Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (14 page)

What about Patty’s recently unearthed letters alleging police coercion? Karofsky had received them but felt they contained “no new facts.” What about Moston’s therapy notes or the hypnotist’s tape recording, in which Patty provides a detailed account of a rape the cops say never occurred? Wouldn’t these be of interest? Not in the least.

Karofsky’s boss, District Attorney Diane Nicks, was equally tight-lipped and defensive. A thin, fidgety former assistant attorney general who nearly knocked herself out trying, with only limited success, to win the confidence of people in her office, Nicks said she was ethically obligated not to say anything that might interfere with Patty’s pending prosecution. Didn’t she also have an ethical obligation to intervene if a person was being wrongfully prosecuted? Nicks called this area of the law “extremely complicated.”

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Becky Westerfelt said several women had called the Rape Crisis Center wondering whether it was safe to report a sexual assault to the Madison police. She suggested two alternatives: asking one of the center’s advocates to be present during questioning or reporting the assault to the state Justice Department, rather than the Madison police.

I wrote a short follow-up article that incorporated these reactions under the headline, “Can Rape Victims Trust the System?” Like the first, it generated no media interest and only a few, mostly negative responses. Several men praised the police for taking a skeptical view toward women who cry rape, citing studies showing epidemic levels of false reporting.

Being charged with a crime placed a huge additional burden on Patty’s already fragile psyche. She and Mark had resumed a platonic relationship, but it was even more strained than before. He denied saying the things Woodmansee attributed to him, but Patty remained resentful. One night she got drunk and took it out on his car, which he had left in her garage. She flung chairs at it, cracking the windshield and putting large scratches and dents in the exterior. Misty came down and made her stop. Despite this, Patty and Mark remained friends and he continued to help her with her vending business.

Another time, when Patty had been out drinking, she came home to find that Misty had allowed Dominic’s nephew to sleep on the couch. She flew into a rage, and she and Misty got into a physical fight.

Misty, already in her bed, heard Patty yelling things like “it runs in the family” and “you’re all assholes” at her houseguest. The nephew sought refuge in Misty’s room, and Patty followed. Misty got up and pushed her mother to the wall in the hallway. Patty grabbed her daughter around her neck. Misty, swearing up a storm, kicked her mother in the stomach to free herself, then locked herself in her room. She even called the police but, as the altercation subsided, declined their offer to send assistance.

Knoll thought my coverage of Patty’s case “substantially complicated the process of trying to do something for this woman. You’ve raised the stakes on this.” His job, as he saw it, was “not to tilt at windmills or try to change the police department.” No good could come from that or from shining a spotlight on injustice. That would only make people in the system dig in their heels.

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At the time, I considered Knoll’s perspective offensively cynical. If the system was making a mistake, then the media’s job was to point it out. Keeping quiet about injustices as a strategy for correcting them cut against my instincts. Surely the system wasn’t so sinister that it would rather be wrong than admit its own capacity for error. Or was it?

I tried getting a tape of Patty’s 911 call. The director of Dane County Public Safety Communications, coincidentally named Jimmy Patty, declined my oral request, saying Madison police opposed its release. I filed a written request reminding Patty that he was the official custodian, and the cops were not. Patty listened to the call and applied what under Wisconsin’s open records law is known as a balancing test—weighing the public’s right to know against any possible harm from disclosure.

On the basis of this review, he decided to release the tape; he notified the district attorney’s office and police of his intent. This triggered a visit from Madison Police Detective Lauri Schwartz, who physically removed the tape from the 911 center. I then tried getting it from the police department, whose records custodian turned me down, saying Karofsky felt its release “may seriously jeopardize prosecution.”

On another front, I looked into the conduct of Lieutenant Dennis Riley, who had received Patty’s letters of complaint only to hand them over to Woodmansee. The department’s official rules on “Complaint Acceptance and Investigation” set forth: “Every employee of the department has the responsibility to insure that a citizen complaint, on being expressed, is received and referred to the appropriate unit or supervisor.” Unless the complaint was considered minor—defined as alleging conduct that, if confirmed, would result in discipline less than a letter of reprimand—Riley was required to pass it on to the Professional Standards Unit.

