August 3, 2021 • 32 mins
One woman escapes Vann and tries to warn the police, but they don't listen.
Find out more about the case on twitter, instagram, or facebook. Follow host Ben Kuebrich on twitter @Ben_kuebrich.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily
represent those of iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees.
This series contains discussions of violence and sexual violence. Listener
discretion is advised. Previously an algorithm. I feel I should
(00:22):
have got locked over them. Yeah, I'll beat her, I
rape you, rape you. I standard y'all call it right,
but we don't call it ran in streets like you
pay here? So what is she complaining about? After Vaughan's
release from prison in August, he moved back to Gary
first time. He really didn't go over okay and true
(00:45):
World War for for a couple of days, and in January,
Vaughan appears to have committed the first of his confirmed murders,
killing twenty eight year old Tierra Baby and Way call
it never happened. Her fiance, Marvin Clinton, investigated her disappearance
(01:08):
and discovered a man, likely Vaughan, had stolen her cell
phone and was using it to call prostitutes, and Marvin
says he took that information to the police. He didn't
have me thank but from that point on it what
he did would director. I have no idea. And around
that same time, another woman had a run in with Vond.
(01:29):
She was one of the very first person that ever
weighing into HOW, but she happened to get away from HOW.
From I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Algorithm
and I'm ben Key Brick at eleven am. On February,
just over a month after Tierra Batty disappeared, Darren Von
(01:51):
contacted a woman who placed an ad as an escort
on backpage dot com. That's the same site that Von
would later use to contact Africa Hardy. The woman who
will call Sarah, came forward with her story after Vaughn
was arrested and she saw his picture on the news.
Detective Ford looked into it. He found the report that
(02:11):
Sarah had initially filed, and then went out to interview her.
How did it make you feel when you saw him
on the news? Ford recorded this interview. With the way
it's recorded, you can hear him well and how do
you spell your last name? But many of Sarah's responses
aren't audible. Luckily I got access to Detective Ford's report
(02:32):
about this interview, so try to fill in some of
the gaps. When the audio isn't clear. I'd prefer to
hear things firsthand from Sarah, and I reached out to
her for comment, but I couldn't get in touch. You
can tell from the get go that she doesn't trust police,
which makes sense given her story. And I know it's
hard for you to believe, but we're here to try
(02:53):
to help himself. Okay, how did you wind up meeting
this guy? You had a back page ad, so you
were in Chicago, you drove the Gary. Okay, so you
met him at one house and he asked you to
drive to another one. Now, how did you find it?
Did he give you directions to it? Or did you
(03:13):
put it like in your phone for GPS? So he
just told you kind of how to get there. Now,
in the report, do you say that it's fourteen East Court?
East fifty Court was the street that von lived on
with his brother, and the address Sarah had given police
was just across the street from where Vaughan was staying.
(03:35):
What happened when you get to the house. When you
when you meet him the first time, Sarah says that
as she was getting out of the car, Vun ambushed her.
He put a knife to her neck, and he told her,
you're going to listen to me. Get in the fucking house.
What did he look like the guys? Sarah says that
(03:57):
because of Von's facial ticks, the way he ground his teeth,
she thought that he used to be addicted to crack,
used to be okay, So he put a knife to
your next and he said, you're gonna listen to me.
Sarah says Von took her to a back room in
the house. He made her hand over her cell phone
and car keys and told her that if she did
(04:18):
what he said, then he'd let her go. But she
didn't believe him because she saw duct tape and gloves
in the corner of the room, and he started asking
her questions. He was asking about your car, who knows
you're there? And he took your cell phone right so
you're saying that these are all science and NFL like
you were probably wind up dead. Okay. I used to
(04:40):
work in narcotics a lot, and I did undercover words.
I have the same sign as you do. When things
started going weird, I started going, okay, it's time to
get out of here. Sad's about and half behind. Sarah
says that Von then repeatedly raped her. He seemed to
be toying with her. He would stop and tell her
he was going to let her go, only to then
(05:01):
begin again. At one point, she tried to escape, but
he caught her and started beating her and tighter wrists
behind her back with a small rope any other weapons
against jubisides tie you off. After hours of holding Sarah
at knife point, choking her and raping her, Sarah says
that Von gagged her through a coat over her head
(05:24):
and drug her outside to her own car, some of
the staff and outside with him punching you and choking you.
