Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language, along with references
Speaker 1: to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: So the police officer they're supposed to decide whether there
Speaker 2: even is any evidence, which is obviously not an evidence
Speaker 2: based evidence system if you're already deciding who's lying.
Speaker 1: I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
Speaker 1: in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
Speaker 1: podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
Speaker 1: research for my many audio and book projects has taken
Speaker 1: me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
Speaker 1: with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
Speaker 1: and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true cases.
Speaker 1: This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad,
Speaker 1: and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind
Speaker 1: their stories. This week on Wicked Words, years ago, author
Speaker 1: Pagan Kennedy wondered about the history of the rape kit,
Speaker 1: a crucial tool for investigators today, who designed it. She
Speaker 1: found out that it was Martha Goddard, a pioneer who
Speaker 1: wanted to help police catch sexual predators using forensics. But
Speaker 1: sometime after she made history. Goddard vanished. Listen to Kennedy's
Speaker 1: story at the center of her book, The Secret History
Speaker 1: of the Rape Kit. I read a New York Times
Speaker 1: review of your book. I can't really remember the last
Speaker 1: review I read from the Times that had zero criticism
Speaker 1: about the I mean zero. What do you think resonates
Speaker 1: with readers? I know you're doing a lot of interviews.
Speaker 1: What do you think it is about this project that
Speaker 1: has really kind of caught the attention of readers today.
Speaker 2: You know, I really thought a lot about how to
Speaker 2: tell this story. You know, I really wanted to deliver
Speaker 2: new information to people, and really important information. But I
Speaker 2: think it's very important to wrap it in a story
Speaker 2: in the right way, and so I thought a lot
Speaker 2: about that. And the Marti Goddard story is several mysteries
Speaker 2: at once, kind of stacked up. And one mystery is
Speaker 2: what happened to her because she was key to creating
Speaker 2: the national system of sexual assault evidence that we have now.
Speaker 2: I mean, she really was the person behind the scenes
Speaker 2: who made it happen at a lot of levels. Then
Speaker 2: after she did that, she just disappeared to the point
Speaker 2: where it was really when I came looking for her.
Speaker 2: It was really really took me forever to find her.
Speaker 2: So there's the mystery of what happened to her, There's
Speaker 2: the mystery of how did she bring about this massive change,
Speaker 2: you know, as an activist in Chicago with seemingly very
Speaker 2: little political power. And then you know, really it's about
Speaker 2: the mystery of evidence. What is evidence? Who gets to
Speaker 2: say what evidence is? Who controls everything about evidence? Is
Speaker 2: about the power structure in criminal justice and in our
Speaker 2: world now there's all this argument about what is even
Speaker 2: true Now. It was a struggle to rethink evidence from
Speaker 2: the point of view of survivors, you know, in the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies that Marty Goddard was a part of. And
Speaker 2: so I really it was also my own story in
Speaker 2: terms of, you know, I was molested as a kid.
Speaker 2: I mean also at the heart of this is if
Speaker 2: something like that has happened to you or somebody, you know,
Speaker 2: how do you deal with that longing for justice that
Speaker 2: you're never going to get And what if you don't
Speaker 2: have the evidence? What if you know something happened to
Speaker 2: you and you don't have the evidence of it. So
Speaker 2: I tried to weave in all of that and more
Speaker 2: into the book and keep it all keep it moving
Speaker 2: very quickly by kind of always having one pot or
Speaker 2: the other boiling at all times in the story.
Speaker 1: Well, that's a good nonfiction narrative right there. Where do
Speaker 1: we start with this story with you? Is it you
Speaker 1: and your journey trying to figure out who is the
Speaker 1: name behind the rape kit and how it is not accurate?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean, for me, the story started in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: The rape kit was very much of the news because
Speaker 2: people might remember there was a huge scandal then about
Speaker 2: untested backlogged kits and these were literally almost half a
Speaker 2: million kits that were sitting in police warehouses or it
Speaker 2: had been thrown away. And when I say police warehouses,
Speaker 2: I mean moldy basements with sometimes pigeons flapping around, you know,
Speaker 2: and mice eating them, you know, or literally lying there
Speaker 2: in black trash bags as if they're about to be
Speaker 2: thrown away or just thrown away. And so I think
Speaker 2: when you know survivors who had gone through a very
Speaker 2: very difficult and invasive forensic exams to create this evidence
Speaker 2: found out about this, there was a huge amount of anger.
Speaker 2: You know, these headlines were out there and I suddenly
Speaker 2: had the thought, you know, it didn't actually surprise me
Speaker 2: so much that the police would destroy or hide this evidence.
Speaker 2: But what did surprise me was what I really thought
Speaker 2: about it was that there was this national system for
Speaker 2: collecting evidence of sexual assault, and that you know, of
Speaker 2: course it doesn't always work as we would want it
Speaker 2: to work, but it potentially had such power to potentially
Speaker 2: take down, you know, somebody very powerful, a Catholic priest,
Speaker 2: head of a school, serial predator who had been hadn't
Speaker 2: been found for years. It also had the potential to
Speaker 2: free innocent black men who are all too often put
Speaker 2: in prison for rape and are kind of framed for it.
Speaker 2: And so that also, that power to exonerate people is
Speaker 2: really important part of the kit. So this thing kind
Speaker 2: of I was kind of like, how did this ever
Speaker 2: get created in a world that seems to be you know,
Speaker 2: in the rest of our designed environment, it seems like
Speaker 2: there's not a lot of care taken to prevent sexual
Speaker 2: abuse or you know, if you go on to social
Speaker 2: media or something, it's not like it's designed to keep
Speaker 2: people from being harassed or stocked or you know, any
Speaker 2: of that. So it just seemed kind of amazing to me.
Speaker 2: So I really suddenly wanted to know all the origins,
Speaker 2: how did this ever come into being? Because I also thought, well,
Speaker 2: this tells you more than just the story of the kid.
