When 18-year-old Marie reported a brutal home-invasion rape in Washington, skeptical police coerced her into recanting and criminally charged her with filing a false report. Years later, two diligent Colorado detectives tracking a serial rapist arrested the perpetrator and discovered photographic evidence proving Marie had been telling the truth all along. This case highlights devastating systemic failures in sex crime investigations and the profound harm caused when law enforcement doubts victims instead of thoroughly investigating.
**THE DAILY INQUIRER**
**EXTRA! EXTRA!**
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### **THE FRAME-UP OF A FRIGHTENED FRIPPERY!**
#### **Slandered Washington Lass Branded a "Liar" by Lynnwood Bulls, While a Shadowy Fiend Roamed the Land—How Two Plucky Girl Gumshoes Trailed the Monster to His Lair!**
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**LYNNWOOD, WASH., March 12, 2009** — They called her a "She-Wolf" in the daily rags! They said she cried wolf to get a high-toned apartment on the city's dime!
But today, eighteen-year-old Marie—a poor, parentless doll who spent her tender years shuffled from one foster home to the next—stood lonely in the halls of justice. No one held her hand save for a court-appointed mouthpiece. The charge? Filing a false report. The penalty? Up to a year in the hoosegow.
Months ago, Marie ran screaming to the local constabulary. She spun a hair-raising yarn of a masked phantom who breached her castle, brandished a shiv, bound her with her own shoe-strings, and subjected her to a dastardly, unspeakable outrage.
But Lynnwood’s flatfoots, Sergeant Jeffrey Mason and Detective Jerry Rittgarn, smelled a rat. They didn't like the cut of her jib. Her foster mother, Peggy Cunningham, whispered into the ears of the law: *“The girl’s a drama-maker, copper. She’s just starved for a bit of attention.”*
The bulls took Marie into the back room and gave her the old third-degree. They sweated her. They barked that her story was full of holes. *“You’re singing a bum tune, sister!”* they roared, threatening to throw her in the lockup and strip her of her subsidized flat if she didn't come clean. Terrified and broken, the poor sheba flipped her switch. She signed a confession saying the whole horrific affair was nothing but a midsummer night’s dream.
Today, she took a bum deal. She agreed to probation, counseling for her "lying tongue," and a fifty-dollar-note times ten to clear the court's ledger. Her pals flew the coop. Her foster folks turned their backs.
The Lynnwood bulls closed the folder, self-satisfied that they’d cured a delinquent girl’s imagination. But they had made a colossal, bone-headed play. For while Marie wept in the shadows, a real-life monster was just getting started.
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### **THE MILE-HIGH GUMSHOES TAKE THE SCENT!**
**GOLDEN, COLO., Jan. 5, 2011** — The mercury was sinking fast on a blustery Colorado afternoon when Detective Stacy Galbraith—a sharp-witted lady dick with an eye for clues—rolled up to a quiet suburban flat.
Standing in the pale winter sun was a twenty-six-year-old college co-ed, shivering in her winter coat. She related a chilling tale that made Galbraith’s blood run cold. She had been sleeping when a masked brute jumped her back. He waved a silver-plated heater, bound her tight, and spent four hours committing a heinous assault. He took snapshots with a pink camera, threatening to put her shame on display if she whistled for the law. Before he vanished into the blizzard, he made her scrub herself clean to wash away the evidence.
But this doll was no dizzy dame. She kept her wits. *“He’s done this before, detective,”* she warned. And she gave Galbraith a gold-plated clue: a dark, egg-sized birthmark on the scoundrel’s left calf.
Galbraith didn’t let the grass grow under her boots. She called up Sergeant Edna Hendershot over in Westminster. Hendershot was a veteran of a hundred criminal chaces.
*“Edna!”* Galbraith cried. *“We’ve got a serial fiend on our hands!”*
Comparing notes, the two lady gumshoes discovered a pattern of terror. The phantom had struck a widow in Westminster, an elderly matron in Aurora, and had nearly bagged an artist in Lakewood who only escaped by leaping from a second-story window. The brute was a master of his craft—he wore gloves, wiped his sweat, and stole his victims' unmentionables. But he left behind two tiny clues: footprints from a pair of Adidas sneakers, and honeycomb glove-prints on the windowpanes.
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### **THE DRAGNET TIGHTENS AROUND O’LEARY!**
The breakthrough came when a clever desk-jockey of an analyst spotted a suspicious white Mazda pickup parked near the Lakewood crime scene. The motor-wagon belonged to one Marc Patrick O'Leary, a thirty-two-year-old Army veteran with a clean record.
The feds and the local bulls tailed O'Leary’s brother to a local beanery. When the brother finished his grub, the G-men swiped his water glass. Through the magic of modern laboratory science—the wizardry of microscopic cell-matching—they proved the O’Leary bloodline was a dead match for the skin cells left at the crime scenes!
On February 13, 2011, Galbraith and a squad of heavily armed bulls surrounded O'Leary’s bungalow.
*“Open up! Law enforcement!”* Galbraith bellowed.
O’Leary stepped onto the porch in his slippers, looking like a man who’d been caught with his mitts in the till. Galbraith patted him down, reached down, and yanked up his trouser leg.
**EUREKA!** The egg-sized birthmark stared back at her!
A search of the brute's lair revealed a museum of the macabre: the Adidas shoes, the honeycomb gloves, a pink Sony camera, and a secret stash of women’s underwear hidden inside a music-box—trophies of his vile conquest.
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### **THE SENSATIONAL PLATE THAT CLEARED THE DAME!**
But the final act of this tragedy was yet to play out. Back at headquarters, the cyber-sleuths cracked into O’Leary’s electronic files. There, Galbraith gasped as she uncovered photographic plates of a teenage girl, bound and gagged, her eyes wild with terror.
On the girl's chest, O'Leary had placed a learner’s driving permit. The name on the card?
**MARIE. OF LYNNWOOD, WASHINGTON.**
The terrible truth struck like a thunderbolt! The girl the Lynnwood bulls had branded a liar, the girl they had dragooned into a false confession, had been telling the absolute gospel truth! O’Leary had prowled her apartment twice before striking, slipping through her unlocked door to stage his sick "rape theater."
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### **RETRIBUTION AND REBIRTH**
Marc O'Leary pleaded guilty to his reign of terror. In Colorado, a stern-faced judge banged his gavel and sent the beast up the river for a staggering three hundred and twenty-seven years. He’ll be pushing up daisies in the state pen long before he ever smells free air. He later copped to forty more years for the Washington outrages.
When the news reached Washington, the Lynnwood Police Department was caught with its pants down. A blistering independent report slammed the detectives’ "bullying," "hounding," and "unbelievably unprofessional" tactics.
Though no coppers were booted from the force, Sergeant Mason had to eat a massive plate of crow. He apologized to Marie, admitting he had failed his oath.
As for Marie? The state expunged her criminal record, handed her back her five hundred dollars, and the city of Lynnwood cut her a fat check for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to settle her lawsuit.
Today, Marie has shaken the dust of Washington off her heels. She took to the open road, piloting a massive overland motor-truck across the highways of this great country—a free, vindicated woman, proving that though justice may sleep, she eventually wakes up!