Opinion/Bill Lueders

A tragedy of errors

Attorney Hal Harlowe's office couldn't figure out why the Aug. 21 order dismissing charges against his client, Patty, hadn't arrived by fax as promised from the Dane County District's Attorney's Office. Deputy DA Jill Karofsky sent it a second time, and Harlowe still did not receive it. Both times, the order was mistakenly faxed to Isthmus, followed by a phone call asking the paper to disregard. Yeah, right.

It was a fitting end to this chapter of what has been from the start a tragedy of errors. Patty, a Madison woman, last Sept. 4 reported being raped at knifepoint by an intruder in her home. Thereafter, says Harlowe, Patty was "subjected to a rape victim's worst nightmare."

In abandoning the state's prosecution, Karofsky admitted that the charge of obstructing an officer could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This was seven months after Patty was charged, and 11 days before her scheduled trial.

In between, the DA's Office and Police Department invested countless hours building its case against Patty, a 39-year-old legally blind woman. It was only after the investigation turned pointedly cruel, with police seeking to contact the man who sexually abused her as a child (see "On the Town," 8/28/98), that the DA's office gave up.

DA Diane Nicks, in a statement, said forensic evidence found at the scene and analyzed long after charges were filed "raises the possibility that [Patty] was assaulted and was perhaps mistaken about her assailant."

It's more of the rank dishonesty that has consistently governed the handling of this case.

Now that the charges against Patty have been dropped, I can for the first time discuss the police reports that provided the basis of the state's case. These consist primarily of a 49-page tome by Det. Woodmansee and a series of subsequent reports by Det. Lauri Schwartz, who took over the case.

I think Woodmansee's report, on its face, ought to strike terror into the heart of every rape victim or potential victim in Madison. Aside from the effrontery of having a male detective spend hours interviewing a female rape victim alone in her home, inquiring about such things as penis size and vaginal lubrication, there is the added horror of realizing that the investigation was, almost from the start, never really an investigation of the sexual assault Patty reported; it was an investigation of her.

Patty, on her first meeting with Det. Woodmansee, presented him with a short list of people she considered suspects. She couldn't identity anyone for sure because she has a severe visual disability and was repeatedly ordered by her assailant not to look at him. Although she suspected one person in particular, she consistently maintained that she wasn't sure. Woodmansee relates his last contact with Patty before he confronted her with his conclusion that she made the whole thing up: "I asked [Patty] if she is now positive that [...] is the person and she stated that she is not."

Indeed, according to Woodmansee's report, Patty herself pointed put that her assailant's inquiry about phones in her apartment and his failure to disable one of them suggested it wasn't who she most suspected: "[...] knows where all the phone are." She recalls that Woodmansee urged her to resolve her doubts, saying, "Don't sell yourself short; if you think it's probably him, it is him." DNA tests later excluded this man as the source of semen found on Patty's bedsheet.

There is no evidence that Woodmansee or anyone else ever bothered to even run criminal-history checks on any of the other individuals on Patty's list, or one produced by her daughter. Patty's daughter, who is known to associate with drug dealers and thugs, said she was "almost positive" the rapist was someone she knew and cited ten male friends who had been to the apartment, including an indeterminate number who knew that her mother was blind.

While ignoring leads like this, Woodmansee catalogued every tidbit he could find that seemed to undermine Patty's credibility. She laughed once or twice while relating embarrassing information--very suspicious. She wasn't as upset as he thought she should be--very suspicious. She called to tell him about a detail she remembered after their initial interview--very suspicious. The signs of physical trauma were not as severe as they might have been--very suspicious.

Sadly, no one in the DA's Office found it suspicious that Patty and her daughter's suspect lists were never investigated. No one found it suspicious that her "confession" is couched in the language of fear: "What do you want to hear? I'll say whatever you want." No one found it suspicious that, in her very next contact with police and consistently thereafter, Patty stated that she was coerced into recanting.

I'll say this about Tom Woodmansee: He may have bungled his investigation from beginning to end, but he's a much better detective than Lauri Schwartz.

Schwartz, put on the case at the behest of the DA's office, this summer compiled 38 additional pages of reports released to Harlowe under discovery. Her interview with me ascribes incompatible dates to the same event in nearly consecutive sentences. Schwartz also included a report on an inquiry I made about another case; she didn't even understand the subject of the call.

None of the individuals I named as being able to confirm parts of Patty's story were ever contacted. An interview in which Schwartz is assured that Patty is reliable and credible gets short shrift; that's not what she was after. Hearsay and innuendo rule. In one report, Schwartz relates false assertions about Harlowe based on what the chief suspect's mother said Patty's daughter told her son that Patty said.

And then there are Schwartz's documented efforts to track down a seven-digit phone number that showed up on Patty's records as having been made from her apartment at the time of the assault. Apparently, it never occurred to Schwartz to simply dial the number; if she had, she would have heard it answered, "911."

"From the perspective of law enforcement, everything in this investigation that could go wrong did," says Harlowe, a former Dane County District Attorney. And while he considers the case "an anomaly," Harlowe hopes that at some point "everyone involved in this tries to figure out how a case could go so terribly wrong. No one wants to see something like this repeated."

Mayor Sue Bauman has asked the cops to look into this case, which is a little like asking the CIA to certify that it isn't up to any mischief. What's needed is a probe independent of the Madison Police and DA's Office. If these people had spent half as much time investigating Patty's reported assault as they did investigating Patty, a violent rapist may have been caught.