Speaker 2: It tells you how something like this that challenges power
Speaker 2: could come into existence. So my first stop was Wikipedia
Speaker 2: of twenty eighteen, and on that Wikipedia there was not
Speaker 2: very much information, but it did say that a police
Speaker 2: officer named Louis Futtulo in Chicago had been the sole
Speaker 2: inventor of the kit in the nineteen seventies, and it
Speaker 2: was called the Vitulo Kit after him because he was
Speaker 2: the inventor, so he was no longer alive and there
Speaker 2: was not really much information out there about him. So
Speaker 2: I kept looking for other people who might be involved,
Speaker 2: and I kept seeing this name, Martha Goddard or Marty Goddard.
Speaker 2: Being a longtime reporter, my first question is, well, okay,
Speaker 2: is she dead or alive? Because that tells me what
Speaker 2: to do next. I couldn't find any obituaries, any memorials,
Speaker 2: any indication that she was dead, you know, and almost
Speaker 2: always when I go looking for somebody, if they're dead,
Speaker 2: there's something it's very clear. So I had to assume
Speaker 2: she was alive. At that time, and so I was
Speaker 2: just hunting and hunting for her. So without knowing it,
Speaker 2: I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of looking
Speaker 2: for this mysterious Marty Goddard. And while I couldn't find her,
Speaker 2: I kept finding all kinds of things that made her
Speaker 2: story just appear before me in technicolor. Because I found
Speaker 2: these pretty obscure oral histories. She had done these long interviews,
Speaker 2: audio interviews where she told her story, and I began
Speaker 2: to find people she had worked with and talk to
Speaker 2: them who had also been involved in her projects, or
Speaker 2: had been working on the rap task for us in
Speaker 2: Chicago or whatever. The story just began to emerge before me.
Speaker 2: And that story was you know this, she begans when
Speaker 2: she tells her story in these oral histories. She begins
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy two, when she was she's a divorce
Speaker 2: a and just divorced, just moved to Chicago. She's you know,
Speaker 2: I have pictures of her. She's this blonde woman with
Speaker 2: big goggly glasses and always looking incredibly sharp. She was
Speaker 2: very determined to be taken seriously, so she was always
Speaker 2: kind of in those suits that women had to wear
Speaker 2: in the nineteen seventies with the silk shirts and the
Speaker 2: sometimes like the little bow ties and the you know,
Speaker 2: the jackets and the briefcase and all of that. So
Speaker 2: she starts with the day or the days when she
Speaker 2: began volunteering. She was working at a nonprofit, but she
Speaker 2: was volunteering at a what they can called a runaway
Speaker 2: hotline in Chicago, and that was for kids living on
Speaker 2: the street to call in and get help. And you know,
Speaker 2: this is the hippie the height of the hippie movement,
Speaker 2: so they were calling them runaways, and the idea was
Speaker 2: these kids that sort of run away to have fun
Speaker 2: and be hippies and headed to San Francisco or whatever
Speaker 2: that was. That was sort of the idea. But she
Speaker 2: walked in and the hotline was housed in this old,
Speaker 2: falling apart townhouse in downtown Chicago, and it was staffed
Speaker 2: all by students and hippies, sort of hippie long hair people.
Speaker 2: So she really didn't fit in. She was this very
Speaker 2: professional looking person, but she sat down and began taking calls,
Speaker 2: and what she discovered was these kids were running away
Speaker 2: from home because many of them were fleeing from abusive
Speaker 2: family members. In fact, she began to see what was
Speaker 2: sort of before everybody's eyes in the early seventies, but
Speaker 2: nobody was talking about or able to see, which was
Speaker 2: that there was just a tremendous amount of child sexual abuse,
Speaker 2: which was thought to be incredibly rare at that time.
Speaker 2: There was really like not even a full understanding of
Speaker 2: child abuse at that time. She was thinking, if this
Speaker 2: is so prevalent, there must be so many predators out there,
Speaker 2: and she began getting involved in trying to help these,
Speaker 2: especially the girls who ended up on the streets, who
Speaker 2: would often be blamed. They would be called like prostitutes,
Speaker 2: and nobody would seem to think, well, how did that happen?
Speaker 2: How does a thirteen year old girl end up on
Speaker 2: the street, and who's to blame for that? You know,
Speaker 2: the girl herself would be blamed and the police would
Speaker 2: holler away to juvenile hall or something. So she got
Speaker 2: very involved in that, and in nineteen seventy four things
Speaker 2: really started to shift into high gear because there was
Speaker 2: the anti race movement really was getting started in America,
Speaker 2: and in Chicago, there was a huge amount of outrage
Speaker 2: starting to happen on the part of women who had
Speaker 2: been assaulted and the police hadn't done anything, and so
Speaker 2: in fact, the attitude of that time, not just in
Speaker 2: Chicago but everywhere was that you really couldn't prove that
Speaker 2: a sexual assault had happened. It was just always going
Speaker 2: to be a he said, she said, There's sort of
Speaker 2: no way you could ever get evidence of it, you know,
Speaker 2: going back into the police training manuals of the time,
Speaker 2: they would say, like women almost always are frequently lie.
Speaker 2: You can't trust them. So the police officer is supposed
Speaker 2: to be the judge the jury. They're supposed to decide
Speaker 2: whether there even is any evidence, which is obviously not
Speaker 2: an evidence based evidence system if you're already deciding who's lying.
