February 11, 2011
Lakewood, Colorado
MARC PATRICK O’LEARY.
That was the name on the driver’s license displayed on the laptop screen in front of Galbraith. O’Leary was just over six feet tall. He weighed 220 pounds. His hair was blond. His eyes were hazel. His face seemed square, heavy, like a clay doll. His lips were thick, his hair short. He had a prominent brow. He lived at 65 Harlan Street, in Lakewood. His birthdate: June 22, 1978. Galbraith did the math. He was thirty-two years old.
“It’s him,” she thought.
Galbraith felt a pang of regret. She hadn’t told her fellow investigators about the white truck because she didn’t consider it a strong lead. It was luck, just pure luck, that DiGiosio had found it. But sometimes, that’s what it took. Galbraith quickly explained the connection to the other cops around the table in the Westminster conference room.
A white Mazda in the vicinity of two of the victims.
The victims’ description of the attacker matched O’Leary’s driver’s license.
The cops in the room—Hendershot, Galbraith, Burgess, and Hassell—had lived blurred days in the month since Amber’s rape. They had dug in dumpsters and ditches, questioned college kids and cable guys, created a task force on the fly, and collaborated with each other’s crime scene investigators and crime analysts. They had exhausted themselves, certain that a serial rapist was loose. Now, with a suspect finally identified, they would work even harder. The conference room in the Westminster Police Department cleared out. The cops raced back to their offices to dig into one question.
Who was this guy?
Galbraith checked the National Crime Information Center, which showed no criminal record—not even a traffic ticket. She enlisted her husband, David, to search the Internet. Once again, they sat across from each other on their living room couches, each armed with a laptop. David got the first hit. Marc P. O’Leary had registered a porn site called teensexhub.net. The rapist had threatened to post photos of the victims online. As soon as David saw the link, he figured he wouldn’t be seeing much of his wife anymore. “Stacy’s a very driven person when she gets a major case. She’ll work thirty to forty hours straight to get ahead of it.”
Grusing contacted his counterparts in the investigative arm of the Defense Department to find out whether O’Leary had been in the armed services—something both Amber and Lilly had suspected. He got a quick response, but with little detail. O’Leary had enlisted in the Army. He had risen to the rank of sergeant. He had been honorably discharged from active duty.
DiGiosio continued her digging. The Lakewood Police Department, like more than 70 percent of law enforcement agencies in the United States, had invested in a crime-fighting tool called a license plate reader, or LPR. The small, high-speed cameras—they can take 1,800 photos a minute—are affixed to the front of patrol cars. As cops drive around, the readers snap pictures of every license plate passed. The information on the license plate—in addition to the date, time, and location of the photo—is automatically fed into a database. Over time, the database had proven far more useful than any log of stolen underwear.
As it turned out, one of the vehicles with a reader was driven by a cop who passed 65 Harlan Street on his way to work. So when DiGiosio typed in the license plate number, she got three hits. One picture captured O’Leary standing next to the white Mazda in his driveway. Another showed the right passenger-side mirror—bent just like the mirror of the white Mazda pickup in the surveillance video from Golden.
Later, Hendershot pored over DiGiosio’s discoveries at her cubicle in Westminster. One of the LPR photos captured the Mazda driving through Lakewood on August 10, 2010. That was the same day Sarah had been raped, Hendershot realized. She looked at the time stamp: 8:49:05 a.m. Only two hours after the rapist had fled the apartment. Then Hendershot found something even more astonishing. Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles records showed that O’Leary had his picture taken for a new license at 11:13 a.m. on the same day. In the picture, he wore a white T-shirt. Sarah had described her attacker as wearing a white T-shirt. It was an astounding chain of events. But Hendershot was still cautious. Who knew what more they were going to find out?
“I want the right guy to go to prison forever, you know what I mean? But you can’t be narrow in focus. You can have that bit of excitement, but there’s still so much more work to do. I can’t imagine how horrible it would be to jump to the conclusion and convict the wrong person, right? I’m excited…but there’s still so much work to be done,” Hendershot said.
