"An Unbelievable Story of Rape" is a 2015 article about a series of rapes in the American states of Washington and Colorado that occurred between 2008 and 2011, and the subsequent police investigations. It was a collaboration between two American non-profit news organizations, The Marshall Project and ProPublica. The article was written by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and the 2015 George Polk Award for Justice Reporting.
The article alternates between two true stories of events occurring between August 2008 and June 2012. The first narrative is about a woman in Lynnwood, Washington, known pseudonymously as "Marie", who reports being raped to the police. After repeated interrogation by the police, who do not believe her, she says that her report was false. She is subsequently charged with a gross misdemeanor for false reporting. The second narrative details the police investigations into a serial rapist in Colorado, who is known to have raped four women and made a fifth attempt. The man is arrested in February 2011, and subsequent evidence on his hard drive reveals that Marie, not previously known to the local investigative team, was raped by him.
T. Christian Miller of ProPublica had been reporting on law enforcement failures in identifying rapists throughout 2015. In August, he learned of the case of Marie and contacted her lawyer, discovering that Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project was already working on a similar story. They began to collaborate, with Armstrong writing about Marie's story in Washington and Miller writing about the police investigation in Colorado. Marie agreed to speak to Armstrong after six months of communication. The article was further informed by other interviews and thousands of pages of public records material.
The article was later adapted into the Netflix series Unbelievable (2019), which has received critical acclaim. The article also provided the basis of Miller and Armstrong's full-length book A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America (2018).
Background History "An Unbelievable Story of Rape" was written by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller. A collaboration between The Marshall Project and ProPublica, it was published on both websites on December 16, 2015. Colorado publication Westword reprinted the article as their cover story on May 19, 2016. The Marshall Project and ProPublica are American non-profit online news organizations. The Marshall Project specializes in criminal justice.
T. Christian Miller was a senior reporter at ProPublica. Throughout 2015, he had been reporting on the failure of law enforcement to trace rapists, including the case of Darren Sharper, a football player who raped nine women. Miller had discovered that a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database to identify serial murderers and rapists was mostly unused in the cases of rape, as most police departments fail to upload sexual assault reports. His article "The FBI Built a Database That Can Catch Rapists — Almost Nobody Uses It" was published in July 2015.
By August 2015, Miller was working on a report about the Washington and Colorado serial rape cases. He focused on a woman who recanted a report of rape after intense police interrogation. Years later her account was proven true when the rapist was prosecuted and convicted. In the article, Miller referred to the woman by her middle name "Marie". Miller called the woman's lawyer and discovered she was in contact with Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project, who had been working on an article about the case for several months. The teams decided to collaborate.
Research and writing Armstrong's editor Joe Sexton and Miller's editor Bill Keller had worked together at The New York Times. Numerous other editors contributed to the article, including managing editor Kirsten Danis of The Marshall Project. As the two reporters and two primary editors were all male, the team ensured that they consulted various women, some with knowledge of the case and some without, particularly in regards to how graphic or detailed to make the description of Marie's rape.
Miller wrote the sections about the woman in Colorado, while Armstrong wrote the sections about the investigation in Washington. The sections are ordered alternately, with an opening paragraph about the woman in Washington being charged with false reporting. The structure was proposed by Sexton. The first draft was 15,000 words in length, shortened to 12,000 in the final version. Keller and other editors recommended reducing the ending of the article, and creating a short epilogue.
As part of their research, Armstrong and Miller made public records requests to police departments and prosecuting attorney's offices in Washington and Colorado. They received thousands of pages of documents, including investigative reports, case reviews, crime scene photographs, and surveillance footage of convicted perpetrator Marc Patrick O'Leary after his arrest. News coverage, criminal justice guidelines, and court transcripts were also consulted. Extracts of an external report made of the mean-spirited incompetence ("bullying… coercive, cruel, and unbelievably unprofessional") of the police department that pushed Marie to first become flustered enough to concede it might have been a dream, then pushed her until she recanted her rape as being a lie, were made public for the first time in the article.
After seven months of email and phone communication with Marie's lawyer, Marie agreed to speak to Armstrong. It was the first time she had agreed to be interviewed by a journalist. Armstrong and Miller also interviewed two of Marie's foster parents and her friend, her public defender and civil suit attorney. The pair spoke to various police officers, including Detectives Stacy Galbraith and Edna Hendershot who investigated the Colorado cases. Three officers in the Lynnwood Police Department were interviewed, including Mason, one of the two officers (neither of whom were ever disciplined) who dismissed Marie's report of being raped. The interviews were made late in the process, the department having refused earlier requests for comment. The other officer, Rittgarn, declined to be interviewed. O'Leary was also interviewed regarding his crimes. A brief audio recording of Marie describing her rape is included in the article.
