Assault, Kidnapping and Sexual Assault

In this episode I will tell you about two cases that may have gone unsolved had it not been for the bravery, intelligence, and resilience of the victims.  

Transcript

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Have you ever been in a situation where you wondered if you should call the police and then decided not to? Do you know what to do if a car without police markings is trying to pull you over or somebody in a suspect, suspicious police uniform is trying to contact you? Have you ever wondered why some people who are arrested are released without any charges? Hello and welcome to Inside the Criminal Process, a podcast where I'll discuss and explain the criminal justice system in America using real-life examples and true crime cases. My name is Scott. I'm a 29-year veteran law enforcement officer and an attorney. I've worked as a patrol officer, a crime scene investigator, a field training officer, a detective, a parole officer, an investigator, a polygraph examiner, crisis negotiator, and an administrator. I've also taught college-level criminal justice classes. So I did want to add some things, some information related to the last episode on polygraph. There's people out there that talk about like somebody's ability to tell whether somebody is lying or not. And they did a study. It was years ago, it's an old study. I don't know how many people they used or how how uh valid the study was, but they tested people's ability to tell when people were telling the truth about certain things. And they they had several law enforcement officers there, and the study found that law enforcement officers were no better than anyone else in determining somebody's line. And while I don't dispute those findings for the most part, I think the study is outdated, and I think that experience in interview and interrogation, as well as interpersonal skills in general, have a huge impact on someone's ability to catch when someone is not being truthful. So just I just wanted to put that out there because I know that a lot of people kind of roll their eyes when say when you're talking about law enforcement deciding that somebody's has has not told the truth. So there's also people out there though that claim people always do or say certain things when they're lying, and you can identify a deceptive person based on body language or or their answers to certain questions. And there were a lot of trainings when I first became a police officer on how to catch somebody lying. And they had, you know, uh some class had told us that if you ask a question and somebody looks to the left when they're thinking about the answer, that means they're lying, or you know, there's certain body language things that people will do, they'll touch their face, they'll do things. And and again, I don't dispute some of these things, but but not everybody's gonna do that. You know, one of the things with body language is well, if they sit there and they cross their arms and they sit back, lean back away from you, that that means that they're not comfortable talking to you. And that that's just not true. Like I'm comfortable when I'm sitting down when I cross my arms sometimes. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean I'm not telling the truth. So be wary of people that tell you, well, I can always tell when somebody's telling the truth. And and in reports, if if you have a reason to believe as a police officer that somebody is not telling you the truth, you better have things that you can put in the report that that indicate that. And it would be contrary evidence. It's not a you can't use a hunch. You can't say, well, it's because they had a hard time answering that question. You can't just put out the opinion out there that somebody's lying. If you're gonna if you're gonna say that somebody's not telling the truth, you need to have evidence to back that up, and you need to be able to explain that to, for instance, a jury. Also, nervousness does not affect the polygraph. It's absolutely normal to be nervous during the polygraph test, and I tell people that all the time. It's kind of like the analogy I use is going through a haunted house. So you're at a certain level of anxiety while you're going through this haunted house, and that that doesn't mean that when somebody jumps out and scares you, that you're not gonna react, right? You're still going to react. So there's a baseline of anxiety that that we will see on the polygraph, uh, but it means people can also react to the questions that you're that you're asking. So today's cases, I'm gonna tell you the facts of two cases to illustrate that luck and victim survivor mindset were main factors in solving these cases. And in the next episode I I'm gonna do is on the investigation process itself. So uh a lot of that, you know, there are good investigators, there's bad investigators, there's mediocre investigators, and it's you know, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to be an investigator, but I'm gonna go through that in the next polygraph. So we'll save that for then. The first case I'm gonna talk about is a sex assault. It was in the parking lot of a nightclub in the city in which I worked. I was working as a patrol officer and and I wasn't the lead officer on the case. Another officer took the call and responded to a residence where she contacted a woman