Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice (4 page)

It was a tempestuous relationship, oriented largely around their mutual fondness for alcohol. Patty was at this point mainly a weekend drinker; her job required her to get up too early for her to drink during the week.

But on weekends she would stay at Mark’s place, and they would in-dulge their passion—for inebriation.

Mark, a short, scrawny man with long, dark hair tied back into a ponytail, owned a large two-flat house on Madison’s east side; he lived downstairs with a male roommate and rented out the upstairs. Recently divorced, Mark was wary about getting into a serious relationship with Patty and had pulled back. Patty suspected that Mark was seeing other women (he denied it), and she was prone to jealousy. In May, Patty had dated another man, Doug, but this ended after two months. Patty’s romantic relationship with Mark never really got back on track, although they did have sexual relations one more time in mid-August, during a weekend getaway to Sheboygan, a small city along the Lake Michigan coast.

It was Misty who called Mark to let him know what had happened.

The night before, Mark had been out drinking with his ex-wife’s sister.

They visited three Madison watering holes and were completely sloshed when they got back to his house after the bars closed. Around 4 a.m.

they both passed out—he on his bed, she on the floor. That’s where Mark left her several hours later when he got Misty’s call.

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Patty put on the clean clothes that Misty had brought along. Then they piled into Mark’s van to drive downtown to Madison police headquarters in the City-County Building, the hub of local government. The building, which also contained the courtrooms of Dane County; the offices of the mayor, county executive, and district attorney; and the county jail, is about a block from Lake Monona, the smaller of two lakes that form Madison’s geographic heart. On the isthmus between these two lakes reside the city’s two main attractions, the Capitol and the University of Wisconsin, positioned, like weights on a barbell, on opposite ends of an eight-block artery called State Street.

The police photographer took pictures of the wounds on Patty’s face, neck, and finger. Like everyone else Patty met that day, he was kind and sympathetic. He expressed his hope that her assailant would be caught. Patty cried, as she had all morning when someone connected with her emotionally.

Afterward, Mark drove Patty and Misty back to the east side. The plan was for Patty to stay at Mark’s house. But first she had to stop by her place to pick up some clothes and other belongings, and she asked Mark to come along, since she was afraid. Mark, however, said he needed to take care of some things at his place. He didn’t specify that the thing he most needed to take care of was the woman passed out on his floor. He said Misty and Patty should come over later in the van that Patty owned for her vending machine business. But the van was in the auto shop, having just been repaired. So Mark dropped Patty and Misty off at the shop, paid the $415 bill, and hightailed it back to his house.

Mark roused his guest and told her it was time to get going. Just then a neighbor knocked on Mark’s door, telling him that the engine of his van was smoking. Like the motorist who drives faster to avoid running out of gas, Mark decided he’d better get his drinking companion home before his smoldering van got any worse. He made it only a few blocks before the vehicle broke down. Mark left the woman at a nearby tavern and walked back to his house. Sadly, all of his scheming was for naught: on their way over, Patty and Misty spotted his van on the street and made inquiries of a bystander, who reported seeing the driver and a tall female companion leave on foot.

Patty’s long, dark hair was down now, and as she stood outside of Mark’s house she combed through it with a brush. To her horror, several large clumps fell out. She remembered then how her rapist had grabbed 24

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her hair and pulled her head toward his crotch, a detail she hadn’t mentioned to Thiesenhusen or the Meriter nurse. Other details would come back to her in similar ways, in the days and weeks ahead.

Within minutes, Patty’s brother Bobby called her from work. Lean and sinewy with hair that fell to the small of his back, Bobby was as vol-atile as an active volcano, his rage over his own painful past ready to erupt at the slightest provocation. “I’m fine,” Patty hastened to assure him, afraid of his reaction, but as she said this she began to sob, the first time that day she had really let herself go. They talked, and afterward she felt better.

