Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (16 page)

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“We’re going to start fresh.” Harlowe was magnanimous in victory, saying Nicks’s decision “really reflects, I think, the system working.”

Privately, Harlowe was disgusted by Woodmansee and Schwartz’s investigation. “They were trying to tie the case up,” he told me. “It wasn’t a search for truth. It was a search for a defendant.” And now this

“substandard police work” would greatly complicate any attempt to charge the actual perpetrators.

The police, however, were apparently determined to affirm their original judgment. As I was preparing an article on these events, Madison Police Lieutenant Cheri Maples called to give me a “heads up.”

There was, she said, a “strong potential” that Pankow would be charged again: “I’m going to warn you right now.” She didn’t want me to have egg on my face. But despite their best efforts, the Madison police were never able to rebuild their case against Pankow. No one was ever charged for breaking little Alicia’s legs, again and again.

14

Discovery

On April 24, 1998, a candlelight vigil was held for Patty outside Madison Police Department headquarters. Organized by a campus antiviolence group, it drew about two dozen people and one television news crew. Patty attended but at Harlowe’s urging did not speak or call attention to herself. Several women shared stories of unsympathetic treatment from local law enforcement. Afterward Patty sent organizers a thank-you note, which read in part: “I was tearfully moved by the overwhelming presence of support. I no longer feel I’m going through this horrible experience alone. I’m sure you can imagine the last six months have been hell for me.”

In many ways, however, Patty was more isolated than ever. Some of her friends and family members, for whom denial was a primary coping mechanism, had pulled away because of all that had happened. Her relationship with Misty, who after a brief hiatus had resumed seeing Dominic, remained bitter and contentious. And Patty’s former landlord sublet her old apartment on Fairmont for significantly less than what she had been paying, then sued her in small claims court for the difference. When the matter came to trial in early April, the landlord’s lawyer brought along one of the initial newspaper articles about a woman on her block who admitted lying about being raped. He said he would introduce it if Patty tried to use the rape as a reason for moving before the end of her lease. She made no such claim and the court commissioner ordered her to pay $701. Patty, crying, told the lawyer to add this to “the rest of the shit this has cost me” and walked out. The judgment was never satisfied.

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Discovery

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Among the people at the vigil was a woman named Cami, a former welfare mom who had gone on to become a successful computer technician. Cami was appalled that Patty was being charged with a crime and called District Attorney Nicks to demand an explanation. Nicks said her office believed that the obstruction charge could be proven. As Cami interpreted this, perhaps a bit harshly, the office didn’t care whether Patty was guilty or innocent and had no concerns about the public policy implications of prosecuting a woman who said she was raped. All that mattered was whether it could win.

Cami wrote Patty a note, which I passed on, commending her courage. Patty wrote me back: “I wish I was the strong and brave woman she thinks I am. The truth is, I’m feeling pretty weak and profoundly sad these days. I am working hard at being the woman she thinks I am. I feel that when I can actively participate in this fight, it will change me dras-tically. I am looking forward to that day.” This was, in the truest sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Detective Schwartz received records of phone calls from Patty’s former residence, from mid-August through mid-October. The numbers were traced to a host of individuals, from Patty’s family members to the assistant at her coffee shop. But one number—which the records showed was dialed at 4:12 on the morning of the alleged assault—

proved elusive. Schwartz’s file documents multiple efforts to track this number down by checking with cellular and paging service companies.

They all said it wasn’t theirs, frustrating the police inquiry. Later, Harlowe employed a different investigative technique: dialing the number.

The person on the other end answered “911.” It was the phone company’s seven-digit analog for an emergency call.

My complaint against Riley was moving forward, or so it seemed.

The PFC scheduled four evidentiary hearings, in June and July. The city hired a local attorney, Paul Schwarzenbart, to defend Riley, as state law required for cases not initiated by police. Schwarzenbart issued a curt, two-page answer to my complaint. It denied that Patty’s letter was a citizen complaint under department rules or that Riley had made untruthful statements when he claimed to have no recollection of having received it.

