Today, Explained - The warehouse of forgotten evidence

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

Reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty set out to investigate why police across the country often fail to catch serial rapists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before we start, just a quick warning.500. She has a nine-year-old daughter. And I drove up there and I came to this white, clabbered house with an SUV in the driveway and a bicycle in front. And I went inside and we started to chat. And she told me her story. I grew up in Minneapolis, also some of the further out rural areas. Amber Mansfield has a bit of a checkered past. She is the first one to admit that. She bounced around in foster care because her parents were unable to take care of her. In her early 20s, she was charged with a misdemeanor offense of prostitution.

Since then, she left Minneapolis, got her high school degree, a house, a car, had a child. And in 2011, she began to correspond with a man named Keith Washington. We pen paled. We corresponded every day, pretty much. I grew up in the neighborhood where his family lived. So I knew his brothers, and we went roller skating. One of them dated my best friend. He was in prison for assaulting a police officer, he said. Actually, he was in prison for violently raping his girlfriend, but she didn't know that.

We supposedly had got pretty close and knew a lot about each other, but one of us knew more than the other because pretty much everything was a lie. And when he got out in May of 2015, they began to hang out. He wanted more, she wasn't so sure. He had a record. She had a child. But at any rate, they would hang out. Then on July 22nd, 2015, Keith Washington flew into a rage, took her keys, locked her in the bedroom of his sister's house. I just remember getting hit. And I'm like, I know what happened. And then next thing I know, like, I was on the floor. Keith Washington put his hands around her neck.

And I remember fighting back. And he's like, this is what it feels like for the last breath to leave your body. And mind you, his hands are like, one of them is all of me. She fell unconscious. When she woke up, he was crying. He asked her to forgive him, but a few hours later, he raped her. And at this point, there was just not a lot of,

not any fight left in me. I was there, but I wasn't there, pretty much. She was really scared. She waited a few days. She saved her clothing. She went to the hospital, and she got a rape exam. Now, a rape exam. She saved her clothing. She went to the hospital and she got a rape exam. Now, a rape exam is a very intrusive thing. It takes four to six hours. The forensic nurse, you know, swabs every part of your body, plucks every item off of your body. It is a really,

really kind of traumatic thing to do right after a rape, especially. While she was there, the police came. And they looked at her and she could tell immediately that they were skeptical. There was like a senior police and a rookie. And like, you know he was a rookie. He didn't know what he was doing. The other one was saying something. I was telling my three, well, ask you what we want to ask you or something.

And what do you mean? Are you sure, like, that's how it happened? Or weren't you over there? And I'm like, basically, it was my fault, and I was there and shouldn't have been there. And what's odd about this is they looked at her skeptically, but still they could see the bruises around her neck, where he had put his hands to strangle her and make her unconscious. The bruises on me, they didn't leave for almost four months. My legs were, like, covered that big.

Like, you could see full-on fist prints. And I can't get all this bodily fluid in myself. Or bruised up like that myself. But they thought that perhaps she had some role in this, that she'd invited it, or maybe she was a prostitute, whatever it was. She said she saw the skepticism in their eyes,

and she said to me, A sex offender and a prostitute? I mean, you do the math. Even though that prostitution misdemeanor charge was more than a decade earlier. Everybody deserves to have a second chance at life. That's all I was trying to do. I just wanted to keep moving forward and be a better person than what I was.

So Amber figured that they would look at both of their records. She had a record. He had a record. And in fact, she was half right. They looked at her record. They did not look at Keith Washington's record. I was a liar, but this man just got out of prison for it. Now, had they taken 20 minutes to type in Keith Washington's name into the criminal database, they would have seen that he was a level three sex offender. That means he was the most violent and most likely to re-offend. His ex-girlfriend, he had pretty much did the same thing.

Broke in, beat her, raped her, the same way choked her. But in front of her kids. In front of her babies. But they redlined the case, meaning that the unit never assigned anyone to investigate her allegations. No one called her, No one called him. They didn't go to the crime scene. They just kind of put the case on hold.

I asked Mike Sorrow about this. He is now retired, but he was the head of the sex crimes unit in Minneapolis back when Amber's case came to them. And we sat in his living room and we had some coffee and he was incredibly open and incredibly skeptical too. He kept saying things like, people lie. And he said that when the officers gave him Amber Mansfield's report, and it showed a misdemeanor charge from more than a decade earlier of prostitution. He said he looked at that report and he said, Are you kidding me? The way the relationship started? And I'm thinking, wait a second here,

you know, that's not the way relationships should start. You know, don't take people that are just out of prison for your dating pool. And then I don't know after that if I even wasted my time running a criminal history check on him. So the case was essentially closed. It was put on hold. If somebody has consensual sex with five to 10 people a day for money, consent can be an issue to prove in that case. And he added, we have limited resources between the police department, the county attorney, and the court system, and we have to use them judiciously. Meanwhile, Amber Mansfield is terrified. Keith Washington had heard that she had reported him,

and he would call and text every day, all day, every day. She kept calling the police, asking about the status of her case, and she never got a response. And meanwhile, Keith Washington was never arrested. He was never questioned. I missed the suspect was a level three sex offender. Okay. If I would have known that at the time, I would have taken different track on the case. And I have to say that he feels really, really bad about this now that they didn't investigate this case because, as it turned out, Keith Washington was a serial rapist. And then a few months later, he assaulted two women in the space of a few hours, leaving them both unconscious and partially dressed. And only at that point did a detective call up Amber Mansfield and ask her about her case.