The antibiotics Patty was given at the hospital caused diarrhea, which made the pain in her anal area more severe. It felt like the blade of a knife was stabbing her. She filled the bathtub with warm water; Mark put in some bubbles and lit a candle. Patty popped open a beer and slid into the tub. It felt good—both the warm water and the alcohol, her pain reliever of choice.

Throughout the day, support for Patty flowed into Mark’s house.

Her sister Betsy, who worked nearby at a local charity, was the first to arrive. She sat with Patty on the deck in the back of the house. Next came Patty’s sister-in-law, Peggy, who worked for the Dane County Sheriff ’s Department; they hugged and cried. Bobby came by later, as did Brenda. Everyone was drinking. It was hardly a festive occasion, but as the afternoon stretched into evening there was laughter and some joking around. Misty was annoyed by this. She hated it when her mother drank, even though most of her own friends abused alcohol and drugs. Patty, for her part, was glad for the numbness, the familiar refuge of intoxication. Later, she and Mark argued about the woman he had been seen with that morning. He told her it was someone from the neighborhood who needed a ride; she didn’t believe him.

That evening Misty’s boyfriend Dominic stopped by. This infuri-ated Brenda, whose own relationship with Dominic had ended in acri-mony. At one point she called him a “spic.” He left soon after, without speaking to Patty except for a brief greeting. Patty pondered her suspicions. Was Dominic’s showing up a sign that he was not the man who raped her? Or was he just so confident that he could get away with it? It was past midnight when Patty went to bed.

The next morning Patty sat on the back deck, alone, letting the events of the previous day sink in. It was already arranged that she
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would miss work; her employees would fill in for her, as they had the day before. She cried some more, feeling helpless. After several hours she called the police department to see if there was any news. She assumed that the police had found evidence. The man who raped her had touched the TV, the alarm clock, the light switch. He must have left fingerprints, maybe even hair or semen. Everyone Patty had spoken with the day before had seemed so optimistic. The police would get this guy, family members assured her. There was no doubt about it.

At a minimum, Patty expected her case would be handled by caring professionals, like the ones she had already encountered. None of the people she spoke to—the 911 dispatcher, officer Thiesenhusen, nurse Poarch, the police photographer—had expressed skepticism regarding Patty’s account. They believed her, and it never occurred to her that anyone wouldn’t.

This was, after all, Madison, Wisconsin, a community that exudes confidence in its superiority: its schools are better, its politics cleaner, its institutions of justice more just, its response to crime victims more compassionate. The Madison Police Department has long regarded itself as among the most progressive in the nation, oriented toward community policing and responsive to the citizenry. For more than two decades, the department had been led by David Couper, a reformer who adorned his office wall with portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Couper squeezed out the department’s old guard, whose approach to policing was immortalized in scene after scene of protesters being clubbed and teargassed in
The War at Home,
the acclaimed docu-mentary of Madison’s anti–Vietnam War movement. He hired women and minorities and raised the expectation of professionalism to where, by the time he left in 1993, the vast majority of Madison police officers had undergraduate degrees, and many had advanced degrees. The department worked with citizen advocates to ensure that victims of sensitive crimes were treated with sensitivity.

Madison’s swollen sense of pride owes to decades of accolades and good fortune. In 1948,
Life
magazine extolled the city’s can-do civic spirit, bountiful parks, and exemplary planning in a cover story called

“The Good Life in Madison, Wisconsin.” In 1996,
Money
magazine named Madison the best place to live in the United States. In 1997,
American Health for Women
deemed it number one, and
Parenting
magazine ranked it the nation’s third best place to raise a family. That 26

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year, the unemployment rate for Madison, population two hundred thousand, and surrounding Dane County, with six other cities, several dozen towns and villages, and another two hundred thousand people, stood at 1.6 percent, the lowest in the nation. Major new brick-and-mortar projects—a huge World Dairy Center, including the State Department of Agriculture Building where Patty ran her coffee shop; a convention center based on a design by Frank Lloyd Wright; and a campus sports arena—added luster to the city’s image. Soon a local busi-nessman would donate $205 million, more than twice the annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, to build a cultural arts center.

