Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (7 page)

They said it was not.

Afterward the pillow slipped off Patty’s face and she saw the man use his right hand to hold the condom at its base as he withdrew.

Woodmansee asked if she managed to get a better look at the suspect. “I remember seeing his shape,” Patty replied. “He was small for a man.”

She said he was only about 150 pounds and not much taller than she was. Patty laughed again.

Suddenly Patty remembered something she neglected to mention earlier, despite Woodmansee’s efforts to obtain a thorough account. Her 42

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alarm clock, set for 4 a.m., had gone off several times during the assault, and each time her assailant hit the snooze button. Woodmansee wanted to know when was the first time it went off. “I can’t remember if we were having anal sex then or, I mean, if he was having anal sex on me.”

This odd nomenclature—“having anal sex”—would also make his list.

Patty, prodded by Woodmansee, provided the remaining details.

How her assailant asked about rope and she suggested he use the bedsheets to tie her up or have her go in the closet. How when the two of them were standing near each other at the foot of the bed, she saw, in the light from the neighbor’s yard, his white sweatpants and the color of his skin. How the closet was so full that when she got inside the doors were bulging outward. How he stuck the knife into the crack and warned her not to look. How he cut the cord of the phone in her room and asked about the other phones. Patty laughed and said an interesting thing—that maybe it wasn’t Dominic because he knew where all the phones were.

The time was now 6:15 p.m., more than three hours after the interview began. Woodmansee decided this would be a good time for a break, but said he would need more information and tentatively set up another interview for the following evening. He also advised Patty that he would be contacting her daughter. She said this would be okay. He gave her his card.

Patty took a cab back to Mark’s house. That evening, Misty and Dominic stopped by. Patty noticed that the cologne he was wearing smelled like that of the man who assaulted her. She called Woodmansee the next afternoon to tell him about it. Patty also asked if the two of them might be able to meet that evening a bit earlier than planned. She remembered that she and Mark had tickets, purchased well in advance, for a concert that night at a local music club by a blues performer, Clar-ence “Gatemouth” Brown. Patty stressed that she didn’t have to see the show. Woodmansee, she would later recall, said it was fine to reschedule and urged her to have a good time.

Later, this would also make his “she’s lying” list: “Canceled next day appointment to go to a tavern. Did not seem to matter to her that I get all the information promptly.”

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Nobody ever accused Patty of being a perfect parent. Certainly her own past—getting pregnant at age thirteen, dropping out of high school—

hardly put her on firm footing to impart life lessons to her daughter.

And her instinct to back down when challenged, acquired over a life-time of hurt, made her a poor match for Misty, headstrong and insou-ciant. Patty’s sister Brenda would later say Misty went through “the same old rebellious crap that every other teenager goes through.” But it was worse. Misty was reckless and immature, Patty irresolute and self-effacing. Her ability to influence Misty’s often bad choices was some-where between nominal and nonexistent.

Yet Patty loved her daughter and did her best to provide, despite being a single parent with a serious disability. The two had always lived together, except for one summer when Misty stayed with her father in a small town outside Madison and another summer she spent with her half sister, Patty’s older daughter, out of state. When Misty was younger, she and her mother lived for a year and a half in Waukesha, a suburb of Milwaukee, and for four years in Sheboygan, an area best known for bratwurst and plumbing fixtures. They moved back to Madison around the time that Misty started high school; she later transferred to an alternative public school, named after Malcolm X, for students who feel as though they don’t fit in. Misty ended up getting a high school equivalency diploma. Her ambition—highly ironic given that many of her closest associates, including the imprisoned father of her unborn child, were drug dealers and thugs—was to become a law enforcement officer. She was short and thin, with stringy blond hair and 43

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cool blue eyes. Like her mom she smoked cigarettes, and her default facial expression was a pout.

It was just after 5 p.m. on September 10 when Detective Woodmansee arrived at the Fairmont Avenue duplex to interview Misty. He got there before she did and had to wait, since Misty was coming from her job at the cleaning service. Misty arrived, driving Dominic’s car.

