Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (5 page)

Woodmansee had a gentle, confident manner and a knack for winning other people’s trust. Early in his police career he worked undercover, from January 1992 to December 1993, primarily making drug arrests. He had no qualms about arresting people for marijuana, a drug he himself had used and possessed. As he later rationalized it, “I was not a police officer at the time.” In March 1996, Woodmansee got permission to conduct an alcohol-impact study. At his direction, thirty central-city officers and supervisors kept incident logs for scattered night watch shifts during a six-month period. The study found that alcohol was a known factor in more than half of all nighttime police calls, including 67 percent of sexual assaults, 80 percent of domestic disturbances, 82

percent of batteries, and all five of the most serious calls—two involving suicide and one each involving sexual assault of children, reckless endangerment, and weapons violations. Woodmansee expressed his frustration in his report.

“I am concerned that our department and community have become almost immune and apathetic to the problems stemming from alcohol abuse,” he wrote. “There is no current system in place to proactively combat the problems stemming from alcohol abuse and its detriment upon our community and our department.” His suggestion: impose an

“alcohol abuse enhancer” fee of twenty-five dollars on offenders in cases where alcohol is a direct factor, possibly using this to provide alcohol treatment to the indigent.

Nothing ever came of this idea, but in January 1997, just as the results of his study were made public, Woodmansee was promoted to detective, which had the incidental benefit of bumping his pay from $44,668 to $46,774 a year. He was assigned, as new detectives often are, to sensitive crimes: child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault. It was an area where his ability to elicit the trust of those he encountered would prove invaluable, given the special challenges for investigators that these cases pose. Often there are complicated histories between perpetrators and victims, and sometimes people’s perceptions are so skewed by all this past history that getting to the truth is like peeling away layers of an onion; you get deeper and deeper without ever reaching a solid core.

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Woodmansee’s approach was to be thorough—much more thorough than the officers who initially responded and filed the preliminary reports. He would spend hours, if that’s what it took, going over the same events, peeling away layers until he found what he was looking for: the truth.

Sadly, in some sexual assault cases, the truth is that people file false reports, for a variety of reasons: to cover up consensual relations, to obtain sympathy and attention, or to get revenge. The same thing that makes sexual assaults so hard to prove—the fact that they occur in private, involving conduct that is not inherently illegal—also makes them easy to lie about. And being called a rapist is a hard accusation to live down, even if it isn’t true. As Sir Matthew Hale, a seventeenth-century English jurist known for his zealous prosecution of witches, expressed it, rape “is an accusation easy to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused tho’ never so innocent.”

(Until the 1970s, some version of Hale’s caution was routinely delivered to juries in rape trials in the United States.) On this difficult issue of false reports, American society remains divided. On the one hand, people are aware that for decades the sexual abuse of women was minimized and dismissed. It doesn’t take a lot of familiarity with popular culture to summon up the image of a tobacco-spitting southern sheriff, circa 1960, telling a bruised and bleeding woman there isn’t any law against a man having sex with his wife. On the other hand, there are signs that society thinks that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, that rape crisis advocates and touchy-feely police have created a situation where women, in particular, can use false accusations of sexual assault to punish or manipulate. After all this clamoring for equality, critics say, women want special treatment in the form of police intervention every time they give in to some red-blooded young stallion, only to wake up with a hangover and a bad case of regret.

Just how often do people make false accusations of sexual assault?

Rape crisis advocates say the incidence of false reporting is about 2 percent, the same as for other crimes. But some law enforcement officials estimate that 10 percent of all sex-crime allegations are false, and studies have come up with numbers as high as 50 percent, which seems incredible. One factor driving these higher-end estimates is the intellectually
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dishonest proposition that any complaint that doesn’t lead to a successful prosecution is false. If a clever defense attorney wins an acquittal in court, is it correct to conclude there was no assault? If a victim drops a complaint due to pressure from the perpetrator or skepticism from the police, does that always mean she was making it up? If a woman says a man had sex with her after she passed out from having too much to drink, but prosecutors decline to press charges because he swears it was consensual, should that be counted as a false report?

Even if false reporting were occurring at epidemic levels, it seems clear that many more people are getting away with sexual assault than being wrongly accused of it. National studies consistently estimate that fewer than one in five sexual assaults are brought to the attention of police. One reason for this is the fear of victims that the police won’t be able to help or, worse, will not believe them. That’s why women who file what are deemed to be false reports of sexual assault are rarely prosecuted—

the justice system does not want to compound the anxiety of actual victims. It’s also why police departments across the country have set up special units devoted to sensitive crimes, to ensure that the cops who deal with victims have special training and skills. Ironically, however, that doesn’t mean they are more empathetic. A study done in New York City in 2001 found that Special Victims Squad detectives were more than twice as likely as regular detectives or uniformed officers to get negative reviews from sexual assault victims. In fact, about 20 percent of the victims surveyed decided against filing complaints as a direct result of their experiences with these specially trained detectives.

Tom Woodmansee had received basic training in sexual assault investigations at the police academy and advanced training at a sexual assault investigating school in Illinois. He participated in a state-run program that helped train other officers on the handling of sensitive crimes, especially domestic abuse. And he worked with representatives of battered women’s shelters and the local Rape Crisis Center to develop state training protocols.

In his eight months as a detective before he was assigned to Patty’s case, Woodmansee was involved in numerous child abuse and sexual assault cases, sometimes as the primary investigator, sometimes helping out other detectives. As an especially enlightened representative of an unusually well-trained department, he was aware of the need to treat 32

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victims of sensitive crimes with courtesy, compassion, and respect. He also knew they were sometimes lying, and that part of his job was to catch them at it.