IT HAD BEEN a chilly morning for the two FBI agents on the stakeout. They sat in their car, parked down the street from O’Leary’s home at 65 Harlan Street. Cars whizzed past. The temperature hovered just above freezing. The sky was clear. It was Friday, February 11, 2011.
At 12:13 p.m., a man and a woman stepped out of the house. He was about six feet one, blond hair, maybe two hundred pounds. She had dark hair, looked to be about twenty. O’Leary and who? A girlfriend? The pair got into a Toyota Corolla and drove off. The agents followed. They were hoping that O’Leary would go for a sweaty workout. Or spit on the ground. Or do anything, really, that might result in his leaving body fluid in a public place. Such remnants were called “abandoned DNA”—genetic material left in the open. Even though the Fourth Amendment required a warrant to gather a suspect’s genetic signature from his home or body, the courts had ruled abandoned DNA fair game for police. The agents could collect it; the state crime lab could analyze it. If O’Leary’s DNA matched the partial profile from the rapist, they would know that the two men were at least related, if not the same man.
O’Leary and the woman drove a half mile to the Lookin’ Good Restaurant and Lounge, a Greek, American, and Mexican diner. The agents waited outside as the couple ate for an hour and a half. When they left, an agent rushed in. He stopped the busboy, who was collecting dishes from the table. After a quick talk with the restaurant manager, the agent walked out with the coffee mug that O’Leary had used. It would have plenty of abandoned DNA on its rim.
While the surveillance agents watched O’Leary, Grusing and a local cop ventured to the front door of 65 Harlan Street. They were dressed like civilians, slacks and shirts. They planned to install a surveillance camera to watch the house and wanted to make sure nobody was home. But when Grusing knocked, a man answered. Grusing recognized him immediately.
It was Marc O’Leary.
Holy shit. Grusing had prepared for the possibility of someone being home. But he hadn’t expected it to be the suspect he thought had just left. He fell back on the ruse he had practiced. His partner explained they were cops. Grusing pulled a police sketch from his pocket and showed it to O’Leary.
There’s been a bunch of burglaries in the neighborhood, Grusing said. Seen anybody who looks like this?
In reality, the sketch was from an FBI murder case. Grusing watched O’Leary closely. Did he suspect? O’Leary held the sketch and examined it. If he were the rapist, Grusing thought, he sure didn’t show it. He seemed to be thinking. But he didn’t seem panicked.
“No, I haven’t seen that guy,” O’Leary told Grusing. He handed back the sketch.
Can I get your name and birthdate? Grusing asked. O’Leary provided them. Still no signs of panic.
Anyone else live here? Grusing asked.
Just my brother, Michael, O’Leary said. He promised to share the news about the burglaries.
As Grusing walked away, he felt like the trick had worked. He had studied bad guys. He knew how they thought. Every cop they saw, every patrol car that passed, was a source of paranoia. “The bad guys always think somebody’s after them,” he said.
He knew, too, how they compensated. They simply got used to it. O’Leary would be suspicious of him. But it would be the same distrust he held of every cop who looked too closely at him. He would rationalize it as another close call. He would have no idea how close.
It didn’t take long to sort things out. The surveillance agents had been following Michael O’Leary and his girlfriend. Michael’s DNA was on the coffee mug. Could they use Michael’s DNA to compare to the rapist’s DNA? Grusing called the director of the state crime lab. Yes—it didn’t matter which male relative provided a sample to compare to the rapist’s DNA. They could do the analysis overnight, the director told Grusing.
The next day, at 2:15 p.m. on February 12, Galbraith got the results. The rapist’s DNA—the few dozen cells found on Doris’s teddy bear, Sarah’s white kitchen timer, and Amber’s face—matched the cells on the rim of Michael O’Leary’s coffee mug. The chance of such a match happening at random was one in 4,114 for white males. If you were a gambler, you’d bet that the rapist was an O’Leary man.
