581: Anatomy of Doubt 

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And I want to tell you about two police investigations. One of them is done so inspiringly well, it's like the detectives in it are like detectives on a television show-- smart and resourceful and great judgment and just police at their very best. The other case-- the same crime, lots of the same facts-- is the opposite. It goes terribly.

And the investigation that goes wrong goes wrong in a very unusual way. It's like a game of telephone, where one misunderstanding begets another misunderstanding begets another, until something that is not true spreads to an entire community of people and somehow hardens into the truth. And it happens incredibly fast. It happens in just three days.

And just to get in front of this, the crime that we're going to be talking about this hour is a sexual assault. If that's a trigger for you, consider this a warning. And one of the first phone calls in this chain comes right after the crime. This is back in August, 2008. A woman named Shannon was standing on her balcony in a Seattle suburb when she got the phone call. It was from an 18-year-old she knew named Marie, who told her she'd been woken up in the night by a stranger who raped her.

Ira Glass

Shannon felt awful doubting Marie. She'd known Marie for years. Marie was a foster child who had stayed with Shannon and her husband very briefly-- just a couple weeks-- when she was younger. And they'd all hit it off. And she stayed close with Marie even after Marie went to live in another foster home. They'd hang out together, cook together. They gave up carbs together for a few weeks.

Shannon loved Marie. She saw herself in Marie. They were alike in lots of ways. That was actually part of her doubt. Marie was emotional. She did cry, like Shannon.

Ira Glass

But Shannon was wrong about Marie. Marie had been raped. It was proven later beyond a shadow of a doubt. And the way her case went wrong-- you know, we've all heard stories about police not believing women who come forward and say that they were sexually assaulted. But in this case, the doubts began not with the police but with people much closer to Marie, people who love her and have the best intentions towards her.

What goes wrong in this case is something so personal, it's like people exercising empathy and getting it wrong. And then that mistake spreads to officials and friends and acquaintances until it is impossible for them all to see the truth, even when new proof comes to light, even when it's all right there in front of them.

Our reporting today is a partnership with The Marshall Project and ProPublica. The first part of the story takes place mostly in Lynnwood, Washington, near Seattle. Marshall Project investigative reporter Ken Armstrong and one of our producers, Robyn Semien, will explain how all this unfolded, starting with Ken, who'll explain a little more about Marie.

Ken Armstrong

Marie gets along with people. She's good at it. It's important to her. She moved around a lot when she was a kid in the foster care system-- she thinks 10 or 11 different families, not including group homes. But she did well in a group, looked forward to high school, loved her classes, liked to hike and go to the beach with her friends, really got into photography.

At 18, she was proud of herself for surviving the foster care system, got a job at Costco, her own apartment.

Ken Armstrong

She kept in touch with previous foster families, like Shannon and her last foster mom, Peggy. Shannon was the fun adult in Marie's life. They were goofballs together. They'd have sleepovers at Shannon's house, laugh a lot. Peggy, who'd been Marie's foster mom from 16 to 18, was more serious and teacherly, more tough love, more worried about Marie's big personality and free spirit getting in the way of Marie's becoming a responsible young adult.

Peggy lived close, and on the morning of the assault, Peggy was the first adult Marie called. This is Peggy.

Robyn Semien

Again, this is Marie. She's 25 now. A quick warning-- what she told police is difficult to hear and definitely not for kids. Here's what happened-- Marie was home by herself, and she was awake all night talking on the phone with her ex-boyfriend, Jordan.

Robyn Semien

He raped her. He went through her stuff. He took pictures. He knew her name. Marie prayed he wouldn't kill her.

Robyn Semien

He said if she went to the police, he'd put the pictures he had of her online.

Ken Armstrong

When the police arrived at Marie's apartment, they did what you'd expect-- they processed the crime scene. A crime scene technician snapped photos of the place. It didn't look like much, an 18-year-old's tidy, bare-bones apartment-- a sofa, a bike, a desktop computer on the floor in the corner. The bed was unmade, green comforter on the floor, a messy sheet.