who reported that she had been sexually assaulted. The victim reported that she had gone to the parking lot to retrieve something from her car. And when she she got to her car, a man kind of appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her, and he sexually assaulted her between the two vehicles, between two vehicles in the parking lot. She was parked kind of far out in the parking lot where there wasn't really great lighting. She gave the officer a description of the man and said that he was wearing overalls. And uh she said also when he unfastened the overalls and and took them down, she saw something fall out of the top pocket. There's a top pocket in overalls that is um it's it's an open pocket. And she said she realized that it was the man's driver's license that fell onto the ground. And and that was the item that fell out of this guy's pocket. She was able to pick that that license up and and hold on to it, and he never he didn't realize it. He didn't see her put it in her pocket. So when he finished assaulting her, uh he left, and then the victim went home and called police. So I'm gonna I'm gonna use uh uh two two terms that I'm gonna have to explain to you what they are: sane, s-a-n-e, and safe. So S A-N-E sane is a sex assault nurse examiner, and SAFE is sex assault forensic examination. Or I've also heard it been called sex assault forensic examiner as well. Uh we usually say sane nafe, sane nurse, and safe is the procedure. So that's what we referred to it as was a sane exam. And this is this is an exam where when somebody's been sexually assaulted, you take them in. It's a medical procedure. The the nurse has to be specifically trained in these procedures to call herself or himself a sane. And they collect evidence, they do examinations, they can tell if there's trauma, they can tell. That one thing they can't tell you is if the person was actually sexually assaulted. They can gather evidence and and they can tell for the most part if the person has had has had sex or intercourse, but they can't really tell you, yeah, this is obviously a sex assault. I mean, there's different things that they look for, injuries and stuff of that nature, um, but they can never for sure tell you that the person has been sexually assaulted. But they're they're great in collecting the evidence, like the DNA and all that stuff, and and handling it as evidence and maintaining a chain of custody and all that stuff. So the the officer took this female that had been assaulted to the hospital to get a saying exam, and she drafted an affidavit for an arrest warrant for the suspect. I mean, she had all the guy's information. Um, it was all right there on his driver's license. So they went, they ended up going and served the warrant, arrested him, and uh uh he admitted to sexually assaulting this female. But had he not dropped his license, the case may have never been solved. Uh the woman didn't know anything about the man, the physical description wasn't too detailed. She didn't see his car, she didn't get a license plate. And um, you know, obviously sometimes witness witness descriptions of people aren't that great because you you're going through your brain is is overloaded with stimulus during a critical incident like that. Second case I want to talk to you about um is also a sexual assault, and it involved a kidnapping as well. So I was dispatched to a hotel to contact a female who reported that she had been kidnapped and assaulted. Um we didn't have cell phones, but the radios in the cars of the department I worked at had an eye call function. It was called eye call. And the dispatcher could dial dial you directly in your car and have a private conversation with you over the the eye call function. So it was like it was like you using a telephone. Dispatcher called me and said, Hey, the female was the female that that had been in the news recently. She went missing in a neighboring jurisdiction, um, and it had been in the news that she was missing. I wasn't aware of the incident because I didn't really watch the news or read the paper. So I contacted the lady in the hotel manager's office. Manager told me she just walked in to the front desk and asked to use the phone to call the police. He actually recognized her from seeing the news story, so he took her back into his office the phone there. She was wearing running shorts, tennis shoes, a light shirt. Um, and I basically asked her what happened. She told me that she was on a running trail three days prior to this, and it was about 9 a.m. So the sun was out. There wasn't a whole lot of people, it was during the week, so there weren't a whole lot of people on the on the running trail. She had been knocked down on the on the concrete, and the man picked her up and she was kind of stunned. He carried her to his truck. He said he put her in the passenger side on the floor of the truck and told her he would kill her if she fought or screamed for help. Uh obviously she was terrified, so she complied. And he had he had some type of weapon. I can't remember if it was a gun or a knife, but I remember that she said that he had a weapon. So they drove. She's on the floor of the truck. It's a full-size pickup for about 30 minutes. She couldn't see out of the truck, obviously, because she was on the floor. So she didn't know where they were when he stopped and told her she was going to get out and