A newly published article by ProPublica and the Marshall Project, two nonprofit national news outlets, tells a tale of injustice that closely resembles a case that played out in Madison more than a decade ago.
“An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” a chilling 12,000-word story that is garnering national attention, tells the story of a serial rapist nabbed in 2011. Among this rapist’s victims: a Washington state woman who was disbelieved by police and pressured to recant, then charged with a crime for allegedly making a false report.
The same thing happened in Madison in late 1997 and 1998 in a case that I covered for Isthmus. Patty, a 38-year-old Madison woman, reported being raped at knifepoint by an intruder in her home on Sept. 4, 1997. She immediately called 911 and submitted to a sexual assault exam that documented physical injuries. But the Madison police detective assigned to her case, Tom Woodmansee, came to doubt her account. A month after the rape, Woodmansee and another detective, Linda Draeger, interrogated Patty at police headquarters, using lies and coercion to get her to recant.
Afterward, Patty recanted her recantation and told her story to Isthmus. The Dane County District Attorney’s Office brought a misdemeanor charge of obstruction against her. She faced up to nine months in jail and a $10,000 fine. The charges were dropped seven months later, after DNA evidence found at the scene could not be accounted for by the prosecution. Police and prosecutors continued to insist that Patty lied — until the crime scene DNA was linked to her rapist in 2001. The rapist, Joseph Bong, was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to 50 years in prison. His mandatory release date is 2045, according to the state Department of Corrections.
The new story, reported by T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of the Marshall Project, presents a similarly enlightening example of how a victim of rape can be revictimized by the justice system. In the case it tells, “Marie,” an 18-year-old resident of Lynnwood, Wash., reported being raped by an intruder in her home in March of 2009. The man tied her up and blindfolded her; afterward, she was able to cut herself free and summon help, including the police.
But the investigating officer picked up on minor inconsistencies in Marie’s story, and summoned her to an interview with himself and a detective in which she was pressured to recant. When Marie amended her account in writing to say the assault may have been a dream, she was told that was not good enough and pressured to instead admit that it was a lie.
“I have had a lot of stressful things going on and I wanted to hang out with someone and no one was able to so I made up this story and didn’t expect it to go as far as it did,” Marie wrote. “I don’t know why I couldn’t have done something different. This was never meant to happen.”
Again, the parallels to Patty’s case are striking, and they underscore the ease with which experienced detectives can exploit the frail emotional state of rape victims to say what police make clear they want to hear. Patty’s confession, as recorded in Woodmansee’s own report of the case, was couched in the language of fear: “I’ll say whatever you want. If you’re going to drop this, I’ll say whatever you want.”
The ProPublica/Marshall Project article, and my book about Patty’s ordeal, Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman’s Harrowing Quest for Justice, both note the legal system’s long history of distrusting rape victims, despite statistics that show the incidence of false reporting is rare. Both quote 17th-century jurist Matthew Hale, who warned that rape “is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused” — language that was actually read to juries in the United States until the 1980s.
Marie was charged with false reporting, punishable in Washington with up to a year in jail. She pled guilty, agreeing to go on supervised probation, accept mental health counseling, stay out of trouble and pay $500 in court costs. (Patty refused to accept similar deals, and insisted on fighting the charges against her until they were dropped, then filed an unsuccessful federal lawsuit against police over how she was treated.)
In 2011, police in Colorado nabbed a suspect in a series of rapes with a similar MO, including the use of a mask and careful removal of bedsheets. The suspect, Marc O’Leary, was tied to crimes through a vehicle identification and DNA evidence. A search of his home turned up “trophies” from these crimes, including underwear from his victims and photographs that he had taken of them.
One of the photographs was of Marie, including a legible image of her driver’s license learners’ permit, bearing her name and address, in Lynnwood, Wash.
Marie’s conviction was reversed, and, in response to a lawsuit, the city of Lynnwood agreed to pay her $150,000. Patty, following her loss in federal court, was barred from seeking further legal redress. But in 2006, after the publication of Cry Rape, the Madison Common Council approved a payment to her of $35,000, and the city and police chief issued formal apologies.
In Washington, according to the article, a sex crimes supervisor with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, Greg Rinta, concluded in a report that Marie’s recantation was not surprising, given the “bullying” and “hounding” employed by the police. He said the cops made too big a deal out of “minor inconsistencies” while ignoring strong evidence that a crime occurred. And he called the threats made by police in the course of getting Marie to recant “coercive, cruel and unbelievably unprofessional.”
That’s in sharp contrast to Madison, where at no time have police officials concluded that the tactics used against Patty were improper.
