Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (2 page)

Suddenly, he pulled her up into a sitting position. He was on his knees in front of her. He produced a condom and tore open the wrapper. “Put it on,” he commanded. She did, keeping her eyes directed downward and not toward his face. Then she lay back on the bed. He placed a pillow loosely over her face and maneuvered himself to enter her vaginally. She was wet, which surprised her and filled her with shame. And then he was inside her, grunting, his hands at her side. He told her to wrap her legs around him. The snooze alarm sounded at least once more, and he slapped it quiet. After what seemed like a long time, Patty’s rapist began groaning—like an animal, she thought. She felt him contract and then relax. He grabbed the base of the condom with one hand and pulled out. A moment later he was on the floor, on
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the side of the bed. He began pulling off the sheets. He seemed suddenly anxious. There was fear in his voice.

“Where’s the rope?” he asked, as though this were a hardware store.

Patty was dumbfounded: how could she answer a question like that?

She didn’t have any rope, but suggested he could use the bedsheets to tie her. He didn’t like this idea. She said she could go in the closet. This was okay with him. Patty started to feel a sense of relief. If he was looking to tie or lock her up, he wasn’t planning to kill her. All he had come for was sex. And to rob her, as would soon be clear.

“What time do you have to go to work?” he asked. Another strange question, suggesting familiarity with her routine. “Bobby’s picking me up at five,” Patty replied. Bobby, her brother, wasn’t picking her up at all.

She had planned to walk to the gym, about a mile away, and from there to take a cab to work. She was trying to increase his sense of urgency.

Patty got up and made her way toward the closet. For a moment, she and her assailant were both standing at the foot of the bed. Light from the neighbor’s deck streamed in through the window, and for the first time she got a look at him—not his face, but his body. He was pulling on white sweatpants, and Patty could see his skin in contrast against them.

He was a light-skinned black man, or maybe mixed race or Mexican.

Bending down, Patty retrieved her purple shirt from the bare hard-wood floor. “See,” he told her as she put it on, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?” “No, it was pretty good,” she said, trying not to make him mad.

“Want some more?” he asked, touching her shoulder.

“No, I can’t, I just can’t,” Patty replied. “I’m too fucking scared.”

“I know,” he said softly. “I know.”

Patty headed to the closet, which was jammed with clothes and boxes. She squeezed into the less-crowded right side, closing the sliding door in front of her. The door bulged outward. From inside the closet, Patty could tell that he turned on the room light and then the TV. She could hear him going to different places in the room, doing something, then rummaging through her backpack, which contained a vinyl bank deposit bag with a small amount of one dollar bills from her vending business. “Where is the rest of it?” he asked. There was no rest of it.

Patty had gone to the bank before meeting with Kilmark. But thinking quickly, she said there was more money in the car and that the keys were on her dresser. She heard him fumbling about. At one point, he walked 10

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briskly toward the closet and shoved the blade of the knife through the gap between the doors. “I told you not to look at me,” he said. “I’m not,”

she assured him.

He cut the phone cord in Patty’s room—she could hear him do it—

then asked where the other phones were. She told him about the one in the kitchen, but not the ones in Misty’s room and in the living room behind the couch. While he was standing there by the closet door, Patty tried to move a hanger that was jabbing into her head. This seemed to startle him. “You stay in there,” he warned. “I mean it.” He went into the kitchen. She could hear him doing something to the phone, just on the other side of the closet wall. And then she couldn’t hear him anymore.

Patty waited in the closet another minute or two, listening. Slowly, she extricated herself from the cramped space and inched her way to the bedroom door. She reached around to the front and pulled out her keys, still in the lock from the night before. She held the door open slightly, clutching the inside knob of the lock, ready to slam it shut and lock it.

After a few seconds, she yelled across the hallway at her daughter’s door.

“Misty!”

No answer. Patty was terrified.
Is she dead in there?
She yelled again, this time louder: “Misty!”

