Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (8 page)

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but did not know which kind, other than that they came in a pink wrapper (contrary to what Misty had said). Woodmansee asked whether Patty had ever been flirtatious toward him or expressed any sexual interest. Negative. Dominic also said there was currently no animosity between himself and Patty. He described her as outgoing and friendly, although it was his impression that she drank too much. The same, he added, could be said about himself.

When was the last time Dominic was intoxicated? He said it was just after Labor Day, and that he had ended up at Misty’s place. Dominic paused for several moments, then stated that he may have been mistaken about the last time he had been at Misty’s prior to the rape.

He now believed it was that Tuesday night, after his booze-and-pill bender with his roommates.

The detectives took a break and got Dominic a soda. When they resumed questioning at 9:50 p.m., they took a tougher tack. Would Dominic be willing to take a lie detector test with regard to these events?

He said he would. Did he have any involvement in Patty’s sexual assault? None. Was there any reason his fingerprints or pubic hair would be found in Patty’s bedroom? Not unless someone moved them there from someplace else, he insisted. “I’ve never been in her room.”

Seeing that Dominic was upset, Woodmansee escalated. He announced that Patty believed he was the person who sexually assaulted her. “You’re kidding!” he responded. Woodmansee explained that Dominic was facing serious potential charges; he continued to deny involvement. The detective said he had reason to believe Dominic knew more about the incident than he was letting on. Dominic reacted with alarm.

“If you want samples or whatever you want, you can have them. Right here, right now, tonight,” he sputtered. “I was not in that goddamn room!”

Dominic then came up with a theory for why Patty would accuse him: “Sir, I swear, she’s overreacting because Misty and I started dating.” This came a moment after saying that, as far as he knew, Patty bore him no ill will. He also speculated that Patty was biased against him because of Brenda and because he was involved with drugs.

The detectives may have figured, with some justification, that anyone dumb enough to make an admission like this to the police was probably not smart enough to lie about a sexual assault. Dominic continued
Misty and Dominic

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to protest his innocence, making what Woodmansee would describe as

“severe body movements” in his chair. “There’s no way I would ever do that,” he insisted. “If I’m going to have sex, I want it to be intimate.” He reiterated his willingness to submit to tests.

But Woodmansee and Draeger didn’t ask him for samples. They told Dominic he was still a suspect and escorted him from the building, a little more than two hours after the interview began. Woodmansee never made any attempt to check out Dominic’s alibi or investigate other individuals whose names were provided as possible suspects.

By this time, Woodmansee’s focus had shifted. He was no longer investigating an alleged sexual assault. He was investigating the alleged victim.

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Another Suspect

It didn’t take long for Patty to find out what Woodmansee had done.

Misty heard from Dominic, who was livid, and confronted her mother.

Patty promptly backed down, saying she didn’t think it was Dominic and hadn’t meant to accuse him.

A number of things, thought Patty, made Dominic the most likely suspect. These she had discussed with Brenda, who wrote out a list.

Dominic knew the door would be unlocked and how to find his way around the apartment. He sometimes came in late, after filling up on booze and drugs. The cologne seemed to match. He had the same skin color. He liked to have Brenda wrap her legs around him during sex, just as the rapist had done, and expressed interest in anal sex.

Still, Patty was never sure it was Dominic and was distressed that Woodmansee had confronted him. She had expected police to examine the evidence and make an arrest based on what it revealed. Telling Dominic that she had named him as her assailant and then letting him go was not what she had in mind. As soon as she found out, that Thursday, September 11, she left Woodmansee a voice-mail message expressing her concern.

Woodmansee didn’t get Patty’s message right away because he was at Meriter Hospital, talking to the SANE nurse, Jill Poarch. He had her provide a synopsis of her exam, and he viewed the tape of the colposcope that documented Patty’s injuries. The anal abrasion, she noted, looked more like a fingernail scratch than something caused by penile penetration. Woodmansee asked if it could have been self-inflicted.

