Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (10 page)

Woodmansee left the interview room several times. He brought Patty another cup of coffee. By her account, during one of these return visits, he said his supervisor was “really pissed” to learn of her confession since he had fielded “a ton of calls” from concerned residents in the Fairmont Avenue area. Woodmansee later admitted telling Patty that his supervisor had gotten calls from people in the community concerned for their safety, but denied using the word pissed. Draeger couldn’t remember.

The interrogation resumed at 7:10 p.m. From this point on, Patty didn’t say anything to contradict the detectives. Had she lied about hid-ing in the closet? Yes, she had lied about that. Had she dumped perfume on the bed? “I dumped the perfume on the bed.” Did she know she was going to lie about this whole matter when she woke up that morning? “Yeah.” Was it her alarm clock that woke her? “I think so.”

What did she do then? “Probably got up and smoked a cigarette, ’cause I usually do.”

Draeger kept at it: “Did you absolutely lie about this and plan to lie to the police about this?” “Yeah,” answered Patty. Then why was it so difficult for her to come up with a reason? “I can’t,” was all she could say.

Draeger asked Patty if she “just wanted the attention.” “Apparently,”

answered Patty. Was she seeking attention from Brenda? “No.” From Mark? “No.” From Misty? “No.” Did she feel closer to her daughter on the morning of the assault? “Yeah.” In terms of a motive, this was as close as she came.

The detectives asked Patty how she was feeling. “Pretty bad and sad,” she said. They expressed concern that she might hurt herself and she assured them she was not suicidal. She gave them the name of a psychologist, Linda Moston, whom she had seen in the past. Woodmansee left the room to call Moston but was unable to get through. He told Patty the police might hold her in jail overnight on “suicide watch.”

She took this as a threat. Her thought:
I have to work tomorrow!
She was
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given another option: go to the Dane County Mental Health Center for an evaluation. She agreed.

At about 8 p.m. Woodmansee drove Patty to the center, a nonprofit agency. On the way, he again asked why she fabricated the rape, and again she couldn’t come up with anything. On arrival he told the two female crisis counselors that Patty had just confessed to making a false report. He noted that she had attempted suicide in the past and had a history of suicide in her family. He also said she had falsely accused her daughter’s boyfriend, who was “in emotional turmoil” as the result of these accusations.

Patty still considered herself to be in police custody, and it was her sense that Woodmansee wanted the center to detain her. In his presence, she agreed that she lied about being raped to keep her boyfriend from leaving her and to jeopardize her daughter’s relationship with the man she accused. But Patty insisted she had no intention of harming herself. The counselors let her go home on condition that she call in at two prearranged times, once before she went to bed and again in the morning.

Woodmansee gave Patty a ride back to her place on Fairmont Avenue. On the way, he asked again how she was feeling. “Embarrassed,”

she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to say to my family and friends.”

He asked if she would like his help breaking the news to Mark, and she said that would be fine. He asked if there would be a problem with Misty. Patty didn’t think so. As they arrived at their destination, Woodmansee asked Patty to call him the following day after she had spoken with her therapist. He asked one more time if she was feeling like hurt-ing herself, and she said no. As Patty stepped from his police car, she said to him, “Thank you, Tom, thank you.” He put it in his report.

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Fighting Back

In some respects, the events of October 2, 1997, were more emotionally devastating to Patty than the rape itself. The man who came into her home and forced her to have sex caused terror and left lingering fear, but at least she knew that she was not to blame. The detectives who came into her life and forced her to deny this experience left deeper scars, because afterward she was filled with humiliation and remorse. If only she had stood up for herself. But, of course, Patty was never very good at that.

When Patty got back inside after Woodmansee dropped her off, Misty wanted to know what police had found, given her mother’s earlier optimism. Did they have a suspect? No, said Patty, they didn’t know anything. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Misty what happened. She was quiet, fighting back tears. When Misty left to run an errand, there was no reason to hold back. Patty began sobbing, overcome with guilt and pain. She called the Rape Crisis Center’s emergency hotline.

