Inside the Year’s Most Unbelievable Story Of Rape
Inside the Year’s Most Unbelievable Story Of Rape
Marie was just 18 years old when she was bound, gagged and raped at knifepoint in her own home by a masked intruder in 2008. When she reported her assault to her local police department in Lynnwood, Washington, she was charged with a misdemeanor for false reporting, a crime punishable by up to one year in jail. Three years later, in Colorado, state police were investigating a string of similar but seemingly unrelated sexual assaults across several jurisdictional lines. All the women described a masked intruder wielding a weapon who bound, gagged and raped them repeatedly in their own homes—just like Marie. Were the assaults connected? And if so, what led law enforcement to disbelieve Marie, the first of the serial rapist’s victims? Had the police investigated Marie’s case more deeply, could they have prevented the rapes in Colorado?
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Ms. Blog: Why tell this story?
T. Christian Miller: I had been working on a series of stories about how police prosecute sexual assault in America [including] a story about the many different police departments [that] essentially whiffed [the] investigation of former football player Darren Sharper [who was accused of raping a number of women], and one of my sources had been involved in or was aware of the prosecution of [this] case in Colorado and she flagged it [for] me as an example of good police work. So I began talking to the police in Colorado who had done the work on the case, and that’s how it started.
Initially, it was just a story about how these cops had done so well tracking this particular attacker [Marc O’Leary] down [which led to O’Leary’s sentencing of] 327 years in prison. That number was huge and it was just so awesome to see what the police in Colorado had done. Pretty early on in the reporting, I’d made an effort to reach out to the attorney for the victim in Washington and when I did that, that’s when I found out that Ken Armstrong at The Marshall Project was working on this story [too], and we decided to work on the piece together. As soon as Ken brought Marie’s incredibly moving story about a woman who reported her assault and had not been believed to the table, it combined [with my cops and robbers angle] to make such a fascinating story.
In your opinion, how do cultural attitudes about rape affect law enforcement’s ability to investigate rape cases?
I think sexual assault has a host of issues around it that are different from other crimes. I think police are naturally skeptical. They deal in a world where there’s a lot of people who don’t tell the truth or try to commit crimes, [but] I think police investigators by nature also want to find out what’s going on. They’re not going to immediately believe anybody, but with sexual assault, in the justice system as a whole, there [is] a built-in or historical skepticism toward sexual assault victims that has not entirely disappeared. There’s a longer history going all the way back to the 1600s when judges would warn juries [to be] careful [about] believing women because [according to them] rape is a crime where it’s easy to falsely accuse somebody. That [was] a standard instruction to the jury back then and I think that carried down through the American justice system.
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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2016/05/13/inside-the-years-most-unbelievable-story-of-rape/
the full pro publica report (warning, utterly heartbreaking and angry-making)
https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story