Summary In Lynnwood, Washington, an 18-year-old woman, referred to as "Marie," reported to police about being bound, gagged and raped at knifepoint by a stranger. Following a hostile encounter with the police, in which they pressed her on her attitude and inconsistencies in her story, she said that she made the incident up. In March 2009, she was charged with a gross misdemeanor for false reporting, fined $500 and put on probation. Marie had been sexually and physically abused in early life and was in foster care for most of her childhood. She joined Project Ladder at age 18, a program designed for people transitioning from foster care to living alone.
In Golden, Colorado, during January 2011, Detective Stacy Galbraith interviewed a woman who was raped at gunpoint for four hours. When Galbraith talked to her husband, also a police officer, he observed similarity to an incident reported to his police department in Westminster. Galbraith began collaboration with Westminster Detective Edna Hendershot, who had investigated two cases in which women aged 59 and 65 were raped in similar ways. They also discovered a burglary where a masked man had attempted to tie up a 46-year-old woman, who jumped out of her window to escape and was badly injured. The four known cases took place in different suburbs of Denver. The man had gone to extreme lengths to avoid leaving DNA evidence, but touch DNA from the same paternal family line was found at three of the four crime scenes.
Marie had made her report in August 2008 to Sergeant Jeffrey Mason and Jerry Rittgarn. Police guidelines advised that rape victims should not be interrogated, as they may be uncertain of details or report conflicting information. Investigating Marie's report, police found evidence of an assailant and abrasions to Marie's vagina and wrist. However, two of Marie's former foster parents began to disbelieve her due to her seemingly calm demeanor, and one reported doubts to the police. Following this, and Marie's conflicting account of when she phoned a friend, Mason and Rittgarn made Marie repeat her story, Rittgarn saying that he disbelieved her. He asked if the rapist was real and she said "no." Without reading the Miranda warning, they asked her to write that she had made a false report. She wrote instead that she had dreamed the incident, now unsure of what happened. After hours of further questioning, Marie wrote that she had been lying.
Project Ladder staff made Marie return to police when she said she made the report under duress. She asked to take a polygraph test—though such tests do not provide reliable evidence—but declined when Rittgarn threatened jail and loss of housing if she failed it. Mason filed a false reporting charge; such charges in similar circumstances were rare. Marie became the subject of media reports and an attack website. She quit her Costco job and considered suicide. In October 2008, one of Marie's foster parents saw a report of a woman in Kirkland, Washington, raped in the same way as Marie. Kirkland police had abandoned this lead after Lynnwood police told them at least twice that Marie's account was a lie.
In February 2011, a report was unearthed of a suspicious vehicle registered to army veteran Marc Patrick O'Leary, who lived in Lakewood, Colorado, and whose description matched the attacker. FBI agents collected DNA evidence from his brother which showed one of them was the rapist. A search warrant led to the arrest of O'Leary. He possessed a mask, gun, women's underwear, and other identifying evidence. Photographs of Marie were found on O'Leary's hard drive. O'Leary had watched his victims for hundreds of hours, breaking into their houses multiple times before each rape. In December 2011, O'Leary was sentenced to 327.5 years in prison for four incidents in Colorado. In June 2012, he was sentenced to an additional 38.5 years for two incidents in Washington.
An external report by Sergeant Gregg Rinta, who worked for the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office as a sex crimes supervisor, condemned the handling of Marie's case. It described the officers' behavior as "bullying" and highlighted threats of jail and housing assistance removal as "coercive, cruel, and unbelievably unprofessional." An internal review also concluded that Mason and Rittgarn's behavior was "designed to elicit a confession of false reporting." In 2015, the commander of Lynnwood's Criminal Investigations Division said that practices had since changed. Neither Mason nor Rittgarn were disciplined.
After Marie approached Mason, he offered an apology. Marie sued the city, winning $150,000. By the time of the article, Marie was married with two children.
Response The article won the 2015 George Polk Award for Justice Reporting, presented by Long Island University, and the 2016 Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting, awarded by the University of Colorado Boulder and Denver Press Club. It also won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, the article being described as "a startling examination and exposé of law enforcement's enduring failures to investigate reports of rape properly and to comprehend the traumatic effects on its victims". It was a finalist in the 2016 National Magazine Awards in the Feature Writing category.