This part of the story reminded me of something. It
reminded me of an incident that Vaughan's brother, Reginald, had
described police. Reginald said Vaughan had once called him at
work out of the blue. It was like like the
(05:44):
only time he's ever calling me over. And when he said,
you say, you know he brought a chap back to
the house and they got your food anything doing it,
I think it really told me is because of the
neighbor across the street. So now to be clear, Vaughan
(06:04):
just told his brother that he'd gotten into a fight
with a woman. He didn't tell his brother about any crimes.
And I don't know for certain that the incident Reginald
was describing has anything to do with Sarah, but I
wonder Regardless, Vaughan forced her into the car and started driving,
and she felt certain that he was taking her somewhere
(06:24):
to kill her. They got the t Brawway and he
got stuck at a red light and it's a pool hall.
We got on twenty Broadway and there was two old guys,
two old gentlemen that was standing outside. Sarah managed to
get the gag out of her mouth and she screamed
(06:45):
for help. They say what they heard was somebody in distress,
and they looked and they see a woman tied up
in the back feet of the car. The men snapped
into action. They were armed, so they pulled out their
guns and stopped Vaughan at the intersection. They helped to
call at the light, and they were trying to make
(07:05):
him get out the car so they can get the
young lady out, and one of the guys shot off
his pistol. One of the men fired a warning shot
and Vaughan ended up bailing out of the car and
running away. So basically, these people intervening for you shoot
(07:35):
a shot in the air. He takes off, run in
and the police show up. Sarah told police what had happened.
She gave them the address where she'd met Vaughan and
the fact that he'd said that his name was Darren.
And after she finished up with the police, she met
up with her boyfriend and it was actually while she
was talking to her boyfriend that she decided to go
to the hospital and get a rape kit because victim
(07:58):
went through several hours in an exam. They had someone
swabbing intimate parts of their body and taking pictures and
you know it's not done for fun. My name is
Dr Rachel Lovell. My area of expertise is around gender
based violence and I am a research assistant professor at
Case Western Reserve University. So a centual assault kit is
(08:23):
a set of items collected by healthcare professionals, primarily in
a hospital setting. The items can be swabs, combs, hair, photographs,
any number of things. Level says that about six of
sexual assault kits will have enough DNA to be analyzed
and submitted to a database. It has to meet a
(08:47):
certain number of criteria to be uploaded into CODIS that's
the us IS Federal DNA database. When a new sample
is uploaded to CODIS, it's compared against all the other
samples sun Vaughan's previous crimes. His DNA should have been
in the federal database. So if Gary police had analyzed
(09:07):
Sarah's rape kit and it had enough DNA, they should
have been able to link the kit to Vaughan. They
would have discovered he was a registered sex offender living
just across the street from the address that she had provided,
And they also would have found out that Vaughan had
been convicted for an almost identical crime to the one
Sarah described. Now, to be clear, we can't know for
(09:29):
certain what would have happened if police had tested Sarah's
sexual assault kit, but it seems quite plausible that they
would have been able to arrest Vaughn before he committed
any more murders. But that's not what happened. Did the
police ever follow up with you or take any steps
to to investigate this? Is there any reason you didn't
(09:50):
want to prosecute him for it? Well, heage you, right.
Sarah is saying there that she didn't press charges because
police told her quote, if he had paid you then
it wouldn't have been rape. Right. That's the exact same
logic that Vaughan had used to justify his rape in Texas,
(10:10):
And according to Sarah, that same logic was now coming
from the Gary Police Department. You can hear Detective forward
Si after he heard that, well, and like you said,
I'm sorry, is that happened. I'm going to continue to
work on this, and i am going to check the
(10:30):
rape kit. It's actually a Gary Police department. I'm going
to get that. I'm gonna send it down to the
state Lab. So if there is any you know, DNA
evidence will be trying to put that together. Instead of
analyzing Sarah's sexual assault kit, police let it sit on
a shelf for over a year. Sarah's kit was part
(10:52):
of a backlog that's frustratingly common across the US. They
are thought to be hundreds of thousands of untested kits.
