Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (37 page)

The bigger surprise (“none of us had any idea”) was that Bong was already in prison and had multiple felonies on his record. He had looked so clean-cut and respectable. After the verdict, the jurors were emotional and several were crying. The bailiff told them about Bong’s criminal past, which made them feel more at ease with their decision.

It was, in many ways, a decision that proved Jefferson’s point. A judge might say the police are legally allowed to do this. A prosecutor might say my job is to back up the police. A regulatory board might say our hands are tied. But a group of twelve ordinary citizens could look at the same situation and say something is wrong here, and find its way to the truth.

The jury’s verdicts proved decisive, and not just for Joseph Bong.

Patty was transformed from victim to hero. The Madison Police Department had done nothing to keep her assailant from victimizing others. Patty had done everything she could.

On March 15, 2004, the Monday after trial, District Attorney Brian Blanchard sent Patty a letter. His first purpose, he said, was to apologize for “errors” made by his office “that caused you unnecessary anguish over a number of years.” He said evidence that emerged due to the prosecution of Joseph Bong “reveals that this office should not have charged you with the crime of obstruction in 1998.” He called it “now obvious
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[this] was a mistake that had grave consequences for you and your family, and also potentially for the safety of others. If it is of any consolation to you, the errors of this office have resulted in a great deal of introspec-tion here about how we handle cases of this type, reflection that should translate into better responses to victims in the future.”

Blanchard’s second purpose was to thank Patty for her “gracious and courageous cooperation” in bringing Bong to justice. “One of the most moving parts of a prosecutor’s job,” he wrote, “is working with victims and witnesses who respond to abuse with dignity and to lies with honesty. We do not judge victims for their level of heroism; a crime victim or a witness is not responsible for having to be a hero under miserable circumstances that he or she did not create. But you have done what many people would be afraid to do, and in so doing have won the genuine admiration of the staff of this office.”

Chief Williams, to whom Blanchard sent a copy of this letter, took a different view. In his last days on the job, he issued a department-wide memo defending his department’s handling of the case. He said the sexual assault against Patty, whom he identified by last name, had been

“vigorously investigated.” He even minted a fresh lie, saying allegations that Bong was identified as a suspect early on “were investigated by

[special agent] Feagles and determined to be untrue.” He also told the
Wisconsin State Journal,
which after the trial ran a long article on the case, that the mythical state review of his department’s actions showed

“we had done nothing wrong.” Having fabricated this finding, who was he to argue with it?

Detective Schwartz, who once boasted of her department’s commitment to “owning our mistakes,” told the paper how Patty (whom she still had never met or spoken to) had not seemed credible: “We can’t make cases better than they are. If we’re not absolutely certain, we’re supposed to err on the side of letting the guilty go free. Patty was inconsistent in what she reported.” Draeger, who would retire from the police department in 2005, issued a statement saying she had accepted “responsibility for my actions,” which she refused to discuss: “I feel it’s time to move on and pray that we can all heal.” Woodmansee declined to comment.

After Bong’s trial, I reported that Woodmansee had sent his case file to the district attorney’s office the day after he was presented with 260

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Patty’s letters of complaint to his boss and that he then apparently lied under oath about this in his testimony to the Madison Police and Fire Commission. Neither the police department nor the PFC did anything about it.

The outcome of Patty’s case did have one immediate and arguably inappropriate consequence. Two weeks after the verdict, a twenty-year-old UW–Madison student disappeared from her apartment, sparking a massive police manhunt and drawing a horde of national media reporters. Four days later, she was found alive and unharmed. The young woman’s story had multiple problems, and police obtained videotape of her buying a knife, duct tape, and other items she used to stage her own abduction. Even still, they continued to search for and even put out a sketch of her alleged assailant, ringing up tens of thousands of dollars in overtime costs. Police officials lied to the public and the press, saying they had “no reason to believe [the student’s] story is made up.” She eventually confessed to fabricating her ordeal to win sympathy from her boyfriend. Asked to defend their actions, the police pointed to Patty’s case, with one law enforcement source telling the press, “They just can’t expose themselves, considering what they’ve just gone through.”

Joseph Bong’s sentencing was originally set for mid-August, but there was, fittingly enough, another delay, this one caused when Bong went into a diabetic coma in the Dane County jail the day before.

He was taken to the hospital and nearly died; he remained comatose for more than a week. There was suspicion his health crisis was self-induced, in part because Bong that day wrote his young daughter a note that had the ring of finality: “Hey, little girl. Your dad just wants you to know he love you. I’ll all ways be with you. . . . I’m not saying good by . . . because Ill never really be gone.”

Bong recovered, and his sentencing took place on October 11, 2004, more than seven years after Patty’s sexual assault. A few days earlier, he ended up back in the hospital, and Patty was initially told the sentencing would be postponed again. But on the prescribed day, Bong was well enough to be brought back to Dane County, and Patty got a call just hours before the hearing. She headed down with her mother and sister Sue, who happened to be visiting. Bong did not wish to be present and resisted efforts to bring him back, aggressively enough that he was accompanied by five deputies. His head was again shaved nearly bald.

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Schwaemle, citing Bong’s history of “very brutal sexual assaults that have a unique aspect of victimization,” asked for one hundred years.

Eisenberg, claiming this sentence would be longer than if Bong had

“walked into [Patty’s] house, put a gun to her head, and shot her,” asked for thirty years. He noted that his client had major problems with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse for which he never received adequate treatment. He said the three separate charges for sexual contact with different body parts ought to be treated as one offense, since they happened in rapid succession, “bang bang bang.” Bong, given a chance to speak, told the court: “There are things I would like to say, but after talking to Mr. Eisenberg, he has advised me that I should probably just pipe down and deal with the appealable issues that come through. So I’m sorry I don’t have more for you to go on from my side, but [it’s] due to my lawyer’s advice.”

