The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  Forget “alleged.” The word “rape” echoed with salient horror from a place like Penn. It is Ivy League, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious universities. Its nearly ten thousand undergraduates are the cream of America’s secondary schools.

  These were college boys. If the charge was untrue, what was at the bottom of it? Were the ATO brothers criminals or merely callous? Were they sacrificial lambs to some new and unrealistic definition of rape, framed by feminist harpies? And if the charge was true, were they guilty of an overtly criminal act, or of acting out a common male fantasy, licensed and approved by the bawdy reminiscences of their fathers and uncles and older brothers, broadcast by subscription TV stations into their living room and glorified in the glossy color photos of popular skin magazines—a fantasy that, this one night, became real and left everyone feeling sick and wounded and more than a little wrong?

  Rape. Once that word is out, the accusation hurled, it becomes important to know, first, what really did happen that night at ATO, and, second, why.

  Laurel Brooks has an aura of sadness that envelops those closest to her. She is so clever and funny, yet can at moments be so utterly certain of life’s ultimate emptiness that a conversation with her is vertiginous.

  Different doctors give different names to her underlying malaise, but one trait stands out: Laurel is far more likely than most people to do something on impulse.

  She is pretty. Delicate. Green eyes, fair hair worn curly, down to her shoulders. Given the tenor of her talk, Laurel’s very wholesomeness unsettles. A high school cheerleader. Varsity letter. Played in the school band. Class officer. Among the top ten in her graduating class. Big deal. She holds these credentials in contempt. Here I am, Laurel Brooks. Twenty-two. Senior, University of Pennsylvania. Big deal.

  Drugs were fun. Booze was fun. Dope was fun. Looking back on it, Laurel figures she spent most of her time in school high. High school, get it? Loads of laughs. Laurel led a kind of double life. She came from a successful family of professionals. There was all this healthy pressure to succeed, and Laurel worked hard to succeed. She had to do well.

  But there was a part of her that was her alone and that asked, urgently, “Why?”

  Will Gleason met Laurel at a party in January, but he didn’t really fall in love with her until a few weeks later.

  An accomplished student, Will bears his scholarship lightly. Daily workouts keep his slight frame taut. At times he feels like he has been borne along through his twenty-one years by tides he cannot fathom. Inner tides or outer tides? Usually when he acted he did not know why. His ambivalence bugs him, but at his age, confusion is often honest and even charming, and he knows this too. His hair is blond, and his eyes are blue, and his smile is quick and frequent.

  The party that January night was for “punks,” pop nihilists in drag. Will was looking for a girl. Laurel was at the party, walking around looking weird. She was wearing her “tripping garb,” a baggy black crewneck sweater bummed off her roommate and black-rimmed black sunglasses to shade her acid-primed pupils. Will had a buzz cut, blond locks cropped to the scalp. He was rolling a cigarette when Laurel walked up and asked, by way of introduction, “Are you Australian?”

  Will had grown up in a New York suburb not twenty miles from Laurel’s hometown.

  “No, I’m not Australian.”

  “Are you European?”

  Her questions were making Will laugh.

  “Well, I lived in Europe for a year.”

  She walked away. Just a screwball, Will figured, but when she came back and asked him to dance, he said OK. Laurel spent the night with him.

  “She liked me,” Will said. “I could see that. Laurel was a wreck the night before, but when she looked up at me that morning—I’ll never forget the look she gave me in the morning. She gave me a look that just melted me, I’m tellin’ ya. She looked at me like there was all the horror and desperation in the world behind those eyes. And she just kept staring at me, and she said things to me like how beautiful I was, and I thought, ‘Well, this is the psychedelia here, telling me how beautiful I am.’”

  They saw each other often over the next two weeks. Will thought she was witty and pretty and fun. But he was alarmed at her drug use and drinking.

  “She bought a ton of acid off of some guy, and she just had hits of acid laying around her room. She would just wake up in the morning, I guess, and feel like she just didn’t want to face the day and just chew hits of acid. I don’t know. That’s what she was into at the time.”