Marie was blindfolded, and her attacker wore a mask, so there wasn't a real description. He wore gloves to avoid fingerprints. He wore a condom. But there was physical evidence. The police got fingerprints off the sliding glass door. Just beyond the glass door, on the back porch, it looked like someone had brushed off a dusty railing while climbing over it.

Police collected the bedding, hoping for DNA-- maybe fibers or hairs. Marie was examined by a doctor. There was a rape kit and a report noting bruising on both of Marie's wrists, plus other bruising and abrasions consistent with sexual activity. When police searched the apartment, they found the things Marie had said the man had used-- the knife, the makeshift blindfold and gag, the shoelaces used to tie her up with.

That's when Marie realized that all of those things were hers to begin with. The knife was from her kitchen. The shoelaces came from her sneakers out in the living room.

Ira Glass

Peggy remembers hearing about the shoelaces and adding them to her list of things that just didn't make sense.

Robyn Semien

Then, that same day, Marie called several of her friends, not just her closest ones, to tell them about the rape. For Peggy, this behavior fit into a bigger picture she had of Marie-- attention-seeking, too flaunty, too flirty, loud, not really aware of how she was coming off in public. Like at the grocery store, riding around in carts with her friends, getting really silly, Peggy said.

Peggy was often telling Marie she needed to tone it down. So to Peggy, Marie calling everyone she knew and saying, "hey, I got raped," didn't seem right to her. She wondered, was this rape story one more way to get attention? Marie, meanwhile, says, sure. She was calling everyone she knew for what she thought was a good reason.

Robyn Semien

So Marie was calling around. And later that day-- or maybe it was the next morning-- Peggy made a phone call of her own, to Shannon, the other main adult in Marie's life. Here's Peggy.

Robyn Semien

Shannon remembers that phone call with Peggy, too.

Ken Armstrong

The day after the rape, Shannon helped Marie moved out of her apartment. Marie's case manager, who was helping her transition from foster care, was also there. And Shannon says that whole day, she kept noticing these things, little things, and each one deepened her suspicion.

Marie wouldn't look her in the eye. She wouldn't hug her. She didn't want to talk about the rape. Instead, she was giggling, rolling around on the grass, being flirty, as Shannon saw it, with the case manager.

Ken Armstrong

Shannon confronted Marie about what she saw as her odd behavior.

Ken Armstrong

Again, this is Peggy. Peggy had her own theory for why Marie might be lying about this.

Robyn Semien

One day after the rape, Peggy called the lead detective on the case, Detective Jeffrey Mason.

Ken Armstrong

Sergeant Mason didn't have a lot of experience investigating sexual assault. Marie's was only the second or third case that he'd worked on.

Ken Armstrong

Sergeant Mason says there were a few other elements to Marie's story that had caused him to question her. But it was really the call from Peggy that changed everything. He talks to his partner, and three days after the attack, Detective Mason calls Marie.

Robyn Semien

Mason and his partner, Detective Jerry Rittgarn, took Marie back to a conference room to talk. And it was a very different conversation from the first time police talked to Marie. Now it was an interrogation. She says the first thing they did was tell her they'd spoken to Peggy, and they'd spoken to her ex-boyfriend, Jordan, and neither of them believed her about being raped.

Peggy was one thing, but Jordan was a friend. He and Marie spoke all the time. They talked about maybe getting back together. And he'd been supportive and sympathetic about the rape. Marie suddenly had to try and figure out what these detectives meant.

Robyn Semien

We talked to Jordan, and he says he never doubted Marie, and he never told the police he did. In any case, both detectives wrote in their reports that Marie seemed unsure of her story. Detective Rittgarn wrote that he found Marie to be making, quote, "deceptive statements to include that she thought certain things had happened rather than she was positive that this happened." Rittgarn noted that she didn't, quote, "take a stand and demand that she had been raped." Detectives made it clear to Marie they needed to be convinced.

