I Am Evidence (2017) - full transcript

All I can tell you

is what I remember.

I went straight back to

my bedroom and he was there,

behind my bedroom door.

Debbie Smith:

And he said don't turn around

and don't scream

or I'll kill you.

Woman 1:

I was on a date with a guy.

He was fighting me

and punching me in my face.

Woman 2:

I started screaming

for somebody to help me.

Woman 1: And then

after that, it's a blur.

Woman 3:

They did a rape kit on me.

They took a swab

of my mouth, my vagina.

Woman 4: And I felt like

my body was a crime scene.

I just thought, I'm going to

give them all this information,

and they're just going to go out

in a week and catch him.

Diane Sawyer:

Really stunning news today

about the number of rape cases

police have never

even tried to solve,

not even opening the rape kits.

Male Reporter 1:

In Memphis more than 12,000.

Male Reporter 2:

Louisville has roughly 4,700.

Female Reporter 1: San

Diego police have nearly 3,000.

Female Reporter 2:

Colorado has 6,283.

Woman: In Texas, we had

over 20,000 untested rape kits.

- Untested

- Untested.

Female Reporter:

Never opened, never tested.

It's estimated as many as

400,000 rape kits nationwide.

Some cases may be too old to

prosecute under the statute of limitations.

Woman: I can understand

one city being negligent,

but a nation?

Mariska Hargitay:

For a survivor to come forward,

to muster that courage,

and to then have nothing

done about it.

What are we saying?

Who are we protecting?

We're saying you don't matter.

Woman 5:

I always was told

as a little girl growing up,

"if someone touches you,

you tell, you tell, you tell."

Wow, and nothing happened?

Hargitay:

By not testing the rape kits,

we're saying, "It's okay,

you can do it again."

And part of the terror

of being raped

is knowing that the perpetrator

is still out there.

I am evidence, literally.

My name is on a box, on a shelf,

that has never been tested.

Hargitay: One of my

best friends is from Detroit,

so I used to come

in my early 20s a lot.

So I... I've always had

a deep affinity for this city.

A lot of people are saying,

"You can't do it."

This is the fifth most

violent city in the country,

and people are going,

"Detroit? Really, Detroit?

Sweetheart, there's other places

you'd get a lot further

with than Detroit."

But I say, "Sweetheart you,

that's where we're starting"

A lot of people just don't

know about this problem,

and I was one of those people.

And then you meet

people like Kym Worthy

and you see what she's doing,

you sort of can't help but

say, "What am I doing?

When I first met Kym

four years ago,

Detroit had just discovered

11,000 untested kits.

Kym's commitment to test

every last kit

here in Detroit,

is so remarkable.

I've been playing Detective

Benson on "SVU" for 15 years,

and when I first began, letters

started coming in from viewers.

These men and women

were disclosing to me

their stories of abuse.

And at first, it was a few,

then it was more,

then it was hundreds,

and then it was thousands.

A majority of them included

some version of,

"I've never told

this to anybody before."

And here I was, an actress on

a TV show getting these letters,

and I was immersed

in these issues.

So I educated myself,

and I got involved.

To me, the rape kit backlog

is the clearest

and most shocking demonstration

of how we regard these crimes.

Kym's tireless and relentless

work here in Detroit

is unwavering and unstoppable.

I had absolutely no clue

that people stockpiled

rape kits.

I had no clue

that anyone would do that.

Kym Worthy: I just never imagined

that it was anyplace else than here.

Robert Spada: I was asked

by the Detroit Police Department

to accompany them

to an off site property room.

I went there.

During that time,

I noticed the racks with boxes

with rape kits in them.

And I asked,

"What's in those boxes?"

And they said that those

were old tested rape kits.

But I pulled some of the boxes,

and I realized that there

still was the seal on the kits.

Which would lead you to

believe they had never been tested

if the seal's never been broken.

I was extremely shocked to think

that there was just racks of kits

sitting

in an abandoned warehouse

with windows open

and birds flying around.

He said, "Boss, you're not going to

believe what has happened, or what I saw."

And he said, "I think I saw,"

he said, "I saw

approximately 10,000 rape kits

sitting in this annex

to the property room,"

and that none of us

even knew existed.

We knew about the Detroit Police

Department main property room,

but we did not know

that there were other places

within the department

they were storing evidence.

And so I said, "You've got to be

kidding me," or some words to that effect.

It's so disturbing.

Yep.

So do we know exactly

how long the...

The kits were stored here?

All we know is the day we found

out, which was August of '09.

Wow.

Do we know how many

were stored here?

- All of them.

- All of them.

All of them, yeah.

So it looks like they're in

the process of tearing it down.

You know, once I get

rid of the shock of it,

of we discovered the kits,

but I'm not surprised.

The victims of these...

That are attached to these kits

are overwhelmingly women.

And very few report,

and those that report are

historically treated very badly.

It's not just the fact that nobody

cared about these women.

It's not the fact that they

treated them with no dignity.

It's the fact that they were

violated in the most intimate of ways,

and nobody gave a damn.

Nobody gives a damn

about women in this country.

Okay.

- Let's get on this one.

- Girl: Who are they?

People, human beings.

- Kids: People Mover!

- Going to work.

Ericka:

I was dating a guy,

and for my 21 st birthday,

I said I wanted to have a party.

And we invited all of my family

and all of my friends,

and it was just this big deal

with balloons and cake.

And of course we danced

all across the whole dance floor

all the way back, on the chairs.

And when we got ready to leave,

my boyfriend, he said,

"Yeah, we're

gonna stop at the store,

but I'll catch back up

with you in a few hours."

So his friend said, "Come on,

get in the car, I got you.

We've been around each other

all this time, I got you."

And so we pulled up to a house,

and he start pouring drinks.

So I took a sip of my drink,

and I took another sip.

And I remember...

I remember putting my head

on my arm on the...

on the armrest.

And “wen...

And then I remember

everything just being dark,

and I couldn't see...

I couldn't see anything,

and I felt like there was

something around my neck.

And there was somebody

on top of me on this side,

and they were

touching my breasts

and... and kissing on me,

and there was somebody

in between my legs.

And I was...

It was just dark.

And I kept saying stop.

I remember hitting this person,

you know, just saying stop

and trying to get

my legs to be closed.