The exact numbers are hard to come by. This victim,
how a sexual assualt kit collected, and the idea that
nothing would be done from that, that that would just
be put on a shelf, I think is painful to
think about. Dr Lovell says that many people are shocked
(11:17):
when they find out how many sexual assault kits never
get tested. How can you have so many rape kits
that were not tested, Like, how could you not test those?
And that's a, you know, a very understandable, legitimate question.
But the problem is even worse than many realize. The
kit is a symptom of a much larger problem. Doctor
(11:38):
Level was part of a project called the Sexual Assault
Kit Initiative. The initiative was to analyze all the backlogged
rape kits in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Cleveland is located,
and Level and her team then look through all the
police records from when these kits were submitted. What we
really found through our research is that many things as
part of those investigations were not completed. It that includes
(12:01):
taking victims statements, offender statements, running someone's criminal history, you know,
all the sort of traditional investigative practices. Kids weren't tested
because lots of things weren't done on these cases. These
cases were close pretty quickly. I think one of the
most important things that people should understand is that the
investigations are often not what you see in TV. People
(12:24):
have a sense that law enforcement has the resources to
thoroughly follow up on all of these leads and test
whatever they want. And you know, do all these sorts
of things. You sexual assaults in particular, the departments are
under resource, they're not followed up on. And this is
what happens when you don't follow up on them, sexual
(12:45):
offenders continue to offend. I was curious what had led
Cleveland to analyze all the rape kids in its backlog.
Why did they decide to go test their untested kids,
Like many things came out of something really bad. On
Halloween in two thousand and nine, they found the bodies
(13:05):
of eleven decomposing women in the house of this man
named Anthony soul so Well was under investigation by Cleveland
police for rape. In two thousand and nine, so Well
killed eleven women and buried them in and around his
Imperial Avenue home. Neighbors remembered that stench of rotting flesh
so wrongly attributed to raise sausage store next door. When
(13:28):
they were sort of following up on these women's bodies,
they identified that several reports had been made from women
who were able to escape from Anthony Sowell and said
that he had raped them and that they had taken
him back to this house, and one of these women,
maybe more, had a sexual salt kit collected that wasn't
tested at the time. Ohio saw a backlog of thousands
(13:50):
of untested rape kits. The plain Dealer reported that one
from two thousand nine was later linked to so well,
but by then he had killed at least four or more.
You never know sort of the counterfactual, So what had
happened had they done that? However, if those cases had
been followed up on, you know, there's a strong likelihood
that he might not have been able to murder the
(14:12):
subsequent victims. You know, the story I'm working on right
now actually has a lot of eerie similarities. People reporting
it to police, reporting the house, and you know it
wasn't followed up on and led to more sexual assaults
and murders. I don't know, it's really hard looking from
the outside kind of understanding how this stuff can happen,
(14:33):
or how someone can kind of throw so many obvious
red flags that don't seem to get caught. You know,
the departments are under resource, they're under reported, they're not
followed up on, and when you don't solve those crimes,
they continue to go on. And commit sexual assaults as
well as other crimes. The Sexual Assault CAN initiative is
sort of pulling off a band aid and showing actually,
(14:55):
there's much worse under here than what we thought, and
really trying to transform the way we think about sexual
assault and how to investigate it. I asked Dr Lovell
how we ended up with this rape kit backlog in
the first place. You have to start with the fact
that DNA testing wasn't really available until the late nineties,
(15:17):
but earlier on police did collect biological samples, not for
DNA testing but for blood typing. When DNA testing did
become available, it was expensive, it was very cost prohibitive,
so police departments only really tested kits where there was
a very strong likelihood that it was going to go
to prosecution and the testing could take sometimes years to
(15:40):
get the DNA evidence back. So by and large, most
jurisdictions may have started to test the kids going forward
when it became cheaper, or primarily those where the victim
wanted to prosecute and the offender was a stranger. That's
the only kids that they were really testing. They never
really thought about going back to the old ones. To
(16:01):
be fair, they didn't know what was going to be
in there. They didn't know how many would have hits.
