NEW YORK (NY)
The New York Times
March 6, 2018
By Emily Bazelon
A FALSE REPORT
A True Story of Rape in America
By T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong
291 pp. Crown Publishers. $28.
In 2008, an 18-year-old named Marie reported that she’d been raped. A stranger with a knife entered her apartment in Lynnwood, Wash., while she was sleeping, she told the police, tied her up with one of her shoestrings and blindfolded and gagged her. He then took photographs that he threatened to post online if she went to the police.
It was a story out of a horror movie or a “Law & Order” script. Indeed, Marie’s foster mother, Peggy, thought of the TV show when she heard Marie recount her ordeal with, Peggy thought, an odd degree of emotional detachment. Peggy knew Marie to have a flair for drama, and she started to nurse doubt about whether her attention-getting tale was true. Another woman close to Marie, a second foster mother, was also uncertain. Peggy relayed her misgivings to the police, setting in motion a chain of disastrous decisions by the Lynnwood investigators that unraveled the life Marie was just beginning to make for herself, and gave T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong the title for their new book, “A False Report.”
Interrogated as if she were a suspect and pressured to recant, Marie wound up facing criminal charges for lying to the police. She was a teenager coming out of foster care and her sense of self and her support system was tentative and fragile. She lost her subsidized apartment and many of her friends. Her plans to get a driver’s license and go to college floated away in a sea of despair.
The John Grisham-worthy twist comes from the investigation of three rapes 1,300 miles away, in two suburbs and a city outside of Denver. The Police Departments in the three places in Colorado (Aurora, Golden and Westminster) pooled their clues and figured out they were probably looking for the same attacker. They found him — the break in the case came from a single detail about the spotting of a white truck. On the rapist’s computer, they found the photos he took of Marie. Years later, here was incontrovertible proof that she had told the truth.
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