Madison was on a roll.

The Madison Police and Fire Commission picked Richard Williams, an African American, to succeed Couper as chief of police, and Debra Amesqua, a Native American, Hispanic, and lesbian all in one, as fire chief. In April 1997, Madison elected its first female mayor, Sue Bauman, and Dane County its first female county executive, prompting
The Capital Times
daily newspaper to proclaim the area “Dame County,”

predictably affronting some readers’ sensibilities. That year, the isthmus area was represented in the state Assembly by Tammy Baldwin, who would go on to become the first “out” lesbian in Congress. Dane County ranked among the top ten counties in the nation in its percentage of same-sex couples, and the national magazine
Lesbian Connection
reported more subscribers in Madison’s 53704 zip code than in any other.

But Madison’s liberalism, then as now, owes largely to its isolation from realities, economic and social, that the rest of the nation confronts.

The jobs are more secure, the pay is higher, the crime rate lower, and the community less diverse. (The 2000 census found the city to be 84

percent white and less than 6 percent African American.) And, in terms of how it operates, there is little that marks Madison as enlightened.

Money and power enjoy the same intimate relationship within the city’s limits as anywhere else. Madison’s proudly progressive spirit is manifest mainly in proclamations of tolerance amid a dearth of actual diversity, punctuated by occasional bleats of political correctness.

The first indication that things would go horribly wrong was when Patty called the police department on that Friday morning, the day after the rape. No, she was told, no suspect had been found, and none of the evidence had been analyzed. What’s more, no one would even be
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working on her case until the following Monday, three days away. There was only one detective assigned to handle sexual assault cases on this side of town, she was told, and he was off until then.

Patty was so surprised by this news that she called the local Rape Crisis Center, asking whether it was normal for four days to pass before police even begin to look into a sexual assault. The person she spoke to didn’t know, and the center’s legal expert wasn’t available. Patty put down the phone and cried some more. She was afraid to go back to her own place, to sleep in her bed, thinking that the man who raped her might return.

She didn’t know it yet, but Patty had more reason to be afraid of the detective the Madison Police Department assigned to help her. She had been given his name and wrote it down: “Tom Woodmansee.”

4

Detective Woodmansee

For Tom Woodmansee, being a cop was not just a job; it was a calling.

“I can think of no other field of worth that I could be a member of than that of law enforcement,” he wrote on his application to the Madison Police Department in 1990, when he was twenty-seven. Already, he seemed persuaded of his own moral rectitude. “I believe I have done a good job in keeping my sense of values and integrity and that I will continue to do so throughout my life,” he assured his employer-to-be. Yes, he had smoked marijuana and there were a few times, especially in college, when he had had too much to drink. And now and then he had a cigarette, a bad habit to be sure. But for the most part Tom Woodmansee was, in his own estimation and that of his fellow officers, up-right and honest, sensitive and caring. He was tall, trim, and in excellent shape. He had played baseball in college, transferring from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire to the UW–Whitewater, a big baseball school, where he graduated in 1985 with a major in speech and a minor in Professional Business Retailer Distribution. For a while he studied martial arts. He still played baseball, softball, basketball, and golf. He was married, enjoyed chess, and sometimes rode a motorcycle.

He was a well-rounded guy.

In his seven years as a Madison police officer, Woodmansee had shown competence and courage. Just a few months earlier he played a pivotal role in nabbing two armed robbery suspects, both nineteen, who had commandeered a man’s car and forced him to drive to ATM machines. When the man escaped and called police, Woodmansee chased one suspect down on foot and “directed [his] body into the brick wall,” as 28

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he put it in his report. Woodmansee later identified the other suspect from mug shots and handled the interrogation, getting the young man to admit his involvement and implicate his partner. Both were convicted.