Years later, there was an outside review of the case by a police investigator, a sex crime specialist named Sergeant Gregg Rinta. His report said, quote, "The manner in which she was treated by Sergeant Mason and Detective Rittgarn can only be labeled as bullying and coercive." Detective Rittgarn declined to talk to us.

Sergeant Rinta's review went on, quote, "If this hadn't been documented in their reports, I would have been skeptical that this actually happened." The victim's credibility, quote, "became the focus of the investigation, and all of the strong evidence that pointed to a serious felony crime was completely ignored." Here's Marie.

Robyn Semien

So she did. She first wrote, quote, "I dreamed someone broke in and raped me." The detectives then insisted that she rewrite it, and not write that she had dreamed it but that she had lied.

There are lots of reasons a victim of sex abuse might consciously choose to say something different from what happened-- shame, fear of retribution. But Marie says that isn't what was happening with her. She started having moments where she actually couldn't tell if she'd been raped.

Robyn Semien

I ran how Marie describes this-- not being sure herself that the assault happened-- by an expert on sex assault trauma and how it affects the brain. She said that this kind of cognitive separation, she called it, while not common, does happen, that it's directly related to the sheer shock an assault has on a person-- like, for example, being awoken by a stranger with a knife-- and that people who have been sexually abused before, like Marie, are at a much higher risk for this happening. Add foster care to that and the risk is greater.

Robyn Semien

So Marie did something familiar to her. She has a way to deal with terrible things happening to her that are out of her control, what she calls flipping the switch.

Robyn Semien

Both detectives noticed the switch. Rittgarn wrote, quote, "Her visual appearance and body language became remarkably different. She appeared less stressed, stopped crying, and even laughed a little." Marie wrote her final statement for the detectives at their insistence-- quote, "I made up this story," she wrote.

Ken Armstrong

This news story ran one day after Marie met with detectives and wrote those statements.

Ken Armstrong

At least three other stations aired similar stories. Reporters chased it.

Ken Armstrong

The backlash was immediate. Marie got hate-filled Myspace messages, angry phone calls. One of Marie's best friends from high school put up a website attacking Marie, warning people she was a liar. It had the police reports with the statement she'd written about making up the story. It had her name and her picture.

For Marie, it was too much. Police didn't believe her. Her foster moms didn't believe her. And it was all over the news. It felt like the world had turned against her. And remember, she was 18 years old, trying to figure this out.

She wanted a lawyer. And she had a support system that could have helped her find one. She lived in her own apartment, but it was subsidized by a nonprofit that helped teenagers like Marie transition out of foster care. Project Ladder, it was called. They taught life skills like how to use a credit card, how to shop for groceries. They were there to give her a hand.

So she asked them to help her find a lawyer. Instead, her case manager called the police, who told him there was no evidence that a rape had occurred. They did not get her a lawyer.

Ken Armstrong

When they got to the station, Detective Mason, the lead detective in her case, wasn't there. He was out that day. So detective Rittgarn grabbed another cop to help out. Here's Marie.

Ken Armstrong

Rittgarn didn't believe her. The other cop didn't know the case and was just following Rittgarn's lead. Marie says one of the detectives told her that if she kept insisting she was raped, she might have to take a polygraph test.

Ken Armstrong

Using a polygraph on a rape victim is a mistake, a big enough one that the federal government can withhold money from states if their police departments do it. The tests are seen as a deterrent to women coming forward to report sexual assault. Plus, they're famously unreliable, especially on someone who's traumatized.

Rittgarn's report says it was actually Marie who brought up the polygraph, not the cops. But what's not in dispute is that once the idea of a polygraph came up, Detective Rittgarn used it to threaten Marie. It's a tactic police use when they're interrogating someone they suspect in a crime. Detective Rittgarn told Marie that if she failed the polygraph, he'd recommend she lose her housing assistance and get jail time.

Robyn Semien

That night, the Project Ladder managers called a meeting.

