2011–
SHAKEN AS HE WAS, SERGEANT Mason elected not to quit the police force. “The decision was, I’m not going to let this define me as who I am. I’ll learn from it and be a better investigator.”
We met Mason at the Lynnwood police station in December of 2015; we interviewed him in the same room where he had interviewed Marie seven years before—across the same table Marie had pounded with her fist, insisting she had been raped. Mason traced his doubts back—the Project Ladder manager’s mention of Marie wanting a different apartment, the skepticism Peggy voiced the day after the rape. “Those were people who knew her a heck of a lot better than I did,” Mason said.
Mason wasn’t disciplined over Marie’s case. In the years after, his police record would be commendable.
“I think anybody that’s been in this job for any length of time—there’s a lot of stuff they see over their career that tends to have an effect on them. Harden a person or whatever,” Mason told us. He took from Marie’s case the need to be more open-minded, freer with the benefit of the doubt. “Nobody goes into law enforcement thinking they’re going to end up victimizing somebody further,” Mason said.
We asked Mason about Peggy. “She was relaying information that she thought was important,” Mason said. She was being the good citizen she thought she was being. Mason was grateful she called. That he used what she said in the way that he did is on him: “I got it wrong.”
We asked about Marie. We told Mason that she wonders about her role in all that happened, if there’s some misstep she could have avoided.
“She didn’t misstep. It was—me. So that’s—just that,” Mason said.
“It wasn’t her job to try to convince me. In hindsight, it was my job to get to the bottom of it—and I didn’t.”
“When you look back on this, what haunts you most about this case?” we asked.
“There’s several aspects”—he sighed—“that do, but probably the most is…what Marie had to endure by reporting this. Yeah…”
“Do you think about her a lot?”
For five seconds, ten, fifteen, Mason said nothing. He let the question sit, collecting himself. Half a minute passed before he spoke.
“Can we…?”
“Sure.”
“I just need to grab some water.”
He left the room.
When Mason came back, he said: “Yeah, I do.” He thinks of Marie often. “It’s pretty random. Just at different times. Over the course of my day, visiting family out of state—it just depends.
“When I think of Marie, it’s more of how she is doing now.
“I hope that she’s okay.”
THE COURT RECORDS for Marie’s false-reporting charge were expunged in the spring of 2011. The file was sealed, its traces eliminated. But Marie knew that erasing history wouldn’t prevent its repeating. So in June of 2013, she filed a civil rights lawsuit against Lynnwood in US District Court. “Maybe they could change the way they do things so another woman won’t get treated as I did,” she says.
The defendants included the city; the two police detectives, Mason and Rittgarn; Cocoon House, a nonprofit that managed the Project Ladder program; and the Project Ladder managers, Jana and Wayne. The lawsuit alleged that the police interrogated Marie without reading her her rights; that the department failed to provide proper training for dealing with rape victims; and that Cocoon House acted in concert with police by not helping Marie get a lawyer. Defense lawyers responded that when the police drove Marie in for questioning, she wasn’t under arrest. Marie was free to leave, so the detectives were free to bypass the Miranda warning. Meanwhile, Cocoon House conceded that Jana and Wayne didn’t help Marie get an attorney. But they had no duty to, the lawyers said.
One defense argument hovered above the rest. If it succeeded, just about every other argument fell away. Marie waited too long to sue, the defense lawyers contended. They said that the statute of limitations for a federal civil rights claim is three years—and that the clock started ticking for Marie in August of 2008, back when she was questioned and charged with false reporting. They moved to have her lawsuit tossed.
To Marie, the argument was confounding. “You can’t file a lawsuit when they don’t believe you,” she says. Was she expected to sue before O’Leary’s arrest validated her basis for suing? Nonetheless, the motion to dismiss posed a challenge for her attorney, H. Richmond Fisher. He likened Marie’s situation to a patient who learns, years later, that doctors left a sponge behind during surgery. The law doesn’t punish that patient for the time between operation and discovery. Nor, he argued, should the law punish Marie for the time between her arrest and O’Leary’s.
