One day after Rachael and Jamie’s story appeared on the Indianapolis Star’s website, it was also published on the front page of the Lansing State Journal, which was owned by the same parent company, Gannett. Nassar’s picture filled most of the top half of the page that morning, atop a big, bold headline spelled out in all capital letters: MSU DOCTOR ACCUSED OF ABUSE.
The phone calls that helped to speed the end of his time at Michigan State started pouring into the MSU police department that morning. Nassar’s photo alone was enough to launch some former patients back into deep and dark memories of their appointments with him. Gymnasts and other Michigan State athletes traded messages with friends linking to the story and asking urgent questions. “OMG did you see this??” or “Is this the guy you told me about?”
Parents who had sat in the exam room or dropped their daughters off dozens of times at Nassar’s office or his home texted and called to see if anything like this had happened to them. A few women had been waiting for an opportunity to speak up for years and quickly started searching for ways to share their stories with police. By 11:00 a.m. on September 13 in California, John Manly had fielded calls from five women who had seen his name in the Star article. He recommended they start by contacting the police.
Andrea Munford took her second phone report on Nassar, the first since her meeting with Rachael Denhollander, in the middle of the afternoon. It was 11:00 p.m. when she got her last voicemail of the day and called back shortly after. The woman told her she had been “waiting for this to happen” and that she tried two years earlier to report Nassar but was told the statute of limitations had expired. She said reading the descriptions of what happened to Denhollander in the Indianapolis Star’s story was like seeing a script ripped “from a textbook” of how she was sexually abused.
Munford and the rest of the MSU police ramped up the resources devoted to their investigation the following morning. While more reports continued to arrive, Munford and a handful of other officers went to work building their case. Munford called the physical therapist Denhollander saw after being treated by Nassar to corroborate part of her interview. The therapist told her that 99 percent of the work she does is external. In the rare cases that she would do internal pelvic work, she always wore gloves, she wanted to make the procedure as quick as possible, and she would never perform it on a woman who is a virgin, she said. She also made clear that there “is no reason for thrusting down there.”
Munford visited Nassar again the following day, this time at his home in Holt. She met two officers from the local sheriff’s department and an officer from Michigan’s Children’s Protective Services agency in a nearby parking lot before knocking on his door together. They spoke to Nassar and his wife about some of the accusations they had received in the past few days. They told him he would not be allowed to stay in his home with his children that night and waited until he departed for a hotel.
The next morning, a pair of MSU police officers visited Nassar’s old office to confiscate his work computer. Officer Kim Parviainen called Dr. Suzanne Thomashow, Amanda’s mother, to follow up on her daughter’s report the same day. Two other officers interviewed the risk administrator for the university’s health care system to make sure the evidence they were going to collect from Nassar’s office was complete and unaltered. By the end of the week, just four days after a newspaper report started to crack the dam of complaints about Nassar, Munford’s team had removed him from his home, secured the detailed records of his interactions with patients, and spoken to at least two medical experts about the legitimacy of internal osteopathic treatments. Parviainen would find a third medical source to add to the list early the next week.
Munford was also working fast to piece together enough probable cause for a search warrant that would allow her back into Nassar’s home as soon as possible. Hard evidence—anything that could be used to help corroborate the stories Munford and her colleagues were hearing on a daily basis—would be crucial to give those claims a fighting chance in court. Nassar had deftly talked his way out of charges two years earlier. Munford knew she had flustered him during their interview, but that wouldn’t be enough. A more prepared interaction with the help of an attorney would likely help Nassar hold the upper hand if a judge had to decide between the word of a purported medical expert and a handful of women with similar complaints.
The case moved fast inside the walls of the MSU police department. It sped forward outside as well. Nassar was no longer allowed in his office as of the end of the day Monday, September 19. The university was planning to announce his termination the following day. When his name hit the papers again with this news, Nassar’s reputation, which had served as his shield, was sure to take another hit. Munford knew desperation would be setting in soon. She cranked away at her keyboard as Monday drew to a close. Her search warrant was ready. The next morning, she would bring it to a judge in hopes they had collected enough troubling information from callers to get inside Nassar’s house.
Tuesday morning was trash collection day in the pleasant, winding subdivision of Holt, Michigan. Sometime early that morning, the wheels of a brown Granger trash bin would rumble down the short driveway in front of the Nassars’ split-level ranch. The police vehicles that wound their way through the neighborhood to Nassar’s home on Tuesday, September 20, had to be careful to avoid the big bin as they pulled up in front of his house.
Magistrate Mark Blumer had not hesitated to sign Munford’s warrant that morning. When Munford arrived around 11:00 a.m. to knock on Nassar’s door, no one was home. She called Nassar’s new attorney, Matt Newburg, to let him know that if someone wanted to be present for the search—and if Nassar preferred an intact front door—he needed to get home soon with the keys. Newburg said Nassar was with him at his office. They would be right over.