  It alarmed him more the more he cared. On the phone one night when she called, drunk, he yelled at her, “I ain’t got time for this! I ain’t got time for these crazy people and getting drunk!” But the truth was that Will was beginning to warm up to her, despite his misgivings. It was a strong undertow, drawing him in, down.

  One day, he considered taking the acid from her.

  “I thought it was going to kill her. She tripped within two weeks about ten times. Then I thought, ‘It’s not my right to take the acid away from her.’”

  That was the day of the ATO party. Will’s father was in town, staying at the Holiday Inn near the university, so Will planned to have dinner with him and hang out at the hotel. He talked to Laurel on the phone that afternoon. She said she was going to a frat party with some friends. Strange, Will thought. He didn’t think Laurel was the type to go to a frat party.

  “What are you doing after the party?” he asked. “I want to see you.”

  “OK,” Laurel said.

  “So, what time do you think you’ll be done with the party?”

  He remembers she told him about midnight or one, or later.

  “Call me as soon as the party is over, and I’ll come get you wherever you are, and we’ll go home, go to my place.”

  Laurel said OK. Will had dinner with his father that night. In the hotel room they watched Hill Street Blues. But Will was restless. During the commercials he phoned Laurel, hoping to catch her. She had left. He thought about looking for her at the party, but he didn’t like frat parties.

  So Will said goodbye to his dad when the show was over and went home. Before he went to sleep, he took the phone from the table in the hall and set it on the floor inside his bedroom door. He wanted to make sure it would wake him when she called.

  Music on the party tape was old rock and new wave. Dance music. A racing beat like the sound of a speeding heart was backdrop to events of the night.

  Henry Groh was helping set up the stereo system downstairs when Laurel showed up. It was ten thirty.

  “She was wearing dark glasses and this big black sweater and jeans with patches all over them. She seemed like one of these new wave–type chicks, you know, like, on South Street, you see these people walking around? She looked like one of these type people.”

  Gradually the first floor filled. Dancers jostled drinkers. People talked in shouts. It was fun. There were beer kegs in the basement and trash cans lined with plastic and filled with purple punch spiked with grain alcohol.

  Andrea Ploscowe had come with a friend. Before they left for another party, Andrea remembered spotting a girl in dark glasses and sweater dancing oddly from room to room, drawing attention to herself. It looked to her like the girl was on something. But there was nothing unusual about somebody drugged out at a party.

  In the wildness later, when the song “Suffragette City” came on, it was the signal for the brothers to do their circle dance. The idea was to join arms in a big circle and go round and round, faster and faster, chanting “Ho! Ho! Ho!” or singing along, dizzy, with David Bowie, round and round until one brother broke for the middle and all would follow, leaping that way and this, limbs akimbo, asses over elbows into a great comical heap. Most of the partygoers had seen this act before. It was an ATO staple. So when the circle formed, all others backed off. Evidently Laurel didn’t know, because she ended up stuck in the center, bewildered. Big Maury Rath, in the crush, grabbed Laurel hard on her upper a
rm and flung her aside when the heaping began.

  Early on, a group of partygoers had some laughs with Laurel by spinning her around in a dark room and refusing to let her out. When she threatened to scream, they pointed her through a doorway that led only to an interior bathroom. She screamed. In her state, with acid and alcohol in her brain, treatment like this was scary and profoundly disorienting. But then she found her way out, and all seemed OK again. She also remembered falling down a flight of stairs.

  Through the night the party roared. It eased and quieted slowly until, by after four, most of the crowd had gone. Small groups clustered in upstairs bedrooms afterward to share personal stashes of dope or grain alcohol or whatever. Already, it had been a good night.