Still nothing. Panicked, Patty ran across the hallway and pulled open Misty’s bedroom door at the same time as Misty was grabbing onto the opposite handle. Then they were both standing there, in the hallway outside Misty’s room, Patty naked from the waist down. “Oh, my God, you’re all right!” Patty exclaimed.

“What happened?” Misty shouted, already losing her composure.

“What happened?”

“I was raped and robbed.” The words hit Misty hard.
Raped and
robbed.
Even before she heard any details, Misty knew this was partly her fault. “Oh, my God,” she blurted out. “I left the door unlocked.”

She had thought her boyfriend Dominic might stop by, as he had the previous two nights.

Patty ran to the front door and locked it. Then she and Misty ran to the living room, to the phone behind the couch. Patty picked it up and made the most consequential call of her life. It was a call she assumed would bring help and comfort. Instead, it led to torments that would make being raped in her home by a knife-wielding intruder seem almost
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insignificant in comparison. She would be drawn into bitter contention with the police, the legal system, and the city where she had lived most of her life. Her self-esteem would be battered, her dignity defiled, her livelihood imperiled, her privacy obliterated. The ordeal would be a crucible in which Patty was melted down and remade—from a woman who learned to retreat in order to survive to one whose survival depended on fighting back. Others, myself included, would be pulled into her drama. The powerful forces aligned against Patty would prevail again and again. Still she persisted, demanding justice, until an amazing thing happened, based on the science of DNA. Even then, her ordeal would drag on, with fresh torments, for years. And it all started with a phone call just three digits long: 9-1-1.

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Emergency Response

Patty’s call came into the emergency dispatch center at 4:13 a.m. on Thursday, September 4, 1997.

“911, can I help you?” answered the dispatcher, a man.

“We were just robbed and I was raped,” said Patty, frantic.

“Okay, this just happened or what?”

“Just now, he just left.” She was having trouble breathing.

“What was this guy, like, do you know him?”

“No, I didn’t know him.”

“Did he break in or what?”

A second passed without a response. “Did he break in?” the dispatcher asked again.

“I haven’t looked around yet. I think my daughter might have left the door unlocked.”

“Okay, so you didn’t know the guy. Okay, and it’s at 736 Fairmont, right?” said the dispatcher, reading the address off his monitor.

From the background came an odd sound, like a squawk, from Misty.

“Right,” confirmed Patty.

“Okay, so can you describe the perpetrator please, the guy?”

Another sound from Misty, this one clearly a sob.

“Not in detail,” answered Patty.

“Was he male white or male . . .”

“He was male, I think he was, like, either black or mulatto.”

“Okay, you think he was black or mulatto?”

“Right.”

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“And this just happened, right?”

“It just happened. He’s still in the neighborhood.”

“Okay. And do you know what direction he went? Did he leave on foot or what?”

“I stayed in my closet. He told me to stay in my closet. My daughter was here. I was afraid he was going to hurt her. I did everything he said.”

“Okay. All right. Did he have any weapons?”

“He had a knife, but I believe it was just like one of mine.” More loud sobbing from Misty.

“Okay, stay on the phone. I’m going to get them started your way, here. I need a description of the person. How tall do you think he was?”

“He was about five six, five eight.”

“Okay. Five eight. Okay. And, ah, was his hair long or short?” The dispatcher was typing information to be relayed to responding officers.

“Very short.”

“Short. Okay. How old did he look to be?”

Misty emitted another piercing wail. “He sounded . . . I’m visually impaired and it was dark. He sounded to be about eighteen to twenty.”

“Okay. Okay. And then, ah, can you tell about facial hair? Did he have long, a beard or anything?”

“I don’t think he had any.”

“Okay. How much did he weigh?”

“Ah, not much, maybe um . . .”

“Take your best guess, go ’head.”

“Maybe 150.”

“Okay, how about clothing? Can you just tell me what kind of clothing?”

“I couldn’t. I haven’t a clue.”

“Okay, do you know what direction he might have fled, or not?” The same question, again.

“No, I was in my closet.”

“Okay, so he just kind of surprised you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And then he raped you in the closet then? Is that what happened?”

“No, I was on my bed.”

