Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (13 page)

Patty, explained Moston, assented to the intruder’s demands “out of survival and fear for her life and the safety of her daughter.” Being

“the type of person who doesn’t like to risk conflict,” she did not want her daughter to know she suspected Dominic, who Moston seemed convinced—perhaps more so than Patty—was the rapist. “She was terrified of the repercussions with her daughter and her boyfriend,” said Moston, who felt Woodmansee used “psychological terror” to manipulate Patty’s conflict-avoidance instincts. Besides, “Here’s a person who’s basically ignorant of her rights. He totally took advantage of that ignorance and went for the kill.” Moston called Patty “the perfect victim” because “she doesn’t stand up to anybody.”

Several times, Moston said there was “no doubt in my mind” that Patty was telling the truth, about both the assault and her experience with police: “This woman does not have the personality nor the desire to make up something like this.” And Moston supported Patty’s decisions to write Woodmansee’s supervisor and tell her story to the press.

“Patty,” she told me, “is the type of person who would bury this. She has to grieve this and learn from this experience, give other women the courage to come forward.”

I also spoke with Ackerman, the hypnotist in Janesville. She told me it was possible for a person to fake being hypnotized or to lie under hypnosis, but she was pretty sure that didn’t happen here: “My educated guess from all my experience is, yes, she was hypnotized, and she was recalling the experience correctly.”

Patty’s encounters with Moston and Ackerman occurred
after
the police had determined that she lied about being raped and succeeded in getting her to recant. Why would Patty scrape together money for sessions with a therapist and hypnotist and then lie all the way through them? It didn’t make any sense.

My next calls were to experts in the field of sexual assault, regarding false claims. Erin Thornley, then head of the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said, “Women rarely lie about being sexually assaulted,” and noted that not all unsubstantiated reports are false.

Sometimes, a case might not be pursued because the rapist “goes
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bowling with the chief of police or hunts with other police officers in town.” Sometimes charges are not filed because prosecutors don’t think there is enough evidence. Sometimes victims “change their minds because of fear.”

Michael Morrill, education director of the local Rape Crisis Center, agreed false reporting was rare but said recanting was not. “Victims do recant, and they do it for a variety of reasons,” including pressure from their families, social groups, and rapists. He even knew of cases where victims said that “the police haven’t believed their story and have pressured them to say they lied.” But he didn’t think this happened in Madison, where the police took an especially “progressive” approach to these crimes. Morrill singled out one detective in particular, a fellow who no longer handled sexual assaults but still took part in a Violence Against Women training group that went around the state teaching other officers to be more sensitive. The detective’s name was Tom Woodmansee.

“He’s outstanding,” said Morrill, who at the time knew nothing about Patty’s case. “He’s absolutely first-rate. If we could have everyone like Tom, we’d be in great shape.”

I looked into how often the legal system sees cases of false reporting, and how it responds. Patti Seger, who worked in the district attorney’s Domestic Violence Unit, seemed to think there were already too many disincentives to reporting assaults, like being subjected to “intensely personal” questions and getting “ripped to shreds” by defense lawyers.

Indeed, she told me, “If I were a sexual assault victim, I don’t know if I’d report it.” Seger could think of “at least one case” where a false report led to prosecution and directed me to Judy Schwaemle, one of the office’s three deputy district attorneys, for more information.

Schwaemle was a veteran prosecutor—tall, imposing, dedicated, tough as a jailhouse wall. Technically, she was the first female district attorney in Dane County history, since she headed the office for about a week the previous fall before the newly named Republican appointee, Diane Nicks, took over. Schwaemle was well liked and respected, but her reputation had one notable blemish: In 1991, she secured a sexual assault conviction against a man named Anthony Hicks, who was freed after serving nearly five years in prison when DNA tests excluded him as the source of a pubic hair found at the scene. Schwaemle, saying the new tests only introduced an element of “reasonable doubt,” never admitted 92

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error or apologized, drawing an editorial rebuke from the conservative
Wisconsin State Journal.

