Missoula (7 page)

“Did she seem mad, Zeke?” Merifield asked. “Did she slam the door?”

“I mean, she left, like, in a manner— She kind of said, ‘No, I need to go,’ ” Adams replied. “And I mean that honestly! I am not lying to you!”

“I believe you,” Merifield said sympathetically. “At any point after you kissed her and she laid back down did she say no?”

“She told me, ‘I don’t and can’t have sex with you.’ And I did not try to have sex with her. I absolutely did not.”

“Did you ever rub your penis on her back?”

“No,” Adams said.

“Did you ever, while she was sleeping, pull her pants down?”

“No.”

“Okay. During the time when you were messing around earlier, did she touch you at all? Kind of rubbing on you too?”

“Yes.”

“How long do you think you guys were back on the bed before she got up and left?”

After a six-second pause, Adams answered, “I’m not exactly sure.”

“Did she ever fall asleep while she was at your house?” Detective Merifield asked.

Adams remained silent for a full ten seconds before replying to this question. “I will say it this way,” he finally declared. “At no point did I think that while I touched her, had any contact with her whatsoever, she was asleep.” He continued to deny Barrett’s allegations for a few more minutes, and then reflected, “I really don’t think that girl is a liar….I just don’t know that exactly everything she said to you was a fact. And I’m not trying to say that she is some kind of bad person or anything like that. I just think she might be a little mistaken.”

Merifield wholeheartedly agreed. “I think it truly was a misunderstanding,” she said. “I really don’t think that there was any intent on your part to get this girl home so you could have sex with her whether she wanted to or not.”

“Certainly not,” Adams confirmed. “Absolutely none.”

“Clearly,” Merifield expounded, “there is a size difference between the two of you, so if you wanted to do that, you could have….People have had sex they didn’t want to have. It doesn’t mean it was rape.”

Sobbing, Adams said, “I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of harming that girl or violating her or making her feel uncomfortable.
If she feels that way, I feel bad that it happened. I’m a good moral person….I told you absolute facts that I am confident in. I came here because I have a true belief in essentially my innocence. That I didn’t break the law.”

“I totally understand,” Detective Merifield said.

Despite having suggested to Kerry Barrett that the point of asking Adams to come to the police station was to “scare the shit out of him,” throughout the interview Merifield went out of her way to comfort Adams. She never challenged his statements aggressively, or probed for details that might reveal whether or not he pulled down Barrett’s jeans while she was sleeping. Instead, again and again Merifield let him know that she was certain he was innocent.

“You are kind of an open book right now,” Merifield told Adams, “and you have been since I talked to you on [the phone four days earlier]….It says a lot for your character that you came in and sat and talked to me this morning….I can guarantee you I am not recommending this case for charges….I can’t show criminal intent. I really don’t believe you had any intent to hurt anybody….You seem like you are a really good person with a really good future ahead of you.”

Merifield said, “We have a lot of cases where girls come in and report stuff they are not sure about, and then it becomes rape. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair to you….You guys both went into this together….She came home willingly with you. The fact that she changed her mind and went home on her own,…that’s not your fault.

“But I have to interview you,” Merifield explained a moment later, apologetically. “I have to talk to her because she came in and reported it. If I had just flushed the case, she’s going to say the police don’t do anything….That’s not the message we want to send to people: ‘Well, we’re only going to half-ass your case because we don’t really believe this happened.’ ”

Merifield stated to Adams, “I don’t think you did anything wrong. I think that it’s torturing you that you are accused of this. And that bothers me….The case, in my opinion, is closed….This case is going to be listed as unfounded. I think this is just a misunderstanding. I don’t think it’s a crime.”

“I’m a good kid,” Zeke Adams insisted. Sobbing, he said he didn’t want his name to show up on computer screens for the rest of his life as a sex offender. “I don’t want to do that to my mom and dad….I don’t see in any way how I’m guilty.”

“You are not,” Merifield reassured him. “Men and women think completely differently,” she offered. “Men are much more concrete….In women’s minds we tend to spin things around, and turn it, and talk to our friends about it. And get advice and then sometimes create situations that maybe we read a hell of a lot more into.” Well-meaning but overwrought friends, she explained, often urge women to report incidents that are not serious enough to warrant investigation by the police.

