by Jon Krakauer
After Barrett departed, Officer Vreeland rang Adams’s doorbell and banged on the door, but failed to rouse anyone inside. So he walked around to the side of the apartment, noticed an open window, peered inside, and saw Adams asleep in his bed. When Vreeland shined his flashlight in Adams’s eyes, he woke up and came to the front door. According to the police report filed by Vreeland,
After identifying myself and Officer Kamerer, I asked Zeke if I could speak with him. He was still very intoxicated and seemed to have difficulty making a decision or even a coherent and understandable sentence. He finally admitted he was Zeke Adams and he invited us in to talk to him….After he was dressed, I told him I needed to ask him a few questions about an alleged incident but that I needed to read him his Miranda Warning. He, for the most part, was uncooperative but that may have been due to his intoxication level. He kept attempting to speak as if [he] was a lawyer using legal terms that made no sense in the way he was using them….He had difficulty giving me a “yes” or a “no” when I asked him if he understood his legal rights, stating I was trying to “co-horse [i.e. coerce] him.”
He finally said he would speak with me. I asked him if he had been at Sean O’Kelly’s [sic] this evening and if he had met a girl named Kerry. He said he thought I was trying to get him to say something without his legal counsel. When I reminded him that he had agreed to speak with me, he told me I was trying to get him to admit he had met “people” [at Sean Kelly’s]….
Zeke then went into a long incoherent speech on the “exact definition of meeting people.” [When] I attempted to explain to him I was just asking him if he met Kerry tonight he replied [with] words to the effect that I was attempting to “co-horse him once again and he thought he needed legal representation.”
I told him I was done interviewing him and that someone would be in touch with him later concerning his side of events.
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ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2011, a female detective named Jamie Merifield called Kerry Barrett to say she had been assigned to Barrett’s case. According to a transcript of the phone conversation, Detective Merifield warned her that it was a “tough case,” because she and Zeke Adams were the only witnesses. Based on Adams’s level of intoxication, Merifield said, and what Barrett had told the officers, “It seems very, very clear” that Barrett’s account was “a very believable story,” and that the events she described actually happened. Merifield cautioned, however, that the case was going to be “very, very difficult” to prosecute. “Shy of him confessing,” she said, “we have nothing to go on.”
Nevertheless, Detective Merifield told Barrett that if she wanted to go forward with the case, Merifield would ask Adams to come to the police station to give a statement. “At the very least,” Merifield explained, she might be able to “scare the shit out of him,” and thereby prevent him from sexually assaulting someone else.
“This was very discouraging to hear,” Barrett said. “I felt like I was getting the brush-off, like they weren’t serious about pursuing it. I told the detective I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and she said, ‘Well, think about it for a few days and let me know.’ ”
Initially, Barrett wasn’t sure if she wanted Zeke Adams to be charged with a crime. She said, “I remember thinking, ‘Yes, what he did was wrong. But he seemed like a nice guy. Maybe it was just a misunderstanding.’ ” As Barrett replayed that night in her mind, however, she recalled that before she’d fallen asleep in Adams’s bed, he had assured her that he was trustworthy and “nothing would happen.” And then, some thirty minutes later, she woke up to him sexually assaulting her. No, she told herself, it definitely wasn’t a misunderstanding. Adams had intentionally deceived her.
“The only reason Zeke didn’t rape me is because I woke up,” Barrett said. For all she knew, Zeke Adams was a serial predator who made a habit of luring women into his bed in this fashion. She decided that he should be held accountable for his actions, and she notified Detective Merifield that she wanted to pursue charges against him.
Detective Merifield didn’t find time to interview Kerry Barrett until October 13, 2011, twenty days after Barrett reported the attempted rape. After taking Barrett’s statement, Merifield phoned Zeke Adams to get his side of the story, but couldn’t reach him. So on October 26 she went to Adams’s apartment and left a note asking him to call her.
Adams phoned Merifield the next day. When Officer Vreeland had tried to talk to Adams on September 23, two hours after the alleged assault, Adams was belligerent and uncooperative. According to the report Detective Merifield filed, however, his manner was quite different five weeks later, when she talked to him on the phone:
Zeke became very emotional….He seemed genuinely shocked that he was being accused of assaulting Kerry Barrett. During the course of our phone call it sounded as though he was crying several different times….He said that he felt bad if she felt uncomfortable but maintained that he never assaulted her. Zeke said he would come in as soon as possible to give a statement because he wanted this cleared up….Due to Zeke’s emotional state and apparent inability to process what was happening, I asked him if he was going to be okay over the weekend. I also asked Zeke if he was suicidal. He assured me he was not suicidal.
Zeke Adams came to the police station and gave a recorded statement to Detective Merifield on October 31. She began by assuring him, “I think this is just a big misunderstanding….If there were charges, I would only recommend misdemeanor charges.” Merifield inquired, “Have you ever been arrested before?”