Most of the sources I spoke to indicated the justice system was wary about prosecuting “false” sexual assault reports, for fear of discouraging others from coming forward. But Schwaemle, when I interviewed her on February 2, said “sexual assault is no different than any other crime when it comes to false reporting.” The charge of obstruction was a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to nine months in jail and a $10,000

fine. But the only specific case she could think of where her office had charged someone for making false allegations of sexual assault was “not a matter of public record” because charges had not yet been filed. It started to dawn on me what case she was talking about. Schwaemle confirmed it: Patty, whom she identified by last name, was going to be formally charged with obstruction later that week. She should have already received a summons to appear.

Patty, it turned out, had not gotten the summons because it had been sent to her old address, on Fairmont Avenue. She didn’t know about the charges until I told her, the following day. She reacted with great surprise. “I wasn’t even scared of that,” she told me. “I didn’t think they’d have the audacity.” And in fact, not once in our conversations had she mentioned any concern about criminal charges. Four months had passed since Woodmansee made this threat, and nothing had happened.

Patty hoped police would “admit what went on in that room” on October 2, but tempered any optimism with a fateful prediction about Woodmansee: “He’s not ever going to admit he’s wrong.” She knew she needed a lawyer, and I suggested David Knoll, the son of Erwin Knoll, the late editor of
The Progressive
magazine. Knoll, a thin, wiry reed of a man with a predilection for using big words, had graduated from law school a few years earlier to begin a career “keeping ne’er-do-wells out of prison,” as his father proudly put it. He agreed to represent Patty, at least for her initial court appearance.

In the meantime, I asked police spokesperson Tom Snyder about the case. “We get lied to all the time, of course,” Snyder told me, after checking in with Woodmansee. “In most cases no one is charged. In this case, it was because of the significant amount of time he put into the case. He put in forty-plus hours of investigation before she admitted she made up the story.”

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Snyder presumably did not know, nor would I until much later, that nearly all this time was spent investigating the alleged victim and not the alleged crime. “I know it was troubling for Tom,” Snyder continued.

“He told me he wanted to believe this woman, he wanted to believe the story was true, and he wanted to arrest the bad guy. But nothing added up.” Later, Snyder related something else Woodmansee had told him—

that he came to doubt Patty’s story because she “didn’t act like a rape victim.”

Woodmansee, who recently had transferred to the Dane County Narcotics and Gang Task Force, a multijurisdiction unit that primarily investigates drug activity, declined my interview request. He left me a voice-mail message: “My supervisor won’t allow me to discuss the case while it’s in the DA’s office, which I’m sure you’re probably aware of and understand. I just wanted to return the call because I heard you were trying to reach me.”

Becky Westerfelt, executive director of the local Rape Crisis Center, confirmed that Patty had spoken to one of the group’s volunteers on the evening of October 2 and later came in for counseling, maintaining that her recantation was coerced. “We don’t have any reason to think she’s not credible,” said Westerfelt, who couldn’t fathom why criminal charges were being filed. “What makes this case so egregious?” She thought this undercut her group’s goal of removing barriers that keep victims from reporting.

Jill Poarch, the nurse at Meriter, was reluctant to discuss the particulars of Patty’s case and worried about any story that might call attention to a woman not being believed. I asked about rubber residue.

Poarch, after checking with the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory, reiterated her original belief: “There is no such test, so they would never tell anyone there was no rubber residue found.”

Poarch’s supervisor, Colleen O’Brien, contacted Woodmansee’s supervisor, Lieutenant Dennis Riley. Afterward, she told me that Riley had provided “all this information” about the case that set her mind at ease as to the conduct of police. As a result, O’Brien advised me it would be unwise to regard Patty’s account as reliable. I spoke again with Poarch, who acknowledged feeling that Woodmansee approached his investigation with some “preconceived ideas” that aroused her concern.

