Recently Netflix released a mini series called Unbelievable. In this show a young girl says she has been raped but police don’t believe her. That was until two female detectives are able to link their rape cases to the young victim.
Now all of this sounds exactly like what a Netflix drama should be but believe it or not Unbelievable is based on real life events.
The Beginning
The real story was first reported by journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong in the Pulitzer-winning Marshall Project and ProPublica article, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.” The story is true, and deeply devastating, if not exactly shocking in a real-life climate where, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), three out of four rapes go unreported, often because victims fear retaliation or that police will not help them.
Our story begins on August 11, 2008. Shortly before dawn, an 18-year-old woman only identified by her middle name Marie was attacked in her Lynnwood, Washington, apartment at knifepoint by a masked man. The intruder tied and gagged her, raped her, and took photographs of her, which he threatened to post online if she contacted the police. Nonetheless, she immediately reported the attack to authorities.
An officer told Marie he’d found several inconsistencies between what she’d said and what witnesses, including one of Marie’s ex-boyfriends and a former foster mother, had said. Another officer told Marie he believed she had made up her account. Eventually, Marie recanted her report. She was later charged with a gross misdemeanor of filing a false report.
The media got ahold of this information and announced, “A Western Washington woman has confessed that she cried wolf when it came to her rape she reported earlier this week. She had been charged with filing a false report, which is why she was here today, to accept or turn down a plea deal.”
Maria’s lawyer was surprised she had been charged. Her story hadn’t hurt anyone — no suspects arrested, or even questioned. His guess was, the police felt used. They don’t appreciate having their time wasted.
The prosecution’s offer was this: If she met certain conditions for the next year, the charge would be dropped. She would need to get mental health counseling for her lying. She would need to go on supervised probation. She would need to keep straight, breaking no more laws. And she would have to pay $500 to cover the court’s costs.
Marie wanted this behind her. She took the deal.
The original journalist Miller and Armstrong described Marie’s thought process in that moment.
“To Marie, it seemed the questioning had lasted for hours. She did what she always did when under stress. She flipped the switch, as she called it, suppressing all the feelings she didn’t know what to do with. Before she confessed to making up the story, she couldn’t look the two detectives, the two men, in the eye. Afterward, she could. Afterward, she smiled. She went into the bathroom and cleaned up. Flipping the switch was a relief — and it would let her leave.”
In an episode of This American Life released in tandem with the ProPublica article, Marie opened up about her memories of the experience. “I’m still in shock that they didn’t believe me,” she said. “I was mad, too. I did pound my hand on the table and stuff like that. And the only way they would leave me alone is if I wrote a statement saying that it didn’t happen.”
Marie grew up in the foster care system where she would move around a lot. No one would tell her why she was moving she would just move. In one story Marie was with a family she truly loved and was about to start high school with classes she was excited to be in. As she entered the school the support counselor met her and said, “Your foster family lost their license. You can’t live with them anymore.” Marie had 20 min to pack and leave. All she could do was cry.
Marie met her biological father only once and her biological mother would often leave her in the care of boyfriends. At an early age Marie was on all kinds of drugs including Zoloft. She was only 8. It was during this time Marie was sexually and physically abused.
One week after she reported her rape, Marie returned to the police station to recant her written statement, which she said she had made under duress. She told Rittgarn and another officer that she really had been raped, and she said she wanted to take a lie detector test to prove it. In response, Rittgarn warned Marie that if she failed the test, she would be jailed and might lose her housing assistance. Marie “backed down” at this, and “the police officers walked her downstairs, where the Project Ladder representatives asked if she had been raped. Marie said no.”
Project Ladder is a program designed for people transitioning from foster care to living alone.To stay in the program, Project Ladder’s managers told Marie that she had to confess to her peers that she had made up the story. She felt ostracized as a result and briefly considered suicide.
Other Victums
20 miles from Lynnwood, Washington is Kirkland. In October 2008 a 63 year old woman reported that she was raped by a man with a knife who broke into her apartment, tied her up, and took pictures. “For the last two or three months, the woman told police, she felt as if someone had been following her.”
A year later in Aurora, Colorado, a 65-year-old woman reported being raped by a masked man who tied her hands with a ribbon, took pictures, and threatened to post them online.
July 2010 a 46-year-old woman in Lakewood, Colorado, reported that a masked man with a knife had broken into her apartment and tried to tie her wrists. She had managed to escape through her bedroom window. At the scene, police found several pieces of evidence including shoe prints in the soil outside the victim’s bedroom and “honeycomb marks” on a window.
In August 2010 in Westminster, Colorado, a 59-year-old woman reported that she had been raped in her apartment by a masked man who tied her hands, took photographs of her, and made her shower afterward. Investigators found honeycomb marks on the window, which Detective Edna Hendershot, who responded to the Westminster scene, later identified as a match for those found at the Lakewood scene.
