Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (18 page)

He said he used this ruse “in conjunction with saying there were no signs of rectal trauma,” itself a misrepresentation. He told Patty the SANE exam had found “no sign of trauma consistent with a sexual assault.” After all this, Woodmansee related, Patty broke down, saying,

“What do you want to hear from me? Want do you want me to say?” He asked for the truth, to which she answered, “I’ll say what you want me to say if you’ll drop this.” Patty then confessed to fabricating the rape but could not explain why.

There was one more major admission. Woodmansee said he discussed his concerns about Patty’s mental health with his supervisor and 124

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was given two options: Patty could be taken to the Dane County Mental Health Center for an assessment or “we could arrest her for obstructing and place her on a suicide watch.” Did he discuss these options with the defendant? “Yes.”

Woodmansee had no choice but to admit certain things, such as the highly equivocal nature of Patty’s “confession,” since he had put these in his report. But he also admitted to lying about his need for samples and the test for rubber residue, which hardly made him look good. In fact, these admissions were integral to the prosecution’s strategy. Harlowe was alleging that the detectives set out to undercut Patty’s ability to think rationally, which the courts had deemed improper. Karofsky wanted to shift the focus to the use of police trickery and deceit, which the courts had upheld.

Harlowe, in his cross-examination, ridiculed the detective’s conclusion, based on his own observations and what others had told him, that Patty’s eyesight was not noticeably bad: “And, in your opinion, the very best way to determine somebody’s visual acuity is to kind of ask around the neighborhood, right?” He asked whether Woodmansee had tried getting the opinion of Patty’s ophthalmologist.

“Objection, relevance,” exclaimed Karofsky. “Sustained,” said Judge Aulik. Harlowe, believing this was essential to his case, asked whether the detective ever determined that Patty was legally blind. Karofsky again objected on grounds of relevance. Harlowe threw up his hands in frustration.

“What’s that about?” demanded Aulik. “What was that gesture about?” Harlowe pressed his point: “If it is not relevant that this woman is legally blind and then she is subjected to an interview where she is told, among other things, that she is not blind and they know it, then there’s nothing relevant. And I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made that gesture.” Aulik sustained Karofsky’s objection.

Harlowe then tried asking what effect Woodmansee expected his various statements to have on Patty. Aulik shut him down again, saying the detective’s opinion was not relevant. All that mattered, the judge said, were “the conclusions and findings as a matter of law that can be made from the conduct and facts that ensued.” Harlowe zeroed in on Woodmansee’s conduct, especially the things he told Patty to get her to confess.

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In the ensuing barrage of questioning, Woodmansee admitted telling Patty that every other detective he had talked to about her case thought she was lying. He confirmed bringing up Patty’s childhood sexual abuse, past suicide attempts, history of depression, and use of Prozac. He couldn’t remember if she asked to leave and come back the next day but denied that she asked to come back with a lawyer. And Woodmansee stated that, after recanting, Patty went “back and forth a couple times” as to whether she was really raped.

Finally, Harlowe probed Woodmansee’s representations that the state crime lab had found no evidence of sexual assault. “You didn’t tell her anything about other evidence out there that might, despite everything you were saying, confirm that she had been raped?” he asked, making an oblique reference to the newly discovered semen. Woodmansee replied, “No, I didn’t tell her about other evidence that had not yet been processed.” Harlowe had no further questions.

Karofsky, on redirect, tried to undo the damage. Had Woodmansee lied in telling Patty the evidence that went to the crime lab came back negative? No. Why did he say there was no physical trauma consistent with sexual assault when the SANE nurse had not reached this conclusion? This was, he said, “my interpretation” of the evidence. (Harlowe, on recross, got Woodmansee to admit he had not made this clear to Patty.) Why hadn’t he mentioned the ruse in his report? Because it seemed to have “no impact.” Had Patty wavered in her recantation? The detective, moments after saying she had done so, now claimed she really hadn’t: “She wasn’t—she wasn’t wavering that this happened, she was wavering that—she was wavering that maybe we could try this, maybe we could do this. It wasn’t—she would admit to lying and then she would try to think of something else like the hypnosis or the polygraph.