Robyn Semien

This is Elisabeth, another former foster kid in the Project Ladder program. She was there at the meeting, along with nine or so others, mostly girls, and the program managers, sitting in chairs in a circle. Marie remembers it as the lowest moment of this whole ordeal, the one time she thought about suicide. Again, here's Elisabeth.

Robyn Semien

Elisabeth felt for Marie. She says there were a couple others who looked like they did, too. But they were in the minority. Mainly, Marie says, people were angry.

Robyn Semien

I spoke to one of the meeting's angry girls. She didn't want to be interviewed, but she told me she thought Marie had lied, and it did make her mad. But she also said-- and Elisabeth told me this, too-- there was something so obvious and transparent about the premise of the meeting. It was a message to everyone-- we're making her tell you this so none of you think about doing it. If you do, you'll lose your housing.

Elisabeth described the woman running the meeting as fuming. We reached out to the Project Ladder managers, but they never replied. Elisabeth stuck by Marie, and one other friend. Friend-wise, that was about it. Elisabeth says Marie was avoided like--

Robyn Semien

Even Shannon, who meant the world to Marie. She told Marie that she couldn't spend the night at her house anymore because her husband worried she might make up a story about him. And if all that weren't enough, about a week later, Marie received a summons in the mail. Police were charging her with false reporting.

The false reporting charge meant that Marie's rape case would be officially closed. The physical evidence police had gathered at the scene was destroyed except for a single fingerprint card that was left behind. Everything else-- the rape kit, the bedding, the DNA swabs-- they were never even tested in a crime lab, never analyzed. Further evidence that could have been gathered never was.

Ken Armstrong

Two months after Marie was charged with false reporting, Shannon was sitting at home, watching the local news with her husband, when on came a story about a woman in Kirkland, another Seattle suburb, who reported being raped by a stranger who broke in, threatened her with a knife, used shoelaces to tie her up, and who took pictures and threatened to post them on the internet.

Ken Armstrong

I talked to the lead detective that Shannon spoke to and to another Kirkland detective on this case. Both remember talking to the Lynnwood PD. But when they learned the Lynnwood police didn't believe their victim, that was it. They didn't look any further. One detective said she figured the Lynnwood police knew their case best. She trusted their judgment.

Even so, one thing they both told me they were surprised by was that the Lynnwood police had gone so far as to charge Marie with false reporting. One detective remembers hanging up the phone thinking, OK. Hope that works out for you guys.

Shannon grew up in a police family. She usually figured police knew best. Not this time.

Ken Armstrong

Shannon thought something had to be done. She thought Marie should get in touch with the Kirkland police herself. She told Marie--

Ken Armstrong

Marie didn't want to talk to anybody else about the rape, especially not police again. The very thought terrified her. What she wanted, more than anything, was to put this behind her. In March of 2009, seven months after she was raped, Marie went to court to accept a plea deal on her false reporting charge. Under the deal, to get the charge dropped, she would need to meet certain conditions for a year. She'd go on supervised probation, pay $500 in court costs, and she'd get mental health counseling, not for being raped but for lying about it.

Ira Glass

Coming up-- today's program is about two police investigations of the same crime. The second investigation, where the police do a stunningly great job, in a minute, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "Anatomy of Doubt." We have the story of two criminal investigations. One goes great, one goes about as badly as it possibly could. We now turn to the successful investigation. It happens in a suburb of Denver called Golden, Colorado. The lead detectives in this second case were very experienced, versus the lead detective in the first case, who only had done one or two other rape cases.

This was stated earlier, but I'll just repeat it here-- the content of today's program probably isn't right for little kids. Here are Ken Armstrong and Robyn Semien.

Robyn Semien

Two years later-- January, 2011-- Detective Stacy Galbraith got a case. A grad student, mid-20s, had been sexually assaulted in her home, raped at gunpoint. To cover his tracks, her attacker took her sheets with him and made her shower to wash off any DNA. And when she went to interview the victim, Detective Galbraith says, the victim remembered an unusual number of details about the guy, way more than any other rape victim she'd talked to before. The victim had basically chatted him up, and he told her things, like he spoke four different languages.