In December of 2013, Marie and Lynnwood agreed to mediation, in hopes of settling before trial. Both sides wrote the mediator beforehand. Fisher said Marie wanted $5 million. Lynnwood’s lawyers said she was unlikely to see an award “anywhere near the mid-six-figure range, let alone seven figures.” Two weeks before Christmas, the mediator called the two sides together, to hash this out in person. The police and Marie stayed in separate rooms while attorneys made their cases. Then Marie was summoned. Asked to tell her story to two higher-ups from Lynnwood’s police department, she described what she had been through. She invited them to imagine a daughter of theirs being treated the way she had been treated. The two apologized, acknowledged the department’s errors, and pledged to do better.
Marie did not get $5 million. She settled with Lynnwood for $150,000. “A risk management decision was made,” one of Lynnwood’s lawyers told a newspaper reporter. Marie settled separately with Cocoon House, for an undisclosed amount.
She never heard anything from Rittgarn, the detective who had threatened to book her into jail and had since moved to Southern California. But after Marie’s lawsuit was filed, a reporter for the Seattle Times reached Rittgarn by telephone. “Rittgarn…said he was unaware of the lawsuit,” the newspaper reported. “At first he could not recall the case, except that he thought it involved ‘that guy from Colorado.’ ”
Although Lynnwood agreed to settle for $150,000, the city’s insurance picked up most of that, leaving Lynnwood to foot only its deductible.
In the end, the city paid $25,000.
“WE HAD A major failing,” Lynnwood police commander Steve Rider told us.
“A drastic mistake,” he called it. “A reality check….Wrong turn…wrong assumptions…wrong calls.
“Knowing that she went through that brutal attack—and then we told her she lied?”
Facing fallout, many police departments resort to damage control: foul up, hole up. Get a big case wrong and they go full bunker, refusing to acknowledge, much less apologize. But the Lynnwood police proved an exception. In 2011, after Marc O’Leary’s arrest, the city’s police chief ordered two reviews—one internal, one external—to determine how Lynnwood’s investigation went sideways. The department chose to own its mistakes, and to learn from them.
The internal review, seven pages long, was conducted by a Lynnwood police commander and a sergeant. Neither had worked the initial case. Their report used understated language—saying, for example, that the investigation reached an “incorrect resolution”—but their analysis was pointed enough. The detectives attached too much weight to small disparities in Marie’s statements and to Peggy’s doubts. Once doubt set in, they interrogated Marie instead of interviewing her. Once Marie confessed, “there was a self-imposed rush to file charges” and close the case. When Marie tried to take back her confession, Detective Rittgarn greeted her with threats.
The external review covered much the same ground, but with language that blistered. This peer review was conducted by Snohomish County sheriff’s sergeant Gregg Rinta, who, unlike Mason, had substantial experience with rape cases. For five years he had supervised the sheriff’s Special Investigations Unit, which handled up to seven hundred cases a year involving adult sex crimes and child abuse.
“In most respects, there simply was no investigation in this case,” Rinta wrote in his fourteen-page report. “For reasons that I cannot explain, [Marie’s credibility] became the focus of the investigation and all of the strong evidence that pointed to a serious felony crime, was completely ignored.” Rinta recounted all the times the first day that Marie, on one hour’s sleep, described being raped. To have Mason then request a written account was unnecessary and even cruel: “What you are asking her to do is tell her story for the FIFTH time.” Multiple statements in hand, Mason elevated “minor inconsistencies”—common among traumatized victims—into major discrepancies. As for Peggy’s doubts, Mason had no business even mentioning them in a report. Someone’s opinion, with no supporting evidence, has “absolutely no relevance in an investigation,” Rinta wrote.
In his review, Rinta makes clear how incredulous he is—at both the missteps and the mindset. He cannot fathom the detectives’ lack of regard for the trauma Marie reported. He cannot understand their lack of compassion. Referring to the day the detectives first confronted Marie and accused her of lying, Rinta wrote:
The manner in which she was treated by Sgt. Mason and Det. Rittgarn can only [be] labeled as bullying and coercive. It is painful to read, and difficult to understand how this type of behavior on the part of experienced police officers can happen in a professional police department. If this hadn’t been documented in their reports, I would have been skeptical that this actually happened.
The way they hounded Marie, it’s not surprising she confessed to lying, innocent though she was, Rinta wrote.