During the investigation, Grusing and Galbraith met regularly at his office in a turn-of-the-century red-brick building in the middle of Denver’s dusty stockyards. It had once housed the Denver Union Stockyard Company and had the feel of a bank, with Ionic columns, wide staircases, and aged wood paneling. The FBI office on the top floor felt more like a men’s club. The agents had decorated the inside with taxidermy of illegally caught game seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service—a javelina here, an elk head there. The men’s bathroom featured a white porcelain urinal the size of a small refrigerator. The metal venetian blinds behind Grusing’s desk were bent—the victim of an impromptu interoffice football game.
Now, the two discussed a new set of facts. A day before, they hadn’t known that Michael O’Leary existed. Now, they knew he was almost Marc’s twin. The two men looked alike—they were almost the same height, and were maybe ten pounds apart. Since the rapist wore a mask, the victims would have a hard time picking between them in a lineup. And Michael was military, too. He had served in the Army. What if Michael had been driving Marc’s pickup to commit the rapes? Or what if they were working together, taking turns?
They still believed that Marc O’Leary was the rapist. But they both knew that a good lawyer would have no trouble making a case for reasonable doubt. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. None of the victims can say for sure which man assaulted her. And neither can modern science. Our legal system says it is better to let ten guilty men go free, than to convict an innocent man. You must acquit.
They needed more.
That evening, Galbraith wrote an affidavit asking a judge for a warrant to search 65 Harlan Street. She listed all the evidence that pointed to Marc O’Leary: his physical appearance, his time in the military, the DNA match. She cataloged the crimes and the lives ripped apart. Using the dry language of a legal document, she wrote down all the things that she hoped to find in the house to prove his guilt:
Items missing from the victims in the cases described above: Pink Sony Cybershot camera, nightgown with blue and yellow floral pattern, women’s panties, green satin pillowcases, green sheets, a solid pink fitted sheet and two matching pillowcases, a pair of white “granny panties,” hot pink sheet, snowflake pajamas, black silk-like bindings.
White T-shirt (possibly with coloring on the front), gray sweatpants with holes in the knees, greenish khaki pants, gray hoodie, black mask, cap or combination thereof, gloves or other item with a honeycomb pattern or imprint, black Adidas shoes with white stripes.
Zippered bag or backpack, items of rope, string, twine or other material that could be fashioned as a ligature; dildo, personal/sexual lubricant, water bottle, wet wipes, thigh high nylons or stockings, vibrator, black camera.
Galbraith finished late that evening. The on-duty judge didn’t want to read the affidavit in an email. He insisted on a facsimile. Galbraith raced around town until she found one store open late, a Safeway, that had a fax machine. The judge signed the warrant at ten o’clock on Saturday night. The raid was set for the next morning.
Galbraith knew that finding the evidence at O’Leary’s house would help the prosecutors build their case. But she needed only one thing to be certain that Marc O’Leary was the rapist.
She emailed a crime analyst at another police department: “I so want to see this guy’s leg! BAD.”
AT 8:15 A.M. on Sunday, February 13, Galbraith knocked on the side door of 65 Harlan Street. It was a clear, cold morning. Snow covered the yard. The circling trees stood winter-bare.
“Police. Search warrant. Open the door!” she shouted. Grusing and six officers from Golden and Lakewood stood behind her, pressed against the south side of the house. They wore bulletproof vests and khaki pants. They had guns drawn.
Galbraith heard noises from inside the house. The door swung open. Marc O’Leary stood in the frame. His dog, Arias, and Michael’s dog, a pit bull, tumbled out ahead of him. Seeing the cops, O’Leary started to kneel.
Outside, outside! Galbraith ordered.
He looked dazed as he stepped out into the slanting midwinter sun. He wore a gray hoodie, baggy gray sweatpants, and slip-on house shoes. He told Galbraith that his brother, Michael, had gone out last night and hadn’t returned. He was alone.
Galbraith pulled him to the side. She patted him down. She knelt down and raised his pants legs.
There it was, on O’Leary’s left calf: a dark birthmark the size of a large egg.
It was him. He was the rapist.
Galbraith turned to Grusing. Thumbs up.