Would it be worth it to test these kids? And
there was a lot of conversation about should we only
test the stranger ones or the non stranger ones, because
the idea is that DNA will help you identify someone,
But if you already know who raped you, what's the
point of testing. What they didn't foresee from that is
(16:24):
that kids can hit to each other. So here's one
person who might have sexually assaulted for acquaintances, and although
each person had their own police report, the kids have
now linked them together. We also have a strong research
to show that because offenders often sexually assault strangers and
(16:46):
non strangers, one person's known offender is somebody else's unknown offender.
So when the kids hit to each other, you now
have a name suspect. They didn't really have a larger
sense either about how many of these kids would be
hitting to each other. Here's these seasoned law enforcement officers
and I would be sitting in meetings and they would be,
(17:06):
you know, just shocked at the number of rapes that
this person had been connected to and how different the
rapes were in terms of victim preference and age and
gender and raise and all these sorts of things. They're like,
how did we never would have put these together had
it not been for DNA because they're so different? Was
this a shock to researchers as well? I think the
(17:29):
number was a little shocking when you started to pull
the ball together. I mean, in Kyoga County, a fourth
of these cases are linked to known serial sex offenders,
so they know that they're connected to some other sex
crime or they're connected to another rape kit. Almost a
quarter of the kids that were analyzed contained a DNA
sample that matched the sample in another kit or a
(17:51):
sample from a noon sex offender. Can we say then
that of these offenses are serial offenses or does that
work for some reason? I think you can extrapolate to that.
There's also researchers from the Detroit Sacchi Project about a
third of their's were connected to more than one sexual assault,
(18:11):
so we estimated at being at and then in terms
of absolute numbers, how many are we talking about with?
So as of December, there was about eight hundred and
fifty known serial sex offenders. And again that that's the
ones you know. Don't forget though, that sexual assault is
the most underreported violent crime and still eight hundred and
(18:35):
fifty known people who are connected to some other rape. Yeah.
It's it's kind of like if you compared it to
like murder something like that, right, if you thought about
eight hundred serial killers active in this county, that that
would sound completely insane. Uh, And it does sound completely
insane with serial rape to right, right, you know, to
(18:57):
what extent has this actually led to, you know, opening
back up investigations or convictions? So u Kyoge County started
completely new investigations for seven thousand rape kits from nineteen
three through two thousand and eleven UM. They just finished
(19:17):
testing and investigating all of those. Over eight hundred defendants
have been indicted. It shows that you can get convictions
from old sexual assault cases when there are sufficient resources
for victims in terms of victim advocacy and victim support,
and there's sufficient um political will to make sure that
these cases are investigated and prosecuted. Cuyahoga Counties investigation into
(19:41):
their rape kit backlog has been an enormous success, in
part because they had buy in at the county, state,
and national level after they'd begun addressing the problem at
the county level. They got federal funding from the Sexual
Assault Kit Initiative, a national initiative to end the rape
kit backlog, which launched in tw Cayuga County has the
(20:01):
most number of convictions relative to the number of kids,
and there's several reasons for that. Most notably is that
Calga County is one of the first ones to do this,
so it's an early adopter jurisdiction is before the federal
money was available to do this, so they kind of
got a head start. And the other head start that
they got was that the state Crime Lab paid for
(20:23):
the testing of all the kids, so they didn't have
to use resources to pay for the testing, but instead
put those resources towards investigation and prosecution. So they really
got a large number of staff and personnel. So they've
seen a very large number. Over eight hundred defendants have
now been indicted. Do you know how many of those
(20:43):
eight hundred were kind of already in prison for something else?
For sure, some of them were in prison for long
periods of time, But for all indicted defendants, we looked
at their criminal histories and the median amount of time
that they had been in cars rated that could be
jail or prison was around six months. Some of them,
(21:05):
you know, were convicted of murder and had life sentences,
but overall they weren't incarcerated for long periods of time. Yeah.