And finally on January 5, 2011 a 26-year-old woman in Golden, Colorado, reported that she was repeatedly raped in her apartment by a masked man with a gun; he tied her hands, took photographs of her, and made her shower afterward. He also took her sheets and bedding with him. This is when Detective Stacy Galbraith responded to the scene. She will be an important person in tying all this together. The victim also remembered one distinctive physical detail about her attacker: a dark, egg-sized birthmark on his left calf.
That night as Stay was heading home she began to ask herself “who is this guy and how am I going to find him?” Stacy often volunteered to take rape cases. As a wife and mother she was good at empathizing with the victims, who were overwhelmingly women. But Stacy had doubts about the Golden, Colorado woman’s story. Was she telling the truth? Or fabricating a ruse to cover a sexual encounter gone wrong?
Once home Stacy recounted the day’s events to her husband who was use to the bleak stories. David Galbraith was also a cop who worked in Westminster, Colorado. As David was listening to Stacy’s story something hit him. The details of the case sounded eerily similar to one his department was working on.
The next day Stacy sent an email to the Westminster Police Department, asking the officers if they had received any reports of crimes that seemed similar to the Golden attack. Cops are often protective of their cases, fearing that information could be leaked that would jeopardize their investigations. But one detective recognized the potential in collaboration.
Edna Hendershot settled into her desk and began to read the email sent by Stacy. Suddenly her mind shot back to a case she worked on 5 months ago. A 59 year old woman was tied, raped, and had her picture taken by a man in a black mask. Edna also remembered that while investigating her case, an officer had alerted her to an incident in October 2009 in Aurora, a suburb on the other side of Denver. Same MO, older woman tie, raped, and pictures taken of her by a man in a black mask.
Edna reached out to Stacy and the two joined forces with Detective Scott Burgess. The 3 compared their cases and came up with once key piece of evidence linking them. The descriptions of the attacker were similar. So, too, his methods. But there was a clincher: the woman in Stacy’s case had remained as focused as possible during her ordeal, memorizing details. She recalled the camera that the attacker had used to take photos. It was a pink Sony digital camera — a description that fit the model stolen from the apartment of the Westminster victim.
The trio later broadened their search and discovered the Lakewood case which was at the time labeled as a burglary. But with fresh eyes ,it appeared very much like a failed rape attempt, committed by an attacker who closely resembled the description of the rapist.
Investigation
At first it seemed like the team had a lead as to the identity of the attacker. Police obtained surveillance footage from the Golden Colorado case. Through 12 hours of blurry footage and 261 vehicles later a white Mazda pickup truck appeared 10 times. But efforts to identify the vehicle’s owner failed. The license plate was unreadable.
Lead after lead continued to produce dead ends. By late January the detectives decided they needed to broaden their scope. This turned up an incident in Lakewood, another Denver suburb, that occurred about a month before the rape in Westminster. Again police labeled the case a burglary. But with fresh eye the details matched the other rape cases. But in this case Investigators at the scene uncovered a few, tenuous pieces of evidence. The night before the attack thunderstorms soaked the ground. This lead to the attacker leaving a shoe print in the damp soil. They also found honeycomb marks on a window. The same honeycomb marks were also found at the Westminster crime scene.
The team believed the marks were from a pair of Under Armour gloves from a Dick’s Sporting Goods. Footprints also matched the footprints in the snow from the Golden crime scene. Stacy decided to send the images of the shoe prints to crimeshoe.com, a website that promised to move an investigation “from an unidentified scene-of-crime shoeprint to detailed footwear information in one simple step.”
This site identified the prints as being a pair of Adidas ZX 700 mesh shoes, available in stores after March 2005.
So they’ve identified the gloves and shoes but not a physical person.
However, the team was able to connect 4 rapes over a 15 month period across Denver’s suburb. If you drew a map, it was almost like the rapist was circling the compass points of Denver’s suburbs.
Stacy and Edna turned to DNA to identify the serial rapist. But the problem was the attacker knew to avoid leaving his DNA at the scene. He used wet wipes to clean up his ejaculate. He ordered the women to shower. He took their clothing and bedding with him when he left. While he had been carful he wasn’t perfect. Technicians recovered three samples of so-called touch DNA, as few as seven or eight cells of skin that could be analyzed with modern laboratory techniques.
Unfortunately, analysis of the touch DNA produced mixed results. The samples narrowed the field of suspects to males belonging to the same paternal family line. But there was not enough genetic material to identify a single individual. The results couldn’t even be entered into the FBI’s DNA database.