In early 1996 the Madison Police Department experienced a rash of

“false” sexual assault reports—four separate cases over a three-month period. In the first three cases, the complainant eventually admitted having lied. In the fourth, the twenty-one-year-old alleged victim stuck to her story about being abducted by a man in a dirty red van with sliding doors. But police determined she was lying, in part because she had the wrong kind of cuts. “She should have a stab wound, instead of a slash wound,” said the department’s spokesperson, lamenting the waste of “time and energy” spent investigating her report. None of these four cases led to criminal charges.

Woodmansee, in his own brief experience, had investigated three false reports of sexual assault. The first case involved a woman who said her neighbor sexually assaulted her. After making the initial report, she recanted to Woodmansee, saying the sex was consensual but her husband compelled her to claim otherwise. In the second, an apparently mentally ill man reported to police that another man forced him to perform oral sex in a parking lot. The patrol officer brought the man to see Woodmansee, who questioned him about inconsistencies and got him to recant. And finally, there was a woman who reported being assaulted at a hotel by a friend with whom she had been drinking. When Woodmansee pointed out problems he perceived with her account, the alleged victim admitted the sex was consensual. She filed a false report, the detective later explained, “out of revenge and spite” because the man had left the hotel “to return to his girlfriend or wife.”

Remarkably, in all three of these cases, Tom Woodmansee was able to get to the truth of the matter, after other officers had been con-founded. It was his special gift to get people to open up, to spill their secrets, to alleviate their terrible weight of guilt. Indeed, less than two weeks before Patty’s alleged rape, Woodmansee had expertly secured a confession in a child abuse case. He was brought into the investigation on the second day and solved it, almost single-handedly, by the end of his shift.

The case concerned a thirteen-month-old girl, “Alicia,” whose right leg had been fractured in two places. The injuries were discovered after
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Alicia’s longtime child-care provider, twenty-seven-year-old Susan Pankow, called the girl’s mother to report that she had been fussy all day and had a temperature of 105. The first doctor who examined the girl missed the injury to her leg, but the next morning her pediatrician, Dr.

Edward McCabe, ordered the X rays that showed both lower bones, the tibia and fibula, of the right leg were broken.

Madison police were contacted and the case was assigned to Lauri Schwartz, a young detective who also worked on sensitive crimes.

Schwartz met with the girl’s mother, who seemed to implicate Pankow.

The detective asked Woodmansee and a social worker to join her when she interviewed Pankow the following afternoon.

The interview, in the basement of Pankow’s home day-care center, lasted two and a half hours. Woodmansee asked Pankow to describe the events of the day she had called Alicia’s mother, which she did for about a half hour before realizing that she was describing the wrong day. Pankow had to start all over. About two hours into the interview, Woodmansee turned up the heat. He noted that Pankow had not inquired as to the nature of the injury being investigated, and said he suspected she knew more than she was letting on.

Pankow admitted it. That morning, when Pankow was changing Alicia’s diaper, she had lifted her leg upward suddenly and the girl had cried out in pain. The detectives had Pankow demonstrate this abrupt upward motion using a rag doll that happened to be present.

Woodmansee then asked Pankow whether she thought she may have caused Alicia’s injuries. Pankow said she hadn’t meant to but maybe she had, because of how sudden the motion had been. “Oh, God, if I did this . . . ,” she exclaimed.

“I was in such a hurry,” said Pankow, explaining that because Alicia was fussy she felt she was neglecting the other children. Woodmansee asked if Pankow was frustrated and she replied, “a little bit,” explaining that she was under a lot of stress. “I was frustrated. I guess you could say I was on the verge of being angry.” Woodmansee asked if Pankow had heard a cracking noise and she said “possibly a crack.”

Soon after, Woodmansee spoke with Dr. McCabe, who told him that what happened to Alicia’s leg was not consistent with accidental injury but was indicative of child abuse. To break the girl’s leg in two places, he said, required the application of a great deal of force. In 34

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essence, the doctor said the injuries could not have resulted from the event—a sudden upward movement during a diaper change—that Pankow related.

But rather than doubt that Pankow was responsible, Woodmansee, in his report, concluded that she must have broken the little girl’s bones deliberately and then concocted this story to make it seem like an accident. Nor was he shaken from his theory by the reaction of Alicia’s parents when told that Pankow had confessed to breaking their little girl’s leg in a fit of anger and frustration. According to his report, “They did not wish to pursue a complaint against Sue because they felt that she was a good day-care worker and they did not believe she had done this intentionally.”

Woodmansee’s report and other evidence were forwarded to the Dane County District Attorney’s Office for review and probable charges. In the meantime, Pankow, who had no criminal record, was forced to surrender her state day-care license and shut down her business. Woodmansee moved on to other cases, including the one waiting for him when he came to work on Monday, September 8. It was an alleged sexual assault of a thirty-eight-year-old woman on Fairmont Avenue in Madison.

Patty had spent the day at Mark’s house, replaying the details of the assault in anticipation of having to go over them with the detective assigned to her case. The police had said he would be back that Monday, and that his shift began at 2 p.m. Patty waited, but he didn’t call. It was unbearable. At 4:30 p.m. she called him at the Madison Police Department’s detective bureau. They spoke for a few minutes.

Woodmansee, it turned out, was not prepared to meet with her that day. He had other things to do, including background work on her case, and so he arranged to interview Patty the following afternoon at her duplex. But he took this opportunity to get a few details. Officer Thiesenhusen’s four-page report, which he reviewed, noted that Patty named her daughter’s boyfriend as a possible suspect. Did she still feel it might be him? Yes, Patty said, it might be. She told Woodmansee where Dominic lived and that he worked for his jailbird mother’s cleaning service, as did Misty. But Patty said she did not want her daughter to know of her suspicions unless there was substantiating evidence. Woodmansee asked her to prepare a list of possible suspects.