“As far as I’m concerned this case is closed,” Merifield pronounced. “Don’t beat yourself up more than you already have about this, okay? It’s a done deal, bud. I don’t think you did anything wrong.”

WHEN DETECTIVE MERIFIELD
called Kerry Barrett and told her there was insufficient evidence to charge Zeke Adams with sexual assault, and that the case was essentially closed, Barrett was dumbfounded. She understood that it would have been difficult to convince a jury that Adams had sexually assaulted her. “I was drinking,” she admitted, “and that works against victims. We fooled around consensually before he assaulted me—I was very up-front about that—and that also worked against me. But after I made it clear that I didn’t want it to go any farther, and he told me nothing would happen, he tried to rape me while I was sleeping. Which is a crime. And now I’ll never know how strong my case actually was, because the police wouldn’t even conduct a thorough investigation. That’s the frustrating part.

“If it was consensual,” Barrett added, “I want to know how Zeke explains me running out of his room, crying hysterically at three in the morning.” Barrett had given Detective Merifield a list of witnesses, including Adams’s roommate, who could presumably corroborate aspects of her story, yet nobody from the Missoula Police Department had bothered to interview any of these witnesses.

As Katie J. M. Baker observed in her
Jezebel
article, “In Missoula…drunk
guys who may have ‘made mistakes’ nearly always get the benefit of the doubt. Drunk girls, however, do not.”

Compounding Barrett’s frustration, as she thought back on the night in question, she came to realize that she didn’t know what Zeke Adams had actually done to her while she was asleep, before she was awakened by him rubbing his penis on her back and buttocks. “I was asleep for what I assume to be twenty to thirty minutes,” she said. That fact that he’d managed to unbutton her tight jeans, tug them down to her ankles, and then pull down her underwear—all without waking her—made Barrett worry that Adams might have also taken other liberties while she was unconscious. “I was bleeding for a whole day afterward,” she recalled. “The officer at the police department asked if I was hurt and needed immediate medical attention, but I said no. At the time, I was too traumatized to consider what might have been done to me before I woke up.”

IN THE WEEKS
after she reported that she had been sexually assaulted, Barrett sank into a miasma of gloom. Some mornings she was too despondent to get out of bed. She found herself sobbing on the floor of her bathroom for hours on end. She stopped going to many of her classes, which was completely out of character for her. Barrett had been awarded two very competitive scholarships to attend the University of Montana, almost never missed a class, and had earned a 4.0 grade point average the year before Zeke Adams persuaded her to spend the night at his apartment.

As she struggled with depression in the period that followed, Barrett told me, “I was a phone call away from dropping out of school and going back to New Jersey. I started drinking a lot, way too much. And engaging in other really risky behavior….You hear that rape victims avoid sex afterwards. But it’s actually just as common for some victims to become promiscuous in self-destructive ways. That’s what happened to me.”

Some rape victims do indeed react to their traumas by turning away from sexual intimacy. Paradoxically, however, many others start engaging in dangerous, indiscriminate sex. Judith Lewis Herman is a
professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of the groundbreaking book
Trauma and Recovery
. Commonly, Herman writes,

traumatized people find themselves reenacting some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form, without realizing what they are doing….There is something uncanny about reenactments. Even when they are consciously chosen, they have a feeling of involuntariness. Freud named this recurrent intrusion of traumatic experience the “repetition compulsion.”

Sigmund Freud believed it was an unconscious attempt to gain control over the traumatic event and thereby extinguish it. As Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, one of the preeminent authorities on posttraumatic stress, explains,

Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma….Freud thought the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings.

In her case, Barrett said, recalling the aftermath of the assault, “My life was falling apart. But somehow I stuck it out. My professors were very understanding. They let me take some incompletes and withdraw from classes.”

Barrett began seeing a therapist, which proved helpful. She also found it therapeutic to speak out—and not just about her own ordeal, but about other women who had been victimized, too.

