by Liz Seccuro
ME: Yes.
I was scared of going down this path, and also worried it was a distraction from the charges against Beebe.
QUAGLIANA: And that you may remember other people taking part, but you’re not sure, is that what you told Detective Rudman?
ME: That may be what I told him.
QUAGLIANA: And by other people taking part, you mean other people sexually assaulting you, correct?
ME: I mean that in the sense that it was told to me afterwards that that happened, so—in giving my statement, which took a long time—
THE COURT: You’ve answered the question.
ME: Okay.
QUAGLIANA: Are you saying that information you received from other people after this incident may have influenced what you think happened?
ME: Not with respect to your client.
QUAGLIANA: With respect to anything, including the presence of other people who may have participated in a gang rape?
ME: I know that other people were on the floor. I know that other people were present and were able to open the door because it was not locked.
QUAGLIANA: When were you given this information about other people’s presence and who did you talk to about that?
ME: Mere days afterwards.
QUAGLIANA: And who told you about that?
ME: There was a fellow student named Ned Cullen, who was in one of my classes, who was rushing the fraternity.
Ned was a friend whom I’d seen some days later at lunch. He’d sat down and said, “Did you hear about the girl who was gang-raped at Phi Psi?” I jumped, but I didn’t know whether that girl was me, or whether some other girl had been assaulted, too. I asked whether he was still planning to rush the house after what had happened. He said, “Of course, my whole family is Phi Kappa Psi, so, what can you do?” But we didn’t get to that story.
QUAGLIANA: And what did he tell you?
THE COURT: Now, I think we’re getting far afield.
QUAGLIANA: Well, it goes—this is what she’s testified to, Your Honor.
THE COURT: No, ma’am, it’s not. She did not testify to anything about anybody else assaulting her.
CHAPMAN: And the Commonwealth’s objection would be, Your Honor, that if Counsel is attempting to show that her recollection today is influenced by the statement of people, that’s one thing. But to simply ask “what did he tell you” sounds to the Commonwealth more like Discovery rather than the appropriate statements that she started out making.
QUAGLIANA: Thank you, Your Honor, that’s all.
THE COURT: Anything further from the Commonwealth?
CHAPMAN: No, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Anything from the Defense?
QUAGLIANA: No, Your Honor, thank you.
THE COURT: Motion from the Commonwealth?
CHAPMAN: We’ll move to certify.
THE COURT: Argument on certification?
QUAGLIANA: Judge, it’s probable cause standard, it’s not a high standard, we’ll reserve our argument for trial in Circuit Court. Thank you.
Not much of a fight. For now.
I was excused, and Cherri Murphy hustled me out of the courtroom so fast that I didn’t even feel my feet touching the ground. I was gone before I could hear the most important words of the day.
THE COURT: Okay the Court does find probabl[e] cause. The case will be certified. What’s the next meeting of the Grand Jury?
CHAPMAN: April 17th.
The preliminary hearing was over. The next step was the grand jury and, thankfully, I would not be called as a witness there.
Cherri Murphy had led me back into a holding room, where I was to wait until most of the press had filtered out so I wouldn’t be besieged at the door. Mike had followed us out of the courtroom, and when I turned to him he was wild-eyed with anger. I thought he was upset about being in the same room as Beebe, or upset, as I was, by Rhonda Quagliana’s questions.
“How could you?!” he screamed at me.
I had not imagined his anger would be directed at me.
“You tripped up! You let that bitch rattle you! What the hell were you thinking? You forgot so many things!”
I had failed. After we had been through so much together, preparing for this moment. On some level, I felt he was right—there were questions I could have answered better, incriminating details I had left out. But he couldn’t understand how wrecked I felt, under pressure and sitting so close to my attacker.