Later, Patty would remember little about this call, except that she cried throughout. She didn’t get the name of the person she spoke to, and the person she spoke to—a volunteer named Annie—did not get hers. But Annie did log a call at 9:21 p.m. from a woman who said she was raped the month before and had just been forced to recant under pressure from police. She said police wouldn’t let her go until she admitted that she made up the whole thing. Now she was afraid the perpetrator would come back, having gotten away with it the first time. Annie provided some comfort and suggested that Patty contact a lawyer with regard to her experience.

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Misty returned and found her mother in tears, but Patty didn’t want to discuss it. She called Mark to ask about the remarks Woodmansee had attributed to him. Mark denied ever doubting that she was raped and suggested she come over. Misty drove Patty to his place, but they saw from the car parked outside that one of his male friends was visiting. Patty was in no mood for this; Misty drove her back home.

Patty didn’t sleep at all that night. As promised, she called the mental health center twice to confirm that she was still alive. She made the second call at 4 a.m., before she left for work. She didn’t say a thing about having made a forced confession. Woodmansee had taken her to the center in what she perceived to be an attempt to have her locked up, and while his concern that she might harm herself was probably sincere, she didn’t feel as though these were people she could trust.

That morning, at work, Patty went into her tiny coffee shop office, closed the door, and called the lawyer whose name she had gotten from the Rape Crisis Center the night before. The lawyer, a woman, said there was nothing that Patty could do, unless or until charges were filed against her. Patty asked about taking a lie detector test; the lawyer strongly discouraged this. Feeling helpless, she called the Rape Crisis Center and set up an appointment to see a counselor. She also talked to her friend Cheryll, who worked in the agriculture building where Patty ran her coffee shop, telling her the whole story.

Patty’s assistant drove her home early, before noon. That afternoon, she called the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault, as Cheryll had suggested. The woman she spoke to was stunned: “This was a
Madison
detective?” Patty also called Linda Moston, the psychologist.

She had counseled three of Patty’s siblings and had seen Patty regularly for several years. Moston, then fifty, with a thin face and long blonde hair, considered herself a “spiritual counselor” who served as a “teacher”

to her clients, whom she sometimes called students. She didn’t believe in medication; her approach was to confront painful problems head on.

Patty and her family presented an almost inexhaustible supply of painful problems.

Moston was on the porch at her home in Waunakee, a Madison suburb that trumpets its distinction as “the only Waunakee in the world,” when Patty called. She said the police had accused her of making up a rape, even though the rape was real. From the start, Moston 66

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believed Patty. She knew Patty’s past history and secrets, her weaknesses and insecurities. She knew that while Patty might be compelled to deny she was a victim, she would never make false accusations to this effect. Patty’s major issue was her sense of powerlessness, owing to her childhood sexual abuse and the loss of her eyesight as a young woman.

She had low self-esteem and trouble setting boundaries with others, especially men. She felt immense grief over how people had treated her and how relationships had turned out. She didn’t need to manufacture new reasons to feel bad.

Indeed, while Moston was at first surprised that Patty hadn’t called her about the rape itself, later this made perfect sense. Patty had plenty of experience being a victim; it was something she could handle without outside help. But the shame of having failed to stand up for herself, an issue on which Patty and Moston had worked, was too much to bear.

Moston set up a time for Patty to come in.

That evening, Woodmansee called Patty at home, asking why she had not called as he had asked. According to his report, Patty “stated to me that she was now denying that she had made up the story and that she felt pressured into telling me that she had lied about it.” He told her that she would be prosecuted for obstructing an officer.

Over the next several days, Woodmansee wrapped up his work on the case. He called Mark to say Patty had admitted fabricating the rape, then recanted her confession. He called Dominic to say he was no longer a suspect; Dominic had already heard the news and said he was considering suing Patty. Woodmansee also finally got through to Moston and “arranged to meet with her at a later date.” No such meeting ever took place, for reasons that would prove illuminating.