Adams replied, “I have not.” This was not true. He had been arrested in December 2008 for petty theft. Merifield didn’t check his criminal history, however, and accepted his statement at face value.
Merifield asked how many drinks Adams had consumed before he met Barrett at Sean Kelly’s, but Adams declined to answer. “I feel like these questions are just going to get me in trouble,” he explained.
“When the officers came and talked to you that night you seemed pretty intoxicated,” she reminded him. “What I need to know is if you had a lot to drink and your memory is affected. Do you think you had a good memory of everything that happened?”
“Yes,” Adams asserted. “I could, for example, tell you specific things about what happened. Like I remember she was from New Jersey….I believe she was, like, a biology major.” (Barrett’s major was psychology.) “My memory is pretty clear.”
Clear or not, Adams’s recollections of the evening closely matched Barrett’s account up to the point where she became uncomfortable with the escalating sexual activity, announced she was leaving, and then changed her mind after Adams promised “nothing would happen” and urged her to spend the night. But Adams steadfastly denied Barrett’s claim that he subsequently attempted to have intercourse with her while she was asleep.
“I did not try to have sex with her,” he told Detective Merifield. “When she laid back down on my bed, I kissed her some more, and then she said, ‘No I have to go.’…She grabbed the remainder of her things and left my house….I can say with one hundred percent confidence that I did not intend to hurt her, harm her, do anything to her that she did not want to be done to her.” At this point, Adams broke down and started to cry. “She didn’t express to me in any way that I had done any of those things,” he insisted through his tears. “When she left my house, if anything, I thought, you know, it just appeared to me like she felt like, uh— She didn’t, you know, she was in a situation, she was like, ‘OK, this might not morally be the right thing to do.’ ”
“Did she seem mad, Zeke?” Merifield asked. “Did she slam the door?”
“I mean, she left, like, in a manner— She kind of said, ‘No, I need to go,’ ” Adams replied. “And I mean that honestly! I am not lying to you!”
“I believe you,” Merifield said sympathetically. “At any point after you kissed her and she laid back down did she say no?”
“She told me, ‘I don’t and can’t have sex with you.�
� And I did not try to have sex with her. I absolutely did not.”
“Did you ever rub your penis on her back?”
“No,” Adams said.
“Did you ever, while she was sleeping, pull her pants down?”
“No.”
“Okay. During the time when you were messing around earlier, did she touch you at all? Kind of rubbing on you too?”
“Yes.”
“How long do you think you guys were back on the bed before she got up and left?”
After a six-second pause, Adams answered, “I’m not exactly sure.”
“Did she ever fall asleep while she was at your house?” Detective Merifield asked.
Adams remained silent for a full ten seconds before replying to this question. “I will say it this way,” he finally declared. “At no point did I think that while I touched her, had any contact with her whatsoever, she was asleep.” He continued to deny Barrett’s allegations for a few more minutes, and then reflected, “I really don’t think that girl is a liar….I just don’t know that exactly everything she said to you was a fact. And I’m not trying to say that she is some kind of bad person or anything like that. I just think she might be a little mistaken.”
Merifield wholeheartedly agreed. “I think it truly was a misunderstanding,” she said. “I really don’t think that there was any intent on your part to get this girl home so you could have sex with her whether she wanted to or not.”
“Certainly not,” Adams confirmed. “Absolutely none.”
“Clearly,” Merifield expounded, “there is a size difference between the two of you, so if you wanted to do that, you could have….People have had sex they didn’t want to have. It doesn’t mean it was rape.”
Sobbing, Adams said, “I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of harming that girl or violating her or making her feel uncomfortable. If she feels that way, I feel bad that it happened. I’m a good moral person….I told you absolute facts that I am confident in. I came here because I have a true belief in essentially my innocence. That I didn’t break the law.”
“I totally understand,” Detective Merifield said.
Despite having suggested to Kerry Barrett that the point of asking Adams to come to the police station was to “scare the shit out of him,” throughout the interview Merifield went out of her way to comfort Adams. She never challenged his statements aggressively, or probed for details that might reveal whether or not he pulled down Barrett’s jeans while she was sleeping. Instead, again and again Merifield let him know that she was certain he was innocent.
“You are kind of an open book right now,” Merifield told Adams, “and you have been since I talked to you on [the phone four days earlier]….It says a lot for your character that you came in and sat and talked to me this morning….I can guarantee you I am not recommending this case for charges….I can’t show criminal intent. I really don’t believe you had any intent to hurt anybody….You seem like you are a really good person with a really good future ahead of you.”
Merifield said, “We have a lot of cases where girls come in and report stuff they are not sure about, and then it becomes rape. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair to you….You guys both went into this together….She came home willingly with you. The fact that she changed her mind and went home on her own,…that’s not your fault.
