The Evil That Men Do Part 24

"First, all the victims were white females from age eighteen to thirty-two, with an average age of twenty-five. He used the surprise approach in every instance, and there was no injurious force. He preselected the victims either through peeping in their windows or through surveillance.

"The method used for control was strikingly similar, too. He had a knife, but he primarily controlled his victims verbally.

"Then I looked at his reaction to resistance. Each of the victims did in fact resist. Two of them, I believe, screamed. Two of them jumped out of bed. According to their descriptions, even though he had a knife, he did not respond with violence."

Roy next examined the UNSUB's s.e.xual behavior, pointing out the rapist's insistence that the victims remove their own clothing, as well as the persistent fondling, kissing, rubbing, and c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s he performed.

He was a power rea.s.surance rapist, no doubt.

"The theme running through the s.e.xual behavior was attempts to bring his fantasy of a consenting relationship to reality," said Hazelwood.

Moving on to the UNSUB's verbal behavior, "the theme was nonviolence," Roy said. He added that the rapist tried in every case to rea.s.sure the woman she would not be hurt.

"Ms. Holly said, 'He was very calm, almost trying to be nice.' Ms. Wilson said, 'He had a really nice kind of a sort of comforting tone.' Ms. Phillips said, 'He was almost loving in a way.' "

If Roy missed anything, the jurors apparently didn't notice.

"His testimony was very useful," says Lamborn. "In some of the cases we had the DNA evidence, but on one or two of them all we had was MO. Hazelwood could combine them all as a series.

"He had a nice, gentle approach to the jury that doesn't try to overstate his testimony. He's down to earth. When you listen to him you say, 'That makes a lot of sense.' And if it makes a lot of sense to a jury, they'll retain it when they deliberate."

Kenneth Bogard was found guilty on all counts, and then stood up in court to confess his guilt, calling himself a s.e.x addict. He said he'd found G.o.d in jail while awaiting trial.

Kim Caldwell was having none of it.

"It's over for you," she said in the wood-paneled court. "This is your funeral. You're dirty and perverted because you don't accept or take responsibility for what has been determined to be your guilt. This is not your celebration today. This is my celebration."

Judge John Thompson sentenced Bogard to ninety-six years in prison. He must serve half that time before being considered for parole.

19.

Pseudovictims It was a vulgar spectacle played out among the tired old river towns of the lower Hudson Valley, a notorious, cynical, race-baiting hoax sparked by a troubled teen's false-and confused-accusations of kidnap and rape.

Under a pale autumn sun early on November 24, 1987-the Tuesday before Thanksgiving-fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley of Wappinger Falls, New York, left her home, ostensibly headed for school. Instead, Brawley took a bus thirty miles west across the Hudson to see a former boyfriend, Todd Buxton, then resident in the Orange County Jail in the city of Goshen, New York.

After visiting the young man, she boarded an eastbound bus in the company of Buxton's mother, Geneva, and rode twenty miles to Newburgh, where Geneva Buxton lived.

The next bus back across the Hudson from Newburgh to Wappinger Falls departed at six, but Tawana Brawley was reluctant to board it.

She told Mrs. Buxton she was having trouble at home with Ralph King, her mother's companion. He'd recently grounded her, she said, for staying out until five in the morning.

King kept going "on and on" about it, and "wouldn't let go" of the matter, Brawley complained.

This was not an isolated incident in the King-Brawley household.

Glenda Brawley, thirty-one, had on numerous occasions disciplined her daughter for running away or spending the night with boys. "And there were numerous reports of fights specifically between Mr. King and Miss Brawley," The New York Times later reported. "When [Tawana] was arrested on shoplifting charges the previous May, the police had to intervene to prevent Mr. King from beating her at the police station."

Ralph King's personal history of violence predated his acquaintance with Glenda Brawley. In 1969, King was accused of stabbing his then-wife multiple times. While awaiting trial for the a.s.sault, King shot her to death. He spent seven years in prison for the crimes.

The grand jury impaneled to take testimony in the Brawley case would hear abundant testimony of what the Times called "strains" between Tawana and King.

"One witness said Mr. King 'would watch her exercise' and talked about the girl 'in a real s.e.xual way,' sometimes describing her as 'a fine fox,' " the paper reported. "Another witness said Miss Brawley referred to Mr. King as 'a filthy pervert.' "

At about 8:00 p.m. on the twenty-fourth, Tawana Brawley finally did board a bus in Newburgh. She asked the driver, with whom she was acquainted, to drop her in Wappinger Falls. He explained that the town was not on his route at that hour. The best he could do was nearby Wappinger.