And when I got home,

I called an ambulance,

and they came and they got me

and they took me

to the hospital.

And that's when

they did the rape kit.

They snatched and they pulled

and nobody comforted me.

When I came out the hospital,

my dad was waiting for me.

We went

to the detective's office,

and my dad was in full dad mode,

said,

"What's gonna happen now?"

and you know, "So how long

is this gonna take,

what's the process?"

And the man was kind

of agitated, the officer,

and he said,

"I'm just going to be honest.

Nothing's going to happen."

He said, "We're going

to put this in a file,

and we're going

to put this in a box,

and it'll have

her name on it."

And he said, "I'm not sure

when we will ever get to it,

or if we'll get to it."

And he said, "I can take you

to a storage room right now

full of people

that are before her

that haven't

been tested for years."

He just,

my dad just played some music,

he played some jazz

all the way home,

and we got ice cream.

And my dad said,

"It's gonna be all right, baby."

If you look around Detroit

if you're ever out and about,

and you think about this,

about how much safer

this all could have been.

And how we're going to get to

the point where it's much safer

when we get all these rapists

off the street.

So it's going

to be interesting to see

how when we're

all done with this,

exactly how many people's lives

have been affected.

And, really, you have to factor

in their families

and everyone they

had contact with and,

you know, since the time,

'cause that's gonna be

impossible to track,

but, you know, it's just...

It's just a lot of people,

many more than I think

people realize.

Worthy: From the very

beginning, I felt this way.

We had to bring justice

to these victims,

and even the cases beyond

the statute of limitations.

I knew I wanted

to get them all tested.

DNA testing can identify

an unknown perpetrator.

It can confirm the presence

of a known suspect.

It can affirm a survivor's

account of their assault.

It can connect the suspect

to other crime scenes,

even those in other states

and jurisdictions.

It can help solve other cases

that may not even be

sexual assaults.

It can also,

and this is very important,

exonerate the innocent.

Bottom line,

a rape kit can bring justice.

So all of these people meet for the

first and third Thursday of every month

for at least two hours

to talk about

how we got into this mess.

On DPD's end, I was tasked

with making sure that

we provided what was needed

to make this project work.

And, you know, there was several

things that was dropped in my lap

that I didn't know how I was

going to be able to get through it.

Or looking at the officers that,

you know, investigate these cases,

they were overwhelmed,

stressed out.

How will we bring this

all together?

Dr. Rebecca Campbell:

My job in this project was to

sort of watch this group

come together,

to document all of the decisions

they had to make.

You know, when you find out

that you have 11,000 kits,

what do you do?

It happened over decades.

What was

the decision-making process

that said,

with limited resources,

I'm choosing not to send

this kit, but I'll send this kit?

But the decision not to send

that kit was far more common

than the decision

to send the kit.

Sol started piecing this together

in the late '90s, early 2000s.

And then we had

New York City break,

and we had Los Angeles break,

and then the community

I've worked with, Detroit,

where it showed up in the media.

And there was

this huge sort of surprise,

but for those of us who have

been in this movement for a while,

it's like,

"This wasn't a surprise.

They have not been testing

these kits for decades."

In Detroit, certainly

finances were an issue.

It costs money to test a kit.

The money for this in Detroit

was just not there.

But why didn't they take

the money they did have

and put it in this crime?

That's when you have to dig

into this a little bit deeper.

You have to open up

the police reports

associated with the kits

that were not tested.

And when you do that,

that's when you

start getting a much

more complicated story.

Campbell: Detroit is

primarily African-American,

so over 80% of them

were from African-American

residents of the city.

By our best estimates,

most of them were poor,

so we're talking

about poor black women.

It's pretty clear they did

not believe the victims.

They fundamentally

did not believe

what happened

to them was a crime.

They did not believe that what

happened to them merited their attention.

We read police reports

where victims

were called bitches,

ho's, whores, heifers.

They said, "Eh, it's not

really a real sexual assault.

This is not worth

our investigative time,

and it's certainly not worth our

limited resources of testing this kit."

Kalimah Johnson:

I carried the pager.

I was one

of those social workers

that responded

to sexual assaults

when they happened

in the city of Detroit.

And if I get a phone call

from a nurse's aide who says,

"Girl, if you're

in the middle of your lunch,

get down here when you can,"

I knew that I was either gonna

interface with a woman of color,

or a woman who might have

had a substance abuse issue,

and didn't belong to anybody,

if you know what I mean.

But if I got a call

from the doctor,

and they would say,

"Hurry up and get down here,"

it was one of two kind of women.

It was either a white woman

or a black politically connected

woman in the city of Detroit.

Either she was a pastor's

daughter or a politician's daughter

or something like that.

And it was a pattern,

and I'm not saying that...

I'm not saying it happened all

the time, but it was noticeable.

I believe that there's just a...

a lesser sense of value

for women who are black,

that they're just not...

Not human enough

to even be rapeable.

And so these cases

just got thrown to the side

and not thought about

in any particular way.

Worthy: With the darker

pigment of your skin,

your life seems

to have less value

in the criminal justice system.

That's true.

You're just taken more

seriously in this country,

in all aspects, if you have

money or if you have influence

or if you have power

or if you have privilege.

- It's a national problem.

- TV Host: Sure, that's right.

There's over 400,000 backlog

untested kits in this country.

Talk to me, though,

about what that means,

the... the... the testing

of these kits.

How you get from testing it

to saying,

"Well, here are the people

that we need to start looking at."

The scientists will take

whatever evidence is in the kit,

the saliva, hair, fibers,

anything to help get

a genetic profile

that can then be loaded

and entered into CODIS.

And CODIS, C-O-D-I-S,

is the DNA national database.

Host: Right.

But there are

two different kind of hits.

It either matches

to a person's profile

already in CODIS,

or it can match

to another case through DNA

from evidence, such as clothing,

even if that person's

identity is unknown.

Host: Yeah.

So now the next critical

step is the investigation

and prosecution of these kits.

Right, and so that next step

is saying,

"All right, well,

let's go find these people

and bring them to justice."

"Let's take each individual

hit, work up a case

the way it should have been

worked up when it first happened."