Speaker 1: I remember reading that you were saying in these manuals
Speaker 1: that officers were told, you know, much of this is
Speaker 1: because their boyfriend or their husband's a cheater and they're
Speaker 1: trying to get revenge. So, yes, that seemed that was
Speaker 1: startling to me when I read that. One thing I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring up because I know we're framing the
Speaker 1: seventies and where we are right now. I just did
Speaker 1: a story on my other show with Poul Holes, which
Speaker 1: is Buried Bones, about the Miranda rights, the origin of that, which,
Speaker 1: of course was a series of sexual assaults. What I
Speaker 1: did not know, and I told one of my classes
Speaker 1: where I teach a true crime at the University of Texas,
Speaker 1: I said, I did not know that even now, what
Speaker 1: happened with the women who accused Miranda of you know,
Speaker 1: assaulting them was they were all given polygraph tests and
Speaker 1: you can still do that. And I just thought, how
Speaker 1: is that even possible when this is a tool quote
Speaker 1: unquote that can't even be admitted in court, let alone,
Speaker 1: you know, it must be used for intimidation or something.
Speaker 1: I was stunned by that, and I'm sure that there
Speaker 1: are a lot of other things that would surprise me
Speaker 1: about how police officers are able to get quote unquote
Speaker 1: the truth from people who come to the station and
Speaker 1: claim something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fascinating. I actually didn't know that Miranda was
Speaker 2: a sexual assault case, and that actually makes a whole
Speaker 2: lot of sense. Yeah, because you're being told that anything
Speaker 2: you can say will be used against you, which of
Speaker 2: course it's doubly true. It's sexual assault cases because the
Speaker 2: survivor is almost always treated, it is often treated like
Speaker 2: a suspect, and that's the fight, that's the struggle. We're
Speaker 2: still having today. You know, just seems so hard to
Speaker 2: shift that culture away from treating the accuser as a
Speaker 2: suspect or a liar.
Speaker 1: So in the seventies we have a don't believe her movement,
Speaker 1: it sounds like, and this is of course disgusting to Marty.
Speaker 1: I'm sure she's learning more and more about this stuff.
Speaker 1: And you were saying, was it seventy sixty you said,
Speaker 1: was when this anti rape movement was really gaining steam here?
Speaker 2: It was around seventy four. This is when the first
Speaker 2: women are coming out of law school. I mean, Barrital
Speaker 2: rape is still legal at this time. There's very little
Speaker 2: understanding of child abuse, so it's just the norm that
Speaker 2: sexual assault happens. If it happens to you, it's probably
Speaker 2: your fault. So yeah, so she because of Chicago had
Speaker 2: this big scandal on its hands and the police department
Speaker 2: there were scandal upon scandal in Chicago because the police
Speaker 2: department there were actually a secret police group inside the
Speaker 2: Chicago Police called the Red Squad. They also had this
Speaker 2: in other cities, but it was very especially kind of
Speaker 2: woven into the Chicago Police department, which was the secret police,
Speaker 2: and they were sort of the Dirty Tricks Gang. They
Speaker 2: would blackmail people they didn't like. They would definitely target
Speaker 2: African America anybody well, they would target anybody who brought
Speaker 2: up police abuse. They targeted African American men. They were
Speaker 2: sort of entangled with Nazi movements. They were, you know,
Speaker 2: so there was in this police inside the police, and
Speaker 2: they had these secret files. And Marty Goddard actually was
Speaker 2: pretty she was being followed during some of the time.
Speaker 2: When she began working on the Rape Task Force in Chicago,
Speaker 2: she did see a file against her. But then the
Speaker 2: files from the Red Squad just like quote unquote accidentally
Speaker 2: all went up in flame. So I went and tried
Speaker 2: to find the secret file, because there is still in
Speaker 2: Chicago an archive of what's left of the Red Squad
Speaker 2: files from the seventies, well sixties, seventies, but couldn't find
Speaker 2: anything there. So if she did have a secret police
Speaker 2: file on her, it was destroyed. But you know, you
Speaker 2: can get the whole the whole vibe. It was very much,
Speaker 2: very difficult. The police were the Chicago police was really
Speaker 2: were really known to be the worst in the country
Speaker 2: in terms of being very much a political group that
Speaker 2: would just hurt the enemies of the then the democratic machine. Anyway,
Speaker 2: she Marty Goddard, because of her activism, was made a
Speaker 2: head of the Citizens Committee on the Rape Task Force,
Speaker 2: and that gave her the power to go in and
Speaker 2: talk to kind of whoever she wanted to figure out
Speaker 2: what was going on, why there was so little effort
Speaker 2: to investigate sexual assault cases. And so she talked to
Speaker 2: hospital administrators, nurses, er docs, you know, people in the
Speaker 2: crime labs, police officers. She just talked to everybody. And
Speaker 2: this was something really interesting about her, which she's just
Speaker 2: a very curious person who wanted to make things work
Speaker 2: and get everybody on board. And so she could kind
Speaker 2: of go into these different spaces and make allies. She
Speaker 2: was very good at kind of showing up in her
Speaker 2: nice suit and shaking people's hands and making allies and
Speaker 2: then just sort of pulling things together. And so along
Speaker 2: the way she became convinced or decided, you know, well
Speaker 2: what she analyzed when she diagnosed what was going wrong.
Speaker 2: Of course, there's a big kind of cultural problem with
Speaker 2: the police really treating survivors quite badly. You know, there was,
Speaker 2: of course the culture, but then at the practical level,
Speaker 2: just people in the nursing staff in the hospital. They
Speaker 2: were just focused on when somebody came in after a
Speaker 2: violin attack. They just wanted to help them and treat
Speaker 2: their wounds, and so that they would try to collect evidence,
Speaker 2: but nobody had taught them how, so they just kind
Speaker 2: of do what they needed to do, throw everything in
Speaker 2: a bag and send it over to the crime lab.
Speaker 2: And then the crime lab opens this bag and here's
Speaker 2: this clothing that has been torn up by the doctors
Speaker 2: as they tried to get to the patient and they
Speaker 2: you know, in slides that hadn't been correctly stored and
Speaker 2: just a jumble of stuff, so they would throw it out.