walk to the door of the trailer with him and just act like there was nothing, there was nothing going on, like she was his friend. At some point during her story, she handed me a piece of paper. She she had written on this piece of paper, or or that it was there was handwriting on the piece of paper, and um she said she would explain to me what it was when we got to that part of the story. So she also asked that somebody contact her boyfriend with whom she had broken up like that same week, just prior to being abducted. She said she was concerned and that he must be worried sick about her. Um she said that her boyfriend was likely in another state because when they broke up, he had packed all of his things and left the house that they lived in together. And he was from he was from a different state. So she was assuming that he was somewhere else in that state. So she said she knew the address of the trailer that she had been taken to, and she knew the name, the date of birth, the driver's license number, um, and the description of the man who abducted her. Said she didn't know him, she had never seen him before. He abducted her. So I thought that was a little strange. So as she went on, she said that the man had taken her in, chained her to the bed in the bedroom, and sexually assaulted her several times over the course of the last several days. So he had also gone to work during the day, but returned in the afternoon, and then he would sexually assault her during the night and then go to work. So she said that the reason she knew all this stuff, he had left his driver's license on the nightstand right beside the bed. She was able, she was chained to the bed, but she was able to lean over and she committed all of that information on that driver's license to memory. She said she was not, she, if she was going to get out of there, she was gonna be able to tell who this guy was, where they were, and and everything that she needed to report this to the police. So again, really strange. I was like, this is this is kind of weird. I've never dealt with this before. I checked the man's information on the criminal information system and confirmed that he actually existed. She had been abducted from a neighboring town. So I had dispatched call the police in that in that city, and they were sending a detective to pick the woman up because they had actual jurisdiction over the criminal, over the criminal case, the kidnapping. Um, and typically where the tri crime starts, that jurisdiction will will continue to take the entire case. Um if it goes throughout several states and it goes it involves a large area, uh they may they may have to split it up a little bit, but this this was going to be this other jurisdiction's case. So she said the man had talked to her about his plans and told her he couldn't let her go because he didn't want to go to prison. She said that he told her he didn't want to kill her, but he had no choice. She said she pleaded for her life and promised she wouldn't call the police if he let her go. At some point, the media had found out that the woman had been located and they set up their cameras in front of the hotel. It was kind of becoming the circus out there in the parking lot. Another officer that had that had responded to assist me. He came for uh, he came also to kind of do some crowd control, for lack of a better word. But he was in the office with us initially, and he told the lady, he said, We need to take you for a SANE exam. And she said, What's that? So he explained it to her. And she was hesitant, you could tell. She said she wasn't sure if she wanted to go through that. And the officer, who wasn't really known for his tact or interpersonal skills, he goes, Well, you don't have a choice since you've been sexually assaulted. We're gonna take you for a sane exam. And she she locked up, she just shut down, she said, I want a lawyer. I promised that man I wasn't gonna report him. And and she said, I feel bad that I've broken my promise. So I sent the other officer, I said, Hey, can you go help make sure the media's being contained and they're not coming in here and disturbing the business and and interfering with the business? So then I I told the the lady, I said, uh, you absolutely, it is your choice. You have to consent for a sane exam. Um, and honestly, I am encouraging you to do this so that we can identify this man that that assaulted you, kidnapped, and raped you, and and we can hold this person accountable because otherwise he's not going to face any uh any type of uh consequences for this. So I was able to kind of calm her down and and everything kind of calm back down and and and we were good to go. So she went back to relating her story to me. She said the night before he dropped her off at this hotel, he had talked to her about a plan. He had come up with a plan. She said he told her he was gonna use a camcorder and film them having intercourse and that they were gonna sign a contract that neither of them would ever disclose their relationship or that they had filmed this or they were never gonna let anybody see the the video footage. Um so he drove, he chained her back up, he drove to a local Walmart, bought a camcorder, came back, and told her, You in order for this to work and for you to survive, you have to be convincing. You have to show that this is like a consensual interaction between the two of