      F
or the first several days after Zeke Adams allegedly tried to rape Kerry Barrett, she seldom left her off-campus apartment. When she finally emerged and ventured back onto the grounds of the university, she had a chance encounter with Kaitlynn Kelly, a smart, feisty junior she had known since the fall of 2009. “She was crying,” Barrett said, “which was unbelievable to me, because Kaitlynn is the toughest girl I have ever met. So I knew something very serious had happened to her.” When Barrett inquired why Kelly was upset, she confided to Barrett that three days earlier she had been raped.

Kaitlynn Kelly lived in Turner Hall, a three-story, all-female dormitory on the UM campus. On September 30, 2011, a Friday night, she attended a party at a house in the Rattlesnake district, a quiet residential neighborhood northeast of downtown Missoula. Kelly arrived at about 9:30, knocked back some shots of tequila and cheap whiskey over the next five hours, and then took a taxi back to the university early Saturday morning with a gay friend named Greg Witt.
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Once they were back on campus, Kelly and Witt sat down on a bench in front of Jesse Hall, near her dorm, so Kelly could smoke a cigarette before returning to her room. When she searched her purse and realized she’d left her cigarettes at the party, Witt offered to beg a smoke for her.

Around 3:00 a.m., two freshmen walked by, Calvin Smith
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²
and
Ralph Richards,
*
³
who were stinking drunk. When Witt asked if they had a spare cigarette, Smith—a tall, beefy eighteen-year-old—replied that neither of them were smokers, then sat down next to Kelly. Richards sat next to Witt.

Greg Witt, who is convivial and forward, struck up a conversation with the two younger students, and the subject turned to sex. Kaitlynn Kelly remarked that Calvin Smith was “a cutie.” Witt suggested to Smith and Kelly that they ought to hook up, because she hadn’t slept with anyone in over a year and, in Witt’s humble opinion, getting laid would be good for both of them.

Egged on by Greg Witt, Kaitlynn Kelly invited Calvin Smith up to her room, and Smith responded enthusiastically. According to Kelly, Smith said, “Let’s go!” and they started walking across a parking lot to her dorm. In a statement the UM dean of students asked Kelly to write a couple of weeks later, she described what ensued:

Calvin had his arm around me as we got to the door. I swiped us both inside [with her student key-card]. Calvin and I went up to my room. We walked in and saw that my roommate and her boyfriend were asleep in her bed. I told Calvin that we could not do anything because they were here. He said, “It’s okay, we’ll be quiet.” I said no.

Calvin then proceeded to lay in my bed. I got in next to him, tapped him to move over so that I could fit, and he moved over. I believe at this point I fell asleep. I woke up to Calvin repeatedly violently penetrating my vagina with three of his fingers. I tried to pull his hand away with my right hand, telling him, “stop, no” multiple times. Calvin continued to penetrate me despite my efforts to pull him away and tell him to stop. Then he proceeded to violently penetrate my anus with the same force and motion. I again tried to pull his hand away. He then stated, “it’s okay, I just want to make you squirt.” He then sat up against my wall and pulled me by my arm over to his penis. He then forced me to perform fellatio on him by pushing my head down. I was in pain and gagging. I finally was able to pull
away and lay down. Calvin then got on top of me and tried to have sex with me. When he went to penetrate my vagina, I was in excruciating pain. I pushed him away with my right forearm and stated loudly that I had to pee. I got up and put on a pair of shorts, and then went to the bathroom down the hall.

Calvin followed me into the bathroom. There were no words spoken, but he peeked over the stall and stared at me. Then he left as I was still peeing. This was the last I saw him.

I came back into my room. When I entered, my roommate, Nancy, was standing and staring at my sheets with a horrifying look on her face. I then looked over and saw my sheets covered in blood….I started crying hysterically and I walked over into the study lounge across the hall. I sat on the couch and cried. My roommate came in and asked if I was okay and if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said I just wanted to go to sleep.

“I was in a lot of pain—it was extreme,” Kelly told me. “When I finally pushed Calvin off of me, I ran down the hall to the bathroom and locked myself in one of the stalls. It hurt so much when I was urinating that I was crying hysterically from the pain. He followed me into the bathroom, looked over the top of the stall, and saw me crying. I don’t think he said anything. I just sat there on the toilet with my head down, bawling. I ended up bleeding for three days.” After Calvin Smith left her dormitory, Kelly said, she returned to her room “and tried to pass out for a little bit, because I was really tired.”

