By BILL LUEDERS

Patty says being raped at knifepoint in her bedroom was awful enough; for the next six weeks, until she moved into a new apartment, she slept at a friend's house or with her adult daughter on the couch. But, she adds, "Nothing could compare to what Tom did to me."

Tom is Det. Thomas Woodmansee, an eight-year department veteran who's highly regarded among people who work with victims of sexual assault. Patty says Woodmansee summoned her to the department under false pretenses, lied about the representations of others, and threatened her into confessing that she made the whole thing up. (Although Patty's full name, for reasons that will become clear, is a matter of public record, Isthmus is using only her first, to protect her privacy.)

From the moment she left the Police Department on Oct. 2, Patty has been telling people that the police coerced her into changing her story about the alleged Sept. 4 assault. She even wrote a letter to the editor to the Wisconsin State Journal and sent it along with two letters of complaint to Det. Woodmansee's supervisor, Lt. Dennis Riley. Although Patty's letters alleged serious and specific police misconduct, they were kept secret from department officials charged with investigating complaints. Instead? Riley gave them to Woodmansee, the accused, to put in his file.

Patty, unlike the police, continued to investigate her attack, and says she now has no doubt who raped her. But the Madison Police Department and the Dane County district attorney's office are not prosecuting this man. Instead, they are going after Patty for having recanted her story. On Monday, Patty was formally charged with obstructing an officer, a Class A misdemeanor for which she faces up to nine months in jail and/or a $10,000 fine.

The police and DA's office admit that prosecuting an alleged rape victim for making false accusations is extremely rare. But they've decided to make an exception for Patty--a 38-year-old legally blind woman with a history of sexual abuse who, except for a few hours in an interrogation room, has never wavered in her insistence that she was raped or, since then, in saying she was pressured into recanting.

"We are curious about why charges are being brought against her," says Betty Westerfelt, executive director of Madison's Rape Crisis Center. "Why is this case so egregious?"

Police spokesperson Tom Snyder says the decision to seek prosecution was made because of the large amount of time Woodmansee spent investigating the case before Patty recanted. In late October, the police put out a press release saying that this rape report was false, which Synder told The Capital Times "affects the real, legitimate victims, the officers who spend hours investigating the case, the citizens who pay for their overtime and the neighborhood residents who were upset by the idea of a stranger assaulting this woman."

In June 1996, after four sexual-assault reports in a three-month period were deemed to be false, the police imposed a freeze on calling attention to false claims. The article said "the department was worried disclosure of such claims would discourage legitimate victims from coming forward." But police evidently felt that the need to reassure neighbors that a rapist was not at large overwhelmed this concern.

The criminal complaint against Patty, filed late last week, contains nothing that contradicts her version of events. It says she gave detailed information about the rape to an officer who responded to her call early in the morning of Sept. 4, and later, to Det. Woodmansee. It says Woodmansee and Det. Linda Draeger on Oct. 2 confronted Patty with their belief that she made a false report. Her response: "Okay, I'm lying."

Patty also sent this letter, along with a handwritten complaint addressed to "Dear Supervisor," to Det. Dennis Riley. The complaint said the detectives pressured her to change her story and that "just about everything these people said in that room was a lie." It stated that whereas she previously would have encouraged a woman who had been assaulted to go to the police, her advice now would be: "Prepare to be victimized again." She signed her full name and gave a phone number.

In 1995, in response to an open-records lawsuit brought by Isthmus and the State Journal, the Madison Police Department was ordered to release copies of complaints filed by citizens against police. Last month, Lt. Pat Malloy of the department's Professional Standards Unit released what he said was every complaint filed by citizens against Madison police in 1997.

But Patty's complaint, which she sent in hopes of prompting an official probe, was not among the 30 acknowledged complaints, although the charges it levels are easily more serious than those contained in any record the department did release.

After looking into the matter, Malloy last Friday confirmed that Lt. Riley had kept this complaint from being investigated by providing it only to Det. Woodmansee. "Riley," says Malloy, "basically gave this to Woodmansee to put in his case file, and that's where I retrieved it yesterday afternoon." (Earlier, Riley told Isthmus he knew of no such correspondence.)

Malloy says this should not have happened, but plans no action against Riley nor any investigation into Patty's complaint, beyond retrieving her letters and reading through Woodmansee's reports. He notes that the department usually holds off on investigating complaints brought by subjects of ongoing prosecutions.

"I would assume that what she said in the letters is basically what her defense will be in court," says Malloy, speculating that Patty's complaint was prompted by her desire to avoid prosecution. He says that if Patty wins her case and comes back to the department asking that her charges be investigated, he'll do so. But he's not convinced there's anything fishy here.

What about Patty's claims that specific threats were made? Offers Malloy, "I don't know the context in which these alleged comments were made, so I would not say there was any inappropriate conduct here."

ACTING LIKE A RAPE VICTIM

Linda Moston has known Patty for 10 years and other members of her family for even longer. A licensed therapist who works out of an office in the Washington Square Building, Moston says Patty and her siblings shared a very troubling upbringing, including a history of childhood sexual abuse. The day after her encounter with police, Patty called Moston.

"She was more upset about that than the rape," says Moston, who urged Patty to come in for counseling.

Moston also heard from Woodmansee, who purportedly told her that he didn't believe Patty and was eager to close the case. "I didn't trust him," recalls Moston. "I just intuitively got a sense about this guy that it was dangerous for me to talk to him." And, after consulting with Patty, she told Woodmansee she wouldn't.