And what happened four days later—when Rittgarn threatened to book Marie into jail and recommend that she lose her housing—was worse. “These statements are coercive, cruel, and unbelievably unprofessional. I can’t imagine ANY justification for making these statements.”
Rinta recapped what happened afterward: the police escorting Marie down the stairs and handing her off to the two Project Ladder managers; the managers asking Marie, in the presence of the two officers, if she’d been raped; Marie saying no.
“I can only presume that this was orchestrated for the purpose of putting pressure on the victim to tell the ‘truth,’ ” Rinta wrote.
It “is painful to imagine how the victim felt.”
At the Lynnwood Police Department, Marie’s case led to changes in practices and culture, Rider says. Detectives receive additional training about rape victims and trauma. They learn the protocols of the International Association of Chiefs of Police—the guidelines written by Joanne Archambault—to build trust with victims, to show respect and reserve judgment, to give victims a say over when and where they are interviewed. Rape victims get immediate assistance from advocates at a local healthcare center. Investigators must have “definitive proof” of lying before doubting a rape report. A charge of false reporting must now be reviewed with higher-ups. “We learned a great deal from this,” Rider says. “And we don’t want to see this happen to anybody ever again.”
In 2008, Marie’s case was one of four labeled unfounded by the Lynnwood police, according to statistics reported to the FBI. In the five years from 2008 to 2012, the department determined that ten of forty-seven reported rapes were unfounded: 21.3 percent. That’s five times the national average of 4.3 percent for agencies covering similar-sized populations during that same period. Rider says his agency has become more cautious about labeling a case unfounded since Marie.
“I would venture to say we investigate our cases a lot more vigorously than many departments do,” he says. “Now, we’re extra careful that we get the right closure on it.
“Each one of us,” Rider says, “will remember this case forever.”
ON A NOVEMBER day—a blizzard was forecast, but didn’t hit—we drove from Denver to Colorado’s upper-right corner, where Nebraska lies to the north and east. At the Sterling Correctional Facility, a prison that looks pretty much like any other—low and long, with concertina wire—we were led through three sets of sliding doors that locked behind us, down a long corridor and into the visiting room.
Marc O’Leary wore green prison scrubs with a ball cap. Stubble lined his jaw. His face looked jowly compared to his intake photo. He blinked in spasms, as though his eyelids were hooked to a motor drive. His hands stayed mostly in his lap, his left thumb bouncing.
“I do a lot of reading,” he told us of his days in prison. Philosophy, science, psychology, “or I’ll read metaphysical stuff like Taoism….Lately I’ve been doing meditation….I try not to let my thoughts carry me….I actually took up sewing.”
His family visits maybe a couple of times a month. They didn’t know about him—not this part of him—until the day he spoke at sentencing. “I spent decades, a long time, learning how to hide this. So I was good at it.” We asked if he committed other crimes the police don’t know about. “Nothing more serious than breaking and entering,” he said. Ever had a formal psychological diagnosis? we asked. No, he told us. “The court assumes because I can speak coherently and I’m not writing crazy stuff in a notebook somewhere that I must be perfectly sane. But if running around breaking into homes and playing out rape theater is not mental illness, then I think the definition is completely lost.”
O’Leary wonders if he could have been stopped, years ago, if there had been a program to intervene with young boys suffering deviant fantasies. “There’s no safe haven for a person that is on the edge or knows that they’re going down the wrong path to really go to and say, ‘Look, I need help.’ ” A program’s success would depend on counselors who understand the urge to rape—people like him, O’Leary said. “I don’t care if you had twenty PhDs on your wall or were an expert in criminology or psychology or whatever—there’s no way I would have opened up completely.” O’Leary told us he is “infinitely more qualified” to counsel potential rapists.
One of the biggest questions that brought us here concerns Lynnwood. Back when he saw the news—that the police had closed their investigation, that they had concluded there had been no rape—how did he react? Was he dumbfounded?
“I didn’t know until after I was arrested,” O’Leary said. “I was told by my public defender in Colorado.”
After committing a rape he didn’t read or watch the news, or go online to track the investigation’s progress. He didn’t see the need. “I thought about it sometimes, but I just never followed up. I was—living two lives is a lot of work. I wasn’t sleeping. I was literally living two lives. And I was just not focused on that.