us. Um because otherwise, like I'm not gonna, I can't go to jail. So I looked at the paper she had given me, and that was where that was the contract that he'd written up. And it was a statement that basically said the man and woman met on a running trail and decided to go back to his trailer and have sex. Um, and they were they videotaped it. The statement said that they both agreed that the encounter was consensual, that neither of them would disclose their encounter or show anyone the recording of them having sex. And then they both signed the bottom of the page, signed and dated it. She said he told her if she didn't go through with this plan, he was going to kill her. So she did exactly what he told her to do. And and who wouldn't at that point, right? So a detective and a sergeant from the the neighboring jurisdiction showed up at the hotel. We were able to get her in their car using a rear office door, and they drove out of the parking lot without even being noticed by the media. I went back to the district station to write my report, and honestly, I wasn't really sure if I believed her story. I was I was skeptical, and I was a little suspicious because she had been so calm, and it was just such a bizarre story. I was like, there's got to be more to it. Um, but I was wrong. The police that that took the case served a search warrant on the man's trailer, and they found the chains. The man actually admitted to the crimes during the interview, and I wasn't there, but I I think there was something else about the timestamp on the video. They were able to confront him with his with his story and bring up the inconsistencies, and he actually admitted to it. Her story was 100% true, and the man was sentenced to, if I remember right, I think it was 60 or 70 years in prison for kidnapping and numerous counts of sex assault. So the first degree kidnapping. In this state, the the kidnapping of first degree is when a person is taken with the intent to demand ransom, uses a hostage, or force concessions. It's a class two felony. If the victim is unharmed, if the victim suffers bodily injury, it's a class one felony. So we talked about classes of felonies a couple episodes ago. So first degree kidnapping can carry life imprisonment, especially if there's bodily harm. But and this is a this is a rule that came about because of that movie The Onion Fields, where the two detectives in Los Angeles were kidnapped. Uh they were overpowered, they tried to interrupt a robbery, they were overpowered, and the the two bad guys took them up. It's a great movie, it's a great book. Uh the book is by Pierce Brooks. He was the chief of the or the detective sergeant on the case at the LAPD. And they wanted to release the detectives, but they discussed it and they said, well, we can't because we're going to go to prison. So they killed them because they thought that because they had kidnapped them, they were going to get the death penalty or life sentence or something like that. So a lot of jurisdictions, a lot of states throughout the United States changed it to say, like, if you're if you kidnap somebody and you release them unharmed, you're not going to get the death penalty. Then second-degree kidnapping in the state, it covers all other unlawful takings, including moving someone without consent or taking a child under 18 with the intent to conceal, sell, or trade them. The penalties vary from class one to class four, class four being the least serious. Right? There's class three if a deadly weapon is used. Um class two if the victim is a robbery or sex assault victim as well. So those are those are the the that's the kidnapping statute in this state. So the lessons I learned in this case, number one, like no victim is gonna act quote unquote normal. There's there is no normal. Some victims, she was very calm, she was very collected, you know, and that doesn't that doesn't mean she's not being truthful. And I wish I had learned this earlier in my career, um, because you know, you'd always say, Boy, the person was crying, but they didn't see any tears, or that person just wasn't upset enough. There, there is no normal way for a victim to ask, especially to act, especially for a victim that that. Was involved in this in something of this nature. This is majorly traumatic. Um, so so for me to kind of think that she wasn't acting like somebody who'd been through that trauma, um, I never did that again. I never I never expected a certain reaction from somebody. Also, proactive victims can make all the difference in the world during an investigation. And you and um both of the cases I talked about today could have very easily gone unsolved because the suspects weren't known to the victims. Um, the victims' bravery, their intelligence, their will to survive, it was instrumental in solving the cases. I was so impressed by both of those victims and the amount of courage and emotional stability and resilience they exhibited. It was it was immeasurable. If God forbid, God forbid you're ever in that situation. Remember you can survive and do things to increase your chances of survival. Um if somebody's trying to force you into a vehicle, um I I would try to resist that as much as possible. I would recommend that you fight back with everything you have: eye gouges, throat bunches, hair pulling, groin kicks, knees to the groin, screaming bloody murder murder. Um you know, if