Washington was charged with assaulting one of the women. The other was unavailable to go to trial. And they didn't charge him with Amber Mansfield's assault. Because of me and my sketchy past, he didn't get got right then and there. That's why these other two girls, like he had time to do that after me. If they would have did their job and got him right then, these other two ladies would have been alright.

But some people will be monsters forever, and she is definitely the monster people warn you about. Barbara Bradley Haggerty, your story, An Epidemic of Disbelief, ran on the cover of The Atlantic this month. Why did you choose to focus on Amber? Why was her story so important?

Because it was so typical. What I found in my nearly year-long investigation talking to detectives and to prosecutors, researchers, victims, what I found is that this case was typical not only in Minneapolis, but also nationwide. The Minneapolis Star Tribune looked at 1,500 closed cases from 2015 and 2016, which is pretty recent. And in two-thirds of those cases, no detective was assigned to interview the victim or the suspect, if they knew the name. They rarely went to the crime scene. So this is happening nationwide. The evidence police need to catch serial rapists like Keith Washington is sitting right under their noses, literally gathering dust. I'm Sean Ramos for him.

That's coming in a minute on Today Explained. Barb, you mentioned the numbers in Minneapolis that in about two-thirds of rape allegations in Minneapolis, police don't even interview the suspect or the alleged victim. What does it look like across the country? So every year, about 125,000 rapes are reported across the United States. And police have to be careful in investigating because, you know, you don't want to bring a false allegation against someone and basically sully his reputation and ruin his life. But in 49 out of 50 cases, the alleged assailant goes free. 49 out of 50 cases. The cases aren't investigated. They're not prosecuted.

And that makes sexual assault more than murder, more than assault, more than robbery, by far the easiest violent crime to get away with. But what about all the rape kits? What happens to those? Nothing happens. You mean women go through this arduous process of performing this pretty invasive procedure in a hospital to hopefully have concrete evidence against their assailants, and then nothing happens? That's right. There are an estimated 400,000 rape kits just sitting in evidence rooms from across the country that have never been tested for DNA samples. And those kits can be used to convict or acquit suspected rapists.

So let me tell this from the point of view of Detroit, okay? In 2009, August 17th of 2009, there was a prosecutor in Detroit named Robert Spada. And he was finding that the Detroit police weren't able to provide the evidence he needed for some of his cases, where he wanted to kind of look over the evidence again. And the police said, okay, why don't you come down to the evidence room, which turned out to be this warehouse. So Spada walks in, and it is utter chaos. Some of the windows are broken. It's hot. It's humid. They're exposed. All this evidence is exposed to the elements. There are birds literally flying around in the ceiling. And Spada says to the police officer, he sees these shelves with all these white boxes stacked up six feet high. Andada says to the police officer, he sees these shelves with all these white boxes stacked up six feet high. And he says to the police officer, so what are those over there?

And the officer says, oh, well, those are rape kits. And Spada says, well, I assume that they've been tested. And the officer said, oh, yeah, absolutely, they've been tested. So Spada walks over and he opens one of the boxes and he sees that it's sealed. It's never been sent to a lab. And he looks at three or four others. They're all sealed. They've never been sent to a lab. He stands back and he does this kind of back of the envelope calculation.

He figures there are about 10,000 rape kits on those steel shelves. 10,000. Turns on those steel shelves. 10,000. Turns out he was conservative. There were 11,341 untested rape kits sitting in a police warehouse. How could that happen? Because the police did not believe that the women are telling the truth. They don't think it's valid evidence. You can understand some of the cases because if the woman knew the

man, they'd say, well, why do we need to test this kit? We know who the perpetrator, the alleged perpetrator is, right? And that's four out of five cases. We don't need the DNA evidence. It turns out that's a really bad assumption. But there's this kind of culture of disbelief that pervades police departments around the country. L.A. had 12,000 untested rape kits. New York City had 17,000. Memphis, 12,000. Detroit, 11,000. It just goes on and on and on.

Do the women know that these rape kits aren't going to be tested? No, they don't know that. Why would any woman go through all of this? Having just been traumatized by being raped, why would she go through this if she didn't think that this was evidence they were going to use? Yeah. I mean, I'm just shocked that that could happen, I guess, that the process would even begin if there was a chance that nothing would happen. Right, right. And there's this image I have of the Detroit warehouse. The police methodically just sliding these rape kits onto

these steel shelves, never bothering to test them. So you've got thousands of rape kits going untested in Los Angeles, New York, Memphis, Detroit. Is any city doing a good job taking these tests and crimes seriously? The city that has been kind of, I think of it as a city on the hill, is Cleveland. So in 2013, Cleveland decided that they probably had a rape kit problem.

