Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (33 page)

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Next Schwaemle turned to the events of October 2. Patty recalled the optimism she felt when she arrived at this meeting, alone, thinking that the police had made a break in the case. When Woodmansee confronted her with his conclusion that she had made it up, Patty was flab-bergasted. “I just couldn’t believe it,” she told the jury. “I really thought he was kidding.”

Patty went on to recount the various representations Woodmansee had made and her offer to take a lie detector test or be hypnotized: “I just kept pleading for him to believe me.” But eventually, she buckled under. “It was obvious I was just going nowhere with him so I said,

‘Fine, whatever you want to hear, I’ll tell you.’” When she tried going back to her original account, Woodmansee got “real mad” and threw down his notebook. So she stuck to her story about having lied, even when he hauled her off to the mental health center.

Schwaemle asked about Dominic, and how she had originally been tentative in identifying him as a suspect even though some things seemed to fit. But after police stopped investigating, she gathered more information and became “almost certain” it was him. “Basically,” she explained, “I had no one else to blame.”

During a break before his cross-examination, Eisenberg mused loudly outside the courtroom, “I’m going to be
so
nice to her.” He even shared with Short his thoughts about the approach of attorney Brad Armstrong, calling him “a real prick.” But when court resumed, he went after Patty in much the same manner.

“You’re not a real truthful person, are you?” Eisenberg asked Patty early on. She disputed this. But hadn’t she, by her own admission, lied to the police when she recanted? “I lied to them but told them I was lying,” she said. On the stand, as on other occasions, Patty proved her truthfulness by making admissions against her interest, such as that she and others were indeed laughing and joking at what Eisenberg called her “little get-together or party” after the alleged rape, or that she wrote her angry, accusatory note to Dominic with the intention of sending it, even though she never did.

Eisenberg picked away at inconsistencies in the various accounts Patty gave to the police, wrote in her “diary,” or testified to at her deposition and the preliminary hearing. Here she said her assailant’s pants were off; there they were just down to his ankles. Which was it? Sometimes
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she said he ejaculated, other times she wasn’t positive. What’s up with that? During her deposition, she claimed the assailant pulled her hair.

Why didn’t she tell this to the police? (Deposition testimony was cited throughout the trial but the jury was never told that Patty had sued the police.)

Was she crying during the assault? Actually, said Patty, “I stayed pretty calm throughout.” Then why did she say in her “diary” that she cried when she told the rapist that she couldn’t see?

Like Armstrong, Eisenberg zeroed in on the most painful passages of this no-longer private writing. The one about deciding to “sensually”

move her tongue around the tip of her assailant’s penis and caress his testicles. Eisenberg even followed it up the same way: “And you were hoping that he would ejaculate in your mouth?” Patty answered in the affirmative but that wasn’t enough. Eisenberg read from her deposition:

“Question: ‘It was your plan that he would have an orgasm and he would ejaculate in your mouth?’ Answer: ‘Right.’”

And what about this possibly apocryphal assailant’s penis? Hadn’t it just come from her anus? Wasn’t it covered with fecal matter? Didn’t it smell? How did it taste? “It was pretty disgusting,” said Patty. Oh, really? Then how come she never told any of the police officers she talked to how disgusting it was?

After about two hours of this, Patty was emotionally frayed. “No, I didn’t!” she shouted at Eisenberg when he asked if she had said something earlier the same way she was saying it now. “What do you want me to . . . ?” Nichol called a break. Patty collected herself. Then she got back on the witness stand and kept going.

Eisenberg dug into his Dominic Theory—that if this crazy woman didn’t fabricate the rape then maybe she was right. Didn’t everything seem to point to Dominic? Didn’t she tell
Isthmus
she was sure it was him? Yes, she admitted. Didn’t she write her accusatory note? Yes.

Didn’t she tell Detective Schwartz she was close to having Dominic arrested? No, she insisted. (This was a complete falsehood that Eisenberg tried to get in under the wire; Patty and Schwartz had never spoken, as Schwartz herself would later testify.)