“I just kind of assumed that police were looking.”
DURING OUR MONTHS of reporting, we spent many hours talking to rape experts—prosecutors, cops, researchers, advocates. To Joanne Archambault, the retired sergeant who has authored guidelines on investigating allegations of rape, Marie’s case shows how police skepticism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Unfortunately, interrogating victims and challenging them about inconsistencies just shuts them down or causes them to recant, which reinforces law enforcement’s belief that so many of these cases are unfounded.”
The Lynnwood detectives not only interrogated Marie, they used the Reid Technique, typically reserved for someone like a robbery suspect. They provoked. They deceived. They studied her physical reactions. Using this approach on Marie was “inappropriate,” Sergeant Rinta wrote in his peer review. He added: “Interpreting body language is an inexact science, and should not be used as a conclusive tool in determining the truth, unless one has expertise in this area. Mason and Rittgarn certainly did not.” The Reid Technique has come under scrutiny generally, as DNA testing has exposed scores of cases in which innocent people confessed to detectives. Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, a police consulting firm, announced in 2017 that it would no longer teach the method because of the risk of false confessions. “This was a big move for us, but it’s a decision that’s been coming for quite some time,” the company’s president said. John Reid, the technique’s namesake, built his reputation in part on a 1955 Nebraska murder case in which he elicited a confession from a young forester named Darrel Parker. Twenty-three years later, a death row inmate named Wesley Peery admitted he was the real killer. Parker was formally exonerated in 2012, the year after Marie’s record was expunged.
Marie’s case is an object lesson in other ways, too. Archambault warns that a rape victim’s recall can be disorganized, inconsistent, or simply wrong. Marie described the rapist’s eyes as blue. O’Leary’s eyes are hazel. Marie described the rapist as five feet six to five feet nine. O’Leary is six feet two.
Her case shows the risk of the abbreviated investigation and discarded rape kit. Once the police suspected Marie of lying, they stopped investigating. Once they concluded she was lying, they had her rape kit destroyed. Around the country, examples abound of similar neglect, only on a grander scale. In 2007, the year before Marie was raped, a task force comprising state and county investigators raided the Harvey, Illinois, police department and found two hundred unprocessed rape kits. Two years later, in Detroit, an assistant prosecutor discovered a cache of 11,341 untested rape kits in a warehouse, “furred with dust.” In 2015, a USA Today investigation tallied seventy thousand untested kits nationwide while noting that it was likely a fraction of the true total. The White House that year estimated the backlog at four hundred thousand.
“That’s tragic. That’s really tragic,” says Susan Irion, a principal figure in the adoption of rape kits back in the late 1970s.
But in some ways—culturally and politically—we’ve also seen a shift. When she was on the police force, Archambault saw how people avoided discussions of rape, how the public wanted police resources devoted to other kinds of crime. But in 2015 the US Department of Justice and the Manhattan district attorney’s office dedicated nearly $80 million to clearing the national rape-kit backlog. A key partner in that push was the Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit founded by actress Mariska Hargitay from the popular television show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In 2016, at the Academy Awards ceremony, Vice President Joe Biden said “Let’s change the culture” while introducing Lady Gaga, who sang while surrounded by survivors of sexual assault. A few months later there was a public backlash when Brock Turner, a former Stanford University swimmer, received a sentence of only six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. More than a million people signed an online petition to remove the case’s judge from the bench.
Meanwhile, sex crimes police have become more receptive to new approaches. Many detectives receive training in “trauma-informed interviewing,” in which they learn about neurological impacts on rape victims. They learn to ask for sensory memories, which can aid recall of other details. (What sounds do you remember? What did you smell?) They learn to let the victim talk without interruption, understanding that a description may not be linear. They learn to ask open-ended questions while avoiding any hint of interrogation.
In Ashland, Oregon, a straight shot south from Lynnwood on Interstate 5, a police detective named Carrie Hull pioneered a program called You Have Options. Launched in 2013, the program aims to increase reporting by sexual assault victims—and thereby increase the chances of identifying serial rapists. Hull knew that many victims have a wish for confidentiality and a fear of not being believed. So her program gives victims a say in how, and even whether, the police proceed. Victims can remain anonymous. If a victim balks at charges being filed, the police honor that decision. In the program’s first year, the Ashland Police Department saw a 106 percent increase in reporting. More than a dozen other law enforcement agencies have since adopted the program in states that include Virginia, Missouri, Colorado, and Washington.
