A False Report

by T. Christian Miller

  Meanwhile, sex crimes police have become more receptive to new approaches. Many detectives receive training in “trauma-informed interviewing,” in which they learn about neurological impacts on rape victims. They learn to ask for sensory memories, which can aid recall of other details. (What sounds do you remember? What did you smell?) They learn to let the victim talk without interruption, understanding that a description may not be linear. They learn to ask open-ended questions while avoiding any hint of interrogation.

  In Ashland, Oregon, a straight shot south from Lynnwood on Interstate 5, a police detective named Carrie Hull pioneered a program called You Have Options. Launched in 2013, the program aims to increase reporting by sexual assault victims—and thereby increase the chances of identifying serial rapists. Hull knew that many victims have a wish for confidentiality and a fear of not being believed. So her program gives victims a say in how, and even whether, the police proceed. Victims can remain anonymous. If a victim balks at charges being filed, the police honor that decision. In the program’s first year, the Ashland Police Department saw a 106 percent increase in reporting. More than a dozen other law enforcement agencies have since adopted the program in states that include Virginia, Missouri, Colorado, and Washington.

  The program’s approach doesn’t sit well with some cops. Their take is that they’re being told not to investigate a crime. Hull sees it another way. The victim’s information could help solve other cases down the road. It’s like the advice Grusing got: Just get them talking.

  —

  We pulled the files for the O’Leary investigation from police departments in Aurora, Lakewood, Westminster, and Golden. The records fill volumes. They tell a story of a case with no loose ends—except one.

  After resurrecting the photos of O’Leary’s victims, John Evans devoted himself to one final task: breaking the Wretch. He dedicated one of the seven high-performance computers on his desk at the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory to cracking the encrypted, seventy-five-gigabyte file where O’Leary kept his most private secrets. For twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Evans ran specialized hacking software that hurled passwords at the file. Some of the passwords were scraps of O’Leary’s life turned up in the search of 65 Harlan Street. Old passwords. Email addresses. The names of family and friends. But mostly, the software served as a sledgehammer, deploying brute-force computing power to send lists of thousands of words and passcodes at the encryption program. Nothing worked.

  “It bugged the hell out of me,” Evans says. “I thought he had evidence of a lot more crimes in there. It was something that he didn’t want anybody to see.”

  At the end of six months of constant battering, Evans decided he needed a bigger hammer. He sent the file to the FBI’s geek squad, the Cryptologic and Electronic Analysis Unit of the Operational Technology Division. One of the most secretive branches of the agency, the cryptology unit had helped the National Security Administration comb through millions of emails. And its scientists, agents, and coders had helped numerous local law enforcement agencies with tough computer cases. But even the cryptologists could not break open the Wretch.

  Evans stored the hard drive containing the original file at the Golden Police Department. The unassuming silver box was stashed on a shelf in the evidence locker, model number WD3200AAKS, serial number WMAWF0029012, case number 1-11-000108.

  On some days, when he is running a route high in the mountains, Bob Weiner’s thoughts will unexpectedly drift back to the Wretch. It has been years since O’Leary pleaded guilty. He is in prison for the rest of his life. He has never revealed the password. Weiner wonders what it could contain.

  “Maybe there’s information in there of a murder. I don’t know,” Weiner says. “My mind, periodically, reverts back to ‘What’s going on, what is in there?’

  “I still think about it.”

  —

  After Marie was raped, people expected her to be hysterical or broken. Marie didn’t want to let go of normal, even if that meant pretending. Normal is what she craved before. It’s what she craved after. “I basically acted like nothing happened,” she says, looking back. “I turned everything off.” So the day of, she seemed detached. Like she was telling me she made a sandwich. The day after, she rolled around on the grass. As for the giggling, that’s something she does when nervous.

  We first interviewed Marie in the spring of 2015—close to seven years after she was raped. She was pregnant with her second child. Her husband was at work.

  What others found peculiar in Marie’s behavior after the attack, Marie traced to her past. “When I was little and living with my mom, I never told anyone about that stuff that happened to me,” Marie said. She never told anyone about being sexually assaulted as a child. “I held it all in. I don’t know if that guy got away or ended up hurting other people. But I didn’t want this time to be like that.” That’s why she told so many people—the calling around afterward that seemed so inexplicable to Shannon and Peggy. That’s also why she told the police, however many times they asked. Most rape victims don’t come forward. Marie did. “So nobody else would get hurt,” she said. “They’d be out there searching for this person who had done this to me.”

  She’s still shocked at how the police brushed away the evidence. “The marks on my wrists weren’t lies,” she said. “The next day it hurt even if someone tried to shake my hand. Made me want to cry.” That was the same day Peggy called Mason—and doubt set in, and the police began seizing on any variation in Marie’s story, which is another thing that gets her. “Little details might have been inconsistent. But in every story there was a person who came in my house and raped me.”

  When the police told her that Peggy and Jordan didn’t believe her—“it broke me,” Marie said. She began to doubt herself, at times wondering if she had made the story up: Maybe the rape had been a dream. And when she confessed to lying? “I lost everything.” She lost herself. Gone was the eager eighteen-year-old starting out. Depression consumed her.