So you have to still go

find the victim,

you have to find the defendant,

you have to find the witnesses,

any other evidence besides

just the DNA evidence.

And put the case together

the old-fashioned way.

And that... that gets

to all the problems

- that you have with resources.

- Exactly.

You just don't have

enough people.

Exactly. Up until...

Up until a couple

of months ago, we had two.

And contrast that

with the city of Cleveland,

who discovered about

4,000 kits several years ago.

They had 35 investigators.

I think 25 or 35 investigators,

- to our two that we had.

- To two.

Rachel Dissell: In 2009, a guy

named Anthony Sowell was caught,

and he was a serial rapist

and murderer.

And at some point, several women

reported

that he had attacked them.

And there were questions

whether some of those reports

were taken seriously or not.

It ended up when the police

were investigating a report

in late October of 2009,

they went to the house

to look for him,

and in the house, they discovered

the bodies of several women.

In total, it was 11 women who

Anthony Sowell raped and murdered.

After that case, our editors

at the "Plain Dealer"

asked us to really dig in

to how sex crimes were handled.

And a part of that was

the question of rape kits.

We knew that

there were a number of them

related to the Sowell case

that had not been tested.

That part for us was really

difficult to see how many people

had been attacked long after the

evidence was there and hadn't been used.

So we wanted to ask

the larger question.

You know, how many

of these rape kits

here in Cleveland

haven't been tested?

When they were done counting

and sorting through the kits,

they had a little over 4,000

that previously

had not been tested.

'Tim McGinty:

Of course we made mistakes

as a law enforcement community.

We didn't realize the potential

of what sat behind us

in the locker.

In this building were these

untested rape kits gathering dust.

We did not appreciate it.

I was shocked

by how many of these

we got hits or matches on

when we took this unknown DNA,

had no idea who it was,

put it

in the national DNA database

and Ohio's database

with known profiles,

and we got a hit.

Those kits start getting tested,

they start getting results,

and then you have almost

another type of backlog,

an investigative backlog.

Hundreds of new cases

were coming in.

How do you figure out

what to do with them?

How do you figure out which is the

most important one to handle first?

Man:

He's got those three events,

all related close in time.

The DNA evidence that

was able to be collected

from the clothing, from the the

pockets, and off the sports bra

of victim number one

and victim number two.

Dissell: And as the

cases were coming in,

they weren't

really triaging them

to see who was in prison,

who was out on the streets.

And so they got a hit

for a 2000 rape

in which the potential suspect

was James W. Daniel Ill.

And several months went by,

and in that time

before he was arrested,

he raped two other women.

And they had

a surveillance video

that showed part of this attack.

Dissell: This case really

knocked some of the folks

on the task force

back a little bit,

because they were so proud

of what they were doing,

but at the same time, they realized

that they had to prioritize the cases.

And you can see

just how much harm it is

for not having tackled

this in the past.

- We're not keeping up.

- No, we're not keeping up.

People who they became

aware of as a suspect,

they had to ask themselves

the question.

Are they on

the street right now?

Could they attack somebody else?

Man: We're still working

on prioritizing the cases

that are rolling in.

I know that Nicole has a guy

with two cases out on the street.

Nicole DiSanto:

Each of the investigators

has anywhere from 80 to

90 cases on their docket.

And every day,

we get another 20 to 30 hits.

If there's a statue

of limitations about to run,

or if we have a serial offender

who's out on the streets,

those go to the top

of our priority list.

Okay, we have a hit to a suspect

who has been identified

in three cases,

one in '95, one in 1998.

And this third victim that

we're trying to locate and notify

is a hit to a 1997 case.

So we're going to go attempt to

find her at her last known address,

and let her know that we have

new information on her case.

Danielle?

DiSanto:

So the reason we're here

is because of the rape

in January of '97.

What can you tell me

about what you remember?

I lived next door to, like,

a little convenience store.

Okay.

And, um, I met a guy

that went to that store.

I think he asked me if I wanted

to smoke a joint or something.

We went to, I guess, one of

his friend's houses or something.

He grabbed me by my neck,

and he pushed me down.

And I started screaming

for somebody to help me.

And I remember, 'cause

there were people upstairs...

and nobody came down.

He, um...

He started pulling my pants

down, and he grabbed my arms,

and he held them real tight.

And he said, "If you don't shut the

fuck up, I'm gonna beat your ass."

And so I shut up.

And he finished,

and I got up,

and I sat in a chair,

and I just cried and cried.

And I didn't

really know what to do.

And then I started feeling,

I don't know,

like it was my fault.

And that I shouldn't have

put myself in that position.

You know it's

not your fault now, right?

Yeah, I know now.

Robert: All right, the

series of photos here

may or may not contain him

in the photographs.

And try not to pay attention

to anything other than his face.

That one.

How sure are you?

- I'm 100% sure it's him.

- 100%?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

Oh, my God.

If you could just circle him.

- Sorry.

- That's okay.

DiSanto: And I have to let you

know he's not in custody yet.

We are going to try and get him

off the streets as soon as possible.

Danielle: So there's

two of us right now, right?

Two local.

There's a third hit.

So there are three different

DNA hits to this suspect.

Dissell:

I think for us in Cleveland,

one of the most striking things

that we learned

was that far more of

the suspects in these cases

than we ever would have thought

were suspected serial rapists.

We did not expect to find

that a third or more

of the people

were linked to multiple cases.

Most men are not rapists,

but the ones who are perpetrate

again and again and again.

Helena: About four days

after my 17th birthday,

it was in 1996,

I had been given

a Volkswagen Rabbit,

a HEW car.

And I was obsessed with the car.

I washed it constantly.

And I had taken it

to a local car wash.

So I was there, and it was dark.

And as I was washing it,

a man approached me

with a rag over his face,

asking for help.

That man abducted me

at knife point

and had me captive

for about ten hours,

during which time I was

repeatedly assaulted.

He took $20 from my wallet.

He took the money,

and he took my license.

He took the license, he said, so

that he would know where I lived.

And he was very clear

that if I reported,

he would come back and

kill me and kill my family.

He eventually did release me,

and then I went,

and I flagged a police cruiser,

the first cruiser that I saw.

I knew that I had to report.

I knew I couldn't go home,

and even though

I was in a state of shock,

I knew that I had to do

something.