I was speaking to another researcher about how you assess
the threat of recidivism given that so many of these
crimes go unreported, so that kind of makes it hard
(21:25):
to figure out how much people are reoffending. Do you
have a sense of how the data from rape kits
is changing, or or should change the way we think
about reoffending. Yeah. I think that's a great question, and
in fact, sachy data the connection is made when the
victim reports and there's DNA collected, not at the time
(21:46):
of conviction, so you have a much more representative sample
of sexual assaults. I think the Sexual Thought Kit initiative
is telling us that serial offending is much more common
than previously assumed, because now we're getting a less biased
view of what that actually looks like, and that in fact,
law enforcement should start with the assumption that that they've
(22:07):
done this before. I guess I was just shocked at
kind of what people can do and how light that
punishment seemed to me as someone not familiar with this stuff. Yeah,
I think one of the sort of larger existential problems
with this is that individuals have to come back to
the community, right most of them. The problem is, oftentimes
(22:29):
the offenders will come out of prison worse than what
they went in, and there's no good treatment for sexual
offenders adult ones. There is some stuff around juveniles, but
for adult male sex offenders, the research is pretty consistent
that treatment is not very effective. What are we supposed
to do when these individuals are out? I don't have
the answer to that, but I think it's an important
(22:49):
conversation to have. I know that. For example, in Washington State,
there's this place called sex Offender Island. The first time
I heard someone talked about, I was like, sex Offender Island.
That sounds like a place I certainly don't want to go,
you know, like that sounds terrible, and it's a it's
a place where they have civilly committed individuals who are
the worst of the worst sexual offenders, and so this
(23:12):
is kind of like they've served their sentence. You can't
legally keep them in prison, but you can involuntarily commit
them kind of like a psychiatric condition. But it's essentially
an extra judicial prison or something. Yes, And sometimes some
offenders say, you know, put me in this because I
will continue to offend. And sometimes they're just civilly committed
(23:32):
by saying, you know, we've deemed you as being too dangerous.
I'm not suggesting that's the right answer, but you know,
I think these are conversations that should also be had
as well, like what do we do with individuals who
may have a hard time being reformed and they are
still a danger to society. I don't want myself for
(23:52):
my children to live next to that person. But at
the same time, that person has served their debt to society,
at least according to the core. Yeah, it seems to
me that like our kind of intuitions about these crimes
don't match up with the laws and the sentences. But
then it seems to me from your research that also
the reality of the crimes doesn't match up with our
(24:15):
intuition either, you know. So I don't know, just everything
is kind of messed up right now, I know, I know, Yeah,
I have no read you know, some of the other
things I could provide recommendations, I don't know what to do.
I think it's those are sort of philosophical questions, But
I think there is a larger story about, now what
how do we as a society handle violent sexual predators.
(24:54):
Dr Lovell's research shows that Sarah's story with a rape
kit that went unanalyzed, in a rap ape that went uninvestigated,
that story is far from unique to Gary. It's part
of a bigger problem occurring all across the country. But
when Marvin Clinton says that he heard about Sarah's story
and how the police hadn't followed up on the information
(25:14):
she'd given them were analyzed her rape kit, it didn't
shock him. I was surprised at all. They may have
feel like she was the words this person, so she
just stopped and the bell with them. It seems like, again,
if they had just taken her seriously, she could have
(25:36):
taken them to the house. They would have seen that
this guy was a registered sex offender who had almost
killed a woman in Texas, and they could have stopped
all of this from happening. Exactly. Yeah, that's so fu exactly,
But they would have took up seriously instead of making
her feel that her life was worth nothing, like we're
(25:59):
not noting what you're doing. We might travel had judging
on you, but we just want to know what's happened
and let her know that her life missed something. Clinton
said that Sarah's story reminded him of his own experience.
It kind of go inside with each other. After Von's arrest,
(26:23):
Marvin says he learned police had lost the phone records
he provided them. They looked through the foul they didn't
have it, So we don't know what the other detective
deal with it, if you just threw it away or
whatever the case may be. But you told them this
whole story about how you had gotten the records and
called and spoken to this woman, and that a man
(26:44):
had called exactly that I had told him all the
novels did I called. I mean, it feels like at
least once you had told them that he had her
cell phone, you know that they should have been able
to track down where he was or something exactly. It
seems from both Marvin and Sariah's stories the police ignored
(27:07):
crucial leads early in and these errors may have left
Vaughn free to commit more murders. Personally, I think if
police had investigated either of these leads thoroughly, they could
have caught and arrested Vaughn and Africa Hardy and many
of the later victims would be alive today. But could
(27:30):
Vaughan have been stopped even earlier? He inclaimed he had
been doing this for twenty some years. If that's a
true analysis, death should have been more than seven victims.