As it happened, Tawana was familiar with Wappinger. Her family had lived in the former mill town until earlier that month, when they were evicted from their town house at the Pavilion Condominiums, 19A Carnaby Street. Tawana still had a key to the vacated unit.

The truth of what else happened to Tawana Brawley on the night of the twenty-fourth may never be publicly known. She declined to appear before the grand jury, which was left to piece together a summary of her account from what she told authorities over the course of three brief interviews.

According to the summary, the last reliable report of Brawley's whereabouts on the night of the twenty-fourth was as she stepped down from the bus in front of a Mobil station in Wappinger.

Then, according to the grand jury's summary of the teenager's version of events, "a dark, four-door car with two men inside approached, and a white man wearing a black jacket with a silver badge hit her, pulled her by the hair into the back seat and got into the back seat himself.

"Ms. Brawley was lying down on the seat and did not see what the driver looked like. She recalled being at a place where there were three men dressed in dark clothes, but did not know where she was, although she thought she was in the woods. She was struck again on the head by the man who had previously hit her. One of the men was tall with blond hair and a mustache. He was also wearing a shoulder holster. She recalled feeling cold. The men urinated on her and in her mouth. Ms. Brawley had no recollection of what happened after that, nor of what happened to her on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Sat.u.r.day."

The grand jury noted it was never clear from Tawana Brawley's few contacts with authorities, or from comments attributed to her by relatives and other witnesses, exactly what sort of s.e.xual a.s.saults she claimed to have suffered. At various times she seemed both to allege and to deny that she had been v.a.g.i.n.ally raped and forced to f.e.l.l.a.t.e her a.s.sailants. She never could locate for police the woods where the alleged a.s.saults took place.

There was considerable physical evidence that connected Tawana Brawley to the interior of her family's deserted condominium for the period November 25-28, the days for which she claimed no memory. The heat had been turned on in the apartment. The denim jacket she was wearing November 24 was discovered in the apartment washing machine. Fibers indistinguishable from those of the apartment carpet were found on her person. An insulating material called Hollofil, recovered from combings of her pubic hair, matched the Hollofil found in a pair of white boots inside the apartment.

Moreover, between November 26 and November 28, neighbors reported they periodically saw a young woman answering Tawana Brawley's description in and around the Pavilion complex.

Brawley's family apparently began searching for her on the night of the twenty-fourth, although she was not officially reported missing for another four days. Sometime that evening, a black female identifying herself as Brawley's aunt appeared at the Newburgh Police Department to report her niece had run away. She said Tawana was believed to be in Newburgh. On the twenty-seventh, Friday, another member of the family personally accused Todd Buxton's sister of kidnapping Tawana.

At approximately 2:00 p.m. on Sat.u.r.day the twenty-eighth, after visiting the Pavilion apartments on what she said was an errand to pick up the family mail, Glenda Brawley drove to the Wappinger Falls Police Department to file a missing person report on her daughter.

Asked by a desk officer why she waited four days, Glenda Brawley said that she worked nights, and did not have a car.

According to the grand jury report, about the same time Glenda Brawley was seen at the Pavilion complex that Sat.u.r.day, an unnamed resident looked out her sliding gla.s.s door "and observed Tawana Brawley in a squatting position . . . a few feet from her family's former apartment at 19A. There was no one else in the area.

"According to this witness, Miss Brawley, after looking around for a couple seconds, stepped into a large plastic garbage bag and pulled it up to her neck. She remained stationary for another couple of seconds and continued to look around. She then hopped two times and lay down on the swampy ground beneath an air conditioner. . . . When she did not move, the neighbor called the sheriff."

The Times reported that Eric Thurston, the responding Dutchess County sheriff's deputy, found Brawley "smeared with feces and seemingly dazed; her jeans were scorched and torn, and racial slurs, including 'n.i.g.g.e.r' and 'KKK' had been written on her body."

Forensic tests would trace the excrement to a neighborhood collie named Remi, who was also the source of the feces discovered within a pair of denim pants found inside apartment 19A. Small wads of Hollofil were found in Brawley's nose and ears, an apparent attempt to protect the orifices from the dog droppings.

At about the time Glenda Brawley was reporting her missing, Tawana Brawley was being taken by ambulance to a local hospital. There, emergency-room personnel found "KKK," "Nigg," "ETE SHI," "n.i.g.g.e.r," and "b.i.t.c.h" written on her chest and torso with a black substance resembling charcoal. Traces of it were detected under Brawley's fingernails.

Her hair was matted and jagged, as if someone had randomly sheared off clumps of it.