And they started a task force and they hired 25 detectives out of retirement and dedicated six prosecutors and other people to this task force to do nothing but test old rape kits and then reinvestigate and catch the rapists, sometimes 20 years after the fact. So they began sending off these kits, and pretty soon they were getting back the results. And so what they found is that they had many, many more rapists than they ever would have thought.

They also had a lot more serial rapists than they ever would have thought. So far, Cleveland has indicted 750 men, 750 men, and they've convicted 400, and they're not done yet. And what they've discovered is they have something like 480 serial rapists on their hands. In Cleveland alone? In Cleveland alone. Think what it is in LA or New York or Chicago or Miami. That's terrifying. Did Cleveland learn anything about the profile of a serial rapist from all those rape kits? Oh, yeah. So what happened, what Cleveland did is they went ahead and they gave all of the results to researchers at Case Western Reserve University.

And they said, here they are. You can look at now we know who these people are. We know their patterns. We know who they rape, how often they rape, where they rape. What they did is they upended all of our assumptions about rapists. So let me just kind of tell you the four big, you know, three or four big takeaways. One is they were shocked at the sheer number of serial offenders. They found that about one out of every five rapes was committed by a serial offender. And what that means is that if they had taken the first and second woman seriously, they could have averted a lot of future rapes.

Cleveland, 480 serial predators in a mid-sized city. Another thing that they found was that our TV idea of a rapist is absolutely wrong. You know, we have this idea that they profile their women and they're patient and they're crafty and they prefer, you know, a tall blonde in her 30s and they'll just wait around for that. Turns out that's completely wrong. These men may have fantasies of having a profile, a perfect victim, but in the end, it's just a crime of opportunity. They just rape whoever they can find. She's there, she's vulnerable.

That's who I will rape. And the former DA in Cleveland, a man named Tim McGinty, who's now retired, told me... You know, the prostitutes get raped first. They're the most vulnerable. They're out at midnight. They're out at the street.

All you have to do is yank them in the car or put the gun to their head. They are the canaries in the coal mine. This is what prosecutors have told me. Often you know that you have a serial rapist on your hands when women in poor areas of a city are being raped one after another. And often what happens is they begin to move up demographically and start doing home invasions and start raping middle-class women, and that gets attention. Another thing that they discovered is that they're essentially one-man crime waves. And why that's important is that it makes them pretty easy to catch. So Tim McGinty, the former prosecutor in Cleveland, said,

These rapists, when you look at them, for the most part, they're pretty stupid criminals. These are not the Napoleons of crime. They're morons. They've been to prison before, and they still go out and do the same damn thing. And we were letting morons beat us. And then one of the biggest surprises that I think has the most impact for law enforcement is this idea of crossover. So for a long time, we thought if you're a rapist, you either rape people you know or you rape strangers. You either rape the woman you met at the Christmas party or you're in an alley with a knife raping a stranger. Turns out that's not true. This wall between the two is actually a plaza.

They rape both. And why that is important, actually Cleveland was the one that found this, because what happened is when Cleveland forklifted its 7,000 rape kits, right, all of them, both the acquaintance rapes and the stranger rapes, what they found is that a lot of the stranger rapes were pinging to the acquaintance rapes. That means that there's this unsolved stranger rape. And that DNA is the same as the DNA in this case, where they know the name of the perpetrator. In over 100 cases, they suddenly had a name to this mystery stranger rapist. And that's really an argument to send in every single kid, no matter whether the woman knew the perpetrator or not. What if you found out your daughter was raped? Your daughter was coming home from a party or left a bar

and she's attacked and beaten and you've got to go see your little girl in a hospital and she's beaten up. And you find out that they took a rape kit and they didn't even bother following up on it. And that had they took a rape kit of that prior rapist, your little girl didn't have to have her ass kicked and beaten and put in the hospital, traumatized for life, because somebody didn't get around to do the job they were paid to do.

What would it take to get police and prosecutors across the country to take rape kits more seriously, to do the work? I think they're being shamed into it now. But I actually think there's a change in mindset that needs to occur. And that is that they need to just believe the woman. You know, when a woman comes in, you know, with bruises, having just done this rape exam, which was so intrusive, and sits down in the chair across from the police officer and says, I was assaulted. I think the thing that they can do is believe her.

They need to do an investigation. And if there's a rapist out there, they need to catch him. But, Shauna, I do think this is going to get better. There is a new generation of detectives coming up who have teethed on investigations during the MeToo movement and during the rape kit scandal, and they look at things differently. And I think they're being trained to take these women seriously. And so I think that what is going to happen is it is going to get better. But it's not going to get better tomorrow.

It's going to take a while for this culture, this kind of epidemic of disbelief to dissipate. Barbara Bradley Haggerty is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. You can find her story, An Epidemic of Disbelief, in print and online at theatlantic.com.