I began to cry. Then I felt angry, too. I started to lunge toward my husband. Cherri Murphy came between us. “You two, this happens, this happens. But this can destroy you. Do not let it destroy you. You’ve come so, so far. It hurts. It’s awful, but you love one another and now is not the time to divide. She did it. She’s survived. You need to come together and do this thing. Just do this thing!”
“But I did the best that I could. I’m so sorry. I did forget some things, but he was right there! I did the best I could …”
Cherri hugged me. Then Mike hugged me, too. I held him for a long time, and then we went out, the cameras following us.
The grand jury was held in April, with Claude Worrell back arguing for the Commonwealth. A few of Beebe’s fraternity brothers who had been interviewed by police were called to testify, but that testimony is not part of the public record, and I was not present to hear it. Beebe appeared, but did not testify. The case was moved out of juvenile court to the circuit court, and Beebe was indicted on two felony counts: forcible rape and object sexual penetration: penetration of the victim by an animate (hand) or inanimate object.
Home again, we settled back into our lives. Once again, I reveled in the normalcy of motherhood and work. I went to PTA meetings, play dates, client meetings. I baked cupcakes with Ava. The investigation of my case continued, but at a less urgent pace. The trial seemed eons away. Still, I was in touch with Worrell and the police regularly, as more and more witnesses were unearthed.
Then, on November 9, 2006, Worrell e-mailed me: “Please call me when you have a minute.” I picked up the phone immediately. My instincts told me this was not good news.
“Claude?”
Silence. And then, a sharp intake of breath.
“Liz, you were right. Beebe was one of three. Three men raped you that night and Beebe was the last. I am so sorry to be the one to tell you this.”
I crawled under my desk and screamed at the top of my lungs.
CHAPTER 10 Dark Days and New Revelations
Worrell’s revelation upended my already fragile sense of security. The legal process had empowered me in some ways, but was also a new source of stress. I had always darkly suspected I had been attacked by more than one person, with my foggy sense of a crowd and the rumors later, but hearing the confirmation was especially destructive to me. Having a gut feeling was very different than knowing there was evidence to support it. With this new information, my panic attacks increased in frequency and intensity. I tried deep breathing, yoga, giving up caffeine, creative visualization, grounding techniques, acupuncture, and meditation. Not even medication would help.
When I had first received the e-mails from Beebe, and way before I alerted the Charlottesville police in December 2005, I had sent notice to the University of Virginia’s president, John Casteen, about the fact that a former student who had raped me was now in contact with me. I expressed concern that the University of Virginia Alumni Association had given Beebe my home address, despite the fact that he was not himself an alumnus, having never graduated from the university. I mentioned that I had met with the university police, Dean Sybil Todd by my side, on several occasions, and I requested any information he might be able to find in my file about the incident.
Casteen replied to say he had received my e-mail and would work diligently to get to the bottom of the problem. He copied his e-mail to others who might help me locate the file.
Later that day, a man named Leonard Sandridge, the chief operating officer of the university, informed me that he had communicat
ed with the University of Virginia Police Department at the behest of President Casteen, and that, despite my many visits and reports made in the wake of the attack, “no record of the complaint can be found at this time.” He also informed me that Student Health records were destroyed after ten years, so there was no paper trail of my visit to Student Health.
Months later, however, after the police were on the case, the chief of police, Tim Longo, referred in his press conference to a university report on my attack. This prompted a Washington Post reporter who was in touch with me to request the report, but the university rebuffed him. But after my testimony at the hearing I read a statement in an article from a university spokesperson saying that the report was legally mine to have. I wanted the Post reporter to be able to see it, so I wrote a formal request to the university’s legal department to have the report sent to me.
One day, while Ava slept, I was sipping tea at my kitchen table when a large yellow envelope with a Charlottesville return address landed on my porch. It was thin. I slid the pages out and stared at them. My eyes scanned the five copied pages of handwriting. There was no letterhead, no date, no signature, and no official stamp. It was rife with black marks, redacted names, but my own name was front and center.