The next step was discovery. With some help from James Friedman, a local attorney who had represented
Isthmus
on open records issues, I 112

The Need to Be Believed

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drew up a set of interrogatories, requests for document production and requests for admission. Schwarzenbart, in turn, subpoenaed me to appear at a deposition in late April and to produce “any and all notes or documents of any kind” related to Patty’s letters or discussions I had with others about them. I complied, submitting a stack of photocopies as well as a letter that decoded my handwriting. The deposition took place at Schwarzenbart’s office. Riley, a solidly built, square-faced man a few months shy of fifty, glared at me from across the conference table.

It lasted about two hours and consisted mainly of going over the material I had produced.

Three days later Riley responded to my discovery request. He—or rather, Schwarzenbart—refused to provide any documents and frustrated my requests for admissions whenever possible. But Riley acknowledged having discussed Patty’s letters with Woodmansee and Captain Jeff LaMar at the time they were received, only to later completely forget not only the letters but also these conversations.

Using the power afforded under PFC rules, I served subpoenas on eight individuals: Detectives Woodmansee and Draeger, Lieutenant Malloy, Captain LaMar, Police Chief Williams, Deputy District Attorney Karofsky, and Jill Poarch and Colleen O’Brien at Meriter Hospital.

I subsequently served Karofsky with a second subpoena, ordering her to appear at a deposition and produce copies of primary case records, including police reports.

Karofsky filed a motion to quash both subpoenas, citing Wisconsin Supreme Court rules barring attorneys from “extrajudicial statements”

that may affect a pending case. She also said my request for documents was “more encompassing then [
sic
] what the State is required to disclose to defendants in criminal cases,” warning that if the PFC denied her motion “there would be little to stop every defendant in Madison from filing complaints with the commission in order to get discovery to which they would not otherwise be entitled.” While expressing skepticism over this claim, I narrowed my request to only those documents that had already been provided to Patty’s lawyer.

Schwarzenbart backed Karofsky’s motion, saying the documents I sought were not relevant to my causes of action. He also moved to disallow any testimony or evidence related to the police investigation into Patty’s sexual assault. At a PFC hearing in late May, Schwarzenbart,
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appearing via speakerphone, argued that I was trying to turn my complaint against Riley into “a mini-trial of the criminal case against

[Patty].” I countered that the basic facts and documents regarding Woodmansee’s investigation were key to assessing what Riley knew and when he knew it. The PFC decided to postpone hearings on the Riley complaint “until resolution of the criminal matter” against Patty.

Around this time, the Dane County District Attorney’s Office came under fire for two other cases involving sexual assault. In the first, prosecutors cut a deal to let a forty-two-year-old city of Madison parks employee get off with one year of work-release jail time and probation for raping a nineteen-year-old coworker on the job. (“It just came over me,”

he told police.) In the second case, the office declined to prosecute a UW–Madison athlete and his friend who allegedly raped a female student, saying the case was too hard to prove. The student, Danielle McGuire, went public with her story, enlisting the support of the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes and appearing as a guest on NBC’s
Leeza,
a daytime talk show. A second woman came forward to report being assaulted, two months before McGuire, by the same athlete. But the office still declined to press charges.

McGuire alleged that her assailant’s status as an athlete afforded special protection. District Attorney Nicks, Deputy District Attorney Schwaemle, and victim/witness specialist Mark Kerman all insisted this had nothing to do with it. “What we decided,” said Schwaemle, “was that this was not a case which can be prosecuted, which is to say that there was not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.” But McGuire remembered Kerman stating that because the man she accused was an athlete, “it would be a high-profile case and we don’t want to put you through that.” She also claimed Schwaemle had said, “Sometimes when a woman says no, she means yes, and coercion is a natural part of sex.”

Schwaemle declined to confirm or deny this remark; Kerman said his

“high-profile” comment was “taken totally out of context.”