The program’s approach doesn’t sit well with some cops. Their take is that they’re being told not to investigate a crime. Hull sees it another way. The victim’s information could help solve other cases down the road. It’s like the advice Grusing got: Just get them talking.
WE PULLED THE files for the O’Leary investigation from police departments in Aurora, Lakewood, Westminster, and Golden. The records fill volumes. They tell a story of a case with no loose ends—except one.
After resurrecting the photos of O’Leary’s victims, John Evans devoted himself to one final task: breaking the Wretch. He dedicated one of the seven high-performance computers on his desk at the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory to cracking the encrypted, seventy-five-gigabyte file where O’Leary kept his most private secrets. For twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Evans ran specialized hacking software that hurled passwords at the file. Some of the passwords were scraps of O’Leary’s life turned up in the search of 65 Harlan Street. Old passwords. Email addresses. The names of family and friends. But mostly, the software served as a sledgehammer, deploying brute-force computing power to send lists of thousands of words and passcodes at the encryption program. Nothing worked.
“It bugged the hell out of me,” Evans says. “I thought he had evidence of a lot more crimes in there. It was something that he didn’t want anybody to see.”
At the end of six months of constant battering, Evans decided he needed a bigger hammer. He sent the file to the FBI’s geek squad, the Cryptologic and Electronic Analysis Unit of the Operational Technology Division. One of the most secretive branches of the agency, the cryptology unit had helped the National Security Administration comb through millions of emails. And its scientists, agents, and coders had helped numerous local law enforcement agencies with tough computer cases. But even the cryptologists could not break open the Wretch.
Evans stored the hard drive containing the original file at the Golden Police Department. The unassuming silver box was stashed on a shelf in the evidence locker, model number WD3200AAKS, serial number WMAWF0029012, case number 1-11-000108.
On some days, when he is running a route high in the mountains, Bob Weiner’s thoughts will unexpectedly drift back to the Wretch. It has been years since O’Leary pleaded guilty. He is in prison for the rest of his life. He has never revealed the password. Weiner wonders what it could contain.
“Maybe there’s information in there of a murder. I don’t know,” Weiner says. “My mind, periodically, reverts back to ‘What’s going on, what is in there?’
“I still think about it.”
AFTER MARIE WAS raped, people expected her to be hysterical or broken. Marie didn’t want to let go of normal, even if that meant pretending. Normal is what she craved before. It’s what she craved after. “I basically acted like nothing happened,” she says, looking back. “I turned everything off.” So the day of, she seemed detached. Like she was telling me she made a sandwich. The day after, she rolled around on the grass. As for the giggling, that’s something she does when nervous.
We first interviewed Marie in the spring of 2015—close to seven years after she was raped. She was pregnant with her second child. Her husband was at work.
What others found peculiar in Marie’s behavior after the attack, Marie traced to her past. “When I was little and living with my mom, I never told anyone about that stuff that happened to me,” Marie said. She never told anyone about being sexually assaulted as a child. “I held it all in. I don’t know if that guy got away or ended up hurting other people. But I didn’t want this time to be like that.” That’s why she told so many people—the calling around afterward that seemed so inexplicable to Shannon and Peggy. That’s also why she told the police, however many times they asked. Most rape victims don’t come forward. Marie did. “So nobody else would get hurt,” she said. “They’d be out there searching for this person who had done this to me.”
She’s still shocked at how the police brushed away the evidence. “The marks on my wrists weren’t lies,” she said. “The next day it hurt even if someone tried to shake my hand. Made me want to cry.” That was the same day Peggy called Mason—and doubt set in, and the police began seizing on any variation in Marie’s story, which is another thing that gets her. “Little details might have been inconsistent. But in every story there was a person who came in my house and raped me.”
When the police told her that Peggy and Jordan didn’t believe her—“it broke me,” Marie said. She began to doubt herself, at times wondering if she had made the story up: Maybe the rape had been a dream. And when she confessed to lying? “I lost everything.” She lost herself. Gone was the eager eighteen-year-old starting out. Depression consumed her.