Robyn Semien

The victim had a good guess of his height and weight and knew that he had a distinct mark on his leg-- a birthmark, she told Detective Galbraith, the size and shape of an egg. He'd had a camera with him, and she remembered the color and brand of the camera.

Robyn Semien

Detective Galbraith noted that the victim wasn't crying. She didn't seem upset.

Robyn Semien

Detective Galbraith at this point had worked dozens of rape cases, maybe 50. She admitted she didn't totally get her victim but that it didn't get in the way of her investigating the crime. Detective Galbraith talked to her husband about the case that night. And her husband, a police officer in another town, remembered a case just like it in his department in Westminster.

So Detective Galbraith contacted Westminster PD the next morning to look at their case file-- details almost identical. The lead detective on that case, Edna Hendershot, says there was one striking connection.

Robyn Semien

Detective Hendershot also said there was a third rape in another town nearby, which made them think there could be a serial offender. The three departments did something that doesn't always happen with different police departments-- they started meeting, working together.

Each department had come up with some kind of trace DNA associated with their victims, not the definitive kind that can positively ID a suspect, but not nothing, either. The samples were tested for similarities, and the results showed that they were connected paternally, meaning the three DNA samples had to be the same guy or men in the same family.

About five weeks into Detective Stacy Galbraith's investigation, there's a big meeting. Federal, state, and local investigators are there, and a fourth local department, too. And in that meeting, someone new to the group, a female crime analyst, stands up. She'd done a search for suspicious vehicles in the vicinity of an attempted rape. Detective Hendershot says at the very end of the meeting--

Robyn Semien

Detective Stacy Galbraith had only seen the truck on a fuzzy surveillance video. But this analyst had the make, model, and license plate. It was registered to a guy named Marc O'Leary. Detective Hendershot, always reluctant to get too ahead of herself, remembers thinking--

Robyn Semien

What they needed now was a DNA sample from Marc O'Leary to see if it tied him to the crimes. So FBI agents stake out Marc's house. The plan was to wait for him to leave, then they'd split up, have a few agents follow him while others put up surveillance cameras outside his house while he was gone. When Marc leaves his house, agents trail him. But what they didn't know is that Marc O'Leary had a brother who lived with him in the same house.

So the guy they were following wasn't Marc at all but his slightly younger, similar-looking brother. So when other agents go to the apartment and knock on the door expecting it to be empty, they're shocked when Marc answers. The agents think quickly, say they're informing people in the neighborhood about a burglar. They even have a flyer with a phony suspect photo to show him. The conversation ends. Marc goes inside.

Meanwhile, Marc's brother is eating in a diner. And when he's done, agents swoop in to get DNA off his glass, which brings them closer to their answer but still not all the way there because while DNA from the brother does link the brothers' family line to the crimes, it does not tell them which brother committed them. Here's Detective Galbraith.

Robyn Semien

For a birthmark. They need to see that birthmark.

Two days later, Detective Galbraith and her team go to Marc's house.

Robyn Semien

She arrested him. Galbraith says it's the most satisfying case she ever worked on.

When the police searched the house, they found shoelaces and other bindings, lock-picking tools, a gun, the pink Sony camera, and, stowed away in the back of an amplifier, underwear he'd collected from his victims. Also, computers, hard drives, thumb drives, media cards, which produced hundreds of images, photos of victims.

Detective Galbraith went through them all. There are pictures of women from the towns in Colorado and--

Robyn Semien

It was Marie.

Robyn Semien

Detective Galbraith contacted the Lynnwood PD hoping to wrap up their case. She had the case file faxed to her. But what she remembers is the cover page of that fax, which read "false reporting."

Robyn Semien

After police filed their false reporting charge against Marie, Marc O'Leary went on to rape at least four other women-- the three women in Colorado plus the woman he raped in the Seattle suburb near Marie. He pleaded guilty to five rapes and over 20 other felonies. He was sentenced to over 300 years in prison.