Eisenberg attacked, and Patty held her ground. How tall was the man who raped her? Patty wasn’t sure: “I’m visually impaired,” she reminded him. Why would being threatened with being taken to jail on 234

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suicide watch bother her so? Hadn’t she had a lot of prior contact with police? Patty shot back: “I have never had a cop tell me I was going to jail because I was raped, no.”

Why, Eisenberg wanted to know, did Patty agree to make corroborating statements regarding how and why she fabricated the rape, like where she got the knife? “They were offering and I was saying ‘Yeah.’”

But didn’t Woodmansee say he wanted her to tell the truth? “He wanted me to tell his truth.” Did he put it that way:
his truth?
“He said so many times that it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen, so I knew what his truth was, and I knew what he wanted to hear.”

Did Patty ever call Tom Woodmansee a liar? “I know he’s a liar,” she said. Why had she canceled a follow-up meeting with the detective “to go to a tavern” with a friend? She hadn’t, she said. She offered to skip the concert for which she and Mark had tickets but he told her not to:

“Basically,
he
canceled.” Why had she “guessed a lot,” as she put it in her diary, in her answers to Woodmansee? Because he wouldn’t accept that she didn’t know or couldn’t remember. Still, she did the best she could.

Schwaemle, on redirect, asked just a few questions. Why did Patty feel Woodmansee was annoyed by her inability to provide precise answers? Patty told the jury what he said about maybe having to go into the bedroom where the rape occurred and “role-play this thing,” if necessary. Why did she write her never-sent letter to Dominic? “I was all out of hope.”

How did Patty feel to learn, as the result of DNA testing, that the semen on her sheets did not belong to Dominic, the man she accused?

A wave of shame washed over her, and she began to cry on the stand, as she choked out her reply: “I. Just. Felt. Really. Just. Horrible.” And afterward, she never again sought to implicate Dominic: “I knew nobody else was in that bed except the rapist.” So if the semen didn’t belong to Dominic, he was not the one. Schwaemle followed with a masterstroke: if Patty had known the semen belonged to Joseph Bong, would she have ever accused Dominic?

“Objection,” exclaimed Eisenberg. “Sustained,” said Nichol. Patty wasn’t allowed to answer. But, for once, there was no need to.

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Burden of Proof

Schwaemle was not sure what to think. As well as Patty did on the stand, and as credible as she seemed, Eisenberg had done some damage.

It still was possible for someone—maybe just a single juror—to doubt her account. Or the jury might consider her truthful but not be sure Joseph Bong was to blame. Patty, after all, was never able to identify him.

And as Judge Nichol told the jurors repeatedly, the defense did not have to prove a thing. The burden of proof was entirely on the prosecution.

The trial resumed Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. First up was Dr. Thomas Stevens, Patty’s ophthalmologist, who explained the nature and severity of her visual disability, based on his own examinations and his review of records from other doctors. He explained how macular degeneration had destroyed Patty’s central vision, leaving her below the threshold of legal blindness. In one test, she had to be within five feet of an eye chart to make out the largest letter. She would have a very hard time discerning detail, especially in dim light.

Eisenberg, on cross, asked whether Patty could make out whether someone wore glasses or had facial hair if he was “right on top of her.”

Stevens agreed this was possible, in good lighting. Eisenberg then listed some details from Woodmansee’s report, including that her assailant did not wear glasses. At just this moment, Bong absentmindedly removed his wire-rimmed glasses and set them on the table.

The next witness was crime scene investigator William Kaddatz, who explained how he collected evidence at Patty’s duplex early on the morning of September 4, 1997. Schwaemle, using a device that dis-played images on a television monitor that faced the jury box, had the 235

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veteran cop describe his diagrams and reports, as well as the two dozen color photographs he took at the time. She called particular attention to his photos of the bottle of Body Splash found in Patty’s clothes hamper, initially covered in part by a white sock. Schwaemle also asked whether, in collecting the bedding, Kaddatz had found a fitted bottom sheet. He had not.

Kaddatz, fielding questions from Eisenberg, said he examined the phone in the kitchen and even tested it for fingerprints, along with other items. He also searched the apartment for blood but found none except on Patty’s pillow.