  * * *

  Versions of what happened next differ significantly. After Laurel cried rape, most of the ATO brothers, on advice from their lawyers, had little to say. Laurel has never publicly talked about what happened. Her version of the incident in this article is drawn entirely from interviews with university officials and students in whom she confided. They say the brothers carried Laurel upstairs when she asked for a place to sleep. She had sex with one of them willingly. Then, one by one, a group of men had sex with her. Laurel pleaded throughout to be left alone.

  Without denying the basic facts of what happened, the brothers contest this coloring of them. In their version, reconstructed by six of them several months later, Laurel stayed in the house long after all but its residents and their closest friends had gone. The party was over, but she was still in a partying mood.

  They have thought and talked much about what happened next. Lou Duncan came out of a bathroom that adjoins his bedroom and saw Laurel, her jeans off, sitting on the lap of his roommate, Ed Roush, who was asleep in a chair. Duncan said Laurel was kissing Roush, trying to awaken him. Duncan approached her and pulled her away. Then Kip Moran came in. Moran is a wiry young man of serious manner. He has a natural flair for leadership. The brothers respected him and trusted his judgment. Moran helped get Laurel dressed again. She told him she wanted to lie down and sleep, so he offered her the couch in his room upstairs. He showed the way, helping her navigate the stairway.

  There is an icebox upstairs near Moran’s room where beer and grain punch were stashed. Henry Groh walked up to check the fridge and then went looking for Moran. His bedroom was dark, but by the red pilot bulb on the stereo, he could faintly see Moran in the room with Laurel, whom he recognized from the party earlier. She was fully dressed and sitting on the couch. Moran was crouched over the stereo.

  “Yo, Kip! What’s happenin’?” he asked. Groh reconstructed what happened next.

  “I started going into the room, and we just started talkin’. She said, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Bags.’ That’s my nickname. And, um, then we just talked about stupid stuff. I was, I had been drinking, and, I wasn’t drunk, but I certainly was at least affected, you know. I wouldn’t have driven in the condition I was in, but I can still remember what happened.”

  Moran left the room as Groh talked with Laurel.

  “When I went in there, there’s no doubt that, like, I would have been open for, like, a sexual contact kind of thing,” Groh says. “And this girl started to, I don’t know, come on to me, in some sense. It wasn’t the kind of thing where all of a sudden you start ripping each other’s clothes off or anything like that. Like, just the normal way of sexual proceedings, you know, occurred. But she was, she was really receptive. She was getting real excited, having a good time, you know . . .”

  By most accounts, Groh was the first to have sex with Laurel that morning. Laurel’s roommate later said that Laurel had confirmed that she had had sex willingly with one man that morning, although she didn’t remember who he was.

  The brothers say that Moran came back upstairs at that point and that Groh left the room. Moran then had sex with Laurel.

  Although the ATO brothers deny that word spread about the girl upstairs, a file of young men—about eight or nine—showed up either to watch or to have sex with Laurel during the next several hours.

  Maury Rath said he came up, like Groh, to check the icebox for leftover grain punch. He too found Moran and Laurel talking in the room. As he entered, Moran again left.

  “You could see just by the light of the stereo, so the room was illuminated a little bit. There was someone there, who happened to be Laurel, half sitting on the floor, half leaning on the couch, you know, just kind of reclining there. I walked in, and I thought, ‘Why is this person here?’ I didn’t know what was going on. I am just assessing the situation. As I came in, she said to me, ‘Who’s there? Who’s that?’ And she goes, ‘What’s your name?’ And I said, ‘Maury.’ And I approached her. As I came closer to her, she reached out to touch my arm. It seemed like she was making advances at me—she was, like, in a rumpled state of dress at that point too. I thought, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ And then I finally, as I moved closer to her, I realized the girl was obviously coming on to me. Not often does a girl come on to you like that. And that situation was, like, really odd, and my first reaction was, ‘What the hell kind of girl would do this?’ and, you know, ‘Who knows what she’s been doing or what’s going on?’ And I just shied away from the situation. I just said, ‘Sorry,’ and I just walked out.”

