But she had never heard him talk about the secret tortures of his childhood. Never heard him say he felt like two people. Never heard him describe hunting women.

  Sheri Shimamoto sat just behind O’Leary’s mother. She noticed that the mother held several sheets of paper. Shimamoto assumed it was the statement she planned to give, extolling his good qualities and asking for mercy. As O’Leary described his crimes, Shimamoto watched his mother crumple the paper into a ball.

  When she stood to address the courtroom, O’Leary’s mother said she had been stunned by her eldest son’s arrest. Marc had been a happy kid—talkative, playful, an animal lover. “Had I known or had any clue at all over the years that he was suffering inside and needed help, there’s nothing we wouldn’t have done to get him help….But, you know, we just didn’t see anything.” Perhaps it had to do with his time in the military. He seemed a different person after his discharge, she said, darker and more withdrawn. She thought he might have a mental illness and hoped he would get help in prison.

  She shared with the court pain from her own past. She herself was a rape victim, attacked at a party when she was fifteen. It was 1963. Nobody talked about sex. Nobody talked about rape. She had discussed the incident with her daughter, but never Michael nor Marc. She regretted it now. Perhaps it would have opened a discussion. She told the victims she understood what they had suffered. She asked for mercy for her son. And for herself. “As a mother, I’ve heard people say, ‘You can’t blame yourself for this.’ Why, why can’t I blame myself? I’m his mother, I raised him; if i
t wasn’t something I did, then it was probably something I didn’t do.”

  Dougan, O’Leary’s attorney, addressed the judge. By Dougan’s calculation, McNulty could sentence O’Leary to a minimum of twenty-six years. He, too, asked for mercy.

  Now, it was the judge’s turn.

  “Mr. O’Leary, let me address you first,” McNulty began. “You indicated that people might hate you, consider you a monster. It’s not my job to vilify you. It’s not my job to judge you. It is my job to judge your actions.”

  McNulty noted that the charges against O’Leary could produce a broad range of sentences. He gave O’Leary credit for his lack of a prior criminal record and for showing remorse. “I believe that you are sincere when you make those statements,” McNulty said.

  The judge then ticked off the evidence against O’Leary. The stalking. The rape tools. The terror inflicted. “The most damning evidence in this case is the evidence you created,” he told O’Leary. “These are pictures of women being raped and you taking those pictures while they’re being raped, and I—I looked at those women’s faces and I saw anguish and fear, despair and hopelessness. And I thought, if you’re looking at that, how can anybody push the button to take the picture?”

  To reach an appropriate sentence, McNulty weighed O’Leary’s crimes in light of others he had judged. McNulty had never seen anything so abhorrent.

  “Sir, you hunted the victims in this case like they were your prey, and then you exercised dominion over them for hours and forced them to do unspeakable acts,” he said, his voice low and steady. “Your actions in this case were pure evil.”

  McNulty told O’Leary that he’d lost his privilege to be in free society. He would assess the maximum possible penalty.

  The sentence: 327½ years in prison.

  O’Leary would never get out.

  —

  A few days later, back in his cell at the imposing, razor-wired intake center for the Colorado Department of Corrections, O’Leary made an unusual offer. He agreed to discuss his crimes with the investigators, without a lawyer present. He wanted to help the victims get closure, he said. There was one caveat: He would not talk if Galbraith were in attendance. A woman, he said, would make him uncomfortable.

  Grusing volunteered for the job. In the ten months since the arrest, cops had turned up evidence of at least one other sexual assault in Washington clearly linked to O’Leary. But they had failed to connect him to any other crimes. The rapes in Kansas had been a dead end—and would remain unsolved. The Wretch stayed sealed. Grusing wasn’t sure what he would get out of O’Leary. But an FBI polygrapher had given him a tip once: The more and longer they talk, the better it is for us. That was Grusing’s goal. Get O’Leary talking.

  A week after the sentencing hearing, at 11:15 a.m. on December 15, 2011, Grusing found himself sitting across from O’Leary in a narrow white cinder-block cell lined with black square acoustic tiles. Grusing wore a blue polo shirt, green pants, and hiking shoes. O’Leary was in a red jumpsuit, open at the neck to reveal a white T-shirt beneath. His hair was shaved close to his head. He wore black tennis shoes, the laces removed to prevent him from hanging himself. His face contorted constantly, his features squeezing in, then returning to normal.

  O’Leary crossed his arms as Grusing sat down. He was reluctant to talk, he told Grusing. He’d had second thoughts. He’d been treated badly in lockup. A guard had threatened to put him in solitary confinement. “I’m not in a talkative mood right now,” he said.

  Once again, Grusing had come prepared. He had studied how O’Leary had learned from every attack. How meticulous he had been. How hard he worked to conceal his trail. Here, thought Grusing, was a man with pride in his work. A man who would be flattered by the opportunity to demonstrate his expertise. “You’re a very important person, you’re a very accomplished rapist weirdo and we would like to study you,” was how Grusing had conceived of his pitch. He made O’Leary an offer. Perhaps he would welcome the chance to talk with a profiler from the agency’s famed Behavioral Analysis Unit?