“Okay, but you didn’t get a good look at his clothing or anything?”

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“No, he made me turn around.”

“He made you turn around, okay. Now your daughter didn’t get a look at him, did she?”

“No. She did not.”

“Is anybody injured at all?”

“No, no.”

“Okay, just stay on the phone now. He didn’t come in a car. You don’t know anything about any vehicle?”

“He asked where my car was. I think he was going to take it.”

“Did he take your keys, too?”

“I don’t know. He was robbing me while I was in the closet.”

“Okay, just stay on the phone, okay?”

“Okay.”

From Misty, loud wails. She was falling apart. Patty, protectively, tried to stay calm so as to not make matters worse. This, too, would later be used against her.

The dispatcher asked what kind of vehicle Patty drove. Though she herself could not drive, Patty owned a 1969 Buick Le Sabre, which Misty used to take her around. Patty told the dispatcher about the car, parked on the street. He asked her to check whether her keys had been taken and whether the car was still outside. At this moment Patty’s alarm clock began beeping. She called out to Misty to turn it off. The noise stopped.

“I ain’t going out there now,” answered Patty, with a nervous laugh.

“I’ll check and see if the keys are gone.” Misty continued bawling. The dispatcher relayed to someone on his end, “He had a knife.”

After half a minute, Patty returned. “Ah, the keys are not . . . They look like they’re gone, I don’t know.” Actually, the car keys were still in the apartment, just not on the dresser where Patty thought she had left them. The dispatcher asked again about the car, and whether she could check to see if it was gone. She told him she didn’t think it was taken.

The dispatcher asked Patty to “just kind of collect your thoughts and tell me anything about clothing you might have noticed. Anything at all, about color, you know, or anything.” His persistence on this point paid off: “It seemed like he had on some really white pants,” Patty told him. The dispatcher asked whether the man still had the knife when he left. “He took everything. He took my bedsheets”—or so she assumed, having seen him strip them from the bed. “He took . . .”

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“Okay, but did he have the knife when he left?”

“I’m sure he did, yeah.”

“Okay, well, how big of a knife was it?”

“It was just a big, like, um, like the kind you cut bread with or something.”

A female voice came on the line. “Did she check to see if the car was missing yet?”

“Let me go check,” Patty answered. “I have to go outside to do it, so I’ll be back.” At this, Misty screamed an angry stream of words, ending in “goddammit.” Said Patty, “They didn’t take the car. No, forget it. I’m not going out there. They didn’t take it. I would have heard it. It’s a loud car.” From Misty, loud crying.

“So there wasn’t a sexual assault then?” asked the woman.

“Yes, there was,” replied Patty. It was a prescient exchange.

The dispatcher asked Patty if she was injured, if she needed an am-bulance. “No, I got a little cut from it but he didn’t hurt me.”

“Okay.” The dispatcher said “a bunch of officers” had been dispatched and would soon arrive. Just as he said this, Patty heard the knock. “They’re there now,” she told him. “Okay, well, go talk to them,”

he said. “Okay? Thanks.” “Okay,” replied Patty. “Thanks.” That ended the call, six minutes after it began.

Patty went to the door to let in the police: officer Cindy Thiesenhusen and Sergeant Tony Jarona. Thiesenhusen, then in her midtwenties, had been hired just the year before. Jarona was a twenty-six-year veteran with a checkered past. In 1993 he was arrested for punching a seventeen-year-old boy whom his daughter, three years younger, had accused of sexual assault. By odd coincidence, Misty, then in her early teens, had testified at the boy’s trial that Jarona’s daughter, her school-mate, had portrayed the sex as consensual. The boy was convicted of seven sex offenses, all involving teenage girls, and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Jarona was charged with misdemeanor physical abuse of a child, later reduced to a disorderly conduct ordinance violation; he paid a small fine and served a brief suspension. He and several other Madison police officers subsequently toasted their notoriety by getting tattoos on their forearms depicting lightning bolts alongside the initials BBB, for “Bad Boys in Blue.” When this came to light—one press account said the lightning bolts were filled in whenever an officer got 16