We have a warrant to search the house, Grusing explained to O’Leary. O’Leary said he wanted a lawyer. At that moment, Galbraith walked up behind him.
“You’re under arrest for burglary and sexual assault, which occurred in the City of Golden on January 5, 2011,” she told him. At 8:35 a.m., Galbraith handcuffed O’Leary. She watched as another officer drove him away for booking in the Jefferson County jail. He was fingerprinted. A technician ran cotton swabs against the inside of his cheeks to obtain a complete DNA profile. In a photo room, he stripped naked so that a police photographer could take photos of every part of his body. At his first court appearance, on February 14, 2011, O’Leary was charged with sexual assault, kidnapping, burglary, and menacing. Bail was set at $5 million. The judge worried that O’Leary was “an extreme danger.”
Galbraith was wearing new boots the morning of the arrest. Whenever she looked at them in the future, she would remember catching O’Leary. She had wanted to make the arrest herself. “I wanted to see the look on his face…and for him to know that we figured you out.”
Golden crime scene investigator Amanda Montano led a team of eleven cops, FBI agents, and criminalists in the search of the house. Westminster’s Katherine Ellis had volunteered to help. So had Detective Aaron Hassell from Lakewood, and Detective Marcus Williams and criminalist Kali Gipson, both from Golden. They dressed in white jumpsuits with hoods, and wore blue surgical gloves and white booties. They looked like a biohazard team swarming the scene of a toxic wasteland.
Room by room, the team combed the house. Marc O’Leary’s bedroom was in the northeast corner. Black curtains covered the windows. The bed was pushed against one wall, beige sheets bundled in the middle. The floor was clean. There was a dresser with a television set on top. Inside the drawers, everything was neat, orderly, in its place. His shirts and pants were stacked, three piles to a drawer. On the floor of the closet, several pairs of shoes were positioned side by side. Montano noticed that one pair were black sneakers with three distinctive white stripes. They were Adidas ZX 700 shoes. Just like the website said, Montano thought.
She moved to the computer room in back of the house. Maroon curtains covered a window that normally offered a view of the Rockies. An L-shaped brown desk sat in one corner. On top were a computer, spiral notebooks, and an iPhone. Above the computer, hanging on the wall, was a framed clock with a military coat of arms. Underneath was an engraving, thanking Private First Class Marc Patrick O’Leary for his dedicated service to the 3rd Platoon “Cocks,” A-Company of the 503rd Air Assault Infantry Regiment—one of the units he had served in while in Korea. Military, just like the victims had suspected, Montano thought.
Bookshelves rose above the desk. Montano wrote down the titles. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza. The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. A biography of Sigmund Freud. The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need. The Bible. Sexy Origins and Intimate Things.
A stack of CD-ROMs in blue plastic cases sat on another shelf. On top of the pile: a pink Sony Cyber-shot camera.
That’s almost too perfect, Montano thought.
Throughout the day, Montano and the rest of the team sifted through O’Leary’s life. In the bathroom hamper, they found a black piece of cloth, knotted to form a kind of mask. In the kitchen, sitting in a basket, they discovered a pair of Under Armour gloves with a honeycomb pattern. Under the mattress, they found a black Ruger .380-caliber handgun. The magazine contained six rounds. A black-and-green Eagle Creek backpack hung in a closet in the computer room. It was stuffed with bags. One held a pair of clear, plastic high heels with pink ribbons. Another was a clear plastic Ziploc bag. Neat block letters, scrawled with a black Sharpie, revealed the contents. STOCKINGS. CLAMPS. DILDO. GAG.
In the back of the closet, Williams noticed a small black guitar amp. He turned it around. Two plastic Ziploc bags peeked out of the back. Williams pulled them out. Montano placed the bags on the floor. Inside, she saw women’s underwear. Peach-and-white striped, bright pink, white, light pink, brown, silky baby blue, and white with colored flowers. There were ten pairs in all.
His trophies.
The abundance of evidence astonished every cop on the scene. It was like finishing a jigsaw puzzle. The jagged pieces formed a clear picture: Marc O’Leary.