Rather than making the office eager to demonstrate its enlightened approach toward sexual assault, these controversies seemed to make it more intransigent. Nicks was especially offended by media coverage of these cases, feeling that her office had been unfairly tainted. Patty’s prosecution became an opportunity for vindication, wherein the office could prove that it was taking a stand against false reports, not genuine 114

The Need to Be Believed

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victims. It could not back down without running the risk of looking bad, a primary concern.

Dominic, meanwhile, was having public-relations problems of his own. In mid-June he and a friend were arrested for attacking a stranger outside a Madison convenience store. Dominic had accosted the man, an African American, saying, “You’re a fucking nigger and you need to die,” then tried to hit him with a twenty-eight-inch black aluminum baseball bat. Dominic’s buddy, Kenneth, egged him on, shouting,

“Whoop that nigger, whoop his ass.” The man managed to get the bat away and police arrived in time to nab both attackers. Dominic was charged with disorderly conduct while armed; Kenneth, who had tried to run, was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and violating probation. Interestingly Dominic as charged faced a lower maximum penalty for this incident than did Patty for obstruction—ninety days as opposed to nine months. (In the end, he got a $330 fine and no jail time.)

Patty’s trial was originally set to begin the second week of May, but the date was pushed back several times. One delay happened at the prosecutor’s request. “The State would not be prepared to go to trial in June because it has yet to receive test results from the State Crime Lab that are vital to its case,” Karofsky wrote the court. “In addition, I will be on my honeymoon during the month of July. As a result, I respectfully request that this case be scheduled some time in August.” Jack Aulik, the reserve judge assigned to Patty’s case, agreed. The new trial date: August 6.

In preparation, Harlowe asked Patty’s ophthalmologist, Dr.

Thomas Stevens, to put his conclusions about her visual acuity in writing. After a fresh examination, Stevens wrote a letter stating that Patty

“has a central loss of vision which would make it impossible to identify a face in good or bad light.” Although her peripheral vision allowed her

“to get around and avoid bumping into large objects,” she was “consid-erably worse than legally blind in both eyes.”

Harlowe also researched the issue of involuntary confessions. Earlier that year the
New York Times
ran an article headlined, “Police Refine Methods So Potent, Even the Innocent Have Confessed.” Many of these methods, the paper said, are delineated in a manual,
Criminal
Interrogations and Confessions,
used by police departments across the
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country. The manual instructs interrogators to methodically heighten suspects’ level of anxiety, often by lying about evidence, to the point where they make incriminating admissions just to take the pressure off.

Harlowe also located scientific papers on this topic and found case law regarding confessions obtained through heavy-handed and coercive tactics. He planned to file a motion to exclude Patty’s confession on these grounds. But before he could do so, there was a development that threw the prosecution’s case into a tailspin.

On June 29 the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory reported the results of testing that the police had initially not bothered to do. It was a shocker: semen had been found on Patty’s bedsheet, in quantities sufficient to allow for DNA testing.

15

“The Enemy”

It might seem reasonable to assume that the belated discovery of semen at the scene of a reported rape would cause police and prosecutors to waver in their insistence that the alleged victim was lying. Instead, this development was viewed as an obstacle to overcome. Deputy District Attorney Karofsky, on learning about the crime lab’s finding, contacted Detective Lauri Schwartz, who launched an investigation apparently aimed at finding some explanation for this evidence that would allow the prosecution to proceed. She started with the primary suspect, Dominic, but seemed mainly interested in ruling him out, conjuring far-fetched theories about how his semen may have found its way into Patty’s bed without his having been there.

Schwartz’s investigation, as detailed in her reports, represented a dramatic escalation of the Madison Police Department’s efforts to discredit Patty. These reports were filled with self-serving accusations from highly questionable sources whose credibility was never doubted or motives impugned. “This lady is crazy,” she quoted Dominic saying about Patty when she called to ask him to provide samples for DNA testing.