Misty said that on the night of the assault her mother had gone to bed early and was already asleep, with the TV on, when she tried asking a question around 8 p.m. Misty herself went to bed around 11 and left the door to her room partly open, although the next morning it was shut. She described herself as a heavy sleeper, saying that on this night as usual she slept with the radio tuned to a local station at a low volume.

The following morning Misty remembered hearing a male voice on the radio say, “It’s a few minutes to five,” shortly before her mom woke her to break the news about the assault. Given that the 911 call was made at 4:13 a.m., this may have been seen as a sign that Misty’s recollection was less than reliable. Instead, Woodmansee would view each discrepancy between Misty’s account and that of her mother as evidence of Patty’s duplicity.

There were not a lot of discrepancies. Misty said her mother was wearing a shirt and pants when she woke her up. Patty had said she was naked from the waist down until after police arrived. Woodmansee would add this to his list of reasons without even asking the responding officers, Thiesenhusen and Jarona, what they observed. There was also confusion over whether the front door was closed or partially open following the rape, and which of the two women locked it.

Woodmansee was especially interested in Patty’s demeanor just after the alleged rape. “She was more rational than I was,” said Misty. “She was shaking but she was more calm than I was. She was trying to calm me down.” Misty said her mother was upset but not crying when she called 911. In fact, the only time she saw her cry was at the hospital when Mark arrived and later, when her Aunt Peggy stopped by. Woodmansee asked Misty if she was surprised by her mother’s reaction. “Yes, I am,” she replied. “I think she’s taking this better than expected.”

Misty told Woodmansee she went into her mother’s room and saw blood on the pillow and wet spots on the mattress. The alarm clock was beeping and she turned it off—which substantiated what Patty said
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about the snooze alarm. Asked who she thought may have assaulted her mother, Misty replied, “I’m almost positive that it’s someone who knows us.” She had upward of twenty male friends who knew where she lived, possibly five of whom would know the front door was left unlocked. But the only one who spent the night there, or used the unlocked door to enter unannounced, was her boyfriend Dominic.

The two had started dating that July 4, about a month after Dominic and her Aunt Brenda broke up. Misty thought she and Dominic had a good relationship, although he drank too much and got jealous.

Woodmansee asked when Dominic last stayed over, before the rape.

Misty said it was the previous night. Two of his roommates, including Slim, had dropped Dominic off at her place around 3 a.m. “He was completely out of it,” Misty recalled with a laugh. “He was dazed, like he had drank six bottles of tequila.” Dominic slept until about 10 a.m., long after Patty had left for work. He and Misty did a cleaning job late that morning and knocked off by early afternoon, because he was so hung over. Dominic planned to come over again that night but never did. The next morning, from the hospital, Misty called Dominic at his mother’s place. His sister woke him up.

“Was the door unlocked?” Dominic had asked. Misty said it was, and he got angry, saying “I’m sick of this shit.” This, she explained, was his way of expressing concern for her well-being. “He’s always told me to lock it since we’ve been dating. He knows the door is unlocked and it bothers him.”

Misty called Dominic on his cell phone later that day to give him an update, and he stopped by Mark’s house that evening. He did not speak to Patty except to say, “How you doing?” Misty was upset that people at Mark’s place were “drinking and laughing and having fun,” given that her mother had just been raped. “I was pissed off,” she said.

Woodmansee proceeded to ask intimate questions about Misty’s relationship with Dominic. When was the last time they had sex? It was the night before this interview, at his house. Did he have herpes? Yes, and currently had open sores. What type of contraceptives did they use?

“Class Act” condoms, which come in a blue wrapper. Did they ever have anal sex? No. Woodmansee asked Misty to describe Dominic’s penis when erect. It was normal size, perhaps a bit smaller, and not unusually thick or thin.

