Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (24 page)

“You’re making fun of it,” Patty protested. “I’m asking questions about it,” said Armstrong. “I’m sorry however you feel about it.” He kept reading: “I could hear him responding positively as if he were my lover.”

“Right?” asked Armstrong. Patty was crying. “I’m going to object again,”

said Short. “Correct?” asked Armstrong, ignoring him. “I just wish I never wrote that thing,” said Patty. Short renewed his objection. Armstrong blew it off: “You can have a standing objection to every single question on every conceivable grounds relating to this document.” He was still going to ask.

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“And what was there about his response,” asked Armstrong, “that seemed as if he were your lover?” Patty: “He just made a couple of groans, moans.” This “strategic move,” he read on, caused her shame and embarrassment. “I’m not sure what you mean there,” he said. “Is it the rape that shames and embarrasses you or your strategy to help him have an orgasm and caressing his testicles that embarrasses you, or is it something else?”

“Yeah, the method of helping him,” answered Patty, humiliated.

But this strategy didn’t work because the rapist didn’t climax? “No, he didn’t,” said Patty. Armstrong did not relent: “But it was your plan that he would have an orgasm and he would ejaculate in your mouth?”

“Right,” said Patty.

Why, if “you didn’t want to have sex,” had Patty positioned herself so the man could enter her vaginally? “I wasn’t fighting the guy at any time,” she said. “I know I should have but I wasn’t.” On those two other sexual assault attempts, Armstrong noted, Patty had successfully fought back, even though she was alone. But during the alleged rape on Fairmont, where “you had another person in the apartment to help you fight the assailant,” she did nothing to resist. “Why is that?”

The man had a knife and Misty was pregnant. “I didn’t want him to hurt anybody,” she said. “But,” exhorted Armstrong, “he never did hurt anybody, did he?” Patty: “I didn’t know at the time what he was going to do.” Armstrong kept at it. “This person never did hurt you at all, did he?” Short objected, but Armstrong paid him no mind. “
Did he?
”

Patty knew what was expected of her: to give in, to back down, to concede defeat. To say all right already, you win, I give up. I’ll say whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll let you walk all over me.

Almost her whole life, this was how things had gone. But not this time.

“No,” she answered. “But I didn’t know he wasn’t going to. If I fought, he may have.” Armstrong ridiculed this: “Was there
anything
that this person did that was forceful in the course of this event?” Said Patty, “Just the fact that he had a knife I felt forced.” Persisted Armstrong, “Did he
ever
in touching you physically force
anything
?”

Patty’s hurt was turning to anger. “I don’t know what you’re saying,”

she retorted. “Did I want him to have sex with me? Is that what you’re saying?” Replied Armstrong, peevishly, “I assume the answer is no.”

“Right,” said Patty.

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Against All Odds

•

Armstrong remained on the offensive. Did the man, with any part of his body, use force on her? “He did hold my hair, my head,” replied Patty. “He pulled my hair. I felt the knife a couple of times. It didn’t hurt. So he didn’t beat me. Is that what you’re asking?”

“Well, he didn’t do that, did he?” crowed Armstrong. “No,” said Patty.

Armstrong then asked about the anal assault and whether the rapist may have had an orgasm during this part and remained hard. Short objected, saying this “calls for a medical conclusion.” “Or experience,”

wisecracked Armstrong. In fact, he said, Patty really had no idea whether the man climaxed in her anus. Patty responded: “I know from the hospital he didn’t.”

The deposition ended past 5 p.m., after more than eight hours. Armstrong was nowhere near finished, but Short insisted on calling it a day.

Patty’s second deposition, on March 21, was just as brutal. Again, Armstrong read from her journal, which he insisted on calling a “diary.”

When Short objected, he renamed it “this writing which I call a diary.”

Armstrong also repeatedly described the gathering at Mark’s house on the day of the rape a “party.” When Short protested, Armstrong replied,

“If a number of people referred to this event . . . as a party, do you say they’re not telling the truth?” Actually, it was Armstrong who was being dishonest; while Misty had told Woodmansee she was upset to see people drinking and laughing, she had not called it a “party,” nor had anyone else who was there.