“As a detective, you serve search warrants all the time. Sometimes you find good stuff. Sometimes, you find a little bit. But you don’t usually find almost every single thing that ties a case to every other case,” Hassell says. “There was so much stuff, you’re like, this is silly.”
After the arrest, Galbraith drove over to Amber’s new apartment. It had been thirty-nine days since the rape. She wanted to break the news.
Amber met her outside in the parking lot. Galbraith told her that the man’s name was Marc O’Leary. That he’d raped other women before her. That Amber had helped to solve the case. Her attention to detail. Her ability to draw him into conversation. Her instincts on his background. Her phone call to police. Galbraith rarely got emotional. But now, she felt overwhelmed—with relief, with satisfaction, with happiness. She began to tear up. I did this for you, she thought.
Amber showed no emotion. She thanked Galbraith. She gave her a quick hug. And then she went back inside the apartment. Galbraith had wanted more of a reaction, even though she knew better. It wasn’t her emotion to have. A victim’s experience of rape was intensely personal.
Hendershot called Sarah. They needed to meet, Hendershot told her. Sarah said she was busy running errands. She didn’t know if she had time to get together.
“Well it’s really, really important,” Hendershot told her. “I’ll go anywhere you are. I don’t care where you’re at, I’ll go anywhere.”
That evening, Hendershot drove to meet her at a Denny’s restaurant. Hendershot saw her in a back corner, eating alone. Sarah had no family nearby. Her husband had died. She had suffered, over and over.
Hendershot sat down, and broke the news.
“It’s over. It’s over. We have him,” she told Sarah.
Both women sat in the booth, tears running down their faces.
“That’s where I got my happy moment, if you will, was when I got to sit in front of her, and tell her that after all this, after everything that you’ve been through, you’ll never, ever have to worry about him again,” Hendershot says.
MICHAEL O’LEARY COULD not understand what was happening. He had driven up to the house at 65 Harlan Street and found it swarming with cops. A crowd ringed the police tape. News crews stood outside, the reporters speaking into cameras. He got out of his car and identified himself to a cop. He was handcuffed and placed into the back of a squad car.
Now, he was sitting in a room in the headquarters of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Two detectives sat in front of him. One introduced himself as Scott Burgess. The other identified herself as Edna Hendershot.
“So do you have any idea what this might be about?” Burgess asked.
“Heck no. I have zero idea,” Michael replied. He knew that his brother had been arrested. But he didn’t know why. He’d seen a story on TV about a guy in Arizona arrested for shooting a bunch of people. The guy had reminded him of his brother: a loner, off-the-grid type. Had Marc been building a bomb or something?
“You don’t get this kind of treatment for a traffic ticket,” Burgess told him.
Burgess and Hendershot fired questions. How did he spend his days?
He went to barber school each morning at eight, and worked at a furniture-delivery store in the afternoons.
Had he ever driven Marc’s pickup anywhere?
Yeah, once. He had used the truck to drop off a television stand somewhere in the Denver suburbs.
Did he use the computer in the back room?
Sure. But he had his own account with his own password. He checked fantasy football scores. Sometimes, he perused a dating website called Plenty of Fish.
Had he ever been to Aurora? Or Westminster? Or Golden?
No. Yes. No.
“Do you have any cousins that live in the Denver area, male cousins?” Hendershot asked.
Nope. There was just his dad. And he lived in Arizona.
Burgess asked a final question. Could he pull up his pants legs?
Michael showed him a scar on his calf. It had come from a bicycle accident when he was a kid. What did that have to do with anything?
“Are you guys gonna tell me what he’s been arrested for or what?” Michael asked.
Burgess hesitated a second. It was a heck of a thing, telling this guy. He literally had no idea. Several women had been raped, Burgess told him. They had described their attacker as six feet tall, about 225 pounds. DNA had tied the rapist to the O’Leary family. And one woman had seen a birthmark on the rapist’s leg.