It was hard to see how Patty’s complaint could be considered minor.

The allegations it leveled—that police detectives used lies and threats to coerce a rape victim into recanting—were significantly more serious than any of the thirty citizen complaints the department acknowledged receiving in 1997. (Among these bona fide complaints: a handwritten letter to “Police Chief Willie Williams” from a jail inmate alleging the officer who arrested him was racially biased, and a grievance from a man seeking “the names and addresses and phone numbers of the young ladies who falsely accused me of following them.”) Even for a
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minor complaint, Riley was rule-bound to investigate and inform the complainant of various options, which he didn’t do. Plus he apparently lied to me in denying any knowledge of Patty’s letters. I informed Marc Eisen, my editor at
Isthmus,
that I wanted to file charges against Riley with the Madison Police and Fire Commission.

State law charged the PFC with hiring police and fire chiefs and imposing major discipline on officers. While the law gave the commission explicit authority to initiate disciplinary proceedings on its own, in practice the only complaints it heard were those brought by chiefs and, on occasion, by citizens. The process was hardly user-friendly—the complaining party had to marshal evidence and present a case—but by law it was open to anyone. “In fact,” PFC attorney Scott Herrick boasted, “when chiefs use it for discipline purposes they are using exactly the same process that a citizen can use.” There was even a prece-dent for its use by media, as the founding editor of
The Capital Times
had once filed charges against the chief of police. Eisen said he’d think it over.

In mid-February I was contacted by a local physician who reported that her teenage daughter’s best friend, on seeing my article, exclaimed that this was “the same detective,” Tom Woodmansee, with whom she had a bad experience. The girl wanted to tell her story and her parents gave me permission to talk to her, provided that I use a pseudonym.

“Cathy” and a friend came to the
Isthmus
office on a Sunday and we spoke in the glass conference room. She was eager to talk: “This guy is obviously not working for people but against people and that’s scary.”

The previous September, during a sleepover at another friend’s house, Cathy woke to find her friend’s brother, also a juvenile, in bed with her, touching her breast and moving his hand down to the buttons of her pants. Cathy reported this to her mother, who contacted a counselor at East High School, which both Cathy and the perpetrator attended. The counselor, Kim Gary, called the police. The case was initially investigated by officer James Witalison, who the year before got a sixty-day suspension and $326 fine for urinating into an unsuspecting homeless man’s whiskey bottle and then watching him drink from it before arresting him for open intoxicants. Witalison spoke to the boy, who admitted getting into bed with Cathy but denied touching her. The case was then assigned to Woodmansee, who met with Cathy in her 100

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home on September 25. The interview lasted three hours. Cathy felt that Woodmansee doubted her account. “He came across a lot different than the other officer [Witalison],” she told me. “He came off as a jerk.”

Later I spoke to Cathy’s father, who also thought Woodmansee was cocky, especially regarding his plans to interview the boy: “He said he had a way of making people talk.”

On October 3, the day after securing Patty’s “confession,” Woodmansee interviewed the boy at his home. He now admitted touching Cathy’s breast and lying about it to Witalison. The boy’s mother told me that Woodmansee had promised the boy his earlier denials would not be held against him. The Dane County District Attorney’s Office initially decided against prosecuting. Cathy and her mother protested this decision, and the office reversed itself. The boy was charged with fourth-degree sexual assault and obstructing an officer for lying to Witalison. (He was eventually convicted on the assault charge and sentenced to six months’ probation.)