Eventually I was taken

to an area hospital

where the rape kit

was performed.

The process takes several hours.

Open up your legs

like a butterfly, okay?

I'm gonna pull

a few pubic hairs.

Helena:

And a humiliating process,

not only because

of the physical invasion,

but because of the kind of questioning

that was going on at the time.

All of the questions that

I got from law enforcement

were asked with the intention of finding

out what I did to cause the assault.

What was

I doing at the car wash?

Did I know the person

who assaulted me?

I felt blamed,

I felt blamed right away.

My parents are both immigrants.

My mother is from Cuba, and

my father is from Argentina.

And when the assault took place,

they had a lot of held

mistrust for law enforcement,

and an expectation

that we wouldn't be helped.

And they were right

to think that.

Patti Giggans:

That's the American way,

this inequality within

the criminal justice system

when it comes

to people of color,

or the economic classes

and the difference.

So that is so endemic

to our society,

of course it's

going to have an impact,

you know, with police

and police investigation.

Gail Abarbanel:

When we first started,

one of the biggest problems

was the police,

and a lot of other programs

were discouraging victims

from making police reports,

because they felt they would be

mistreated by the police,

and in many cases they were.

County Supervisor: How many rape

kits do you have at Central Storage?

Off the top of our heads,

we could not tell you right now.

Female Reporter: When the

Sheriff's Department finally counted,

they found nearly 5,000 kits

in storage.

300 of them were past

the statute of limitations.

Giggans: And it was very

confusing in the beginning.

We heard that there

were 7,000 kits,

and there were 11,000 kits,

and there were 12,000 kits.

It was fascinating in terms

of the confusion

around

what was really happening.

And then we found out

that kits had been destroyed,

kits had been thrown away.

Steve Cooley: In terms of

the destruction of evidence,

I think that may have occurred

in the L.A. County

Sheriff's Department.

They had, in our view,

misinterpreted

the statute of limitations

and had been

destroying rape kits,

thinking the statute had run

when it hadn't.

Therefore, there were rapists

who were not caught.

And there were survivors

who lived in fear

of maybe the rapist

was going to come back.

Helena: When something

like this has happened

and you don't know

where that person is...

that means they're everywhere.

They are over your shoulder.

They're gonna be inside the

front door when you walk in.

I would come home at night

and open the door

and imagine his hands

coming up to my throat.

I could feel his hands

coming up to my throat.

Going up the stairs

to my room, in my room,

every sound you hear is them

breaking into the house.

I would have

terrible nightmares.

I would wake up each morning

and imagine going downstairs

and finding my family dead.

I was afraid to leave my house.

There was a time during

which I was not functioning.

I was not a functioning person.

And I can't understand...

why I was so unimportant,

what was

so unimportant about me,

that someone couldn't just

take a little bit of their time

and help me find out.

Ericka: I do want to take

the time just to say thank you

for, you know, the things

that you've poured into me

and into my girls.

You know, being

a single mom is not easy.

It's kinda like when you're

going through your journey,

and you don't have resources

or you don't have money

for resources.

Like, "Well, how do I cope?"

Sometimes I'm kinda scared,

because, you know, as a mom

you don't want your kids

to see you as anything flawed

or anything like that.

And in the

African-American community,

you know, we have other myths.

You know, where you can't tell

people what happened to you.

You don't have faith in God.

- Just go to God.

- Just go to God with it

and let it be there.

I mean, this can go back to

slavery how we were forced to,

you know,

carry things in silence.

You know, our pain, our

anguish, all type of stuff.

- I say speak up.

- Right.

If you are going

through something

you don't know

how to get out of it,

don't hold anything in.

Ericka:

After my incident,

I was very depressed.

And I didn't have a reason.

I didn't have a reason to live.

The insecurities

and all of the different fears.

Now it's just an open wound.

I do feel like a big piece

of me was taken away from me.

You know,

I'll never be the same.

Woman:

I will be 32 this year.

That was my 21 st birthday,

so 11 years.

Woman:

No.

I... I wasn't waiting.

I stop...

I gave it up, on that day.

I've never waited,

because I couldn't wait.

I couldn't think about it.

I couldn't even expect anything.

Or I would not, I would not,

I don't think

I would be here today.

Helena:

For so many years

after the police dropped

my case essentially,

every once in awhile,

I would see something

or experience something

that triggered the memory.

And I wondered, "Is it possible

that my kit is still out there?"

I had to keep going

higher and higher and higher

in the level of people I was

getting to advocate for me,

to a point where I had,

you know, an ex-D.A.

calling the Sheriff's Department

to ask, "What happened

with Helena's case?

You need to tell us more."

And within two weeks,

I had a call.

I had a call...

from the Sheriff's Department,

who hadn't called me back

for 14 years.

And they came to my house

with what they call the six-pack.

And even though it had been

more than a decade,

I knew right away

which one he was.

And it was eventually

revealed to me

that the kit had

actually been processed

three or four years prior to my

advocates becoming involved,

that it had matched to

Charles Courtney in that time,

and that no one

had followed up on it.

I feel like a fool

when someone says,

"Well, why didn't they process?

Why didn't they call you?

They had a match.

What happened?"

I don't know,

and I can't tell you,

because they wouldn't tell me,

other than

it fell through the cracks.

Because the DNA from my kit had

not been processed, he went home.

He was... He was

a long-distance truck driver,

which is

another very troubling fact.

The fact that

he had access to victims

between at least

Los Angeles and Ohio.

There could be who knows

how many other victims.

You getting out your piano?

It's playing a song.

Amberly:

It happened April 21st, 1998.

I dropped off some film at the

grocery store to get developed,

and I wanted to stop by there

after I got off work

on my way home that night

to pick it up.

He was out in the parking lot,

lingering around.

Really didn't pay

much attention.

And I went in and got my film,

wasn't in there that long.

Came back out, and he was

still out in the parking lot.

Still didn't register in my head

anything bad

was going to happen.

And, um, I went

to go get in my car,

and he came up behind me

and threatened me.

Said he had a weapon.

And there was a parking lot

that had a bunch of trailers,

truck trailers sitting in them.

There was one pulled out.

So he had me pull my car

in that spot,

and that way, nobody could

see my car from the road.