“I’m sorry to tell you that and I’m sorry to say that this is going to be something that is going to be difficult, I would imagine, for a family to deal with here,” he told Michael. “But we are very confident that Marc, unfortunately, is our suspect.”
Michael said nothing. Burgess and Hendershot continued to ask questions, but Michael stopped answering. Minutes passed in silence as the two cops waited for him to speak.
Finally, he found his voice.
“This is just gonna kill my mom,” he said.
“She’s not gonna be able to handle this, I guarantee you that, like, she’s done. Her life is over. This is just gonna eat her alive forever. It doesn’t matter, there’s nothing I can do about it, nothing anybody can do about it,” he said.
He pressed Burgess. Were they sure they had the right guy? Maybe he was being framed?
Burgess told him no. They’d found plenty of evidence at the house. “In my mind, it’s overwhelming,” he told Michael.
Michael didn’t want to be disloyal to his brother. Blood thicker than water and all that. But this—this was too much.
“I actually looked up to him and thought he was doing good. I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m just, I’m embarrassed like, I’m embarrassed to even show my face.
“He might as well be dead. He’s gonna be gone forever,” Michael said. “I wish I could just like shoot him.”
He told the detectives that his brother was involved in occult stuff. Astrology. Alchemy. Secret societies. His brother and his friends subscribed to strange beliefs about the world’s social order, he told the detectives. There were only two kinds of people: those at the top, and the rest in their thrall.
“In their world, everything is broken down, like with alphas and bravos,” he said.
The words resonated with Burgess. The rapist had made a cryptic reference to Amber about wolves and bravos. Now, the rapist’s brother was using similar words. Imagine laying that coincidence out for a jury. Could it be two different guys with the same secret philosophy? What are the chances? Here was a chance to fit another puzzle piece into place.
Burgess asked, “Have you ever heard the term ‘wolves and bravos’?”
“Yeah, wolves and bravos,” Michael said.
“What’s wolves and bravos?”
“The wolves are basically like alphas and the bravos are just like the majority masses of the people. They’re not physically fit, they’re not mentally fit, they’re not anything. They’re just on the next level down. That’s how they break it down, the same way wolves do, because that’s how wolves break down.”
“Is that how he regarded himself? Was that the kind of stuff he was studying?”
“They basically classified him as alpha and that alpha males in that society basically can have sex with multiple women, they don’t have to be tied down,” Michael said. “I don’t see how that ties into frickin’ going out and raping and stuff like that but I mean it’s just all way too deep to even try to think about, you know?
“The dude’s fucking psycho,” Michael said.
AS MONTANO STEPPED through O’Leary’s house, she was followed by another man—John Evans, a fifty-year-old computer expert. A civilian investigator with CBI, Evans knew that the rapist had threatened to post the victims’ pictures on the Internet. And that O’Leary owned pornographic websites. Evans’s job was to scoop up all the computers, hard drives, and cell phones in the house. Montano was searching for physical signs of O’Leary’s guilt. Evans was seeking digital ones.
Evans had a long history with computers. As a young man, he had purchased one of the first computers made to use in the home, a Commodore 64. That was back in the 1980s. It couldn’t do much. Add numbers. Print HELLO. Show blocky graphics. But he fell in love with the machine with the clunky brown keyboard and glowing screen. At the time, it seemed like magic.
He turned his hobby into a career. After serving in the Navy—he had worked in Antarctica for three years, wowed by the polar nights and then days without end—Evans moved to Colorado. He got a job as an animal-control officer—a dogcatcher, as they were once called—and then joined the Golden Police Department as an evidence clerk and a crime scene technician. Working mostly alone, in an office lined with shelves, he logged fingerprint cards and DNA swabs, pistols and photographs, bedsheets and torn clothes. His fascination with electronics led him to take classes in computer and video forensics, the analysis of digital media to use in court cases. He became a certified computer forensic examiner—the first in Golden and one of the few in the Denver region.
Evans’s reputation as a computer whisperer spread. Other agencies began sending him their computer crimes. At first it was mostly around Golden. But soon, cops from around Colorado were asking him for help. Did your case have blurry surveillance video? Evans could enhance it. Need to crack open a hard drive? Evans could do that, too. Encrypted emails? Evans was the man to call.