There was a consistency that was present during her confession.” Except when she wavered.

Woodmansee closed out his testimony by saying he knew the techniques he had employed “might be perceived by people as trickery and deceit.” He agreed this was what it amounted to but insisted, “I didn’t do it with any malice. I did it in search of the truth.”

In her closing argument, Karofsky focused on Wisconsin case law regarding police deceit: “I think it’s pretty clear, judge, that police officers are allowed to use deceptions and ruses in their investigations.”

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One case she cited was about how police conned a confession out of a murder suspect. Another involved a drug kingpin. Patty, hearing this, was astonished: Did this woman not realize how ridiculous she sounded? Did she really see no difference between lying to killers and drug lords and lying to women who say they’ve been raped, to see if they crack?

Karofsky, drawing from Woodmansee’s testimony, asserted that the defendant had “fifteen to seventeen prior police contacts.” Like him, she did not clarify that these included times Patty called police to report a theft or disturbance, or that she had no adult criminal record. She said Patty was free to leave and was never threatened with going to jail. Karofsky then contradicted herself, saying Patty was told, “We could put you upstairs and arrest you on an obstructing charge and put you on a suicide watch.” The prosecutor said the evidence was “uncontroverted”

that Patty never asked for an attorney. For all these reasons, she said, the motion to suppress should be denied.

Harlowe, in his closing, appealed to Aulik’s “experience and common sense,” saying the judge needed to take into account the totality of circumstances under which Patty recanted. Over Karofsky’s objections, he endeavored to reconstruct these circumstances.

Police summon Patty—who, according to Dr. Stevens’s letter, was beyond legally blind—to a surprise interrogation. They put her into a tiny room with a toilet and say they know she lied about being raped.

They confront her with alleged discrepancies, including the extent of her visual impairment. Said Harlowe, “They’re telling her, these two cops in a closed room at night, that we know you can see, you’re lying about seeing. And then they add to that that we’ve talked to your daughter, we’ve talked to your boyfriend, every cop that’s had anything to do with this case, they all know you’re lying.”

Patty offers to take a polygraph and is refused. She’s told the test for rubber residue proves she’s lying. She’s told the nurse who examined her found nothing. “What she’s being presented with,” said Harlowe, “is a world gone mad. It is truly a Kafkaesque situation.
I’m blind.
No you’re not.
I was raped.
No you weren’t.
There was physical evidence.
No there wasn’t.”

The detectives, said Harlowe, isolated Patty. They lied to her. They conveyed to her “that no matter what the truth was, no matter what she
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knew, she was lying and nobody in the world would believe her.” They made her feel that “there is no hope because rationality is gone.” Harlowe pulled a rhetorical arrow from his quiver and aimed it between Aulik’s eyes: “Judge, under those circumstances,
you
would confess.”

When Patty did recant, Harlowe noted, she framed it in terms of a willingness to say whatever the detectives wanted to hear: “Does that kind of give you a tip that maybe her will is overborne, that we’re not dealing with deliberateness of choice?” Harlowe, visibly angry, called what happened “one of the most rotten interrogations I’ve ever seen. It’s an embarrassment to me as a citizen.” He said Aulik’s duty was not only to apply case law and constitutional principles, but “to respond to this as a decent human being getting a sense of what this citizen was put through.”

Karofsky, in rebuttal, saw it differently. “The police officers in this case ought to be proud of what they did,” she told the court. While no one wanted a society where rape victims are “psychologically isolated and coerced,” she said, “we certainly also shouldn’t be living in a society where someone’s allowed to finger someone and say that person sexually assaulted me and drag their name through the mud, and that’s the basis of this charge.”

It was an audacious distortion. Patty had never “fingered” anyone as her assailant—her identification of Dominic to police was always equivocal. And until Woodmansee brought it up at this suppression hearing, Dominic’s name had never been mentioned publicly in connection with the case. And yet it was Dominic, a drug-dealing petty thug, to whom Karofsky’s sympathies flowed, and not at all to the Enemy.