this this is your life, like you've got to do some pretty pretty violent stuff to this person to keep from being placed in that car and transported somewhere. If you can always carry pepper spray, a knife, or even a gun if it's practical and you feel comfortable with that. Very few, I will tell you, very few attacks will will continue an assault if they're stabbed in the throat, neck, eye. You know, sorry to be so graphic, but but your life's on the line. No time to be passive or friendly or or or try to negotiate if you're in a situation where you can fight back. And also if you wake up in the trunk of a car, look or feel for an emergency release. Most newer cars have them. And and um one last piece of advice: I never accept a drink that's been delivered by somebody other than wait staff at a bar or restaurant. Ape rape drugs, date rape drugs seem to be pretty easy to acquire, and that's that's a pretty common, uh, pretty common theme if you watch the true crime shows. Answers to today's questions calling the police. I will tell you that I grew up in a house where we didn't call the police, uh, not that we ever needed them, but I always thought that calling the police was the absolute last resort and only to be done in emergencies. I will tell you now that if it crosses your mind to call the police, just do it. You can cancel them if you need to. They may still show up just to ensure everything's okay. But the old adage, better to have and not need than to need and not have, applies here. Trust me, police are used, they're used to getting calls that seem so unnecessary for them to respond to, but it's best to let them decide that than to be in a situation where someone's gonna get hurt or even worse. So, what to do if if you're worried the person that's that's trying to contact you or deal with you isn't really a cop. Um, like an officer impersonation case. I had two cases where the person I dealing I was dealing with thought I wasn't actually a police officer. Um, there was the first jurisdiction that I worked in. We didn't get badges when we went through field training, we got cloth badges. And a lot of people they they'd see that and they'd wonder why you're wearing a cloth badge, and if you're a cadet or what was going on. So I pulled this lady over and she was she said, I'm really scared, et cetera, et cetera. My training officer was with me, but um, I said, What are you afraid of? She goes, Well, I don't know if you're a real cop because you don't have a badge on. Uh so I told her, I said, just call 911 and ask them if the police have pulled you over, because we have to, yeah, we had to call out where we were pulling people over. So she did. She called 911 and uh asked if if if I was a real police officer. And uh, of course they they told her that I was, so that so that was good. And then I got I I was questioned when I was in an unmarked car. I pulled somebody over, and the person I was in full uniform, but he didn't want to open his open his window because he didn't think I was a real cop. So again, I had him call 911 and talk to the dispatcher. Both people, when they were told by the dispatcher that I was a police officer, they were they were fine with it. This goes for an op if an officer shows up your door at your door as well, and you don't think he or she is legit, call 911 and and ask dispatch if if you're dealing with a real cop. They will know, they should know. If not, they can get a hold of somebody that that can tell them whether or not the person is a, they will find somebody, a sergeant or somebody on that shift that will know what's going on. If you're in your car and you don't have a phone, just drive to the nearest police station. I mean, they may be mad if you finally get there and they and pull over, but it's better than than pulling over for somebody who's not a police officer. Uh the third question about if you ever wonder why charges are dropped or why somebody may get arrested, but but never goes through the court process or gets charged. So charges get dropped by DA's offices, um, or not even filed. The DA may take the case, but not never even file it. The because probable cause didn't exist, um, or they they feel probable cause existed, but they don't think they could prove the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. There's a lot of book and release cases that we that that we would do, is where we'd take some of the like the assault I told you about last time, the young man that stabbed those two guys. He was taken in, he was booked, so we had all of his information, but then he was released without a bond. So but but you have a certain amount of time in the statute of limitations to file those cases. There may be a lack of evidence uh or or new evidence that exonerates the person. Sometimes the DA dismisses cases in the interest of justice, uh, or the the cost wasn't gonna be or the trial wasn't gonna be cost effective, cost outweighs the benefits of the prosecution. DAs have a lot of discretion, and and you know, sometimes that's part of a part of a bargain that they have with the person's lawyer or whatever. So that's it for today's episode. In the next episode, I'm gonna break down the investigation process. Like I said, I'm gonna talk about investigation steps, crime scene procedures, and uh I'll have some stories for you as well. So, as always, thank you for listening and take care.