This was how Evans learned that computers contained black magic, too. Many of the cases he worked involved child pornography. That meant he had to spend long hours looking at the most disturbing images possible. He got to know the canon—the standard set of tens of thousands of photos and videos of sexually abused children that circulated on the Internet among the world’s perverts. It was never easy. Never normal. But he got used to it, like cops with dead bodies. “You build an immunity to it after a while. It was rough. At times, I just had to get up and walk away,” he says. Evans kept his eyes alert for new images. Ones he had never seen before. Those were the children he might still be able to save.
In the back room, Evans inventoried each component of O’Leary’s computer setup. There were two computers, one on his desk and one stored in the closet with the backpack and the guitar amp. There was an iPhone. Two thumb drives on the bookshelves. The CD-ROMs. And two SSD memory cards in O’Leary’s cameras—the stolen pink Sony Cyber-shot and the Canon Rebel XTi, the same model he had mentioned in his exchange with the woman on Craigslist.
Evans transported everything back to the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, located in an uninspiring office park in Centennial, one of Denver’s most southern suburbs. Funded by the FBI, the lab brought together federal agents and Colorado investigators to serve as a local crime lab for all things related to computer forensics. State law enforcement agencies would bring encrypted files, half-erased accounting records, Internet IP logs in hopes of turning up evidence of a crime. Evans, on permanent loan from the Golden Police Department as part of the FBI program, enjoyed the collaboration. “You try to help everybody out,” he says.
At his desk in a long floor filled with cubicles, Evans had seven computers—PCs and Macs—each with two screens. They whirred away, unearthing digitized secrets. Evans looked like a stockbroker on the floor of the Wall Street exchange, but his fourteen screens showed losses, never gains.
“We’re all looking at really bad stuff, all day long, every day.”
O’Leary’s computer yielded evidence almost immediately. Evans found a backup of O’Leary’s iPhone that contained the notes he had taken while he stalked Amber. The notes dated back to September 28—more than three months before the rape. On that day, he recorded several entries over five hours spent outside the apartment. The last one was at 2:30 a.m. Amber “comes home, strips to undies and takes a really long time in the bathroom, sits down at her desk and starts writing,” he wrote. On November 10, he described watching Amber and her boyfriend. Amber “comes home with white BF about 10:30 to 10:45, BF in PJs, game over.” On January 3, he worried that Amber might be moving out. He could see boxes being packed in her house. He picked the lock on the door that night, to prepare for slipping into her apartment. “Got here about one, home alone,” he wrote one day before the rape.
On the same iPhone, the investigators found evidence that O’Leary had been stalking another woman—a divorcée from Littleton. There was no sign that he had actually struck. Just that he was planning to.
The iPhone also divulged O’Leary’s contacts. He didn’t have many. There was his brother, Michael. His mother and stepfather. Some local friends. And one number with a 602 area code. It was a woman from Arizona. Her name was Calyxa.
Evans forwarded everything he found to Galbraith or Hendershot. He’d write a quick, familiar note: “Here’s a couple of interesting things found today.” Evans’s best friend was Mike Hendershot, Edna’s husband. They’d met at the Golden Police Department—where Evans had also met Galbraith. Evans, too, was part of the blue web.
Among the files that O’Leary had downloaded, Evans found an electronic copy of a book on police techniques: the Rape Investigation Handbook. It had been written by two streetwise cops who spent decades investigating sexual assault: John O. Savino, an ex–NYPD officer, and Brent E. Turvey, a criminal profiler. The handbook was written in a folksy style, with lots of anecdotes. Many of them were profiles of rapists and their crimes. But the book also described investigative techniques. The analysis of touch DNA. The use of ViCAP. The characteristics of serial rapists. It seemed to Evans that O’Leary might have studied the book.
He was a student of rape.