Their team, now ten detectives and officers in total, split up once they were inside to cover every inch of the fifteen-hundred-square-foot home as efficiently and thoroughly as possible. They found a hoarder’s trove of medical records, documents, and other items while they moved from room to room. Munford would later tell Matt Mencarini of the Lansing State Journal, “it appeared he never threw anything out.”
There was a stack of records lying on the floor of the master bedroom beside the night table. Another stack piled up against the wall of a basement hallway. Officers made their way to the southeast corner of the basement where they found Nassar’s training table, his various bottles of lotions, and dozens of small rolls of tape.
The drawers in his makeshift home office were stuffed with files, CDs, videotapes, and more. The detectives didn’t bother to sort through them at the house. They grabbed them all and hauled them up the steps to the driveway.
One detective logged and labeled each new piece before it was placed inside one of the vehicles. Anything that could hold information was deemed worthy of confiscating. There were a pair of laptops, two flash drives, five SD cards with various amounts of memory, three 8-millimeter camcorder tapes, a couple dozen VHS tapes, more than one hundred CDs and DVDs, a stack of floppy disks, a couple cell phones, an iPod Touch, an Amazon Kindle, and a large box stuffed full of Olympic memorabilia.
Detective Erin Held made her way through the house with a camera around her neck. She snapped photos of the evidence they collected and recorded videos of the search in progress. When she got back outside, she trained her eyes on the large brown trash bin still sitting on the curb. She decided it was worth a look. She flipped the lid open to find it was still full. The trash collectors had taken their time getting to the bins on Nassar’s street on September 20. Held pulled three large bags out of the bin and stuck those in with the rest of the evidence.
The afternoon was nearly over by the time the team returned to the police station on the southern edge of campus. The investigators loaded a cart with the storage devices and Olympic memorabilia to be wheeled into the building. Two of them drew the unenviable task of searching for relevant material in Nassar’s week-old trash. As one detective tagged the items and secured them in the on-site evidence room, two others picked their way through the garbage.
One of them pulled an unusually heavy grocery bag out of one of the piles. Inside they found three different external hard drives. Two of the three sleek silver boxes were neatly labeled, leaving no doubt who used to own them: “USA Gymnastics, Larry Nassar, MSU Sports Medicine” and “Dr. Larry Nassar USA Gymnastics.” He brought the hard drives over to the evidence room just a few minutes after his colleague had finished logging and locking up the other items they had collected. They reopened the room at 4:55 p.m. and added the three new items to their substantial pile.
It took nearly a week for the officers to make their way through all of the material they collected from Nassar’s house to search for anything that might be useful. They added an additional laptop—a work computer Nassar had returned to Michigan State earlier that week—to the pile of evidence the day after searching his house. When the Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime Unit opened the work laptop, they found its hard drive had been wiped completely clean.
As her coworkers combed through the evidence they had collected, Munford continued her interviews and delved further into the medical nuances of pelvic floor manipulations. Experts told her that Nassar’s habit of not wearing gloves and performing the exams without another medical professional in the room were red flags, but they also said internal manipulations weren’t an automatic indication that what he was doing was a crime. There was a chance Nassar could explain away the troubling patterns, pitting the word of a famous physician up against a small group of mostly anonymous women. A prosecutor might shy away from a case with that much uncertainty or, if his case did end up in court, allow Nassar to accept a plea deal for much less significant but easier to prove charges.
The detectives hoped to find something more to strengthen their case. They collected Nassar’s personnel files from the university. They sent warrants to Google and Facebook to get the two tech companies to provide data about Nassar’s online habits. They had made their way through most of the items from his home and office without unearthing any proverbial smoking guns. Finally, one of the members of the staff’s Computer Forensics Unit made his way through the external drives they found in the garbage.
The first few images he found on the drive made his jaw drop. He stopped his search to loop in his bosses. Eventually, MSU police would team up with the FBI to review the contents of the drive. Within the next few days, the investigators uncovered thirty-seven thousand images and videos of child pornography. Some of the images showed children younger than twelve years old.
Police traced the metadata of the images to discover that a large portion of the material was downloaded to Nassar’s hard drive during a four-month stretch in late 2004. The period of activity began September 18, 2004—one day after Brianne Randall-Gay uttered Larry Nassar’s name inside a police station for the very first time and about a week before her mother met with Nassar and got the sense he believed he had been “put on the radar screen.”
The descriptions of Nassar’s treatments were murky enough that he might be able to convince the world that he had been upholding his Hippocratic oath even if he was working in a questionable gray area of medicine. The images found inside his curbside trash bin were unambiguous. They made it hard to see Nassar’s explanations as anything but a sinister cover story. One month after Rachael Denhollander and her husband nervously set foot in the MSU police department, Nassar’s shield was crumbling.