This meant police never heard from a professional therapist who harbors "not a doubt in my mind" that Patty was indeed raped and then badgered into saying that it didn't happen: "This woman does not have the personality nor the desire to make up something like this."

On Oct. 10, the day Woodmansee forwarded his request for prosecution to the DA's office, Moston began counseling Patty about her rape and her experience with police. The man who Patty awoke to find holding a knife to her throat "told her to be still or he'd kill her," says Moston, reading from yellow legal pads. "He tried to anally rape her. Then he told her to give him a blow job. Then he vaginally raped her. Patty complied because she was totally afraid for her life and the safety of her daughter. She told him she couldn't see and he said, 'I know.' She started to realize it was someone she knew."

It usually is. The state Justice Department says 92% of the 6,000 sexual assaults reported in Wisconsin in 1996 were perpetrated by someone known to the victim. That's one reason victims are often under enormous pressure to either not report being raped or to recant. Patty, says Moston, was "terrified of the repercussions" of accusing her daughter's boyfriend, believing it would imperil already troubled relationships with her daughter and Patty's own boyfriend. That's why, when Woodmansee engaged in what Moston calls "psychological terror," Patty backed down: "She doesn't want to risk conflict."

Besides, Moston notes, Patty "is basically ignorant of her rights," and Woodmansee "totally took advantage of that ignorance and went for the kill."

In subsequent sessions, more details poured out, but Patty was blocking on some aspects of the rape. Moston suggested hypnosis.

Patty twice visited a hypnotist in Madison, but never went under. On Nov. 17, she went to Charlene Ackerman, a hypnotist in Janesville. This time it worked: "It felt like I was in a dream, like I could remember."

Ackerman says it's possible for a person to fake being hypnotized or to lie under hypnosis, but she's pretty sure that didn't happen here: "My educated guess from all my experience is, yes, she was hypnotized, and she was recalling the experience correctly."

Moston ended up listening to a tape of that session, because Patty couldn't bear to. She says Patty is crying throughout. The details she gleaned, recorded on Moston's legal pads, persuaded Patty that she was correct in her suspicions. She left convinced her assailant was the man she suspected all along.

Patty says her daughter stopped seeing this man a little more than a month ago, around the time that Patty became a 38-year-old grandmother. The man, not the father, has since moved to another Wisconsin community. Patty's daughter believes her mother was raped, and also put through hell by the police. But she's never believed her boyfriend was responsible.

Moston calls Patty "the perfect victim"--blind, lacking self-esteem, easily cowed. "She doesn't stand up to anybody." That, she thinks, is what made her an easy mark for a rapist, and a pushover for the police. Now, says Moston, Patty needs to start standing up for herself: "Patty is the type of person who would bury this. She has to grieve this and learn from this experience, give other women the courage to come forward."

This, of course, is given greater urgency by the decision of the DA's office to prosecute Patty. When Patty first started talking about her case with Isthmus in late January, she didn't consider this a possibility. When she found out last week that charges were indeed being filed, she was shocked: "I didn't think they'd have the audacity."

The complaint is signed by Assistant District Attorney Jill Karofsky. On Monday in a Dane County courtroom, Patty and her attorney, David Knoll, stood silent to misdemeanor charges of obstructing an officer. Court Commissioner Todd Meurer entered a plea of not guilty on Patty's behalf; a pretrial conference is scheduled for April 12.

REMOVING BARRIERS

The issue of false reporting sends shivers down the spine of people who work with victims of sexual assault. Erin Thornley, executive director of the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault, finds it troubling that more attention is given to a very few false complaints than to the preponderance of complaints that are real.

"Women rarely lie about being sexually assaulted," says Thornley. "Far more times than not they're telling the truth."

Even without the danger of being accused of making a false report, Thornley says it's extremely difficult for women to come forward with charges of sexual assault. There's a huge stigma and "still a tremendous amount of victim blaming."

Patti Seger, who works in the DA office's domestic violence unit, cites other factors inhibiting the reporting of sexual assaults. For one thing, it's "intensely personal stuff" to publicly recount: "It's hard enough if you're the victim of a battery to say, 'This guy socked me in the eye.' What if it's a sexual assault?"

And then there's the legal system, in which their assailants can mount an aggressive defense. "Victims get ripped to shreds," says Seger. "If I were a sexual assault victim, I don't know if I'd report it."

Most women don't. Westerfelt of the Rape Crisis Center says studies place the report ratio at about one in five. She says prosecuting women for making what are determined to be false complaints runs contrary to her group's goal--"to remove barriers keeping people from reporting at all."

Michael Morrill, also with the Rape Crisis Center, says many victims are under tremendous pressure from their families, social groups and rapists to keep quiet about it. "Victims do recant, and they do it for a variety of reasons." He's heard from some women who say "the police haven't believed their story and have pressured them to say they lied." But he thinks cops in general "have come a long way in understanding why victims recant."

And Morrill says one of the Madison Police Department's best detectives, while he no longer handles sexual-assault cases, still goes around the state training other officers in how to take a more enlightened approach.

The detective's name is Tom Woodmansee. "He's outstanding," says Morrill. "He's absolutely first-rate. If we could have everybody be like Tom, we'd be in great shape."

Woodmansee apparently agrees. In 1996 he spoke to Shannon Henson, a student journalist now interning at Isthmus, about his work in the area of sensitive crimes: "From teaching around the state and seeing how other departments deal with this, I can honestly say we do the best job in the state."