But the team got a break when they were approached by a young crime analyst from Lakewood police department after a press meeting. The woman told the team that 3 weeks before the attempted rape in Lakewood, a woman had called police late in the evening to report a suspicious pickup truck parked on the street with a man inside. Police checked it out, but the man was gone. What had attracted the analyst’s attention was the location of the pickup. It was parked half a block from the Lakewood victim’s house, by an empty field adjacent to her backyard. The pickup was a 1993 white Mazda.
The pickup was registered to a Lakewood man named Marc Patrick O’Leary who became the team’s prime suspect. On February 13, Stacy knocked on his door with a search warrant and patted O’Leary down, lifting his left pant leg to look for the distinctive birthmark the Golden victim had described. She found it. As Stacy told This American Life, she immediately thought, “He’s the guy. He needed to be in handcuffs. He was very surprised. He went almost blue.”
Caught
O’Leary was arrested for burglary and sexual assault. Inside his home, investigators found shoes that matched the prints left outside the Golden and Lakewood scenes, a pair of Under Armour gloves with a honeycomb pattern, and a black head wrap that seemed to have been used as a mask.
Police enlisted a forensic computer specialist to access encrypted files on O’Leary’s hard drive. The specialist found a folder containing photographs of all O’Leary’s victims, including “an image of a woman Stacy didn’t recognize. It was a young woman‚ far younger than the Colorado victims, perhaps a teenager. The pictures showed her looking terrified, bound, and gagged on a bed.” The picture also included the woman’s learner’s permit, identifying her as Marie!
Stacy told This American Life:
“I don’t have just an unknown victim here that I may never know who she is. I know who this is … He probably did that as a form of intimidation to her: I know who you are. I’ll have your name and your address. But it helped us, actually.”
Lynwood police tracked down Marie, who was now living in a town to the south of Seattle. They told her the news: Her rapist had been arrested in Colorado. They gave her an envelope with information on counseling for rape victims. They said her record would be expunged. And they handed her $500, a refund of her court costs. Marie broke down, experiencing, all at once, shock, relief and anger. According to This American Life, Marie ultimately asked the lead detective on her case for an apology. She received it.
On December 9, 2011 O’Leary pleaded guilty to 28 counts of rape and associated felonies in Colorado, and was later sentenced to 327 and a half years in prison. He is imprisoned at the Sterling Correctional Facility and will never be released.
In June 2012 Stacy worked with a Washington criminal analyst to link O’Leary to the rapes in both Lynnwood and Kirkland. He pleaded guilty to both in June, and was later sentenced to 40 years for the rape in Kirkland and 28 and a half years for the rape of Marie in Lynnwood.
Marie sued the city of Lynnwood. Per the Seattle Times, she stated in her lawsuit that Lynnwood detectives had “disregarded evidence of the assault, bullied her into saying it didn’t happen, and then threatened to have her thrown out of her apartment when she insisted it did.” In January of 2014, she settled with the city for $150,000.
In a 2018 NPR interview a representative spoke about how Marie was doing. They said the was well and that, “One of the things that Marie told us is that after all of this happened, she didn’t want to live in fear. She didn’t want to let this experience limit her in how she went about the rest of her life. These days she’s a long haul truck driver. She drives an 18-wheeler across the country. She and I speak fairly often. And it seems like every time I talk to her she’s in a different state. She is strong. And she is resilient.”
In 2019 Marie told ProPublic:
“I don’t want to cower in the corner. I didn’t want it to ruin the rest of my life. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I wasn’t going to let him destroy me.”
Stats
According to RAINN the majority of sexual assaults are not reported to the police. Only 230 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are reported to authorities. That means about 3 out of 4 go unreported. Between 2005–2010 the victim gave the following reasons for not reporting.
- 20% feared retaliation
- 13% believed the police would not do anything to help
- 13% believed it was a personal matter
- 8% reported to a different official
- 8% believed it was not important enough to report
- 7% did not want to get the perpetrator in trouble
- 2% believed the police could not do anything to help
- 30% gave another reason, or did not cite one reason
To throw more stats at you out of 1,000 sexual assaults 995 perpetrators will walk free.
So what can we do to change these stats? First we need to provide training to officers on how to handle the sensitivity of the cases. Next we need to remove the stigma reporting sexual assaults have. And while this is easier said than done RAINN has made it their mission.
If you are a victim you can call their hot line at 800.656.HOPE You’ll be connected to a staff member from a local sexual assault service provider who will walk you through the process of getting help and reporting to law enforcement at your own pace. You can even go online to rainn.org and locate an article about reporting to law enforcement. It has all the steps outlined for you.
Not a victim? RAINN offers training and resources such as how to identify sexual assault and ways to support the organization financially.
To hear this episode and more visit lightsonpod.com