The only evidence of physical injury that physicians discovered, however, was an old quarter-size bruise behind the teen's left ear, plus some swelling in Brawley's left arm, where an IV had been inserted by ambulance paramedics on her way to the hospital.

No sticks or leaves or dirt or other detritus consistent with Tawana Brawley having spent a considerable time being s.e.xually a.s.saulted in the woods were discovered about her, in her, or on her clothing, either.

A rape kit examination disclosed no evidence of s.e.xual a.s.sault or s.e.xual intercourse. Brawley was discharged from the hospital at about 10:00 p.m. that Sat.u.r.day night.

False accusers are a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of women who report stranger rapes each year, somewhere between 4 and 7 percent of the total, according to Hazelwood, who has studied the behavior of hundreds of what he calls pseudovictims.

Roy frequently consults in rape and a.s.sault cases where a false accusation is suspected, so it was no surprise that immediately after the Brawley case broke, Hazelwood received a telephone call from J. J. Thompson, a Dutchess County investigator.

Thompson wanted Roy's opinion of Tawana Brawley's truthfulness. Hazelwood in turn routinely asked for FBI clearance to offer his help. But the Bureau, concerned with the incendiary nature of the case, told Hazelwood not to have any official involvement in the investigation.

So Roy a.s.sisted unofficially. He reviewed the case for Thompson, and then served as an informal consultant to the ensuing official investigation.

Although the evidence would show there was no substantive reason to believe Brawley's allegations-which under normal circ.u.mstances should have quickly faded away-reasonableness soon was the scarcest commodity in Dutchess County, where the investigation took place.

Two lawyers, Alton H. Maddox, Jr., and C. Vernon Mason, together with the Reverend Al Sharpton, an activist preacher from Brooklyn, appeared together on the scene as Tawana Brawley's "advisers." This "trickster trio," as reporter Steve Dunleavy described them in the New York Post, proceeded to promote an epic hoax based on a single, bogus allegation of conspiracy.

A short while after Brawley reported her story, a part-time white local police officer named Harry Crist, Jr., committed suicide, apparently as a consequence of career and personal problems.

Because of Brawley's accusations, Crist's movements at the time of her alleged abduction were of understandable interest to investigators. However, Steven A. Pagones, a Dutchess County a.s.sistant district attorney, came forth to say that he and Crist were friends, and that they had been together with a third white male, a state trooper named Scott Patterson, at the time of the alleged a.s.sault on Tawana Brawley.

Although no evidence connecting Crist, Pagones, or Patterson with Brawley has ever surfaced, her three black advisers seized on Pagones's information as evidence of a cover-up.

"Mr. Pagones and his organized crime cronies are suspects," Sharpton said on Geraldo Rivera's television program. Sharpton repeated the accusation in several other venues.

"He was one of the attackers, yes," Alton Maddox, Jr., said in a televised press conference, adding, "If I didn't have direct evidence, I wouldn't be sitting here saying that."

One theory that Brawley's three advisers floated had Pagones and Patterson actually killing Crist, staging the crime as a suicide.

Pagones finally filed a $395 million defamation suit against the three advisers and Tawana Brawley in 1988.

As the contrived controversy gained momentum, and national attention, New York governor Mario Cuomo named Bob Abrams, the state attorney general, as a special prosecutor.

Sharpton responded by comparing Cuomo and Abrams to Klan members. At one event, Maddox swore indignantly, "Robert Abrams, you are no longer going to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e looking at Tawana Brawley's picture!"

Public opinion polls indicated that most New Yorkers, white and black, disbelieved Brawley's account. Nevertheless, the comedian Bill Cosby put up a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for information. Boxer Mike Tyson gave Brawley his Rolex, and talk-show host Phil Donahue took his show to Dutchess County, where he broadcast live from a rally of Brawley supporters.

To a degree, Sharpton, Mason, and Maddox succeeded in making the truth of the case irrelevant. They promulgated a "could have been" theory that had resonance for many blacks distrustful of white authority.

Lateef Islam, a local activist who marched frequently in support of Brawley, told Washington Post reporter Dale Russakoff that at the time of the hoax he refused to dwell on the issues of truth.

"I was working on the fact that it could have happened," Islam explained, a position Islam shared with many of Brawley's supporters. "I've known incidents like that that happened, and I was angry at people who said it couldn't have happened."

Such crimes of course do occur. But there were two major reasons to conclude that this purported incident could not have happened in the way Tawana Brawley claimed. One, there wasn't a scintilla of corroborative physical evidence, when there should have been a great deal of it. To the contrary, the physical evidence all pointed away from Brawley's version of events. Secondly, as Roy would explain in his informal consultations with the task force, it was clear from the behavioral evidence that Tawana Brawley's allegations were unsupported.