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Another Suspect

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Poarch said this was possible but felt it was consistent with a rapist trying to “gain penetration.”

The detective was working on a different theory—that the rape never happened. As Poarch later recalled their conversation, “He felt that there should have been more injury, that he had had some discussion with some other police officers and that they all felt that someone who had been sodomized should be kind of ripped apart, should have more injury. And I kind of laughed and I said, you know, ‘How many SANE exams have they done?’” Poarch held firm, saying Patty’s exam

“was consistent with her having been sexually assaulted. A lot of times in a sexual assault you don’t find that people are ripped apart and have a great deal of injury.”

Woodmansee asked whether Patty’s other injuries—the bruise to her inner thigh and cuts to her hand, neck, and face—could have all been self-inflicted. “That could have happened,” Poarch replied. “I can’t say that that absolutely did not happen.” But she had no reason to suspect this and felt the injuries squared with what she would expect to find based on the events Patty described. At the end of their talk, Poarch would later say, “I’m not sure we came to a mutual conclusion.” Indeed, they hadn’t.

When he returned to his office, Woodmansee received Patty’s voice-mail message and called her back. He said he found it unusual that she did not expect him to interview the man she identified as the most likely suspect. She said she was disappointed he had moved so quickly in talking to Dominic. He asked whether she still thought he was the one, and she said yes, especially after talking things over with Brenda.

She wasn’t able to identify his voice because “the guy did not use his voice. It was like it was forced, like he tried not to sound like himself.”

While Woodmansee had Patty on the phone, he asked her some more questions. When was the last time she had voluntary sex? Patty said it was with Mark about three weeks earlier, during a trip to Sheboygan. When was the last time she changed her bedsheets? About two weeks before the assault. Had anyone besides herself and the man who assaulted her been in the bed since? No. Woodmansee asked about Patty’s injuries. How did she get the cuts on her face? Probably early in the assault, when the intruder held the knife against her. What about 52

Perfect Victim

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the cut to her forefinger? “He didn’t cut me, I did it,” replied Patty, explaining that this must have happened when she reached around and touched the blade.

Some of Woodmansee’s questions—for instance, whether Patty was sure she was wearing only a shirt when police arrived—were clearly geared toward investigating her story, not the assault. And almost all of Patty’s answers fed into Woodmansee’s theory of the case. She said that after a certain point she didn’t feel her life was in danger and now thought, looking back, “I could have kicked his butt. It wasn’t that threatening a knife.” Very suspicious. The description she now gave of the knife seemed more detailed than two days before. Very suspicious.

Patty also remembered that when she and the rapist were standing at the foot of the bed, he said to her, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” and touched her shoulder. Woodmansee was stunned, asking why she had not recalled this before, during their initial three-hour session. She didn’t have a good explanation. Very suspicious.

On Monday, September 15, Woodmansee picked up the sexual assault kit from the police property room and delivered it to the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory for processing. Two days later, he stopped by Mark’s place at around 7:30 p.m., hoping to talk to him. That he wanted to interview Mark—someone who knew Patty but had no first-hand knowledge of the assault—was another sign as to which way his investigation was heading. Mark was working, but Patty was there.

Patty asked Woodmansee if they could talk, and they went out to the back porch. Mark’s dog knocked over a small grill and Woodmansee watched with interest as Patty cleaned it up. She seemed to have no trouble seeing this, even though it was dark.

Patty said she understood why Woodmansee had confronted Dominic but was upset because of the position it put her in. He asked whether she still thought it was Dominic, and she said she was more and more sure. He asked if she was positive, and she said she was not.

He asked if there was anyone else she could think of, and she mentioned Misty’s friend Lonnie. Why, Woodmansee wondered, hadn’t she mentioned this person before? “Well,” replied Patty, “Misty told me that he was out of town.”