It stated that I had come to someone in authority to report an “alleged rape at Phi Kappa Psi house.” People were interviewed. There were five interviewees in the report and, although the names were blacked out, one was clearly Jim Long, and another was Hud Millard. I had no idea who the others might be. They spoke of a party, of alcohol. One witness said he saw me lying bleeding on a sofa, but that he assumed I had been menstruating. Another witness claimed he saw me in a sheet lying on another floor bleeding, and then ran away. One witness tried to wake me up, but I only opened my eyes. One witness saw a man “running out of a room, with blood all over his pants” and “thought there had been a shooting,” so he and his companion ran away to avoid any possible trouble. The report ended with the assertion that I had been advised by the university that I could speak with the Commonwealth’s attorney but that I and my parents had turned down this option in the presence of Dean Canevari. It also stated that all options had been offered to me and my family and that I refused them and was referred to counseling. The pages dropped to the floor as I sat in shock, looking at this document of lies—the lies of scared student witnesses (or, now I thought, possible perpetrators?) and of the university, trying to make this incident look resolved. (Later, interviewed by Worrell at her home in Texas, Dean Todd said she had written this report, although her name was nowhere on it. Sadly, Dean Todd passed away from pancreatic cancer before the trial, and she defended the university’s handling of the case to the end.) Since this document was the only official report from the time of the incident, the police and the attorneys clearly had a lot more work to do.
Worrell’s new information came through Beebe’s attorneys, and had been obtained by their team’s private investigator. Their team offered the investigator’s file to me in full for $30,000. It was a hefty price tag, and Mike and I were more than a little concerned that money could even buy such information; our own investigators were public servants, tied to bureaucratic purse strings. And who knew what was in the file? There was no guarantee that it was the kind of information we needed. I had to trust my own team to find the truth. Still, after the police had investigated all of the people I could remember from the party, the dorm, and the fraternity roster, they didn’t have much to go on. Few people stepped forward to volunteer information, and many refused to cooperate with the police. Without a subpoena, no one can be forced to answer police questions. I’d like to think that if I ever had information about a crime, I would willingly share it. In this case, however, we were dealing with a tight-knit fraternity, and even all these years later, their bonds were ironclad. Besides, many were now prominent members of their communities and didn’t want to touch this case. They maintained their silence.
After the bombshell about the gang rape, Worrell flew up to meet with me and prepare me for trial (scheduled for late November), a meeting we had planned even before this development. It was clear now that I had holes in my memory, which can be the kiss of death in the prosecution of a rapist, even one who has confessed. We would need to change our strategy as it related to my testimony.
When Worrell arrived, I was thrilled to see him and was burning with questions. We lunched at a restaurant two blocks from my home, taking a booth in the back, with both our notes spread on the table. He began to unravel the discoveries of the months since the preliminary hearing, based on the witness interviews.
The first was Hud Millard. Not surprisingly, I was very interested to hear his version of that night’s events, although I was worried he would not remember them clearly, as he had been pretty drunk. Hud was now a pediatrician. He said he remembered working the door that night, remembered me and Jim arriving at the party. But he claimed to have left the party at eleven thirty P.M. and recalled nothing more. It was certainly curious. This was a man who was carried to a room, deposited there, and padlocked inside—presumably because the other brothers suspected he would intervene to help me. Perhaps he was embarrassed to admit that his brothers had done this to him. In any case, it appeared he had no interest in helping me now.
We had also wondered what had become of Beebe’s roommate, Matt Westfall. Beebe had explained in his e-mail that what he did to me “he did upon Matt’s bed” and that Westfall had been away for the weekend. Detectives Nick Rudman and Bob Sclafani had met with Westfall on a bench in New York’s Central Park. He was disdainful toward them, and supportive of Beebe. He spoke of Beebe’s “broken childhood.” He didn’t want to get involved, he said, as he was a “businessman of the utmost standing.” Surely, Beebe would have had to explain to his roommate what had happened. What had Beebe told him about the bloody sheets from his bed? What had Beebe told him about anything? Citing his “stellar business reputation,” Westfall simply refused to cooperate.