Once again, much of the deposition was devoted to exploring personal areas that had nothing to do with the conduct of police. Patty was grilled about her relationship with Mark. “Did he sexually abuse you?”

“Did he physically abuse you?” “Did you sort of stalk him?” “Was he afraid of you when you were jealous and angry?”

Armstrong also lambasted Patty about how, after September 4, she let Misty stay “back in the rape apartment, alone.” What steps had she taken “to protect Misty” during this period of time? Patty had urged Misty to also stay at Mark’s, but she declined. By the way, said Armstrong, this “prompts me to ask a question I forgot to ask last time.

After you had your [older] daughter [at age fourteen] and you had had those seven, eight, nine years of sexual abuse by your stepfather, why did you leave [this daughter] in the home with your stepfather to be raised?”

Short objected. Patty cried. “I was a kid,” she pleaded. “I thought I
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was the only one being abused.” Armstrong showed no mercy: “And at that time, recognizing that you were a kid, you had no concern that your stepfather might sexually abuse your first daughter?” “I didn’t,” said Patty, adding that she was never aware of any abuse. “Have you asked her?” pressed Armstrong. “No,” admitted Patty.

A moment later, employing his parallel tack of treating Patty as though she had the IQ of shrubbery, Armstrong asked, “Do you understand that you filed a complaint in the federal court suing Woodmansee and some other people?” He called Patty’s attention to the section of her

“diary” where she described her first meeting with Woodmansee, and how he seemed to exude “obvious arrogance.” What did she mean by that? Well, for one thing, said Patty, Woodmansee told her straight off that he was going to do a better job than the police who had already questioned her.

This set Armstrong off. “Weren’t you real happy,” he asked, “that somebody was going to do a better job in questioning you to find out who raped you?” He then chided Patty for writing that Woodmansee, during this first encounter, was frustrated with her inability to remember details. Wasn’t this to be expected from someone “working very hard with the victim to get some answers that might help solve the crime?”

Patty said she thought Woodmansee’s “pressuring” was counterproduc-tive. He made her feel as though “I can’t remember” and “I don’t know”

were not acceptable answers and expressed his frustration by sighing a lot.

“So what?” interrupted Armstrong. Replied Patty, “What do you mean, ‘So what?’” She couldn’t believe she had to justify her opinion that Woodmansee’s sighs were inappropriate for a detective interviewing a rape victim, even as he was sitting right there in the deposition room sighing up a storm. Armstrong erupted: “You have an officer trying to solve your rape and he’s frustrated by your answers and he’s sighing.
Who cares?
”

Patty said she felt intimidated, recalling how Woodmansee had suggested the two of them might have to “role play” the rape if she couldn’t get it right. Armstrong berated Patty’s discomfort with this suggestion:

“And you are upset that he’s trying to be very thorough and do whatever is necessary to help you remember to the best of your ability what happened?”

172

Against All Odds

•

After hours of this sort of questioning, during which he continued to denigrate Patty about “the rape you claim happened,” Armstrong turned his attention to the events of October 2, which were at the heart of the lawsuit. It was here that his efforts to break Patty’s spirit paid off.

For a long time she held firm, maintaining that the entire time she was at police headquarters and, even afterward, at the mental health center, she felt she was in custody. She recounted that she wasn’t allowed to leave to smoke a cigarette and that when she asked to come back the next day with a lawyer or counselor Woodmansee had refused, saying, “You’ll just change your story.” But then, in a rapid-fire exchange, Armstrong succeeded in strong-arming Patty into a series of admissions that would undermine her cause of action.

armstrong: “Did you ever ask Tom or Linda if you were free to leave?”

patty: “No.”

armstrong: “Did you ever tell Tom or Linda that you wanted this interview or interrogation to stop and you wanted to go home?”

patty: “Not in those words, no. I told him I was telling him what they wanted to hear so that I can leave.”

armstrong: “Did you ever attempt to get up and walk out, announce you were leaving and make the move to leave?”

patty: “No, I didn’t feel—they wouldn’t have let me.”

armstrong: “So is that the answer?”

patty: “I never made the attempt to get up and leave.”

armstrong: “And you never announced that you were now going to leave?”

patty: “No.”

armstrong: “Did you ever demand to call a lawyer?”

patty: “Just the one time.”

armstrong: “The one where you said you want to maybe come back the next day with your lawyer or Linda Moston?”

patty: “I didn’t say maybe. I said I wanted to come back the next day with my lawyer or my psychologist.”

armstrong:“Now let’s talk about this day when you’re actually with the detectives. Did you ever demand to have an attorney present on that day?”

short: “Objection, asked and answered.”

patty:“No.”