He had me for a couple of hours.

After he was done

doing what he was doing,

he threatened me,

took my license.

He said he would come back

and kill me and my family

if I reported to the police.

They did a rape kit on me.

And then

after they did all that,

then I went down to the police

station to make a statement.

The police didn't contact me

again for a long time.

Michelle Brettin:

Amberly was assaulted in 1998.

The lab for the state of Ohio

finally received enough money

to hire someone

to put in the DNA

from all the backlog rape kits

across the state.

In 2001,that's

when we finally got the call

that the suspect's DNA

had been in the computer

and it finally hit.

So I started looking at why,

why was he in CODIS?

I read his record. It said

that he had been charged

with a felony sex offense

against his own wife.

He raped his wife

in the same manner

that he raped my victim,

Amberly.

A Fairfield detective

left her card in our door,

and said please contact her.

Brettin:

It was heartbreaking.

She's a beautiful young girl,

and she was struggling

really, really hard.

And... to the point that she

had turned her life to drugs.

When traumatic experiences

like that happen to you,

everybody deals with everything

in a different way,

and it did have something to

do with my addiction issues.

Brettin:

I made contact with her

after I got a lineup together.

When I showed her the lineup, she

couldn't pick Charles Courtney out.

I could have handed her a

hundred lineups with him in it.

It wouldn't have made a

difference. She did not recognize him.

And she told me, she said,

"Hey, you know,

I didn't look at his face."

I concentrated

on one of his tattoos

more than anything else

with him, and, um...

Man:

It was a lion

on his forearm roaring,

and in the background,

there was a sun.

You could see the sun

through the lion's mouth roaring.

Sol took a picture

of every tattoo he had,

everyone of them.

Prison tattoo

after prison tattoo.

And I went back to Amberly,

and then I started showing her

pictures of each and every tattoo,

And I left

the lion's head for last.

Amberly: As soon as

she showed me that tattoo,

I knew that was it.

Brettin: I knew I had

enough to arrest him.

So the next day, went up there,

I called for Hamilton

police officers to back me up.

Two of them came out,

knocked on the front door,

and he answered the door.

He answered the door.

And I asked him,

"You Charles Courtney?"

He said, "Yup." I said,

"You are under arrest."

Woman:

I think it was the next day.

Woman:

She cried. She cried.

She cried, and I think...

some relief.

'Cause I told her, I said,

"He's not gonna do this again.

He's not gonna get out,

he's not gonna hunt you down.

This guy's going away.

There's nothing anybody

can do about it.

He's going away."

I never really thought that

he would ever get caught,

'cause so much time had went by.

Shortly after I had put

Charles Courtney in jail,

Los Angeles County

Sheriff's Department called me

in reference to a case

that they had with Helena

that occurred in 1996.

And they had just received a hit

that Charles Courtney was

also their perpetrator.

I faxed them everything I had

and thought that they were going to go

ahead and proceed with Helena's case.

But there was nothing.

I didn't hear anything back

until about 2011.

From what I understand, Helena

was still pushing for some resolve on it.

A decade, a decade on a case

that could have been

resolved for her.

A decade that

a police department wasted

and not taking care

of its business.

Laura Chick: I have heard

that the prosecution numbers

in Los Angeles

are exceedingly low.

And it's very disturbing to me,

very disturbing.

I cannot imagine why.

Because they don't

prosecute cases... rape cases.

I mean, that's like... that's

like the unspoken problem.

That even the cases that get

taken to them, they get rejected,

a huge majority of cases.

Man:

Oh, I'm not aware of that data.

You're going to have to show

that data to me or share with me,

so I can actually have it

checked out.

I'm not aware of that data.

Dr. Cassia Spohn: When we

looked at the 2005 to 2008 cases,

and we traced them all

the way through the system,

only 12% of the cases

resulted in a... in arrest.

I think it was 8% of the cases

resulted in a conviction,

and about 5% resulted

in a prison sentence.

So in other words, one out of

every 20 reports of forcible rape

reported to the Los Angeles

Police Department

resulted in a prison sentence.

When we asked them, you know, what

do you mean by a "righteous victim"?

They talked about cases

that involve strangers,

who jump out of the bushes and hold a

gun to her head or a knife to her throat.

And these are the exception,

not the rule.

Cases involving acquaintances

and intimate partners

are the typical sexual assaults

that we see reported

to the police.

The roots are the fact that

this was happening to women,

for the most part,

and the misogyny.

The inequality,

the scandalous belief that

women are making up these stories,

all fed into

having a system that was

more than inefficient,

it was... it was scandalous.

That report was

thoroughly discredited.

I'm aware of that report.

It was thoroughly discredited.

It was flawed.

So I'm not even

going to talk about it.

I'll refer you to the people who

did the analysis of that report.

It was thoroughly flawed.

I did a thorough review

of the research methodology,

and the research methodology

that was used

by Spohn and Tellis

is very rigorous.

From the methodological

research point of view,

there was nothing that was

problematic with the study.

When you're going to take

someone's freedom away,

and impact their lives

and their family's lives,

by putting them in prison,

and for sex offenses

in California,

you go to prison for a

longtime, you better be accurate.

You better have a high standard.

And law enforcement sometimes

do bring cases to prosecutors,

and, ultimately, the decision

is the prosecutor's to make.

Cooley might find the study

disreputable for a few reasons.

One is the district attorney

is an elected office,

and the results suggest that not as many

acquaintance cases were taken forward,

and that...

That's not good press.

On average, 86%

of sexual assaults

that are reported to police

are never referred

to the prosecutor's office

even for consideration

of charges.

The decision that nothing is

going to happen with the case

happens right there

in the law enforcement agency.

And when you ask them why

and you look at it,

a lot of times it goes back

to these types of issues.

The victim didn't behave right.

There's something weird

about how she reacted

that makes us

doubt her creditability.

We know that between

12% to 50% of rape victims

experience tonic immobility.

It is called rape-induced

paralysis in this context,

where the key word

there is "paralysis."

The victim cannot move

in the trauma.

It is hardwired into the body

as a protective mechanism.

So this is a case study

from a gang rape.

The victim was frozen,

as they take turns going in

and sexually assaulting her

one after another after another.

Her body did what it needed

to do to try to keep her alive.