Later Saturday morning, when she woke up after sleeping for a couple of hours, she became unhinged at what she saw in the light of day. “There was blood on the pillow I was laying on,” she later recalled in a tearful interview with Detective Connie Brueckner of the Missoula Police Department. “I looked up, and there was blood on my wall above my head. And then I sat up really quick. And I looked at my side and there was blood on that wall, to my right. I jumped out of my bed…and there was blood all over my sheets….So I instantly got up and I took the Germ-X wipes, and cleaned my walls really good. And then as I was sobbing I took all my sheets and my pillow case off and I put them in a white Walmart bag, or maybe
it was a bag from the grocery store on campus, and I shoved them all in there and put them down the trash chute.”

After cleaning the walls and disposing of the sheets, Kaitlynn Kelly noticed that her jeans and belt were missing. “I was really confused why he took my pants,” she said. “I can’t get over that.” She went for a drive with her roommate, Nancy Jones,
*
⁴
to try to clear her head. “I didn’t understand what had been done to me,” Kelly reflected. “I kept asking Nancy, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘You were raped.’ ”

Even after Nancy put it that plainly, Kelly said, “It took me a couple of days to comprehend it. On Monday, Nancy convinced me to go into Curry Health Center to get a rape kit done.” At Curry a physician documented severe vaginal and rectal pain, vaginal bleeding, and abrasions to her inner thighs and vaginal vault. But Kelly didn’t want to report the rape to the police.

On Tuesday, Kaitlynn Kelly ran into Kerry Barrett and told her what had transpired. At that point, Barrett said, “Kaitlynn didn’t know who Calvin was, didn’t know his last name, didn’t know where he lived. And she was scared for her life, because it had happened in her room, and she didn’t know if he was going to come back.” Although Barrett urged Kelly to report the assault, Kelly resisted. “She worried she might get in trouble,” Barrett said, “because she’d been drinking and she was underage, only twenty at the time. And she didn’t think the cops would believe her story.”

Kerry Barrett, concerned that the man who raped her friend would never be held accountable, decided to take matters into her own hands. There was a security camera trained on the door Kaitlynn Kelly and Calvin Smith had used to enter Turner Hall. “So I called up campus security and asked them how long they kept the tapes from their cameras,” Barrett said. “At which point they kind of roped me into telling them why I wanted to know.” When Barrett disclosed what had happened to Kelly, a campus safety officer drove over to Barrett’s apartment and brought her in to review the security footage.

It didn’t take long for Barrett to identify Kelly on the video, entering Turner Hall with a large young man at 3:27 a.m. “We saw the guy
who raped her enter the dorm with his arm around her,” Barrett said. “She looked very, very drunk. And then about half an hour later we saw the rapist go out the door with her pants in his hand.” Apparently, he took them as a trophy of his conquest.

Barrett hadn’t told Kelly that she’d gone to the campus police. She made it clear to the safety officer who’d shown her the video that Kelly didn’t want to report the rape, and she begged him not to contact Kelly. He agreed, promising that he would save the footage so it would be available if Kelly changed her mind.

A day later, Barrett confessed to Kelly what she’d done, explained that the video of the rapist was being preserved, and related that the campus police had assured her that Kelly wouldn’t get in trouble. After some deliberation, Kelly reconsidered and decided to report the assault to the campus police. Because the alleged crime was a felony, the UM police immediately turned the case over to the Missoula Police Department, which dispatched Officer Randy Krastel to Kelly’s dorm room to take a statement and collect whatever evidence still existed.

By now, five days had passed since Kaitlynn Kelly had allegedly been raped. “I’d thrown away my blood-soaked sheets because I was disgusted and I didn’t know what to do,” she told me. “But I gave the cops my bloody shorts, my bloody underwear, my bloody T-shirt. They also took my two-inch-thick memory-foam mattress that was soaked all the way through with blood.” Officer Krastel interviewed Kelly, Kerry Barrett, and Kelly’s roommate and took photographs of the crime scene.