Another especially compelling witness failed to cooperate. When I was shown a composite photograph of Phi Kappa Psi members, I identified Francis Woller as the individual who may very well have been the person who lifted me into Beebe’s waiting arms. I also recalled that he had been in the second-floor party room and had actually been tending the bar for a while. As it turned out, Woller worked as a trader at a leading bank. Detective Rudman came to New York several times to interview him and was rebuffed each time, since Woller worked on a locked trading floor. Worrell and I discovered that Woller was the son of a much-loved elected government official. His father was a dear friend of President George W. Bush.
Worrell placed a call to Woller’s father’s office, admonishing him to tell his son to cooperate with authorities in the investigation. I was impressed with Worrell for standing up to this man. But for a long time, it had no effect. Woller went abroad on an extended work assignment of almost a year. However, when he returned, he hired himself a Charlottesville attorney and made some gestures of cooperation. He admitted to having purchased the strong grain alcohol that was in my green drink. He said he had been sent out to do so. He had nothing else to add.
John Block, the Dateline producer, who had been following the investigation and doing some detective work on his own, wanted to ask Woller further questions. He waited outside Woller’s posh New York City apartment each day. Block told me that Woller, exasperated, allegedly said to a Dateline reporter, “What’s in it for me to help this girl now?” His attorney sent a “cease and desist” letter to me in August 2008, disputing every word his client told police and threatening me with legal action should I disclose anything about his client.
There was another witness, Tuck Hammett, who had been missed by the Charlottesville police in the initial flurry of interviews. All these years later he was living alone on the outskirts of Charlottesville, in Albemarle County’s quiet tranquillity. I did not know him, nor had I met him on the night in question. As it turned out, H
ammett had been at a Grateful Dead concert with William Beebe the night I was raped, before coming back for the party. Hammett was no longer a student at that time. He had graduated, but remained a fraternity “adviser.”
Detective Rudman and another officer caught up with him at his home in the country. Hammett was sitting on his porch, smoking a joint, when the car pulled up.
“Hey. I was wondering when you guys would find me!” he exclaimed.
The officers went inside and questioned him at great length. What they heard would be the basis for many other interviews and re-interviews of previously uncooperative subjects. Hammett spoke of “that girl the three guys had sex with” and described me and the three, believing it to be consensual. He told the story of how he had returned from the Grateful Dead show with Beebe and one other brother and how a girl was being “passed around” for sex. Hammett would be subpoenaed as a witness at the April grand jury. I don’t know what he testified, but at that point only Beebe’s actions were under scrutiny by the jury.
While the officers were at his house, Hammett mentioned that the RV parked on his lot belonged to one Nathan Burgos, a fraternity brother he remained good friends with. The name was familiar to the cops.
Nathan Burgos had been interviewed earlier in the investigation since he was listed in the yearbook as a Phi Kappa Psi brother, and the investigation had naturally started with any known members who were likely to have been at the house that night. Burgos, upon being interviewed by police, claimed to know nothing about the night in question, but other witnesses certainly remembered his being there. Burgos was older than most brothers owing to a tour in the United States Navy; according to various witnesses, he was known to “get girls drunk and take advantage of them.” Burgos had allegedly been seen digitally raping me with four other men witnessing and cheering as he hiked my sweater above my neck and my skirt above my waist. It is alleged that this was the first attack, and it took place on the chapter-room floor while I was unconscious from the green drink. When the police came back to question Burgos after the press broke, he had left his wife and child and gone south. He claimed to have hired a lawyer. That lawyer had not been paid; he said he was not the attorney of record for Burgos. A grand jury subpoena was drawn up for Burgos, but he could not be found—he had become a veritable ghost. He never testified on the record.