Speaker 2: So that was what was happening to a lot of
Speaker 2: the evidence. So it became clear that you needed to
Speaker 2: train everybody. You needed to get them to all talk
Speaker 2: to each other, and you needed them to all be
Speaker 2: on board and create one unified system. She I think
Speaker 2: it was she who probably did have you know, talked
Speaker 2: to a lot of people and tried to establish exactly
Speaker 2: what happened. It's a little hard, but it seems like
Speaker 2: she had the idea of using the kit a kit
Speaker 2: to kind of be the object that moved from place
Speaker 2: to place, and kept everybody on the same page. I
Speaker 2: should say that she did not invent the kit, nor
Speaker 2: did Louis Viattulo, who was credited with it. There were
Speaker 2: actually rape kits in existence then they weren't used widely.
Speaker 2: They were used sort of here and there, like as
Speaker 2: experiments sort of or and many of them were quite bad.
Speaker 1: In what way bad like inadequate.
Speaker 2: Well, I found one from nineteen I found I didn't
Speaker 2: find the kit. I found the instructions from a nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy three kit that said that if you thought that
Speaker 2: the woman accusing rape was a quote ced prostitute, then
Speaker 2: you didn't need to collect evidence. Wow, you should collect
Speaker 2: evidence if she was a thirteen year old girl headed
Speaker 2: to Sunday school. But maybe if she was a quote
Speaker 2: bar maid, you didn't have to do it. So again,
Speaker 2: it was like actually codifying that police bias right into
Speaker 2: the tool. So there's nothing magical about a rape kit.
Speaker 2: A rape kit can be very bad. So anyway, Marty
Speaker 2: Goddard brought this, she was told by a friend in
Speaker 2: the police department, you've got to get Louis Batulo on
Speaker 2: board because he's in the crime lab. He was sort
Speaker 2: of Chicago famous at that time because he'd been helped
Speaker 2: to solve some big cases and he had just had
Speaker 2: a lot of power inside the police department. So she
Speaker 2: went to him proposed to this idea and or some
Speaker 2: idea that she had, and according to her big collaborator
Speaker 2: at that time, Cynthia Gary, he threw her out of
Speaker 2: the office initially and yelled at her for sort of
Speaker 2: presuming to come in. But then days later he had
Speaker 2: created a prototype of what they had discussed, and so
Speaker 2: she did end up working with him, you know, But
Speaker 2: she went on to found a nonprofit, Get all the
Speaker 2: hospitals on board, run all the trainings, raise all the money,
Speaker 2: think up you know. Really, there was so much about
Speaker 2: the kid that wasn't in the box. It was a
Speaker 2: sense of design, It was an attitude of looking at
Speaker 2: it from the survivor's point of view. Part of the
Speaker 2: original kit was a very simple didn't have that many
Speaker 2: tools in it, and it had a very simple set
Speaker 2: of checklists so that if you were trained, and you
Speaker 2: didn't need a ton of training, you could follow this
Speaker 2: and everybody would know exactly what evidence was collected and
Speaker 2: how to collect it. So it was very much about
Speaker 2: creating a system and then housing all these samples, biological
Speaker 2: samples that had been collected in exactly the same way
Speaker 2: so that it was standardized.
Speaker 1: I wonder if we can go back and do a
Speaker 1: little bit of a timeline of collecting evidence for sexual assault.
Speaker 1: Raye Paul and I on Barry Bones do talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, cases from the seventies and the fifties that
Speaker 1: are sixties that have been solved with DNA evidence that's
Speaker 1: been collected in a lot of time. It's that semen swabs,
Speaker 1: which for some reason always surprises me or right, they
Speaker 1: are often in cases like you know, I think it's
Speaker 1: a Knoxville, Tennessee where there was a suspected serial killer
Speaker 1: of young girls, and so you know there is biological
Speaker 1: evidence there. What's your understanding of when they first started
Speaker 1: thinking about collecting anything, I mean, my goodness, in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds. I don't even know if they would
Speaker 1: have known what to capture what not to capture.
Speaker 2: Well, I think the cases you're talking about are where
Speaker 2: the survivors are dead. So the survivors, the non survivors,
Speaker 2: the victims are dead, right, So that was really different
Speaker 2: like collecting from a dead body. We're talking about collecting
Speaker 2: from somebody who's alive, you know, again, it becomes much
Speaker 2: more of you know, it's if somebody's dead, it's clear
Speaker 2: that violence has occurred. Yeah, so it's a very different
Speaker 2: process when the survivor is alive and accusing somebody, especially
Speaker 2: somebody in power.
Speaker 1: Do you know when that would have started with survivors.
Speaker 2: It's a very hazy history, which I actually traced back
Speaker 2: to the witch trials because there was very you know,
Speaker 2: Matthew Hale, who was in English, I don't know if
Speaker 2: he was a judge. I guess he was a judge
Speaker 2: in the sixteen hundreds, who was the man who formulated
Speaker 2: a lot of the ideas that underlay marital rape. It
Speaker 2: was the idea that, you know, a woman was property
Speaker 2: of her husband, so she couldn't be sexually abused because
Speaker 2: she was property. And he also was involved in some
Speaker 2: witch trials. But you know, the idea of a witch
Speaker 2: trial was you're investigating somebody's body to see if they're
Speaker 2: a liar, essentially, and that idea, you know, and then
Speaker 2: you have, like in the Victorian era here and there,
Speaker 2: and even early twentieth century, you have female accusers being
Speaker 2: examined to see if they're virgins, you know, it's just
Speaker 2: a long chain of is she a liar? Is she
Speaker 2: a slut? You know, And so by the early seventies
Speaker 2: when this is happening, I mean, they certainly would have
Speaker 2: you know, of course, any situation where the victim is dead,
Speaker 2: that becomes a whole different kind of case. You know,
Speaker 2: there were really obvious cases or if you had maybe
Speaker 2: a sympathetic police officer or something. You know, it was
Speaker 2: just they would bring people in, they would collect their story,
Speaker 2: they might collect evidence, but it wasn't like there was
Speaker 2: any real system in place, and it was again very
Speaker 2: much under the control of the police officers to decide.