The hearing lasted three-and-a-half hours. Aulik promised a written decision. Afterward Harlowe met with Patty and others in a small conference room. “What you were subjected to,” he told her, “pisses me off more than anything I’ve seen in twenty-eight years of practice.” He was pretty sure Aulik would rule against him, as he suspected all along. But he thought Woodmansee’s admissions regarding the ruse and nurse Poarch would be helpful at her trial. And he told Patty that nothing from this point on would be as bad as what she just endured. Harlowe was wrong on two out of three.

Karofsky left on her honeymoon. Brophy, commenting publicly on the case, defended the police methods used as “unfortunately necessary.”

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He also said Patty’s prosecution was proceeding because her initial rape report “created an enormous amount of fear in her particular community.”

On July 14 Judge Aulik issued his decision, which came down squarely on the side of the police. “Making up stories to induce suspects to confess is not improper conduct,” he wrote, ruling that Patty’s admissions were voluntary and not the result of any “coerciveness.” How else, he wondered, could Woodmansee “have gotten to the exact reason [the]

defendant was being questioned, to extract the truth, other than to outright accuse her of lying?” Harlowe, he claimed, wanted the court to conclude “that because the defendant suffered from a physical disability she should not be subject to questioning about a very serious accusation she had made against another person.” He said Patty deserved no special consideration since “the record is undisputed that the defendant had 15–17 previous police contacts.” Finally, Aulik repeatedly stated that the “rouse” [
sic
] employed by Woodmansee was “about the lack of prints on the condom.”

The judge hadn’t even been paying close attention. Yet his ruling would acquire a life of its own, as a kind of Magna Carta for those eager to affirm that the police officers in Patty’s case did everything right.

17

Honest Mistakes

Cheri Maples had had enough. After fifteen years on the job, the Madison police lieutenant felt her commitment to the enlightened treatment of crime victims had been clearly established. A lesbian, vegetar-ian, and practicing Buddhist, she had previously worked with a local battered women’s group and served as director of the Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She now headed one of the Madison Police Department’s outpost districts and oversaw its handling of sensitive crimes. In this capacity, she had looked into the case involving Patty and had become thoroughly disgusted. Maples believed police enjoyed enormous power and discretion that could be abused. She credited media exposés of police wrongdoing with helping clean up departments across the land. But my reporting on Patty’s case? That was going too far.

Maples, no doubt expressing a majority view among her colleagues, felt I was unfairly besmirching the Madison Police Department and especially Tom Woodmansee. She saw Aulik’s ruling as a complete vindication of the methods used to secure Patty’s confession and thus was irked that my article on the suppression hearing focused on Woodmansee’s admissions about the ruse and Harlowe’s expressions of disgust.

A few days after this article was published, Maples delivered a fourteen-page, single-spaced letter attacking my reporting to my editor, Marc Eisen, with copies to people in the police department and district attorney’s office. It accused me of “self-serving mudraking” and “self-righteous insistence” that I was right while “everyone else is wrong.” It 129

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compared me to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose crusade to bring down President Clinton was then in full flower. Maples said I had set out to “purposely manipulate and distort facts.” She even asserted that I had “dragged” Cathy, the East High student, into “this drama” for my own selfish purposes.

“I have stood by and watched a number of people that I have tremendous admiration and respect for be attacked,” wrote Maples. “None have been more viciously attacked than Tom Woodmansee, a person I have only known to be honest, ethical and compassionate in his deal-ings with the citizens he serves.” At worst, her colleague was guilty of

“an honest mistake.” And “if it turns out that an innocent victim was falsely accused, no one will feel more sick about it than Detective Woodmansee.”

The most significant statement in Maples’s letter, however, was that Patty was being prosecuted not because she confessed to making a false report but because she returned to her original story: “Without the recantation of the recantation she never would have been charged.” Another factor, wrote Maples, was Patty’s “going to the press.” This was a point-blank admission of retaliatory intent, one substantiated by subsequent revelations.