There are several routinely observed factors in false accusations of rape-although none should be taken as absolute proof that a self-described victim is lying. Many occur in truthfully reported cases as well.

Pseudovictims range in age from young girls to mature men and women, and come from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

In Roy's experience, the motivation for falsely reporting a stranger rape often is a desperate need for attention. Many pseudovictims also are highly self-destructive, and in the past have tried less dramatic means of gaining attention, most commonly feigning illness.

When a police department questions a victim's allegations, as in the Brawley case, Roy advises them to check for recent stresses in his or her life, emotionally upsetting incidents such as Tawana Brawley's clashes with her family.

Pseudovictims sometimes have a history of making similar accusations, and that history may be a long one, too. In the most extreme case Roy knows of, a woman made two identical false rape allegations twenty-seven years apart.

False allegations of rape also may follow similar incidents of which the pseudovictim is personally aware, or learns about in media reports, or sees portrayed in the movies, on television, or in popular fiction.

In one example of this copycatting, a woman walked into a police station to report she had been stopped on the highway at 1:00 a.m. by a black police officer, who raped her at gunpoint. She described him as six two, with a black patch over his left eye. He was missing three fingers from his gun hand, too, she said.

The city police suspected an impersonation rape, and issued a composite sketch, along with a warning, to the public.

A week later, the woman admitted she'd made up the whole thing.

Two weeks after that, two women came forward to say that they, too, had been driving on the beltway and had been stopped and raped at gunpoint by the same a.s.sailant.

Informed that the previously publicized allegations were false, the women turned and wordlessly departed the police station.

A short while before Tawana Brawley made her accusations, a former cla.s.smate, also a black girl, reported that two white men had abducted and raped her. She recanted the story.

Geneva Buxton later told the grand jury that on the afternoon of November 24, after visiting her jailed son she and Tawana Brawley were pa.s.sed on a Goshen street by two white men in a vehicle. She said the pickup slowed and made a U-turn, then drove by again, slowly, as the occupants looked "real hard" at Brawley.

In the weeks following her accusations, three more black females, one in New Jersey and two in New York, also falsely reported they'd been s.e.xually a.s.saulted and smeared with feces by groups of white males.

In an ill.u.s.trative case, an imaginative sixteen-year-old girl told police she'd been attacked and raped in a service station rest room on a day that she skipped school.

According to her story, the girl consumed a half bottle of vodka, and had stopped to use the rest room when a razor-wielding a.s.sailant followed her inside.

They struggled. She suffered three superficial scratches on her neck, as well as single cuts, ostensible defensive injuries, lengthwise on both her palms.

She said that after raping her, the man carved "Don't forget" into her lower abdomen, bracketing the words with acute diagonals similar to the > "greater than" and < "less="" than"="" symbols="" on="" a="" computer="">

The teenager later admitted fabricating the story.

While pseudovictims tend to avoid injuring sensitive areas of their anatomy, one woman in Roy's casebook required surgery for removal of a tree branch she'd inserted into her v.a.g.i.n.a.

Typically, the pseudovictim's report will be either extremely vague or lavishly detailed. Roy once served as a consultant to authorities in a British serial rape case where the suspect was alleged to have a.s.saulted seventeen victims. Hazelwood reviewed the statements from all seventeen women, noting that each, except for one, was able to tell her story in three to five pages of text. The exception's account ran to twenty-seven pages. She finally came to the alleged rape itself in the middle of page 26.

Hazelwood told prosecutors that he found this victim's story suspicious. The next day, the defendant in the case abruptly confessed to sixteen of the rapes, but adamantly insisted he knew nothing of the elaborately narrated story that Roy questioned.

A pseudovictim will stress his or her powerlessness to repulse the attack as a face-saving factor, and the rape will be described as both violent and degrading.

As the investigation continues, the pseudovictim may evince scant interest in actually identifying his or her attacker. Tawana Brawley did not speak to investigators after November 30.

Pseudovictims also may exhibit features of borderline personality disorder, the mental warp portrayed with icy brilliance by actress Glenn Close as the depraved Alex Forrest in the movie Fatal Attraction.

Like Forrest, they can be impulsive, moody, histrionic, reckless, and highly unstable in their relationships.

Their romantic attachments especially can be obsessive, and a not uncommon object is the detective a.s.signed to their case.

Roy's advice to the incautious rape investigator contemplating such an affair is simple: Don't do it. "Remember the rabbit in the pot," he says.

Both the most interesting and unique false allegation he's ever encountered was made by a twenty-seven-year-old woman, mother of an eight-year-old child.