Speaker 2: And so what I think Marty Goddard and the other
Speaker 2: activists of the seventies were doing was trying to take
Speaker 2: the power, you know, out of the individual police officer
Speaker 2: and say, look, we're going to collect evidence from everybody
Speaker 2: who wants evidence collected. Anybody who's accusing and they want
Speaker 2: evidence collected. It was essentially creating a new norm, a
Speaker 2: norm that if you're a survivor in theory, you have
Speaker 2: the right to have evidence collected from you if you
Speaker 2: want it. That that belongs to everybody.
Speaker 1: What is the rule now, Is it that anybody who
Speaker 1: comes in, male or female and says I've been the
Speaker 1: victim of a sexual assault, it is their right to
Speaker 1: have their evidence tested? Or is there any discretion for
Speaker 1: anybody either at the hospital or at the police department.
Speaker 2: Well, in theory, that's how it works. In practice, and
Speaker 2: we can get into this later, there's all kinds of
Speaker 2: reasons why it doesn't always work that way and often doesn't,
Speaker 2: and that just the hurdles that survivors have to go
Speaker 2: through to even get to the point where they're getting
Speaker 2: a forensic exam or very high. And so a lot
Speaker 2: of people just simply don't have access to the system
Speaker 2: at all, just because they may not have a car
Speaker 2: to get to a hospital something like that. So as
Speaker 2: I've been touring with around after this book, you know,
Speaker 2: I just hear so many stories, for instance, male victims
Speaker 2: being turned away because somebody tells them, oh, the rape
Speaker 2: kit isn't for you, which is not true. You know.
Speaker 2: One of the other big problems right now is something
Speaker 2: that happened later. You know, as the rape kit comes
Speaker 2: into becomes a national system in the eighties, there's entirely
Speaker 2: new kinds of nurses. There's forensic nurses being trained, and
Speaker 2: there's now you know, the system is built out even
Speaker 2: further more and more to where we have the idea
Speaker 2: of trauma informed care and you know nurses who are
Speaker 2: specially trained to help survivors and all of that. But
Speaker 2: right now there's just not enough forensic nurses. So often
Speaker 2: also the people who are the nurses or doctors that
Speaker 2: you know, somebody might counter it's not their fault, but
Speaker 2: they haven't been trained, and they're any er where there's
Speaker 2: a huge amount of time pressure and stuff. So there's
Speaker 2: all kinds of reasons why it does not work as envisioned.
Speaker 2: But I think the idea there's something just important in
Speaker 2: the idea that everybody has the right to file evidence now,
Speaker 2: and that I never thought, even when I was working
Speaker 2: on the book, I never thought, oh, that could be
Speaker 2: taken away. You know, even if in practice we fall
Speaker 2: short of that norm, that that idea that we have
Speaker 2: that I thought we all shared that every person who's
Speaker 2: believes that they've been sexually assaulted has the right to
Speaker 2: report it and be examined and see if there's DNA
Speaker 2: evidence or other evidence that is now being chipped away
Speaker 2: in Idaho a law passed this summer, so anybody under
Speaker 2: eighteen has to get the parental consent in order to
Speaker 2: file sexual assault evidence.
Speaker 1: That's such bullshit. Yeah, but what is that? What is
Speaker 1: that coming down to? I mean, what is the politics
Speaker 1: behind that? It's the agreement that children shouldn't be making
Speaker 1: their own decisions? Is that what the push for that was?
Speaker 1: That parents have to be more involved? The lack of
Speaker 1: parental rights? Is that what this is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a far right movement around. In fact, in Idaho,
Speaker 2: any procedure, even a minor one involving a minor, the
Speaker 2: parent have to give consent. But that of course includes
Speaker 2: going through a forensic exam. And so of course if
Speaker 2: the parent is actually the perpetrator.
Speaker 1: Or doesn't believe it.
Speaker 2: Or doesn't believe it, or somebody else in the family
Speaker 2: it's the perpetrator, you know, then that's a big problem.
Speaker 2: But the upshot is that, you know, in Idaho and
Speaker 2: potentially in more and more states, we could see this idea.
Speaker 2: I thought, you know that it seemed like we all
Speaker 2: share that any survivor who wants to report what happened
Speaker 2: to them and have evidence collected that they had that
Speaker 2: right that's not anything that I think we can take
Speaker 2: for granted anymore.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to the nineteen seventies. So you know,
Speaker 1: Marty is having a conversation with Vittulo and next thing
Speaker 1: we know, he's got this prototype for the kit. Do
Speaker 1: they get along on this process or is she done
Speaker 1: with this process once she gives him the idea? And
Speaker 1: where do we go from there?
Speaker 2: So yeah, when you read, you know, it's hard to
Speaker 2: know exactly. I have a lot about that in my
Speaker 2: book trying to parse that out, But it doesn't seem
Speaker 2: like once she had the prototype they were working together
Speaker 2: that much. And in fact, if you go back and
Speaker 2: as I did, and look through a bazillion newspaper articles
Speaker 2: and can kind of reconstruct the story, she then takes
Speaker 2: the lead, and she's quoted everywhere in the newspapers and
Speaker 2: sort of doing everything. So she now has the prototype,
Speaker 2: she has the go ahead to create a system in
Speaker 2: Chicago using this kit. She doesn't have the money. She
Speaker 2: started a nonprofit like as the Mechanism to do this,
Speaker 2: but so she needs to raise all this money. She
Speaker 2: can't get any funding because this is not the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that well healed philanthropic organizations are funding at
Speaker 2: that time. So this is kind of one of the
Speaker 2: many bizarre twists in the story was that her friend
Speaker 2: at the Playboy Foundation, Margaret who is now name Margaret Pcorney,
Speaker 2: reached out to her and said, look, I think you
Speaker 2: can get funding here. Strangely enough, the Playboy Foundation. Playboy,
Speaker 2: of course, was the big industry in Chicago. The Playboy
Speaker 2: magazine was making a lot of money, and Hugh Hefner
Speaker 2: was this real Chicago personality, and there was this huge
Speaker 2: building in the center of town that said Playboy. They
Speaker 2: were funding a lot of civil rights and feminists, activism
Speaker 2: and work. I didn't know that. How Why why? I
Speaker 2: think it made sense in a weird way for you Havener,
Speaker 2: because he wanted women to be liberated and sexually free,
Speaker 2: and if women are being sexually assaulted all over the place,
Speaker 2: that's not going to happen. He also funded Ruth Bader
Speaker 2: Ginsberg's projects at the ACLU as she got her start,
Speaker 2: so it kind of weirdly made sense for him. Anyway,
Speaker 2: they did get this grant to do this pilot program,
Speaker 2: and they got a lot of help from the Playboy staff.