So she goes to the hospital,

she has a rape kit,

she gives the initial report

to the police officer,

the police officer refuses

to take the kit.

He said it was a sloppy mess,

and he closed the case

right then and there.

He marked it as "unfounded."

When I interviewed him later,

I asked him why,

and here's what he said.

He said, "She just laid there

so she must have wanted it.

No one wants to have

a train pulled on them,

so if she just laid there

and took it,

she must have wanted it."

Campbell: When we look

at how police are trained,

on the issue of sexual assault,

more often than not

in the academy,

what they learn is,

"This is the law,

these are the different

degrees of the law."

Do they learn

about victim behavior? No.

Do they learn

about trauma? No.

Do they learn about how trauma

impacts memory? No.

And so they bring to the

interaction an expectation

that victims should behave

a certain way.

If you're really traumatized,

you should be crying,

you should be upset,

you should be demonstrative,

you should be grateful

for my help.

So what they see doesn't

look like a real victim,

and if this isn't a real victim

then we're not investigating it,

and we're certainly

not testing the rape kit.

Hargitay: So, Kym, are you

getting good coverage here?

Most of them are on board.

So the press are in,

so we have them with us.

I just think it's so important,

but, you know, also to get

people personally invested to say...

You know, there's something great

when somebody says you can't do it,

and you're like,

"You know what, fuck you."

- Worthy: It could be anywhere.

- "I can do it. I can do it.

Also you don't tell me

what I can and can't do.

- That's right.

- And all it takes is focus,

dedication, and commitment.

Worthy: We have so far, out of

the over 11,000 that were found,

tested 1,600 kits.

And 100 serial rapists

have been identified.

We had to literally,

make a database,

take information

off of every single kit...

Name, where it happened, date.

In many cases, we were

taking the huge journals

and flipping through those and

trying to find anything we could

to match up those kits.

If you can track a package when

you order something from Amazon,

you can track

that package online

and know where it is

at every moment

to know why your items

haven't arrived, where they are,

then certainly we ought

to be able to track

with today's technology,

a victim's rape kit through

the criminal justice system.

I've said long since 2009

that all of these kits

should be tested,

but it doesn't make

any sense to test them all

and then not follow through with

investigating and prosecuting them.

And the CEO, Mr. Ficano, in

his recent deficit elimination plan,

said that the Wayne County

Prosecutor's Office is a low priority,

and we should cease

prosecuting cases

that come from this rape kit

backlog and sexual assault.

So violence against women

is a low priority

in this county to him.

Look, I was sheriff

for two decades,

so I'm very sensitive

to criminal justice

and the needs that are there.

But when the money isn't there,

you got to make some tough

decisions sometimes that are part of that.

Worthy: Sexual assault

is probably the hardest,

probably only second

to child abuse

and child molestation,

to prosecute.

Jurors don't want to believe it.

They find reasons

and excuses to not convict.

And there's a lot of

victim-blaming in sexual assault.

It's the victims fault.

"Why were you there?

Why were you wearing that?"

And no one would ask

a robbery victim,

"Why were you wearing

that necklace?"

That has nothing whatever to do

with the fact that she was

a victim of a violent crime.

What were you wearing that

particular morning, Miss Hughes?

Woman:

Some jeans and a shirt.

- What type of shirt?

- A work shirt.

Okay, like a t-shirt?

Like a pullover.

Okay, I guess I'm not sure

what a pullover is.

And when the driver gets out of

the truck, what do you see him do?

Woman:

Walking towards me.

And what do you do

at that point?

I stood there.

Okay.

You didn't step back?

You didn't run?

You didn't call 911?

. Okay-

Female Attorney:

Did you fight him?

No.

Okay, did you try to kick

at him or kick him off?

Not really, 'cause I didn't

want him to shoot me.

Male Attorney: The verbal conversation

is talking about money, correct?

No.

It's not talking

about money for sex?

. Okay-

What is the verbal conversation?

A gun pointed at me,

telling me to get in

or I'm going to shoot you.

Okay, that's

the only thing that was said?

- That's what he was saying.

- Okay.

Thank you.

Worthy:

You are certainly a sum

of everything

that's happened to you.

It's a part of my past,

but it's something that I

don't think about very often.

And that's very unlike a lot

of sexual assault victims.

This happened back in 1980.

I was in law school

at the time, my first year.

I thought that

I would never be a lawyer,

and that had been my goal

since I was in sixth grade.

And I thought that I would

either drop out

or be so traumatized

if I really faced it head on.

And so I made a decision

very early on

that I wasn't

going to report it.

I did go to the doctor, but

I wasn't going to report it.

Literally I believed that I would

not survive if I went that other path.

And it still was after that

for many, many, many months

about just feeling, like,

just dead inside.

I have adopted daughters,

and you want them to grow up

in a world where there

may not be sexual assault.

Or if, God forbid,

they are sexually assaulted,

their case will be important.

Their kit will

not be sitting on a shelf.

You just want things to be

better for them.

Tim McGinty:

How we doing, guys?

DiSanto:

Good, how are you?

Nicole, she has

a serial case to run by you.

He is currently on parole

in North Carolina.

We have three cases

on him from...

one from '95, one from '97,

and one from 1998.

Now, this victim, Danielle,

she feels a lot of guilt

that had she not gotten herself into

that situation this wouldn't happen.

She blamed herself

rather than the rapist.

- Absolutely.

- Okay.

She was raped, she went,

got a rape kit, she reported.

It's not her fault.

You've got to track him down.

With this

interstate cooperation,

you guys working

cold cases, us...

I think we're going to be

going back and fourth

with a lot of our perpetrators.

I mean, anytime you can get

this kind of person off the street

that's truly a predator,

and its obvious his past shows

he's a predator, is a good day.

We're hoping that he shows up

for this probation meeting,

and we can get him into custody,

and, hopefully,

he'll talk to us.

- It's Bass.

- Man over phone: Hey, man.

Bass: Hey.

Man over phone: The vehicle

was sitting at the house.

His vehicle was at the house, so

When you talked to the

probation agent this morning,

did she say he was going to

come at some point this morning?

Is that what I heard you say?

She said he was going

to be here at 10:00.

- At 10:00.

- And that was 45 minutes ago.