Nichol reflected on Bong’s extensive criminal record, which he called “terrible . . . about as bad as I have seen.” He told Bong that while

“you weren’t responsible for what the police put [Patty] through, but that too was a terrible miscarriage,” Bong was clearly someone from whom the public needed protection. Nichol, less than three weeks from retirement, sentenced Bong to fifty years. When added to his existing sentence and against time served, it meant Bong would not be eligible for parole until 2014 and, more likely, would serve the rest of his life in prison, with a mandatory release date of 2048. That is, unless his appeals process were to win him a new trial and a different result.

Patty was never compensated by the city for any of the time or money she spent defending herself against criminal charges or pursuing her own path to justice. At one point, her lawyers met to discuss making overtures in this direction but decided it would be futile. For Patty, a bond was broken between her and the city where she had lived for most of her life. In late 2004 she accepted a vending route well outside of Madison and a year later moved to a small Wisconsin town, closer to her new responsibilities, though she kept her Madison apartment for some time afterward. Her ordeal had made her less trusting of people in power, but it had also made her stronger, more confident in herself. She had been the perfect victim, but managed, through her own passionate commitment to the truth, to triumph over the outrageous adversity she was made to endure.

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A charitable observer of Patty’s tale might argue that the system is self-correcting. Mayor Bauman was drummed out of office; other players who seemed ill-suited for their roles, including Chief Williams, Deputy District Attorney Karofsky, and Detective Draeger, faded away.

And, in the end, the same office that had charged Patty with a crime for having reported being raped became her avenging angel, working mightily to set the balance right.

On the other hand, the Madison Police Department never admitted error or offered Patty any apology. The only “I’m sorry” she got from the cops was in 2001, from Captain Maples, who was consequently investigated for possible disciplinary action. (She was later passed over by the PFC for the vacant chief ’s job and soon after resigned from the force.) The only apparent change within the Madison Police Department happened in 2003, when its policies and procedures manual was revised to specifically allow officers to engage in untruthfulness “as part of legitimate investigative activity.”

The message of Patty’s case, beyond the example of her remarkable courage, is that the justice system is not necessarily just. A judge who says police have the legal authority to trick a suspect into confessing may be upholding case law, but he or she is not making reasonable judg-ments about what is right and what is wrong. Lawyers who brutalize a blind rape victim may be looking out for their clients’ financial interests, or their own, but they are not behaving decently. Cops who come to court in support of the defense of a violent rapist may be showing solidarity with a fellow officer, but they are also showing disrespect for what they are supposed to represent.

Maybe the mistakes made by Tom Woodmansee (who has remained a detective in good standing in the Madison Police Department) were understandable, given the circumstances with which he was presented.

But his refusal to admit having made them, no matter how obvious it became, put his conduct in a different category. He could have proved, on any number of occasions, what he once called his “sense of values and integrity” simply by saying, “Look, guys, I think I screwed up.” His failure to do so is not all his fault; in this, he was aided and abetted by others in the department and by a city that despite its air of superiority is prone to bouts of moral narcolepsy. Everyone seemed to care more about protecting his honor than doing the honorable thing. And thus he became less of a protector of the public than a danger to it.

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The same can be said for the entire justice system. The truest mark of its corruption is not that it makes mistakes but that it is so reluctant to admit them. And it is not enough for the system to admit it made one here, after a jury reached this finding beyond a reasonable doubt. It is a lesson it must take to heart. The use of police interrogation techniques so effective at getting people to confess that they work even on the innocent must be reconsidered, perhaps prohibited. The unholy harmony of purpose that has developed between police and prosecutors needs to be broken, so each can serve as a check on the other. Victims of police misconduct must have access to independent oversight boards equipped with genuine power and the will to use it. And players throughout the system must find the courage to revisit cases where the exercise of their power may have produced an unjust result, like convicting the innocent.

To admit the justice system’s capacity for error and abuse is not weakness but strength. To say “I’m sorry” is not just an admission of wrongdoing but also an affirmation of the desire to do what’s right. For the system to work, it needs to pay attention to those times when it doesn’t. After all, the people who run it are only human.

Afterword

Response to the publication of
Cry Rape
in the fall of 2006 was, in Madison, immediate and overwhelming. It was the kind of reaction I naively thought my original reporting on Patty’s case would prompt, but didn’t. One reason for this difference is that the book, for the first time, laid out Patty’s ordeal in its totality, after events made the enormity of the injustice she endured nearly impossible to deny—although, in some quarters, efforts to do so persisted. But the main reason Patty’s story finally connected with the conscience of official Madison was a young man named Austin King.

King, 25, had been elected to the Madison Common Council in 2003, representing a mostly student district. As an undergraduate majoring in Spanish, he had been active in a host of causes, including an anti-sexual-assault movement that involved teach-ins at campus frater-nities. King, by day a labor union lobbyist, soon emerged as one of the twenty-member council’s most active and progressive players. He led an effort to raise the city’s minimum wage, jump-starting a statewide hike, and pushed to make local employers offer sick-leave benefits. In April 2006 he became council president, the youngest alderperson ever to hold this position.

For King, the details of Patty’s story were a revelation, and a call to action. Reading an
Isthmus
excerpt from the book about her travails during the civil lawsuit stirred in him the same feelings as seeing the photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib—shame, remorse, and a sense of personal responsibility. He wept. Then he got to work.

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