Speaker 2: The designers helped did sort of a logo for the kit.
Speaker 2: There's a kind of groovy seventies women on it. They
Speaker 2: gathered volunteers there and had everybody put together these kits
Speaker 2: and made thousands of kits and got them out into
Speaker 2: the hospitals and started up this very very ambitious program
Speaker 2: across Chicago and then across the entire state. And part
Speaker 2: of the training that the nurses had to have and
Speaker 2: the doctors was that they were going to take this
Speaker 2: kit into the courtroom. They probably take the actual kit,
Speaker 2: but they were going to talk about what they had
Speaker 2: done and present it to the jury. And so the
Speaker 2: kit itself had to look really official and scientific, and
Speaker 2: the whole process had to be kind of put in
Speaker 2: this language of you know, scientific evidence, because again, you know,
Speaker 2: the accuser was not going to be believed by the jury,
Speaker 2: especially at that time, and so what you had is
Speaker 2: people who are kind of in a white lab coats
Speaker 2: talking on their behalf and saying, well, we did this test,
Speaker 2: and we did this test, and we did this test,
Speaker 2: and that really did start to help to win cases
Speaker 2: and persuade juries. You know, this was at a time
Speaker 2: before DNA identification existed. If they had, say blood in
Speaker 2: a sample of blood. You know, they couldn't really narrow
Speaker 2: down who was the suspect that much. You could do
Speaker 2: blood typing, you could do HLA take typing, you could
Speaker 2: do these other kind of tests. You're not really you're
Speaker 2: maybe eliminating, you know, a third of people out there
Speaker 2: are two thirds or something like that, but you're not
Speaker 2: really saying with any certainty who the suspect is. So
Speaker 2: Marty continued to you know, really advocate for this. It
Speaker 2: became you know, you see, if you're following it through
Speaker 2: the newspapers, you suddenly see exploding headlines all over the country. Wow,
Speaker 2: there's this new rape kit system. It's it seems to
Speaker 2: really be helping to solve cases. It seems to work
Speaker 2: really well. You see other cities adopting it. And she
Speaker 2: was given money by the Justice Department to go around
Speaker 2: the country and help other cities and states set up
Speaker 2: their programs. So that's what she did in the early eighties.
Speaker 2: And she worked really hard and burned out very badly,
Speaker 2: which I think is part of the why she disappeared.
Speaker 2: But because of the work she and all these other
Speaker 2: people did, wonderful people did back then, there was now
Speaker 2: these kits all over the country storing biological evidence. So
Speaker 2: when DNA identification did come along in the late eighties nineties,
Speaker 2: you now, these kits are just so much more valuable
Speaker 2: and so much more convincing to a jury where you
Speaker 2: can say, Okay, look, you know, we had three women
Speaker 2: accusing this guy, and we have one kit that shows
Speaker 2: that he's definitely the person whose blood is in this kit.
Speaker 2: So that kind of evidence really is much more convincing
Speaker 2: to juries.
Speaker 1: I remember, you know, when I'm in Texas, when Dallas
Speaker 1: got a new DA, the first black DA, Craig walk
Speaker 1: in and one of the first things he did was
Speaker 1: go and test all of the outstanding sexual assault kits
Speaker 1: and other biological evidence, and it came back something like
Speaker 1: I feel like it was like twenty five percent of
Speaker 1: the people who had been you know, arrested and convicted
Speaker 1: in those cases were exonerated just based on what he
Speaker 1: did with these kids. Was there a way to trace
Speaker 1: or tell the story of one of these kits where
Speaker 1: it leads to an exoneration or a conviction. I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if there's like a little map of where all these
Speaker 1: kits that came from Goddard's mind, you know, where they
Speaker 1: came from.
Speaker 2: Not really to be honest, because by the time the
Speaker 2: kits are really everywhere, they're already becoming slightly different everywhere.
Speaker 2: That was the thing, and I think she had really
Speaker 2: wanted a standardized system. We still don't have one. People
Speaker 2: became aware of the backlog of kits in the twenty tens,
Speaker 2: but they the backlog started as soon as you had
Speaker 2: DNA testing. So you know, you can imagine, like DNA
Speaker 2: testing becomes available, it's super expensive. A city like New York, say,
Speaker 2: already has ten thousand kits or something, and now they
Speaker 2: all need to be tested. And honestly, police departments did
Speaker 2: have tend to have pretty much money, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: it was not put into testing the kits. So immediately
Speaker 2: you start to see backlogs in the nineties, so a
Speaker 2: lot of there were all these kits on file that
Speaker 2: have been filed, but many of them had not been tested.
Speaker 2: And that only became an issue decades later because of
Speaker 2: some amazing activists who worked super hard to bring it
Speaker 2: to everybody's attention. But that was you know, that was
Speaker 2: one of the problems, is like in theory, yes, this
Speaker 2: is an amazing way of finding finding serial predators. But
Speaker 2: in practice, if you're not actually testing the kits, you know,
Speaker 2: that may not happen. I'm glad you brought up the exonerations.