The questioning went on for several more hours, until about 6 p.m. Armstrong scoffed at Patty’s testimony that she feared the two
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detectives, based on their threat to put her in jail overnight on suicide watch. Why should this make her afraid? he wondered. Wouldn’t being jailed really be more of “an inconvenience or annoyance”? He again questioned her indelicately about the assault (“Did this person ever kiss you?” “Did you kiss him?”), challenging and doubting her account. But Armstrong’s purpose was already achieved. Once again, Patty had been too honest for her own good. If only she had said, “Yes, I demanded an attorney; yes, I got up to leave but they physically prevented me.”

Patty’s third deposition took place a few days later. Armstrong, who was billing the city’s insurer at the rate of $120 an hour, painstakingly went through Patty’s itemized claim for damages. It listed twenty-one hours of lost work time, at $8 an hour, for a total of $168. In all, Patty sought actual damages of $5,528, including Harlowe’s $5,000 fee, plus unspecified punitive damages.

Toward the end of this deposition, Patty expressed that Woodmansee seemed single-mindedly focused on a single suspect, Dominic.

He kept asking whether she thought it was him, which struck her as beside the point: “There’s evidence. Get it. I thought the evidence

[would show] that he did it or he did not.” Woodmansee, from his place at the table, issued a sigh so loud that Short complained. Said Woodmansee, “I’m doing my best not to react to her accusations that are lies.”

23

The Police Defendants

Parties to a civil action who are being deposed should remember, first and foremost, to abandon hope. They cannot possibly help themselves or their side; they can only minimize the hurt. Depositions are fishing expeditions in which opposing lawyers cast about for incriminating admissions. Statements that serve the interests of the person being deposed are tossed back into icy waters. Smart deposition witnesses are correct but not candid, responsive but not forthcoming. The police defendants in Patty’s case understood this, and it made them formidable witnesses, although Woodmansee’s powerful need for self-justification would create a few chinks in the armor.

Due to his lack of financial resources, Mike Short deposed only three people: Woodmansee, Draeger, and Schwartz. Since he didn’t have an office of his own, these depositions took place on enemy turf—

the offices of Axley Brynelson. His six deposition sessions, including recesses, took a total of seventeen hours, compared to the nineteen and a half hours that Axley spent deposing Patty.

The first defendant deposed was Lauri Schwartz. The earnest young detective, Modl told Short, had been calling him to complain about her inclusion in the lawsuit. Short agreed to consider dropping her depend-ing on what he was able to learn. Schwartz’s depositions—a three-hour session followed by an hour-long one—were mostly a waste. Schwartz said she consulted with Woodmansee during his initial investigation and suggested that he employ a ruse, although not specifically the one regarding rubber residue. Later, she was assigned to do follow-up work on Patty’s obstruction charge. She could not remember if she made it 174

The Police Defendants

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clear to the people she spoke to that this was her purpose. She did not contact any of the family members whose names and numbers Misty provided, except for Patty’s sister Sue.

Schwartz made this call to obtain contact information for the sisters’

former stepfather, whom she wanted to question about Patty’s allegations of past sexual abuse. Determining whether this abuse occurred, she said, was relevant in assessing “the credibility of the person in the current investigation.” After this contact caused a fuss, District Attorney Nicks “informed me that she believed that my investigation was concluded.”

Short sought more specifics, but Schwartz did not provide them.

He was left sputtering that she “can’t remember the substance of any of her conversations.” That sparked an argument with Modl, after which Short called it quits. He later agreed to drop Schwartz from the suit, focusing his efforts on the police conduct that led to Patty’s confession.