WARNING: Disturbing content
WHEN 18-year-old Marie went to the police with a story of her attack by a masked rapist, the tale sounded like something out of American Horror Story.
She said a man dressed in black had come through her window, tied her to the bed with her shoelaces, blindfolded and gagged her and sexually assaulted her at knifepoint.
Marie, from just outside Seattle, had been abused for years as a child and grew up in care. As a teenager, she was shunted from home to home, living with foster mother Shannon McQuery for a few weeks, and later Peggy Cunningham, who brought her up.
When Marie shared her dramatic story, neither the police, Peggy nor Shannon, who she remained close with, could quite believe it.
The teenager rang Shannon to tell her about the shocking rape on the day it happened. She seemed unnaturally calm. “There was just no emotion,” Shannon toldProPublica. “It was like she was telling me that she’d made a sandwich.”
When they went to the bedroom where the attack had apparently taken place, Marie seemed unmoved. Later, she laughed and joked in the garden, seemingly totally at ease. The pair went to buy new bedding because the police had taken Marie’s old ones away as evidence, and the young woman’s main emotion seemed to be anger that she couldn’t find an identical set.
“Why would you want to have the same sheets and bedspread to look at every day when you’d been raped on this bed set?” Shannon wondered.
Peggy felt the same nagging doubt when she heard the news. “[Marie] was crying and I could barely hear her,” she said. “Her voice was like this little tiny voice, and I couldn’t really tell. It didn’t sound real to me … It sounded like a lot of drama.”
Under pressure, the 18-year-old retracted her statements. Later, the assailant was caught.Source:istock
The two foster mothers spoke to each other and shared their doubts. Was Marie doing this for attention? They felt they had to tell the police about their concerns. About the same time, police heard Marie was unhappy with her subsidised apartment, and wondered if she was making the story up to find a better one.
Despite the medical report showing abrasions to her wrists and vagina, something seemed strange about her relaxed attitude. They noticed inconsistencies in her statements. In one, she said she had called a friend while still tied up. In another, she said she had cut herself free first. They called her back in, and questioned her at length.
Marie cried. She told police about being abused at seven, and having to eat dog food because she was so hungry. She was lonely living by herself. But she said she believed the rape had happened. Detectives told Marie her story didn’t match the evidence and they thought she’d made it up. Was there really a rapist on the loose? “No,” she said.
They told her to write down the true story, admitting she had lied. “When I went to sleep I dreamed that someone broke in and raped me,” she wrote.
The detectives asked why she hadn’t said she had made it up. Marie insisted she was “pretty positive” it had happened. “Pretty positive?” they asked.
She said she might have blacked out, and admitted she needed counselling. They talked more, about her stress and loneliness, and she became calm, agreeing to confess. She sketched out events again. “I made up this story,” she wrote.
Later, she reached out for help to Project Ladder, an organisation that had helped her transition from foster care into her own home. After talking to them about her memories of the rape, and the same police officers, she gave up. She agreed she didn’t want to take a lie-detector test and risk jail.
The authorities made her confess to other young people in the housing project. In the face of their rejection, she considered suicide. A month later, she was charged with false reporting, punishable by up to a year in jail. It was a rare outcome, one investigators believe was a reaction by the police force to the perceived waste of their time.
Marie started receiving calls from disgusted former schoolmates. She quit her job at Costco and began smoking and drinking.
Then: police caught her rapist. A 32-year-old army veteran named Mark O’Leary with a pornography website had been terrorising the area, committing a string of identical crimes against women aged up to 63 and taking photos of his victims. In one picture was a terrified young girl, bound and gagged on a bed. It was Marie.
ProPublica, which produced a detailed report on her case with The Marshall Projectfor the wrongly accused, says the biggest problem with rape cases is not false reports, but the fact they go unreported. One reason is that women fear police won’t believe them.
In 2011–12, an estimated 51,200 Australians aged over 18 were victims of sexual assault, with more than two-thirds not reporting the most recent incident to the police. It’s not clear how many are false, but around three-quarters of incidents police decided were untrue appeared to have an element of judgement based on stereotypes regarding the defendant’s behaviour, demeanour or motive.
Marie’s lack of visible distress had been a coping mechanism, learnt in her childhood as a reaction to the violent abuse she suffered. The fact it created doubt highlights the issues around rape reporting and training officers on how to deal with such cases. Not all victims will react in the way you might expect, and interrogating them is the wrong approach.
O’Leary pleaded guilty to 28 counts of rape and associated crimes, including the attack on Marie. In December 2011, he was sentenced to 327 years in prison and will never be released. Marie was given just $US500 court costs refund.
She later sued the city and settled for $US150,000, leaving the state, starting work, marrying and having children. She forgave her foster mothers, and even received an apology from the police officer who never believed her.
That was simply the reality for someone whose story was too awful to be true.
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