Speaker 2: I think you know, when I talk about this, people
Speaker 2: kind of assume that the idea that if you have
Speaker 2: more kits, you're supporting the car sooral system, or you're
Speaker 2: supporting putting more people in prison. But the fact is,
Speaker 2: number one, we don't want to put the wrong people
Speaker 2: in prison. Number two, you know, the kids have taken
Speaker 2: gotten a lot of people out of prison, and whatever happens.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to get into the issues. I not
Speaker 2: smart enough to figure out how the prison system should work.
Speaker 2: But whatever happens, we need to know who is attacking,
Speaker 2: violently attacking, and sexually attacking people like I think that
Speaker 2: information is extremely important to know what we do with it,
Speaker 2: how we treat that, how we decide what we decide
Speaker 2: to do with especially the serial predators, that's another big issue.
Speaker 2: But certainly knowing who those people are, being able to
Speaker 2: identify them and being aware of what they're doing and
Speaker 2: hopefully able to stop it in some way like that,
Speaker 2: that's just an incredibly important thing. And it doesn't necessarily
Speaker 2: you know, honestly, there's so few convictions for sexual assault.
Speaker 2: It's not like any of this it's going to make
Speaker 2: it's making a lot of people go to prison or
Speaker 2: any of the right people.
Speaker 1: Well, you had a question that you were trying to
Speaker 1: solve at the beginning of your research, which is what
Speaker 1: exactly happened Marty. You said that in the eighties she
Speaker 1: was touring and lecturing and educating and everything and got
Speaker 1: burned out. So what did you find happened you know
Speaker 1: after that time? Is this when she vanished kind of
Speaker 1: from the newspapers and everything.
Speaker 2: She vanishes. And I was interviewing a number of people
Speaker 2: who had worked with her in the seventies and knew
Speaker 2: her or were friends with her, and even they didn't
Speaker 2: know what had happened. They wanted me to find her.
Speaker 1: Was she married or with kids or any family or anything.
Speaker 2: Well, one thing I was in touch with Cynthia Gary,
Speaker 2: who had worked with her, you know, had been studying
Speaker 2: police violence in the early seventies and worked really closely
Speaker 2: with Marty Goddard at that time and was also on
Speaker 2: the Rape Task Force. And so I was pumping Cynthia.
Speaker 2: She didn't know what had happened to Marty, but she
Speaker 2: knew a lot about Marty, So I was sort of
Speaker 2: pumping her for any clues that I thought would lead
Speaker 2: me to Marty Goddard's present day whereabouts, you know, family members, what,
Speaker 2: you know, anything. So I was hitting Cynthia with after
Speaker 2: we talked, with like a lot of emails, like I
Speaker 2: found this thing, do you think this is connected to
Speaker 2: remember this? And in the midst of that, Cynthia sent
Speaker 2: me this suddenly remembered something and sent me this string
Speaker 2: of emails that I got. Well, I was hiking. It
Speaker 2: was really weird. I just remember how shocked I was
Speaker 2: that day that Cynthia suddenly remembered In the late seventies,
Speaker 2: Marty had gone on vacation to Hawaii and when she
Speaker 2: came back, she called Cynthia and said that she had
Speaker 2: been violently assaulted. And this was already with when she
Speaker 2: was working in Chicago, with running this system as far
Speaker 2: as I've been able to nail it down, and you know,
Speaker 2: getting those emails and then it was just very raw
Speaker 2: because Cynthia had just you know, all the memories had
Speaker 2: come back and they were just very raw and jumbled.
Speaker 2: But then as I began to talk to more people.
Speaker 2: I would ask them about this if they knew about it,
Speaker 2: and I gathered more and more different points of view,
Speaker 2: you know, people telling me about, yes, this happened to her,
Speaker 2: and I had actually in these oral histories, there was
Speaker 2: one where Marty had mentioned something happening to her and
Speaker 2: then I the tape with actually was not very good,
Speaker 2: and she had mentioned something very brutal, and I thought
Speaker 2: maybe it was in childhood or something, and then I
Speaker 2: realized she was talking about this particular attack. And then
Speaker 2: I was eventually able to talk to her sister, and
Speaker 2: you know, whatever nail it all down. But the upshot
Speaker 2: was she was very violently attacked. She began drinking much more,
Speaker 2: she began traveling all around the country and doing this work,
Speaker 2: and people just lost track of her. And you know,
Speaker 2: I eventually did find out what had happened and why
Speaker 2: she had vanished, and you know, I can't answer all
Speaker 2: the questions, but I had a pretty strong story, and yeah,
Speaker 2: I learned a lot about you know, what happened after
Speaker 2: that and sort of why she disappeared and why she
Speaker 2: wasn't able to ever be part of this forensic system
Speaker 2: that she really helped to create ever again.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if we mentioned this, but part
Speaker 1: of the interesting thing about your book is she had
Speaker 1: known that people would not take this seriously if the
Speaker 1: kit were named after her, after a woman. That's why
Speaker 1: she sort of pushed Vitulo to be the name on it.
Speaker 2: Is that the document that is really surprising is that
Speaker 2: there's a trademark document from nineteen seventy eight which is
Speaker 2: filed by Marty Goddard, her nonprofit you know under the
Speaker 2: ageis of her nonprofit, and it is for a sexual
Speaker 2: assault evidence kit called the Viatulo Kit. So it was
Speaker 2: clearly her decision to call it this, and a rape
Speaker 2: kit doesn't need to be named after any person, and
Speaker 2: now isn't you know now would be called the mostly
Speaker 2: it's would be called the sexual assault evidence kit. Officially,
Speaker 2: everybody calls it the rape kit. But you know, now, like,
Speaker 2: why does it have to be named after person? You know,
Speaker 2: at the time, you know, as far as I've been
Speaker 2: able to reconstruct the story, it was just very clear
Speaker 2: that the police department and the State Attorney General's office
Speaker 2: really wanted credit for this, and that you know, again
Speaker 2: you're with this system is going to take power away
Speaker 2: from the police department. They're not in control of it
Speaker 2: entirely anymore, and so you know, I think that that
Speaker 2: was a very smart calculation on her part. Again, you know,
Speaker 2: she had been told by her friend inside the police
Speaker 2: department it's really important to get Batulo on board, so
Speaker 2: you know, that may have been part of it. Exactly
Speaker 2: what happened and what that conversation is like, I don't
Speaker 2: know if we will probably ever know.