The accused rapist, Calvin Smith, had graduated from a small-town high school the previous June, where he’d distinguished himself as an athlete. Individuals who knew Smith have described him as “kind,” “easygoing,” and “goofy.” But he had never had sex before meeting Kaitlynn Kelly, and a look at what he has posted on a social media site suggests that he was a frustrated, involuntary celibate. On January 11, 2011, Smith posted a line from the animated sitcom
Family Guy
on his Facebook page: “women are not people god just put them here for mans entertainment.”

When a Facebook friend commented that the actual line is “Women are not people. They are devices built by the Lord Jesus
Christ for our entertainment,” Smith replied, “Ahhh I wish I had that power.”

AFTER OFFICER KRASTEL
visited her dormitory, Kaitlynn Kelly was asked to come downtown to the police station to talk to Detective Connie Brueckner, a highly regarded, eight-year veteran of the Missoula police force. The interview, which was recorded, lasted forty-two minutes. Brueckner was thorough, and asked probing questions, but she presented them in a sensitive, supportive manner. When Kelly admitted that she had agreed to have sex with Calvin Smith before they entered her dorm, Brueckner inquired, “What were you thinking at that time?”

“That it was going to be a good time,” Kelly replied.

“What did you think was going to happen?”

“Probably, maybe, have sex.”

“Were you okay with that idea at the time?”

“I was,” Kelly answered. “That’s why I let him in my room.”

“Did that change?” Brueckner asked. “That feeling?”

“Yeah,” Kelly said. “I guess when we got in my room. Because my roommate and her boyfriend were in the room. They were, like, snoring. Passed out. And I told him, ‘My roommate and her boyfriend are here. We can’t do anything.’ And he told me, ‘It’s okay. We’ll be quiet.’ ”

“What did you think of that?” Brueckner asked.

“Not okay,” Kelly answered.

Detective Brueckner assured Kaitlynn Kelly that it was understandable and acceptable for her to have changed her mind about having sex once they entered the dorm room. Then she asked Kelly, “If your roommate wasn’t there, would you have been okay with it?”

“No,” Kelly declared without hesitating. “As soon as we walked in the dorm, I was like, ‘No! I don’t want to do this.’…I told him, ‘You can just lay on my bed until the morning.’ ”

“And what did he say to that?” Brueckner asked.

“Well, he got on my bed and lay down,” Kelly answered. “And I got next to him and lay down.”

Detective Brueckner asked if she and Calvin Smith went to bed with their clothes on.

“Yes,” Kelly answered. “I don’t know what happened after that, but the next thing I remember is waking up with his fingers inside of me, with a stabbing motion, very roughly.”

“Inside your vagina?”

“Yes,” Kelly said.

Brueckner asked what happened to the clothing she had been wearing when she got in bed.

“When I woke up?” Kelly said. “I didn’t have pants on, but my shirt was still on.”

“And what happened when you realized that was happening?” Brueckner asked.

“I kept reaching for his hand and pulling it away,” Kelly explained, demonstrating with her hands. “I kept grabbing at his thumb and pulling, like, towards him. To get him off of me. But he kept, like, coming back.”

“Did he say anything?” Detective Brueckner asked.

According to Kaitlynn Kelly, Calvin Smith told her, “No, just wait. Just wait.”

“Were you saying anything?” Brueckner asked.

“I was saying, ‘Stop!’ ” Kelly insisted. “And then—”

“How loud were you guys?” Brueckner interrupted.

“I don’t think I was very loud,” Kelly replied. She paused for a moment before explaining, ruefully, “Because my roommate was there, I didn’t want to wake them up. I just wanted it to stop. And then he went in my rear, with his hands doing the same stabbing motion.”

A little later, Detective Brueckner again inquired why Kaitlynn Kelly hadn’t done more to alert her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend, who were asleep a few feet away in the same room. “I have to ask obvious questions,” Brueckner apologized, “because these are questions people would ask….You’re using a quiet voice when you’re telling him to stop. I can understand to some degree. But tell me what was your thinking there? Why weren’t you just screaming loud? It certainly would have stopped things.”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said. “To tell you the truth, I just don’t know. I was very scared.”

“Did he ever make any threats to you?” Brueckner asked.

“No,” Kelly replied.

“I don’t mean to ask you that question to make you feel bad,” Brueckner persisted. “It’s just—it’s easy to think through things now and go, ‘I could have done this,’ or whatever. But things were happening.”