Afterward, she feared going outside. She stayed in and watched a lot of television. Nights were the worst. “Really bad,” she said. “One night I did try to walk to the store by myself and felt like I hallucinated someone following me. It freaked me out. I didn’t even get a half mile from my house. I ran home—like, running—because I thought I saw someone following me.” She stopped going out after dark. At home, in her apartment, she avoided the bedroom. She slept on the couch, the lights on.
The day she learned of O’Leary’s arrest, Marie asked the Lynnwood police how many other women he had hurt. She couldn’t help but think: If I hadn’t recanted, perhaps they would have been spared. It was something else to carry, however unjust the load.
O’Leary pleaded guilty in both of the Washington cases. When he was brought to Washington for sentencing, Marie stayed away. “I didn’t want to face him,” she said. “That wasn’t something I could handle or do.”
The grandmother in Kirkland did attend O’Leary’s sentencing. “It was very important to me to see that it was him,” she says. “It was justice for him, it was justice for me.” She spoke at the hearing, but avoided recounting details of the attack. “I didn’t want him to relive it,” she says. She didn’t want to give him that satisfaction. After the assault, she suffered post-traumatic stress. Her heart raced. She kept her blinds closed. She remained on high alert to every noise. Nights were hard, she says. It was especially hard taking a shower, because she couldn’t hear anything else, leaving her imagination to fill the void.
O’Leary received forty years for the attack in Kirkland. He received twenty-eight and a half years for the rape of Marie.
When Marie had received counseling as ordered by the court, she told the counselor the truth. She said she had been raped. After O’Leary’s arrest in Colorado, Marie wanted to call the counselor—to tell her, when I told you I was raped, I was telling you the truth—but she couldn’t find her. Marie knows there may be people who don’t know her story’s afterword. Her peers from Project Ladder—the teens gathered around that day to hear her confess to lying—do they now know the truth? Elisabeth does. She was the girl to Marie’s right, the one Marie sensed sympathy from. They later became friends. Marie learned Elisabeth had also been sexually assaulted—but hadn’t said anything, for fear of not being believed. But as for the others in that circle, it’s unlikely they all know the postscript. People move on, misconceptions in tow.
We asked Marie to walk us forward from the time she learned of O’Leary’s arrest.
With the $500 she received that day, Marie bought a new phone, because her old one was broken. She bought clothes. She gave some money to a friend.
With Shannon’s help, Marie got her driver’s license—and the day she passed that test, she signed up for another: She enrolled in school to become a truck driver. Being on the road appealed to her. So did getting away from Washington. So did a job that showed she wouldn’t be defined by her past: “I just didn’t want to be hating life and living in fear.”
She passed the commercial driver’s test on her first try. The day the license arrived, she boarded a plane. She flew east for a job interview and got the job, which required not just driving but swinging an eight-pound hammer in coveralls, safety glasses, and hard hat. Her next job was driving only: She hauled fresh water to fracking sites. After that she hauled pipe to drilling rigs.
She met a man online, his first message arriving as she sat in her truck, waiting to drop off a load of pipe. “It was so easy to talk to him when I first met him.” For Marie, he was also easy to trust. “He was the first guy that ever bought my dinner,” she said. They got married and had a child. A few months after our first interview with Marie, they had another. The family now lives somewhere in the middle of the country.
In the fall of 2016, Marie made a phone call from the road. She was in Pennsylvania, on her way to make a delivery in Maine. When Stacy Galbraith answered, Marie introduced herself. She used her full name. She told Galbraith who she was—the woman in the photograph. I want to thank you for all your work, Marie told the detective, and as she spoke, her voice began to break. Galbraith asked Marie how she was. Marie said she was married with two kids. Galbraith said she had two kids of her own. They didn’t talk for long, fifteen minutes maybe, but all Marie wanted, all she really needed, was to tell Galbraith how much her work had meant. Before O’Leary’s arrest, Marie had been stuck, unable even to get her driver’s license.
“She let me move on,” Marie says.
In her eighteen-wheeler, Marie left Pennsylvania and made for New England, knocking off her trip’s last five hundred miles. When she reached the country’s northeast corner, she unloaded her haul, picked up a new one, and headed west for California.