I mean, we got to get him

one way or the other.

We feel... We feel comfortable

going and getting him.

Ohio Investigator:

Can you walk us in there?

Do you want to go in there?

DiSanto:

He's getting dressed?

DiSanto:

You can just wait here a minute.

DiSanto: I guess you're probably

wondering why you're here?

Man: Yeah.

Well, in 1995,

did you happen to have

sex with this woman?

Probably so, ain't no tellin'.

- You what?

- Probably did.

But you don't...

You don't remember her?

I don't know.

I was doing PCP and everything.

If it was at a party,

I might have went.

- I don't know.

- Okay.

She was taken to a building,

held for along period of time,

and raped repeatedly.

Not by me!

- No?

- Hell, no.

She called, they were going

to hang out, kick it,

and then she ends up

getting raped.

- Does that sound familiar?

- Mm-mmm.

Does it make it ring a bell?

You didn't have sex with her?

Why...

Why do you think I'm here

with three different victims,

who have all been raped...

and we're talking to you?

I don't know.

No?

Have you ever raped any women?

- No. Mm-mmm!

- No?

Did you ever get a girl so intoxicated

and then take advantage of her?

- No.

- No?

Because you know that's

against the law as well.

If somebody can't give

informed consent,

that's against the law as well.

Yeah, but

we both intoxicated, too.

I don't know, you raped me,

I don't know.

So do you want to explain how

your DNA is in the 15-year-old?

I don't know.

Or on the 15-year-old

or in her panties?

I don't know.

She probably was partying

and got into an orgy

and probably did some shit she

didn't want to do and regretted it.

People do a lot of strange

shit. You don't know why.

DiSanto:

But if they don't know you,

if you're not tight

with any of these people,

they have no revenge, right?

You haven't done anything

to any of these women, right?

See, that's what I'm saying,

I don't know.

They didn't come to me.

I got DNA, and I went to them.

So why are they still going

to say, "Yep, I was raped?"

What do they have to gain?

Take it to court.

I ain't raped no girls.

Take it to court.

I'm gonna go to court.

DiSanto: Looks like you're

getting a trip back to Cleveland.

Helena: Not knowing what would

happen next in the judicial system

was a huge lead blanket

over my life.

I began researching and found

articles talking about

how Charles Courtney,

he was a convicted rapist.

The other rapes

he was connected to

had kits that were part

of the backlog in Ohio.

God, I don't even remember

when I found out about Helena.

Just by his character,

I could tell

that I wasn't the only one

he'd done things to.

I knew there

was other people out there,

and there probably

still is more out there.

You know, he was a truck driver,

from Ohio, Indiana,

to California.

Helena's from California,

so in all honesty, I believe

there's more women out there,

along the way

that he's probably...

'Cause he's a serial rapist.

Brettin: In Amberly's

case, Charles took a plea.

And he got sentenced

to 30 years.

Man:

No. My family did.

Judge: The State of Ohio

vs. Charles Courtney Jr.

Female Attorney:

Helena: For my own case,

because it had been so long,

the statute of limitations

had expired,

and they were not able

to charge him with rape.

But the D.A. found

a loophole, which was to say

that because he had taken

$20 from my wallet,

it was now abduction with

intent to commit another crime,

which was to take my $20.

That was the only reason that

we were able to file a charge at all,

and because of that,

they were able to get him

to plea to 25 years to life.

But if he hadn't done that,

if we hadn't found that

loophole, that exception,

there wouldn't have been

any justice for me.

Something that I've found

every since then

is that I'm not angry

at Charles Courtney.

I have long moved past

that feeling,

and I feel like terrible things

happen to people.

Violence is learned,

and I have compassion for him.

I don't have compassion for

the system that made this okay.

Because the system should

be more accountable,

the system should be...

The system should be

better than a criminal.

Amberly: if they would

have took it more serious

and believed Helena

and did their jobs

and ran her rape kit

in a timely manner,

I would have never got raped,

'cause he would have

already been caught.

I just have this feeling,

to this day

that there are rape kits

that haven't been processed

that his DNA is on

across this nation.

And I wouldn't be surprised if

they found a body attached to him.

I wouldn't be surprised if

he killed one of those victims.

It's me, it's Ericka.

My sister challenged me

to the gospel challenge.

I can't sing, either.

We two non-singing sisters,

but I'm going to sing anyway,

okay?

Don't judge me when my CD

starts skipping, either.

With me

Wt is well IX

With me, it is

Ericka: An organization

that I was working with,

we were putting on a conference,

and Kym Worthy was

one of our speakers,

because it was national news

about the abandoned warehouses

that the rape kits were in.

When she started talking about

the findings and the numbers,

before that day, I don't think I

connected it mentally or emotionally.

And I said to her, I was like,

"I just wanted you to know that

those numbers, I'm one of them.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's not just numbers.

Like, here I am in front of you.

Like, you're talking about me."

And her face,

she was, like, blown away.

Like, "Oh, my God."

She hugged me

and she held my hand,

and she said,

"You know what, call me."

She said, "I'm going

to follow up with you."

She didn't lie.

I didn't reach out to her,

she reached out to me.

She told me,

"We have found your kit,

and if you want to move

forward, we can move forward."

And my biggest thing was

the shame.

People will know,

people will know.

I had to learn in this process

the shame that's

associated with this,

'cause it is a shameful thing.

It's not mine, it's his.

And I got the courage to go

ahead and take the next step.

Ericka:

Okay, so here we go.

I've been carrying

something for 12 years.

On Facebook, everybody sees

how, you know, I advocate

for different things,

and y'all know I'm a part

of a larger community

of workers.

So, um, on my 21 st birthday,

I was sexually assaulted

by someone,

and I had a rape kit done,

and, um...

it's been sitting on the shelf.

So all of those 11,000 untested

rape kits that they found,

I had one of them.

But that's been my biggest

secret for 12 years.

It's been 12 years

my birthday this year.

I just had to get it out,

and stop trying

to hide and sneak,

and people ask me questions,

and I'm, like, not being

all the way honest.

You know what I mean?

Deshawn:

Well, I'm sorry for whatever

you had to experience

as far as that.

I hope they catch

the son of a bitch

and put him far,

far back in the jail.

I'm proud of you.