She also admitted being upset by the things Woodmansee reputedly 94

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said—that she found no evidence of sexual assault and did not believe Patty was raped. But since my initial contact, Poarch had talked with Woodmansee, who denied saying these things. “Now that I’ve spoken to him and his boss, Dennis Riley,” Poarch told me, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

Patty still could not remember the name of the supervisor to whom she had sent her letter of complaint. She thought it was an old name, maybe “Frank” or “Fred.” I called Riley directly, to see what he knew.

Riley was evasive, saying his policy was not to talk to the media: “I don’t trust them.” Was Riley the person to whom Patty sent her letter? “Not to my knowledge,” he told me. I read portions of Patty’s “Dear Supervisor” letter aloud to him and he drew a complete blank: “I do not remember the letter. I do not have a copy of the letter.”

Well, then, who did? On February 5 I called Lieutenant Patrick Malloy, then head of the Madison Police Department’s Professional Standards Unit. By now I had reviewed what the department said were
all
the complaints received from citizens in 1997, and Patty’s was not among them. Malloy knew of no such complaint, but promised to look into it. Early the next morning Malloy told me what he found: “What was delivered up here was to Lieutenant Riley and Riley basically gave this to Woodmansee to put in his file and that’s where I retrieved it yesterday afternoon.”

Malloy said this should not have happened—the letters should have been forwarded to his unit for review. Even so, Malloy planned no action against Riley nor any investigation into Patty’s complaint, which he interpreted as being primarily a response to the fact that she was facing criminal charges: “I would assume that what she said in these letters is basically what her defense will be in court.”

Patty came to court on the day she was supposed to, accompanied by Knoll, her friend Cheryll, and a legal advocate from the Rape Crisis Center. But Patty’s case was never called; the summons, sent January 21, had come back as undelivered and was in the process of being refiled. In the hallway, Knoll sternly admonished Patty not to talk to me. Not then, not ever. It was not surprising: defense attorneys typically discourage their clients from talking to the press. But my research was mostly complete, and there was no turning back on my plan to write about the case.

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Patty’s initial appearance was rescheduled for February 9. She met Knoll at the courthouse, missing another morning of work. Knoll stood mute as the charges were read, and the court commissioner entered a not guilty plea on Patty’s behalf. She was released on a $500 signature bond, a pretrial conference was set for April 2, and the criminal complaint became public. Curiously it contained nothing that contradicted Patty’s account. It said she had reported being raped and later, when confronted by Detectives Woodmansee and Draeger, admitted, “Okay, I’m lying.” Okay to what? Why had the detectives doubted her account?

What did they tell her before she confessed? The complaint, signed by Deputy District Attorney Jill Karofsky, shed no light on these things.

The issue of
Isthmus
containing my forty-four-hundred-word story on Patty’s case hit the street three days later, on February 12, 1998. It was one of the few times in my career that I expected a piece of writing to have a dramatic impact. Police and prosecutors would see what I had found—the testimony of Moston, Misty, Kilmark, Ackerman, and Patty herself—and reverse course. They would realize there was a chance, if not a likelihood, that an actual rape victim was being charged with a crime. They would take a new look at the case and make sure Patty’s original report was more fully investigated. I was very naive.

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Up against the System

There persists, in some quarters, a belief that the criminal justice system is fundamentally about justice. But most people with real-world familiarity with how courts and law enforcement work harbor no such illu-sion. Sooner or later, they come to see that the key word in the phrase

“criminal justice system” is not “justice” or even “criminal” but “system.”

In the week after my article was published, I tried to talk to Police Chief Williams, but he did not return my calls. Neither did Mayor Bauman, the only local official with statutory authority to give orders to the police. Patty’s prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Jill Karofsky, a petite thirty-one-year-old with a squelched, Kermit-the-frog voice, stood by her charging decision: “I read the article. I also saw the police reports. I can see there are a lot of differences.” She wouldn’t elaborate.