Actually, Misty’s list of names did include “Lonnie Alvord,” her former boyfriend. It was not the correct spelling, as Woodmansee might
Another Suspect

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have realized from that afternoon’s editions of
The Capital Times.
The main page of the local section carried an article about the arrest of eighteen-year-old Alonzo Elvord Jr. and twenty-one-year-old Joseph Bong in connection with an armed robbery/abduction. Early in the morning on the previous Saturday, the two used a sawed-off shotgun to rob a hotel just outside Madison; they abducted two employees, who managed to escape. The newspaper reported that, besides armed robbery and false imprisonment, Elvord was charged with obstruction and Bong with fourth-degree sexual assault. The two men were cousins, and Misty had known them both.

But tracking down possible rapists was apparently no longer on Woodmansee’s agenda. The only suspect in his sights was the one he was talking to at Mark’s house. He asked about Patty’s alarm clock, which had a nine-minute snooze delay. How many times did it go off ?

Earlier Patty had said five or six, but now thought it may have been as few as three. She said the alarm was set for 4 a.m., but the clock was set fast. Woodmansee asked why she had not said this earlier; she thought that she had. He would include this on his list of reasons for believing that the rape did not occur: “Changes clock time when I ask detailed questions about alarm and time frame.”

Woodmansee asked what Patty thought should happen to Dominic, if he was the one. “He should be put in prison for a long time,” she answered. And, Woodmansee continued, “If [Dominic] is telling me he had nothing to do with this, is he lying to my face?” As usual when challenged, Patty said what she thought would give the least offense, in this case a wary “yeah.” Woodmansee’s tone made her again feel like she was wasting his time. She told him, “It wasn’t the rape so much as it was waking up to a knife at my throat that upsets me.” This, too, would make his list.

After this interview with Patty, Woodmansee drove to her old apartment. He spoke to the next-door neighbor, who was home the night of the alleged assault but did not see or hear anything until the lights of the police squad cars woke him up. Misty was at the apartment, and Woodmansee stopped in. She expressed confidence that Dominic was not to blame, saying her mother had admitted as much: “She said she would know if it was him.” Woodmansee told Misty this wasn’t true, that her mother had in fact named Dominic.

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The detective asked about Mark. Misty said he and Patty argued a lot. She wasn’t sure if they were still romantically involved: “I don’t know what the situation is with those two. Mom tells me they are just friends, but then there is this jealousy thing.” Overall, she found their relationship “confusing.”

Woodmansee asked Misty if he could look around in Patty’s bedroom. The door was locked, but after the rape Patty had hidden a key, expressly in case police needed to get back in. Somehow or other, Misty knew where to find it. Woodmansee turned the lights off and TV on, and, according to his report, “noticed that the TV illuminated the room well.” It was an odd observation, since Patty had said the set was on for only the first minute of the assault, when her face was pressed into a pillow. The detective then thrust his six-foot-two, 195-pound frame into the closet and found it was difficult to do so, because it was so full. He checked the floor of the bedroom and closet for dried blood and did not find any. But he did locate “two small amounts of dried blood” on the right side of the kitchen phone, which he believed to be the one Patty used to dial 911.

This was, in Woodmansee’s mind, a major piece of evidence. If Patty was bleeding when she was on the bed and again when she called 911, why was there no blood in the places where she was in-between?

In fact, Patty had not used the kitchen phone, which she thought the rapist had disabled, but the one behind the couch. And if these spots were in fact dried blood from Patty’s cut, as he assumed, they had somehow not been noticed by the crime scene investigator, who had examined the phone and dusted it for prints thirteen days earlier.

The following evening, as arranged, Mark arrived at the Madison Police Department’s detective bureau. During this interview, Woodmansee asked almost nothing about the alleged assault or possible suspects. His sole purpose, it seemed, was to obtain his case’s crucial missing element: motive. Why would Patty make up something like this?

Woodmansee quizzed Mark about their relationship. Mark said he had known Patty as a friend and drinking companion for more than twenty years, but it was only a little more than a year ago that they started going out. In recent months, he had “been somewhat trying to get out of the relationship” because she wanted “a real marriage-type commitment” and he didn’t. “I have even quit making love to her,” he
Another Suspect