One day, Evans stumbled onto a strange file stored on the hard drive of the computer that had been on O’Leary’s desk. It had a suggestive name: “Wretch.” It was enormous—nearly seventy-five gigabytes, big enough to store all the books on a library floor, big enough to store tens of thousands of high-quality photos and videos. And it was sealed tight. Evans discovered that O’Leary had used the software program TrueCrypt to protect the file from prying eyes—eyes like his.
Evans became obsessed with discovering the secrets of the Wretch.
Though encrypted, the Wretch provided clues. O’Leary had transferred images into the Wretch for storage. That act, the moving of a folder of photos, left behind a record. Evans found that O’Leary had named one folder “girls.” Within it were more folders—each one with a woman’s name. Evans found Amber’s name and Sarah’s name. He found Doris’s name mentioned 1,422 times on 211 different files.
He found eight other names, too, names he didn’t recognize. He put them aside. They might help investigators track down other victims.
“If you saw how meticulous he was, even with his underwear drawer, it was easy to understand” why he labeled the folders with the women’s names, Evans says. “He was really careful about everything he did.”
Evans dedicated one of his computers entirely to hacking into the Wretch. As he waited, he applied his tools to the smallest things he had taken from 65 Harlan Street: the two memory cards from O’Leary’s cameras. Each was the size of a stamp.
There, he found the evidence he was seeking.
The photos of the victims.
O’Leary had attempted to hide them. As far as Evans could figure out, O’Leary had transferred the photos from the camera into the Wretch. Then, with the images copied and stored in the safety of the Wretch, O’Leary deleted everything from the photo cards. Only he hadn’t succeeded. The names of the files of the images had vanished. But the electronic bits that formed the images themselves remained on the card until permanently overwritten by another photo. The most careful of rapists had again left behind traces—digital ones.
Using software to recover deleted files, Evans rescued more than four hundred images of Amber, posed and photographed, her face a mask of fear. There were more than a hundred images of Sarah, forced to lie sprawled on her bed, her hands tied behind her back. There could be no mistake. The man in the photos was O’Leary. And he was raping the women in exactly the way they had described.
As he scrolled through the photos, Evans sometimes had to stop. He would go outside for a cigarette break. He estimated he had seen millions of pornographic images—many violent, many involving children—in his twenty-five years in law enforcement. But the people pictured in them had been anonymous and unknown. Now, he knew the names of the terrified faces staring at him on his computer screen. “You couldn’t sit there and go through it all,” he says. “It just gets to be a little overwhelming. It is real. You know you have a real victim out there.”
When Evans called Galbraith and Hendershot to deliver the news, they raced over to the lab to view the files and immediately identified their victims.
Hendershot’s succinct assessment: “I can’t think of a more vile human being.”
Hendershot noticed one picture where Sarah was wearing a pair of chunky red sandals. She recalled seeing them in a box when she had searched Sarah’s apartment. Sarah had said the rapist put shoes on her. But she couldn’t remember what they were. Hendershot decided to try one more time. She called Sarah. After chatting a few minutes, Hendershot asked her the same question she had asked before. Any chance that Sarah could remember the shoes?
As a matter of fact, she could. Sarah told her that she had been looking at a photo album a few weeks ago and saw a picture of herself wearing red sandals. Her memory suddenly flashed: Those were the shoes the rapist had grabbed.
Hendershot was amazed. Six months after the rape, Sarah’s traumatized brain had recovered a lost image. Her memory was still finding puzzle pieces, still fitting them together.
Evans continued to unearth files that O’Leary thought he had deleted. He found eight photos that had been taken years before. They had been part of a bigger set, but most of the images had been overwritten as O’Leary had raped more women and taken more pictures. One more attack, and the eight images would have shared the same fate, vanishing forever.
Instead, Evans managed to recover them. He reviewed the photos with Galbraith. They were pictures of a young woman. She wore a pink T-shirt. She had the same look of terror as the other women.
Galbraith’s heart sank. Another O’Leary victim. But how would she find her?
The last photo provided the answer. Marc O’Leary had placed the woman’s learner’s permit on her torso. Click.
The image clearly showed her name. And her address.
Lynnwood, Washington.