  Afterward, she feared going outside. She stayed in and watched a lot of television. Nights were the worst. “Really bad,” she said. “One night I did try to walk to the store by myself and felt like I hallucinated someone following me. It freaked me out. I didn’t even get a half mile from my house. I ran home—like, running—because I thought I saw someone following me.” She stopped going out after dark. At home, in her apartment, she avoided the bedroom. She slept on the couch, the lights on.

  The day she learned of O’Leary’s arrest, Marie asked the Lynnwood police how many other women he had hurt. She couldn’t help but think: If I hadn’t recanted, perhaps they would have been spared. It was something else to carry, however unjust the load.

  O’Leary pleaded guilty in both of the Washington cases. When he was brought to Washington for sentencing, Marie stayed away. “I didn’t want to face him,” she said. “That wasn’t something I could handle or do.”

  The grandmother in Kirkland did attend O’Leary’s sentencing. “It was very important to me to see that it was him,” she says. “It was justice for him, it was justice for me.” She spoke at the hearing, but avoided recounting details of the attack. “I didn’t want him to relive it,” she says. She didn’t want to give him that satisfaction. After the assault, she suffered post-traumatic stress. Her heart raced. She kept her blinds closed. She remained on high alert to every noise. Nights were hard, she says. It was especially hard taking a shower, because she couldn’t hear anything else, leaving her imagination to fill the void.

  O’Leary received forty years for the attack in Kirkland. He received twenty-eight and a half years for the rape of Marie.

  When Marie had received counseling as ordered by the court, she told the counselor the truth. She said she had been raped. After O’Leary’s arrest in Colorado, Marie wanted to call the counselor—to tell her, when I told you I was raped, I was telling you the truth—but she couldn’t find her. Marie knows there may be peopl
e who don’t know her story’s afterword. Her peers from Project Ladder—the teens gathered around that day to hear her confess to lying—do they now know the truth? Elisabeth does. She was the girl to Marie’s right, the one Marie sensed sympathy from. They later became friends. Marie learned Elisabeth had also been sexually assaulted—but hadn’t said anything, for fear of not being believed. But as for the others in that circle, it’s unlikely they all know the postscript. People move on, misconceptions in tow.

  We asked Marie to walk us forward from the time she learned of O’Leary’s arrest.

  With the $500 she received that day, Marie bought a new phone, because her old one was broken. She bought clothes. She gave some money to a friend.

  With Shannon’s help, Marie got her driver’s license—and the day she passed that test, she signed up for another: She enrolled in school to become a truck driver. Being on the road appealed to her. So did getting away from Washington. So did a job that showed she wouldn’t be defined by her past: “I just didn’t want to be hating life and living in fear.”

  She passed the commercial driver’s test on her first try. The day the license arrived, she boarded a plane. She flew east for a job interview and got the job, which required not just driving but swinging an eight-pound hammer in coveralls, safety glasses, and hard hat. Her next job was driving only: She hauled fresh water to fracking sites. After that she hauled pipe to drilling rigs.

  She met a man online, his first message arriving as she sat in her truck, waiting to drop off a load of pipe. “It was so easy to talk to him when I first met him.” For Marie, he was also easy to trust. “He was the first guy that ever bought my dinner,” she said. They got married and had a child. A few months after our first interview with Marie, they had another. The family now lives somewhere in the middle of the country.

  In the fall of 2016, Marie made a phone call from the road. She was in Pennsylvania, on her way to make a delivery in Maine. When Stacy Galbraith answered, Marie introduced herself. She used her full name. She told Galbraith who she was—the woman in the photograph. I want to thank you for all your work, Marie told the detective, and as she spoke, her voice began to break. Galbraith asked Marie how she was. Marie said she was married with two kids. Galbraith said she had two kids of her own. They didn’t talk for long, fifteen minutes maybe, but all Marie wanted, all she really needed, was to tell Galbraith how much her work had meant. Before O’Leary’s arrest, Marie had been stuck, unable even to get her driver’s license.

  “She let me move on,” Marie says.

  In her eighteen-wheeler, Marie left Pennsylvania and made for New England, knocking off her trip’s last five hundred miles. When she reached the country’s northeast corner, she unloaded her haul, picked up a new one, and headed west for California.

  A Note from the Authors

  We—“we” being T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong—came into this story from separate entrances, then stumbled upon one another in the middle.

  Miller was working for ProPublica, a news organization devoted to investigative reporting. In 2015 he was working on a series of stories about police missteps in rape investigations. He wrote about ViCAP, the database the FBI built and then pretty much ignored. He wrote about the police’s failure to stop Darren Sharper, a former pro football star who was eventually convicted of raping or attempting to rape nine women in four states. While reporting these other stories, he heard about a serial rapist, Marc O’Leary, who had been captured in Colorado thanks to stellar work by agencies working together across jurisdictional lines. Miller began reporting in the outskirts of Denver, in order to profile an investigation done right.