“But I have to interview you,” Merifield explained a moment later, apologetically. “I have to talk to her because she came in and reported it. If I had just flushed the case, she’s going to say the police don’t do anything….That’s not the message we want to send to people: ‘Well, we’re only going to half-ass your case because we don’t really believe this happened.’ ”
Merifield stated to Adams, “I don’t think you did anything wrong. I think that it’s torturing you that you are accused of this. And that bothers me….The case, in my opinion, is closed….This case is going to be listed as unfounded. I think this is just a misunderstanding. I don’t think it’s a crime.”
“I’m a good kid,” Zeke Adams insisted. Sobbing, he said he didn’t want his name to show up on computer screens for the rest of his life as a sex offender. “I don’t want to do that to my mom and dad….I don’t see in any way how I’m guilty.”
“You are not,” Merifield reassured him. “Men and women think completely differently,” she offered. “Men are much more concrete….In women’s minds we tend to spin things around, and turn it, and talk to our friends about it. And get advice and then sometimes create situations that maybe we read a hell of a lot more into.” Well-meaning but overwrought friends, she explained, often urge women to report incidents that are not serious enough to warrant investigation by the police.
“As far as I’m concerned this case is closed,” Merifield pronounced. “Don’t beat yourself up more than you already have about this, okay? It’s a done deal, bud. I don’t think you did anything wrong.”
—
WHEN DETECTIVE MERIFIELD called Kerry Barrett and told her there was insufficient evidence to charge Zeke Adams with sexual assault, and that the case was essentially closed, Barrett was dumbfounded. She understood that it would have been difficult to convince a jury that Adams had sexually assaulted her. “I was drinking,” she admitted, “and that works against victims. We fooled around consensually before he assaulted me—I was very up-front about that—and that also worked against me. But after I made it clear that I didn’t want it to go any farther, and he told me nothing would happen, he tried to rape me while I was sleeping. Which is a crime. And now I’ll never know how strong my case actually was, because the police wouldn’t even conduct a thorough investigation. That’s the frustrating part.
“If it was consensual,” Barrett added, “I want to know how Zeke explains me running out of his room, crying hysterically at three in the morning.” Barrett had given Detective Merifield a list of witnesses, including Adams’s roommate, who could presumably corroborate aspects of her story, yet nobody from the Missoula Police Department had bothered to interview any of these witnesses.
As Katie J. M. Baker observed in her Jezebel article, “In Missoula…drunk guys who may have ‘made mistakes’ nearly always get the benefit of the doubt. Drunk girls, however, do not.”
Compounding Barrett’s frustration, as she thought back on the night in question, she came to realize that she didn’t know what Zeke Adams had actually done to her while she was asleep, before she was awakened by him rubbing his penis on her back and buttocks. “I was asleep for what I assume to be twenty to thirty minutes,” she said. That fact that he’d managed to unbutton her tight jeans, tug them down to her ankles, and then pull down her underwear—all without waking her—made Barrett worry that Adams might have also taken other liberties while she was unconscious. “I was bleeding for a whole day afterward,” she recalled. “The officer at the police department asked if I was hurt and needed immediate medical attention, but I said no. At the time, I was too traumatized to consider what might have been done to me before I woke up.”
—
IN THE WEEKS after she reported that she had been sexually assaulted, Barrett sank into a miasma of gloom. Some mornings she was too despondent to get out of bed. She found herself sobbing on the floor of her bathroom for hours on end. She stopped going to many of her classes, which was completely out of character for her. Barrett had been awarded two very competitive scholarships to attend the University of Montana, almost never missed a class, and had earned a 4.0 grade point average the year before Zeke Adams persuaded her to spend the night at his apartment.
As she struggled with depression in the period that followed, Barrett told me, “I was a phone call away from dropping out of school and going back to New Jersey. I started drinking a lot, way too much. And engaging in other really risky behavior….You hear that rape victims avoid sex afterwards. But it’s actually just as common for some victims to become promiscuous in self-destructive ways. That’s what happened to me.”
Some rape victi
ms do indeed react to their traumas by turning away from sexual intimacy. Paradoxically, however, many others start engaging in dangerous, indiscriminate sex. Judith Lewis Herman is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of the groundbreaking book Trauma and Recovery. Commonly, Herman writes,
traumatized people find themselves reenacting some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form, without realizing what they are doing….There is something uncanny about reenactments. Even when they are consciously chosen, they have a feeling of involuntariness. Freud named this recurrent intrusion of traumatic experience the “repetition compulsion.”
Sigmund Freud believed it was an unconscious attempt to gain control over the traumatic event and thereby extinguish it. As Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, one of the preeminent authorities on posttraumatic stress, explains,
Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma….Freud thought the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings.
In her case, Barrett said, recalling the aftermath of the assault, “My life was falling apart. But somehow I stuck it out. My professors were very understanding. They let me take some incompletes and withdraw from classes.”
Barrett began seeing a therapist, which proved helpful. She also found it therapeutic to speak out—and not just about her own ordeal, but about other women who had been victimized, too.
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* pseudonym