  Rath says he then walked to his room, drank some punch and went to bed. He had to leave early the next morning to catch a bus home and see his girlfriend.

  Interviewed together, the brothers give similar accounts. One by one, they happen upstairs alone and enter the room, where Laurel makes “advances.” One by one, they either have sex with her or they don’t. Jake Daubert claims he was unable to get an erection. “Though I would have to admit that I had sexual contact with her, I could not complete the act, and I did not have sex with her. I basically was embarrassed. It was the first time I had to face impotence, all right? And I was terribly embarrassed about that.”

  Interviewed separately, the brothers offer conflicting details in their stories. For instance, several say they encountered Laurel alone in the room, while others describe being present for those encounters. But despite important inconsistencies, a rough picture emerges. For most of the time, more than one of the men were present. Most of the brothers involved were aware that this was not a simple sexual encounter. All insist that they considered Laurel’s behavior to be strange—and even, in Rath’s case, disgusting—but they judged her to be sober and alert and willing. They say Laurel left the room at one point, wrapped in Moran’s robe, and walked to the bathroom. Then she came back. They say at one point Laurel did ask them to stop. She said she wanted a cigarette. Daubert gave her one. She smoked it, chatting with them, and then the sexual activity resumed. One of the brothers made sure that there were condoms available on a table in the room for the others. Venereal disease was something they all feared. For one brother, Nick Allen, it was the first time he had had sex with anyone.

  “It didn’t seem that odd to me,” Allen says. “Because of the stories I’ve heard from other fraternities and from guys in the house and from the movies you see on TV. We have this Select TV in the house, and there’s soft porn on every night. All the guys watch it and talk about it and stuff, and it didn’t seem that odd, because it’s something that you see and hear about all the time. I’ve heard stories from other fraternities about group sex and trains and stuff like that. It was just like, you know, ‘So this is what I’ve heard about, this is what it’s like, what I’ve heard about.’ That’s what it seemed like, you know.”

  Daubert, who had seen Allen with Laurel, says he felt “really weird and bothered,” because Allen, theretofore a virgin, had been able to have intercourse with Laurel while he had not. Months later, he was still troubled.

  Daubert is not the only brother who felt pressured to perform. A number of those present struggle to describe an odd “mood” during the incident. As the sexual acts occurred, others stood by outwardly oblivious, as if pretending th
at nothing unusual was happening. Standing by, one by one, they saw but did not watch.

  “When I walked into that room that night, I knew what was going on,” says Al Mitchell, one of those involved. “Not through anybody telling me, but there was a different kind of excitement going on there, a different mood. And Laurel is there in a bathrobe. She obviously has no clothes on under there. I knew what was going on. I’m not stupid. It was more of a crazy mood. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t blatant, though. It was weird. I knew what was going on without ever having been told. I think everyone knew. I was kind of in a spell. But what I have to stress here is that it never, in any way, resembled the way in which you have some guy having sex with this girl, coming off and saying, ‘OK, you’re next.’”

  They use different words, but the feeling is the same. It was as if their responses were foreordained. They were acting out some brute ritual they can neither understand nor explain. It had something to do with belonging to the fraternity and, deeper than that, with what “fraternity” meant, what it meant to belong. Feminist writers argue that implicit in any exclusive organization of men, especially in a society dominated by men, is an assumption of sexual supremacy—an assumption that armies, clubs, and fraternities have been acting out in gang bangs for centuries.

  In their most polished version, the brothers depict themselves more as victims of a series of seductions than assailants in a train of rapes. If Laurel’s version is true, most of them are simply lying. Laurel’s friends and school officials who spoke with her later said she repeatedly protested and asked the brothers to stop. One of the brothers involved tried to be helpful about the disparity: “The guys are very wary of what could happen to them. They are very distrustful. You don’t know what they have been through. I am under the impression that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Cut it in half. I don’t know if what you come up with will be exactly what happened, but it’s the fairest thing to do.”