In mid-November, four days after this charging-decision reversal, Woodmansee showed up at East High, where he saw Cathy in the school office. He asked to speak with her in private, escorted her to an empty room, and closed the door. There, according to Cathy, he demanded to know why she had changed her mind about wanting the boy charged. (Earlier, she had just wanted him to admit what he had done and for no one at school to find out about it.) Woodmansee, she related, dug into her: “What do you want me to do, put him in prison and throw away the key?” Cathy said she wanted the boy punished because he was continuing to harass other girls at school. To which Woodmansee allegedly replied, “I can’t put him in jail for being an asshole. He has to break the law. If he runs a stop light, then I can get him.” At one point, Cathy remembered, Woodmansee pulled back his coat so she could see his badge and gun. He asked her what she wanted done. Cathy’s response:

“I want to leave. Right now.” She bolted from the room.

Woodmansee left and counselor Gary was summoned to the scene.

“I remember it well,” Gary told me. “She was very upset and crying.”

Cathy called her mother from school. “Oh, Mom, he was so mean to me,” she said, according to her mother’s contemporaneous notes.

Cathy’s mother tried contacting Woodmansee’s supervisor, Riley, to complain, but never got through. When she told me this, I mentioned
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that the police department had a complaint unit and even forms. Cathy subsequently filed a five-page handwritten complaint.

Woodmansee again refused to talk to me. Assistant Principal Lee Thomas said Woodmansee was at the school on another matter and just happened to run into Cathy. But then Thomas learned that the meeting took place behind closed doors, a clear violation of school district rules that required police to get permission before interviewing students on school grounds. “You can’t just come in here and talk to somebody,”

Thomas said. “Not if you’re a detective. Not if you’re a parent, or a friend. Not if you’re the mayor.” The longtime principal, Milt McPike, a former professional football player, forcefully agreed: “A detective does not come into this building unless he comes to me.”

Madison school officials ended up winking at this flagrant violation, on grounds that Woodmansee was purportedly in the building for another purpose. John Olsen, then the district’s safety coordinator, put it like this: “The police concluded it was inadvertent. We’re certainly sorry she felt traumatized by this event. But we don’t think he intentionally broke the rules.”

The police department dismissed Cathy’s complaint with similar dispatch. Woodmansee was exonerated of any and all wrongdoing. I wasn’t. Cathy, in speaking to Malloy, the complaint investigator, mentioned something I had said—that her coming forward might be helpful to Patty, about whom she had expressed concern. Malloy relayed this to others in the department. One officer later breathlessly notified the mayor’s office that I “SOLICITED another citizen, a juvenile, to file a complaint against Woodmansee.” The cops were digging in their heels.

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The People’s Lawyer

Hal Harlowe understood as well as anyone that while the criminal justice system could be, in a word, “ugly,” it could also be ennobling. He had seen the system at its best and worst, from both sides. Early in his career, he had prosecuted criminal cases as an assistant district attorney in Wisconsin’s Rock County and for the state Justice Department. He also had worked as a criminal defense attorney in Milwaukee and Madison. Over the years, Harlowe had seen dangerous criminals avoid punishment and good people who made mistakes involving drugs or anger get railroaded by prosecutors who seemed to have anger-management issues of their own. “What would really invigorate the system,” he often said, “would be having DAs and public defenders switch jobs every few years.”

In 1973, when Harlowe was a state prosecutor, he handled a horrific case involving a young Chippewa man who allegedly beat two elderly women to death on an Indian reservation. The man had a long history of violence and told a friend he committed the crime. But the evidence against him was slim, due in part to shoddy police work. (Harlowe himself found the murder weapon, a tire iron tossed into a hamper that local authorities managed to overlook.) A self-described “hotshot,” Harlowe thought he put on a good case and was confident in a conviction; instead, the all-white jury returned a not guilty verdict. The Native Americans in the room began wailing. “It was like the unrestrained moaning you hear at a funeral,” he later recalled. “It came straight from their souls. It went back in time and bespoke ages of suffering.” That sound—of justice denied—was forever etched in his mind.

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Nine years later, Harlowe, then with a public interest law center that advocated on behalf of juveniles and the disabled, ran for Dane County district attorney and won. During the campaign, he characterized the position as “the people’s lawyer.” After a few months in office, he was less sanguine, calling the job “the ultimate test of someone’s optimism.