Woodmansee, according to his undated report, contacted the district attorney’s office on October 10 to say he would be forwarding the case for prosecution. He claimed that the police department had gotten “repeated calls” from “throughout the community” regarding “our inability to apprehend the suspect” and thus would be releasing information to the media, to allay public fears. Woodmansee’s report spilled out more than twenty-five thousand words over forty-eight single-spaced pages but neglected to mention that he got Patty to come in for an interrogation under false pretenses and concocted a ruse regarding the alleged rubber residue. This was especially ironic given the report’s final sentence: “Case status: Referred to DA’s office for charges of obstructing.”

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He was asking that Patty be prosecuted for lying to police, without disclosing the lies he told to trip her up.

Meanwhile, Patty was trying to deal with the twin traumas of being raped and then disbelieved. She met with a counselor from the Rape Crisis Center and with Moston, both for about an hour. The Rape Crisis counselor, a young woman, was so upset by Patty’s story that she began to cry. She suggested that Patty find a new apartment. Patty was no longer staying at Mark’s house but never again spent the night in her bedroom on Fairmont Avenue. She slept on the couch and lived in fear, made worse by her belief, implanted by Draeger’s speech about

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” that she could no longer turn to police for help.

One night in early October, Patty got a cab ride back to her duplex; she expected the driver would wait until she got inside, as usual. But the cab drove off, and Patty found herself hurrying to the door, keys in hand, heart pounding. She got the door open and slipped inside, in such a panic that she left her keys in the lock. She pressed her back against the door and slid to the ground. She sat there, on the floor, her body a wedge against the man she imagined would presently be trying to force his way inside. A moment passed, and Patty began to cry, thinking to herself,
If this is the way I’m going to live the rest of my life . . .

Patty bought some pepper spray to carry in her purse. Just having it made her nervous; she could imagine reaching for it in an emergency and spraying herself in the face. So she practiced in her backyard. She sprayed a very small amount on her finger and sniffed; that made her start choking. Later, when she went to the bathroom and wiped herself, the pepper spray somehow seeped through the tissue paper. She stood there, yowling in pain and self-recrimination, as the bathtub filled slowly with warm water.

As suggested, Patty found a new apartment, a few miles away. She and Misty, then six-and-a-half months pregnant, began moving in mid-October, although the transition took until the end of the month to complete. Patty started staying at the new apartment right away, even before she moved her bed and other furniture. Her lease on Fairmont Avenue ran through June, and she was obligated to pay the rent in full until her landlord found a new tenant. The apartment remained empty until January, so Patty had to pay two rents through the end of the year—$600 a month for the old place on top of $850 a month for the 68

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new one—and even then her obligations to her former landlord would not be satisfied.

At her new apartment, another duplex, Patty set a rule: none of Misty’s male friends were allowed inside, ever. One day, while they were still moving in, Patty came home to find Dominic helping Misty fix a borrowed rug cleaner. She made him leave.

Throughout this time, Patty never gave any thought to the possibility that she might be charged with a crime, as Woodmansee had announced. She considered it an idle threat and, as the days passed without charges being filed, it seemed more and more remote. She saw Moston for several more sessions. According to Moston’s detailed notes and later recollection, the issue never came up. Compared with Patty’s fear for her safety and anger over what police had done, it didn’t even register as a concern. Patty thought about how the detectives had surprised her, accused her, threatened her, and broken her will. It offended her sense of right and wrong and made her worry about how other rape victims were treated. Still, she was prepared to swallow the humiliation and sublimate her rage, to let herself be the victim and not make a fuss.

All that changed on the morning of Wednesday, October 22, just shy of three weeks after her recantation. Patty was talking with her friend Cheryll at the coffee shop. “See the news last night?” Cheryll asked.