Nichol had instructed the jurors that they could ask questions of witnesses. These had to be put in writing for prior review by the judge and opposing counsel. Kaddatz’s testimony prompted one juror to ask whether he found fingerprints from Patty and Misty on the items tested.

Kaddatz said there were none and that this was unusual: typically, household items would have prints on top of prints on top of prints.

Next up was Patty’s old friend Cheryll, who had spoken with her at the coffee shop on October 3, 1997, the day after Patty recanted. “She was visibly upset,” Cheryll told the jury. “She said that she had been raped. And she said that she wished she had never called the police.”

They didn’t believe she was raped, Patty had said. They didn’t believe she was blind. She asked for a lawyer and they refused. So, eventually,

“she just outright told them what they wanted to hear . . . to get out of there.” Eisenberg established that Patty had in recent weeks let Cheryll and her husband stay at her place, after they had fallen on hard times.

The prosecution called Jill Poarch. Now head of her hospital’s Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program, Poarch had by this time conducted hundreds of sexual assault exams and reviewed thousands more.

She explained her examination of Patty on September 4, the tools and procedures she used, the injuries and other findings she documented.

Asked about Patty’s demeanor, she reviewed a behavioral checklist and read the items she’d checked: “controlled, cooperative, quiet, trembling, and tearful.”

Poarch said Patty’s exam was “consistent” with her account of what happened. Injuries were typically found in about 40 to 50 percent of anal assaults and would be less likely if the victim did not resist or the rapist used lubrication. In this case, there was an abrasion just next to
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the anus. No visual inspection was ever done of the inside of the anus, so there may have been injury that was not observed.

Eisenberg, in turn, zeroed in on the anal assault and the suspicious lack of more serious injury. Hadn’t Poarch told the detective the abrasion was “like a fingernail scratch”? Hadn’t she inserted a gloved finger to check for bleeding and found none? Hadn’t the victim indicated that no lubricant was used? Hadn’t she told Feagles she did not feel there had been significant anal penetration? Poarch confirmed all of these things. But she also answered yes when asked by Schwaemle on redirect whether full anal penetration could have occurred.

After a break for lunch, Alonzo “Lonnie” Elvord Jr., twenty-five, took the stand wearing a brown leather jacket. He identified himself as Joseph Bong’s cousin. He admitted he had once been convicted of a crime, but the jury was not allowed to know this was the hotel robbery and abduction he perpetrated with Bong just days after Patty’s rape.

Elvord testified that he had been to Misty’s place at least several times and had even helped her and Patty make the vending machine run.

He knew she was blind and that she kept money from her business in zippered bags at her duplex, the door to which “was hardly ever kept locked.” In September 1997 he and Bong were both living with Elvord’s mother on Madison’s east side, and both worked for the same employer; they sometimes went drinking together. But Elvord denied ever telling Bong details about Misty’s mother or her business.

Elvord, under questioning by Eisenberg, made other statements that undercut the prosecution’s case. He claimed to have picked up Bong at Misty’s apartment “once or twice.” He said he saw Misty enter her mother’s bedroom when she was not there. He confirmed the au-thenticity of photos, circa 1997, showing Bong to be muscular with a tattoo on his chest. These photos were projected on the monitor for the jury to see.

The next prosecution witness was Cindy Thiesenhusen, the first officer on the scene. She recalled how Patty had been shaking and crying and gave an initial statement in which she remembered, among other things, that her assailant had “asked how old her daughter was” and if she “would be a good fuck.” Was Patty freely bleeding anywhere? asked Schwaemle. “No,” answered Thiesenhusen. She also attested to the chain of evidence, telling what was taken where. Lauri Schwartz, who 238

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had switched roles from detective to sergeant, would give similar just-the-facts testimony later that day.

Misty, now twenty-five and living in Sheboygan, where she worked for a security company, was called to the stand. From Schwaemle’s point of view, this was a huge risk. Misty could help her case a little or hurt it a lot. Her memory was not impressive, and she could be incautious in the things she said. It was important that jurors hear from her, but more important that they believed her. And Misty might not come across as credible.