In a post-sentencing interview with police, he admitted stalking victims over time, sometimes breaking and entering in the weeks before an attack to plan and make sure a woman was living by herself and didn't have a dog. He also said he knew police departments weren't great at talking to one another. So he planned his attacks, deliberately, in different cities.

Ken Armstrong

In March, 2011, two years after Marie took a plea deal for filing a false police report, she got a visit from the head of the Lynnwood PD's criminal investigations division, Commander Steve Rider.

Ken Armstrong

Sergeant Jeffrey Mason, the lead detective in the case, hadn't thought about Marie's case in years. He was sure she'd lied, so he just moved on. And then he got a phone call telling him that a serial rapist had been arrested in Colorado, that Marie had been raped by this man, that Marie had been telling the truth.

Ken Armstrong

Marie requested a personal apology from Mason, and she got one in the same police station where two and a half years before she had been interrogated as a criminal suspect instead of treated as a rape victim. Marie says he seemed sincere and ashamed. He rubbed his head. He looked like a lost little puppy, is how she puts it.

And then there were Shannon and Peggy, the two adults who mattered the most to Marie as a teenager. They are both still in her life today. This is Shannon.

Robyn Semien

Of course, this is Peggy. Shannon and Peggy have thought a lot about what happened and their role in it. They doubted Marie because of something so normal and human. They trusted their intuition about someone they knew really well. It's hard not to do that. They had a gut feeling that was wrong but felt utterly true.

But trauma works in complicated ways. You can't tell if someone was raped by how they're acting. They can be subdued and detached, but they can also be hyper and laughing. They can go back and forth. Sometimes, they tell no one what happened. Sometimes, they tell a lot of people. Sometimes, they're not sure if the assault actually happened.

At this point, Peggy knows that. But even now, she can't shake the feeling she had that led her to call police in the first place.

Robyn Semien

What she does know is that she never expected her feelings to derail an entire police investigation. She's mad police let that happen.

Ken Armstrong

Detective Mason takes full responsibility for what happened. Commander Rider, Mason's boss, head of the criminal investigations division, calls Marie's case, quote, "a major failing," one his department thinks of often. He says the detectives should never have given Peggy's call the weight they did.

The Lynnwood Police Department's own internal review of the case said the same. The report said the call, quote, "caused the detectives to change their focus towards investigating the victim for false reporting." No one was disciplined in the case. Marie sued Lynnwood and its police officers and wound up settling for $150,000. She also sued the Project Ladder managers and the nonprofit that oversaw Project Ladder, Cocoon House.

Cocoon House issued a statement at the time saying, quote, "Our hearts go out to Marie and her family. We strongly believe that Cocoon House and its employees acted appropriately on behalf of the client," the client meaning Marie. Cocoon House settled the lawsuit.

Marie says her conclusion and her advice to any woman who wants to report a sexual assault-- bring proof.

Ira Glass

This story was put together by Ken Armstrong and Robyn Semien. Robyn is a producer on our program. Ken is an investigative reporter for The Marshall Project. A print version of the story, a collaboration between The Marshall Project and ProPublica, was published in December. You can read that online at themarshallproject.org or propublica.org. That version of the story was reported and written by Ken and ProPublica's T. Christian Miller, who also contributed to the radio version of the story.

[MUSIC - AMY BLACK, "SHADOW OF DOUBT"]

Well, our program was produced today by Brian Reed, Robyn Semien with Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Brian Reed. Our editor's Joel Lovell. Julie Snyder's our editorial consultant. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Production help from Lyra Smith. Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our business operations manager. Elna Baker scouts stories for our program. Kimberly Henderson is our office coordinator. Research help from Christopher Swetala. Music help Damien Gray, from Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, I asked him, why is he so beloved? Is it because he's so great at his job? Or is he just so good-looking.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - ANNE WEISS, "SHADOW OF DOUBT"]