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Misty would later say she was offended by these questions. It was a reaction Patty anticipated, having herself endured a marathon encounter with Woodmansee’s inquiring mind. In fact she had told him, when they spoke that afternoon, that Misty didn’t like to be asked a lot of questions. But Woodmansee didn’t perceive any umbrage on Misty’s part, and later put Patty’s warning on his list of reasons, saying, “She did not want me to ask detailed questions.”

During Misty’s interview, Dominic called twice. Woodmansee asked to speak to him and set up a meeting at police headquarters. He left Misty and headed downtown for a face-to-face with Dominic. He arranged to have a more experienced detective, Linda Draeger, sit in on this interview.

Draeger, then forty-four, was a twenty-year department veteran with sharp instincts and a no-nonsense approach. She had a reputation for being abrasive; other members of the department, she once boasted, considered her a “bitch.” But she was also seen as one of the department’s best detectives. During the past decade she had worked on a dozen murder cases, a third of Madison’s total. Her triumphs included helping nail a young Madison woman named Penny Brummer for the 1994 murder of her gay lover’s best friend. There was no physical evidence connecting Brummer to the crime; her conviction was based on circumstantial evidence, including an alleged nod of her head when detectives accused her of involvement. Draeger also played a key role in sending away seventeen-year-old Darnell Hines for a drug-related killing in 1995. Again, there was no physical evidence tying Hines to the crime, but Draeger persuaded a woman who earlier said she hadn’t seen a thing to admit, and later testify, that she watched Hines shoot the man at close range. Draeger was so pleased when the verdict came back as guilty that she wept and hugged the prosecutor in court. “There was never a doubt in my mind” that Hines was the killer, she said at the time. Others—including the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which investigates possible wrongful convictions—would later flag both cases as ones where the local police and Dane County District Attorney’s Office may have put innocent people behind bars.

Dominic arrived at the police department’s detective bureau around 8:20 p.m. Woodmansee greeted him and introduced Detective Draeger.

They went into an interrogation room. Draeger didn’t ask many
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questions or write a report. Her role was to provide support and be a witness. (Ironically, when asked about this interview later, under oath, she remembered almost nothing about it.) Woodmansee, by this time, had already run a criminal history check on Dominic, finding evidence of impulsive and violent behavior.

In 1992, Dominic had been arrested in Racine and charged with vandalism and battery for drunkenly smashing his own head into the dashboard of his sister’s car before punching another sister twice in the face with a closed fist. The next year, back in Madison, the mother of one of his two young sons obtained a domestic abuse restraining order against him. She described repeated threats and abuse, including one incident where he allegedly held a gun to her head, threatened to kill her, and then choked her until she collapsed to the pavement.

Dominic, the detective would note, was mixed race and light skinned, five feet five, 135 pounds, with short black hair, an acne-scarred complexion, and hoop earrings in his left ear. He said he sometimes slept at Misty’s place, mostly on weekends, when Patty was away. He had never been in Patty’s room, which he said was always locked. The last time he stayed overnight before the rape was Monday, September 1, Labor Day. The next night, he was out drinking with friends and took some Percocet—which, he told the detectives, “mellow you out”—

before returning to his apartment to sleep around 3 or 4 a.m.

This contradicted Misty’s account, which was that Dominic ended up in her bedroom that night. But Woodmansee either did not notice or decided not to challenge him on it. Dominic went on to explain that he was feeling ill that Wednesday and had left work early, as Misty had said. He went to his mother’s place, where his sister was staying with her new baby. He planned to see Misty again that evening but fell asleep on his mother’s sofa. The next morning Misty called and told him what had happened. He later stopped by Mark’s place but left after Brenda called him names. Asked if he could think of anyone who might be responsible, Dominic named his roommate Slim, who besides fitting the physical description of the alleged rapist had commented more than once that he found Patty attractive.

Next, Woodmansee asked Dominic to describe his sexual relationship with Misty—everything from how often to which positions to what he did during a herpes outbreak. Dominic said he often used condoms 48

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