  Meanwhile, Armstrong was living in Seattle and working for the Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism outlet that covers criminal justice. He knew about Marie’s case because her lawsuit had been written about in local newspapers. But Marie had never agreed to be interviewed by the media. Like Sergeant Rinta—the sex crimes investigator who conducted the peer review of Lynnwood’s investigation—Armstrong could only imagine what Marie must have felt when she was accused of lying. He reached out to see if she would be willing to share her story, and after seven months of emails and telephone calls, Marie agreed. Beginning in the spring of 2015, Armstrong and Robyn Semien, a producer for the radio show This American Life, interviewed Marie, Peggy, Shannon, Sergeant Mason, and others. Armstrong also gathered records from the Lynnwood police, in order to reconstruct an investigation gone wrong.

  In the summer of 2015, Miller began reporting the Washington piece of the O’Leary case and reached out to Marie’s attorney, H. Richmond Fisher. Fisher told him something no journalist ever wants to hear: another reporter was already working on the story. News shops can be even more turf conscious than police departments, so this discovery elicited some cussing from our employers. But we chose to work together. We knitted our two halves into one—an investigation gone wrong tethered to one done right. In December 2015 we published a twelve-thousand-word story, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” that contrasted the police investigations in Washington and Colorado and depicted the emotional toll on Marie. In February 2016 This American Life aired “Anatomy of Doubt,” an exploration into how the suspicions concerning Marie’s story started and spread. “People exercising empathy—and getting it wrong,” is how Ira Glass put it in the introduction. But even after completing those two stories, we felt there was more to tell. We wanted to trace the historical roots of the skepticism that often confronts rape victims and the misguided assumptions that can lead some detectives astray. We wanted to profile Marc O’Leary and the array of law enforcement officials behind his capture. We wanted to place Marie’s case in national context—to show that as awful as her ordeal was, other victims have suffered much the same.

  Hence, this book.

  As we reported the story out, we came to admire the resolve of those willing to talk to us about something so painful. Marie agreed to be interviewed because she believed that the more her experience was known, the less likely it was to be repeated. Peggy and Shannon agreed to talk in the hopes others could learn from their mistakes. The same went for the Lynnwood police, including Commander Rider, Sergeant Cohnheim, and the case’s lead detective, Sergeant Mason.

  We tried, without success, to interview Jerry Rittgarn, the former Lynnwood police detective. He replied in an email that he was perturbed at having the Lynnwood police portrayed as bullying Marie (“bullying” was the word used in Sergeant Rinta’s report), saying any such depiction was “far from the truth. When you have victims who lie to the police and then seek out attention in the form of a biased story written by the media you sensationalize the case and don’t tell the complete truth. If you want a complete truthful account of what occurred, to include interview, evidence, etc., I will do it only under monetary compensation contract.” We informed him that we don’t pay for interviews.

  In writing about rape, we often found ourselves balancing competing objectives. While describing the assaults, for example, we tried to use enough detail to convey the horror of what O’Leary put his victims through. At the same time, however, we wanted to stop short of being gratuitous. In writing about O’Leary’s victims, we strove to withhold details that could be used to identify them. (So we say Sarah sang in a church choir, without saying which church.) At the same time, it was important to us to write about the women he attacked as real, distinguishable people instead of as caricatures; doing so required some level of detail. Another challenge concerned language. In this paragraph and elsewhere in the book we’ve used the word “victim” to refer to Marie and other women attacked by O’Leary. Some who have been hurt—but by no means all—prefer the word “survivor” or “victor.” We opted to use “victim,” the most common term, as a general descriptor. But we knew that one woman attacked by O’Leary does not identify with that term, so we avoided using it in specific, individual reference to her. In describing O’Leary’s assaults we also tried to avoid language that might
be associated with consensual sex—changing, for example, the word “fondle” to “grope.”

  As is common practice to protect the anonymity of victims of sexual assault, we’ve changed some names in this book. We refer to the people in Marie’s life—friends, family, and others—by using first names only. For victims and for suspects who were subsequently cleared, we generally chose pseudonyms or, in Marie’s case, her real middle name (which she does not go by). We disclosed a victim’s real name if she chose to be identified publicly. We also used full names for police officers, prosecutors, judges, and other public officials, and, of course, for Marc O’Leary.

  Throughout the writing and reporting of this book, we tried to be mindful of potential blind spots. Perhaps one of the biggest in this project is gender: while the vast majority of sexual assault victims are women, we are both men. Fortunately, we were able to turn to the women involved in this project and in our lives. Rachel Klayman and Emma Berry were our editors. The head of Crown is Molly Stern. We also sought out other women readers (including our wives) to review drafts and offer insight. We reached out to experts in the fields of trauma and sexual violence as well. Those who were kind enough to offer feedback included Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma; Joanne Archambault, chief executive officer of End Violence Against Women International; and Michigan State University psychology professor Rebecca Campbell, a leading researcher on sexual assault.

  Lastly, Marie agreed to review our manuscript for accuracy, and to let us know if there were passages or details where we might have misstepped and, without need, compounded the harm she has suffered. Marie’s resilience is remarkable. So is the generosity of her spirit and her understanding of the good that can come from having people know and spread her story. We hope we’ve done her story justice, and any errors that remain are on us.