  O’Leary shifted in his seat. “There’s a lot to talk about,” he said.

  Over the next four hours, O’Leary went on nonstop, a scholar monologuing on rape tactics to a single, seemingly rapt pupil. Grusing would lean forward, scribble on a legal pad at times, and occasionally share tidbits of the cops’ investigation. It didn’t take much to keep O’Leary going.

  “It was like I’d just eaten Thanksgiving dinner,” he said of one attack, kicking back in his chair.

  As he described each rape, he lingered on details. Doris had chastened him. “I left before I think I normally would have left, because [she] had said a couple of things that sort of hit me.” He downplayed his talk about wolves and bravos with Amber as “bullshit.” “The conversation and stuff was basically just to fill in the gaps” between his attacks, he said. “In a different situation, had we met on different terms, we might have gotten along.” He expressed his deepest regret about Sarah. He attacked her after failing with Lilly. “She got me at my worst,” he said.

  He admired Lilly’s split-second decision to flee. “I was kind of pissed. But at the same time, I was cracking up. Smart girl. She had one chance and she took it.” O’Leary told Grusing a story about something that happened before he attacked Lilly, back when he was still doing surveillance. One night he had been standing on a chair, peeking into her window, when he heard a noise. What the hell is that? he wondered. He looked up. On the roof, just above him, a gray fox was staring at him. O’Leary gestured at the fox to scare it away. The fox didn’t move. O’Leary decided to retreat. As he walked toward his truck, though, the fox followed him. It waited while he got in, and didn’t leave until he began to drive off. He thought Lilly might actually have an animal protector. “There’s a lot more to this world than most of us realize,” O’Leary told Grusing.

  O’Leary let spill lessons for law enforcement. He described the countermeasures he’d taken to avoid the police. He knew that the Army had a sample of his DNA. He worried that the cops might be able to access that record and identify him. So he took steps to avoid leaving genetic traces. He told Grusing that he knew, in the end, it was an impossible task. “You can’t beat the technology,” he said.

  He brought up the moment when Grusing and another cop had knocked on the door of 65 Harlan Street and found him home. Grusing had handed him a sketch of a dummy burglary suspect. O’Leary had thought it was a subterfuge to collect his fingerprints. He grabbed the laminated paper anyway. He felt safe. He always wore gloves. “There’s no way I left prints,” he had thought to himself.

  He realized that police departments often did not communicate. And so he deliberately committed each rape in a different jurisdiction. “It’s basically to kind of, you know, keep you guys off of my trail, I guess, for as long as possible.” It had worked well in Washington. The cops in Lynnwood had missed their chance, he said. “If Washington had just paid attention a little bit more, I probably would have been a person of interest earlier on.”

  He urged cops to track the geography of suspicious-persons reports. By the time a rape happened, it was too late to go search for a predator. His cycle would have ramped down. “It’s almost like you guys, as soon as you go on full alert, it’s when I go into hiding, that’s when I’m a normal person,” O’Leary said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “We’re on the wrong schedule basically.”

  “Wrong for us,” Grusing said.

  “Yeah,” O’Leary agreed.

  Then, without preamble, O’Leary launched into a jeremiad. He had struggled alone his entire life. Struggled and lost. And it wasn’t just him. There were other men, too, men who had spent their lives in futile combat to destroy the monster inside them. It was a waste.

  “The only way they can stop is some guy like you is going to show up at their doorstep,” he told Grusing. “From then on, they’re just a specimen. That’s all they are. They get paraded in front of the media. Their family l
ife is ruined. And they get locked up in a hole and the world takes them out whenever they want to poke them and prod them.” O’Leary flung his hands above him. “They have all these shows and shit, Criminal Minds and Dexter and Law & Order: SVU. As long as it’s not happening to them, everybody wants to look at it. As long as the train wreck is not in their neighborhood, then it’s fascinating and everybody loves it. They eat it up. People want to sell books.”

  O’Leary suddenly stopped. He seemed to sink into himself. He stared at the floor.

  “We all have predispositions,” Grusing said. “Yours, it’s what keeps me employed.”

  Grusing stood up to leave. O’Leary looked up. He gestured to the two-way mirror on a wall in back of the interview room.

  “There’s a whole gang back there, huh?” he asked.

  “Just us and Stacy Galbraith,” Grusing replied.

  O’Leary dropped his head into his hands. “I knew you were gonna do that,” he said.

  O’Leary looked directly at the mirror. On the other side, Galbraith looked back.

  “Hi, Stacy Galbraith,” O’Leary crooned. “I bet you wish you could have shot me.”

  Grusing interjected.

  “We can’t bring our guns in here anyway,” he said.

  “No, I mean when she was at my door and had her gun pointed at me.”

  Grusing shook his head.

  “Well, that’s a lot of paperwork.”

  On the other side of the mirror, Galbraith could not help but feel chilled. That night, for the first time in the entire case, she had trouble sleeping.

  Epilogue

  EIGHTEEN WHEELS

  2011–

  * * *

  Shaken as he was, Sergeant Mason elected not to quit the police force. “The decision was, I’m not going to let this define me as who I am. I’ll learn from it and be a better investigator.”