Speaker 1: What do you think the legacy is here? Because while
Speaker 1: the rape kit, of course is very important, it sounds
Speaker 1: like her being out there being a face, really being
Speaker 1: an activist seemed to be as important. Am I right
Speaker 1: about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And I think also, you know, one of my
Speaker 2: obsessions is really the politics of design and the fact
Speaker 2: that everything we have, everything we interact with, is designed
Speaker 2: by people and they have agendas. Every tech chnology that
Speaker 2: comes along creates winners and losers. It's designed for certain
Speaker 2: people and gives certain people more power, and it may
Speaker 2: take power away from other people. In this case, I
Speaker 2: think it was so important to have more of a
Speaker 2: survivor's point of view in the design of this system,
Speaker 2: that it is designed around the idea that it's an
Speaker 2: evidence based evidence system that every survivor will be listened to,
Speaker 2: every bit of evidence will be collected, and we're not
Speaker 2: going to prejudge people. So, you know, I was really
Speaker 2: interested in making that more obvious to readers, and also
Speaker 2: to think about what are the problems with our designs,
Speaker 2: design now and our technology now, and who is it helping,
Speaker 2: who's it hurting? And who gets to design and create technology.
Speaker 2: That's an huge amount of power to have.
Speaker 1: Do you think that one of the next big steps
Speaker 1: would be making sure that not only you know, everybody
Speaker 1: is able to have their evidence collected, whether the police
Speaker 1: believe them or not. You know that everybody has that right.
Speaker 1: But also I wonder about the training of the nurses
Speaker 1: who are not trained specifically to collect this evidence, or
Speaker 1: the doctors. Is there any standardized training with how to
Speaker 1: deal with survivors of sexual assault? You know, while we're
Speaker 1: in a hectic area and whether it's a hospital or
Speaker 1: you are wherever it is, that seems that it could
Speaker 1: be as traumatizing, you know, for a survivor, the collection
Speaker 1: of all this.
Speaker 2: You know, really it's a matter of money, and we
Speaker 2: could use thousands more forensic nurses. You know that would
Speaker 2: be amazing. Another big problem is that the way that
Speaker 2: evidence is defined, the kid itself and the way that
Speaker 2: evidence is defined hasn't changed very much since the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: So when I do talks, I kind of show the
Speaker 2: original kit and then I show one of the kits today,
Speaker 2: because there's probably more than a thousand in America. It's
Speaker 2: also a complete tower of babble, you know, it's complete
Speaker 2: chaos out there. So this is another thing. It's not
Speaker 2: helpful to have all different kits with all different rules,
Speaker 2: which is you know, for the nurses. That's not good either.
Speaker 2: But anyway, the kit, you know, from the seventies, it's
Speaker 2: all on paper, it's in cardboard. The kit today still
Speaker 2: almost all on paper, but just much more of a mess.
Speaker 2: You know. The original one was very carefully edited and
Speaker 2: doable in a reasonable amount of time. The new kits
Speaker 2: can have dozens and dozens of envelopes, most of which
Speaker 2: you would never use. They're all there. It's like, if
Speaker 2: this totally rare event happened, use this envelope, you know,
Speaker 2: because committees and crime labs keep packing them with more
Speaker 2: and more stuff. There's just been no standardization. There's been
Speaker 2: and again talking about design justice. There's been no kind
Speaker 2: of sense of what the nurse needs, especially if she
Speaker 2: hasn't been trained in forensics, you know, which is what
Speaker 2: we seem to be doing now. That wasn't supposed to happen.
Speaker 2: But if that's what we're doing now, you know, the
Speaker 2: kit should be very very easy to use, and it
Speaker 2: can you know, there can be a lot of things
Speaker 2: that shouldn't be in there, Like the crime labs I
Speaker 2: learned are part of the problem in that they seem
Speaker 2: to have all the power they want to create new
Speaker 2: different kits. That has asked the nurses to do things
Speaker 2: that they want, whether that's what should happen or not.
Speaker 2: So an example of that would be some of the
Speaker 2: kids might ask for what medication the survivor is taking,
Speaker 2: even if that includes psych medication. That's not something the
Speaker 2: crime lab needs to know or should know. They might
Speaker 2: even ask to see the whole account of the testimony,
Speaker 2: which also the crime lab should not be seeing that
Speaker 2: because the job of the crime lab is to test
Speaker 2: samples and to come back with accurate tests. It's not
Speaker 2: to judge. Again, it's not to judge which kits they
Speaker 2: should process based on how they feel about the victim.
Speaker 2: And I would also say the craziest thing to me
Speaker 2: is all that it's still all on paper. Yeah, in
Speaker 2: a twenty first century world.
Speaker 1: You know, we're not saying what happened to Marty after
Speaker 1: all of this and her profile goes down. But do
Speaker 1: you think that she understood the impact that her work
Speaker 1: had or would have. I sometimes feel like it's such
Speaker 1: a shame when people die before they see you know,
Speaker 1: how prolific their one idea was and how much of
Speaker 1: an impact. I know there's so many improvements that need
Speaker 1: to be made, But do you think that she had
Speaker 1: a sense that she really moved the needle on the
Speaker 1: way other people did.
Speaker 2: I think for a time she did. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 2: it's hard because it's a whole many, many span of years,
Speaker 2: but I think there was definitely a period when she
Speaker 2: understood and she wanted to get back into forensic and
Speaker 2: forensics and wasn't able to.
Speaker 1: If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
Speaker 1: audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
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