I'm glad you're releasing

whatever's holding

you down, definitely.

Yeah, I already feel better now.

I'm ready.

Ericka:

When I reflect back,

one of my favorite words

that I learned is "unapologetic."

So I have learned to be

unapologetic

about who I am

and what I believe.

So, Alise, you know

why I'm taking Spanish?

For the neighbors.

So I can talk

to the neighbors better.

Mm-hmm.

So I started

a block club on our street.

- Oh.

- Whoo-hoo.

I'm getting ready

to run for city council.

I'm evidence that regardless

of what happens to you,

you can get through it.

You can move past it,

you can grow,

you can change for the better.

I am evidence that

there's more to that box.

It's a human being there.

This is not just a kit,

this is a person.

Be careful, it's ice.

Ericka: And the

God that I believe in...

we don't have

to get a victory at court.

Bye, Imani. Bye!

Ericka: You still get

what's coming to you.

I'll be free.

HE'!-

I brought you some good news.

- Guess who's in jail?

- Out here, too?

Nope, down in

North Carolina still.

DiSanto:

So how are you?

Danielle:

I'm okay.

I had some difficulties

when this first came up

with new feelings about it.

'Cause I hadn't thought

about it since it...

You know, I pretty much

buried it since it had happened.

As soon as I saw his face

on that sheet, like,

I just knew right away

who he was.

Like, I'll never... Like, I didn't

think about that face, but now...

Yeah, like, I never forgot.

DiSanto: We just

don't know if he'll plea,

we don't know

if it'll go to trial.

With all three of our cases,

he's indicted on three counts

of Felony One Rape,

three counts

of Felony One Kidnapping,

and one count

of Corruption of a Minor

for our one victim

that was younger than you.

If he got max,

he's looking

at a minimum of 33 years.

- Oh, wow.

- If he got max.

- Wow, that's...

- And those are set sentences.

- That's great.

- I know.

Thank you so much.

Nice job being so strong.

Thank you, you helped me.

McGinty: Linda, you want

to tell us about the stats?

Linda: Sure.

We have in progress

We've completed 790 cases.

McGinty: These rape

kits are the best bargain

in the history

of law enforcement.

$400 a rape kit,

and one in four

results in an indictment.

One in four of the four

is a serial rapist.

I've never seen an opportunity

like this in law enforcement.

It'll never happen again.

Man: My goal is to get

grand jury time every week.

Dissell: You can't change or fix

what happened to one person.

You know, you can be

empathetic about it,

you can listen,

you can tell their story,

but you can't change that.

What you can change is what

might happen to someone else.

Hey, how are you?

Woman:

I'm good, I'm good.

Thank you very much.

You take care.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

Bye-We-

It's so funny, I remember having

a conversation with Mariska,

and we talked about how

we had 100 serial rapists,

and we were like,

"Wow, how can that...

100 people out still raping

because the kits that pointed

to them weren't tested."

And that meant, you know,

many more than that,

because we knew that...

'Cause these were

the identified serial rapists.

And now we have 770?

I think it's, like, 774.

Over 770

identified serial rapists.

That's almost a thousand!

Over 770 identified serial

rapists just out of this project,

just in one city,

in one county, in one state.

Hargitay: I've been

getting these reports

about what you've been doing,

and it's a constant education

for all of us now.

Kimberly Hurst:

There's been a lot of talk

about the progress that's

been made, and it's been...

I mean, I don't know that I

really sat back and appreciated it.

We have no training

in med school,

P.A. school, nursing school

on how to do these kits.

And now we go into the

hospitals, train physicians,

the P.A. schools,

the nursing schools,

looking to try

and standardize programs.

So we've been working

with partners

at the state level to try

and get that in place

to make sure that there

are programs everywhere.

What we saw in Detroit was

that when you pull them

off the shelf and you test them,

and this has

happened in Cleveland,

it's happened in Los Angeles,

it's happened in New York.

When you test them and

you start seeing the matches,

the hits, kit to kit to kit.

So the proof's in the pudding.

How do we rebuild survivors'

trust in the criminal justice system?

There needs to be an apology,

and we need to be creating

different solutions, different options.

We need to be bringing survivors

in to say, "Give us another chance."

The benefit to public safety

of testing these kits

is almost impossible

to put into words.

The day that it sank in for me

is when Detroit Police

Department sent me...

I don't know,

it might have been you, Marvin.

When you sent me

that list of victims' names.

Because a kit is a kit,

you know.

But when you get

that list of names,

and it just scrolls down,

and it doesn't stop,

and it just keeps going

and going and going.

You're, like,

saying to yourself,

"All right, this is something

where we can't rest, right?

This is something

where we have to go till...

you know,

we have this leader right here

just pursuing the justice.

Worthy: I know y'all talk

about me behind my back.

In a... in a good way.

Worthy: We've been at

this since August of 2009.

Our results from our testing

have links to crime scenes

from 39 other states.

So that means there's only

ten states in the United States

that haven't been affected by our

rape kits that were found in one city.

If anything positive

has happened from all of this,

it's that people

are talking about it,

and people know about it,

and others have come forward.

Ericka:

Just got a phone call

from the investigators and...

So we know my kit

has been tested.

We know that I picked

a person out of a lineup.

We know that that person

has been questioned...

and their DNA was taken

at the time

that they were questioned.

The test results are in,

and the profiles match.

And I feel very free,

and I feel... I feel new.

And I want

to encourage other women

who may be watching this video

that have experienced a rape,

a molestation,

any act of violence,

to press forward,

because I feel strong.

I feel stronger than

I've ever known I can feel,

and in ways that I've

never known that I could.

All right, I'm done, I'm done.

I gotta get it together.

Oh, man, but I love you all

and thank you.

God bless.

They need to let us decide if

we're going to send the kit in

and when we send the kits in,

Because the majority

of our... our rapes...

Not to say we don't

have rapes, we do.

But the majority of our rapes

that are called in

are actually consensual sex.

Now what?

I don't know,

want to go do something fun?

You want to have some fun?

You know how to drive?

No.

High-five.

Thank you!

The DNA identified

by testing my kit

brought a serial interstate

rapist to justice.

If it had been done earlier,

at least one other rape could

have been prevented, perhaps more.