Do you wonder if there are other victims out there?
We have a lot of missing females out here, some
(27:53):
of them uh center cold cases, but I mean they've
been missing for years. To think back when he said
he'd been doing it for twenty years, we got some
people that have been missing almost that long now, and
then just a coincidence that he said he'd been doing
it all this time and we got all these people
(28:13):
still missing. Possible or could actually be something to it
that we don't know. We can only go about what
he said now. They dismissed some of the ideas that
he had that they found not to be true, but
we don't know what else and what ain't see. There
were some stuff that he said that they looked into
(28:36):
and they weren't sure if it was true. Yeah, yeah,
they had their doubts about it. I mean even detective
Board say he had been looking at couple of cases
that he was trying to link to their van, but
he just had been able to link him. I know
of three cases man him was talking about, but he
(28:58):
found victims that were angle. His probably as was to
try to link the cases to damn man right now,
he just ain't been able to do that. But if
they do link some of all cases to him, I
wouldn't be surprised. Could Vaughan have been stopped even earlier
before any of these crimes? Was Von responsible for the
(29:23):
murders the algorithm had detected? And could police have caught
Vaughan if they had heated hard Groves warnings? How many
change gears here and switch the focus away from von
crimes and back towards hard Groves algorithm. I reached back
(29:44):
out to Hargrove to let him know what I found
out about Von and Von's confessions. Were you able to
get any audio out of the Gary police farm? You did?
Next time? On algorithm? You know I have tried over cases, um,
(30:04):
there are some cases that stick in your mind, and
this was a case that stuck in my mind because
number one, we had a we had a good defense
to the forensic evidence. If you can call it friends
of evidence, and his defense was that he had been
dealing drugs and that he owed the person he was
dealing with a lot of money. That's one of the
critical needs for law enforcement. There needs to be a national,
(30:30):
updated data set for homicide. All right is seven three pm.
I just checked my mail. I was looking for wedding
invitation and instead I found a piece of mail from
Darren Fond. I had written to him a couple of
months ago seeing if he had any interest in talking.
(30:53):
Open this up. Never gotten a piece of mail from
a serial killer before. This episode was written and produced
by me ben Key. Brick Algorithm is executive produced by
Alex Williams, Donald Albright and Matt Frederick. Production assistants in
(31:13):
mixing by Eric Quintana. The music is by Makeup and
Vanity Set and Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks to Christina Dana,
Miranda Hawkins, Jamie Albright, Rema l k Ali, Trevor Young,
and Josh Thane for their help and notes. Next week
we're gonna have a bonus episode where we address some
(31:34):
listener questions. If you have any questions, if you have
any tips about the investigation, really anything at all, please
call and leave a voicemail at a D eight five
zero one three zero nine. That's a D eight five
zero one three zero nine, or reach out to me
on Twitter. I'm at Ben Underscore keybrick kue b R
(31:54):
I c H. Would really love to hear from any
of you, even if it's just general thoughts about the show.
We're doing that to both address your questions and also
we've gotten some interesting tips already that we want to
look into, so we just need a little extra time
to research and then work on the next episode. Thanks.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily
represent those of iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees.
This series contains discussions of violence and sexual violence. Listener
discretion is advised. Previously an algorithm. I feel I should
(00:22):
have got locked over them. Yeah, I'll beat her, I
rape you, rape you. I standard y'all call it right,
but we don't call it ran in streets like you
pay here? So what is she complaining about? After Vaughan's
release from prison in August, he moved back to Gary
first time. He really didn't go over okay and true
(00:45):
World War for for a couple of days, and in January,
Vaughan appears to have committed the first of his confirmed murders,
killing twenty eight year old Tierra Baby and Way call
it never happened. Her fiance, Marvin Clinton, investigated her disappearance
(01:08):
and discovered a man, likely Vaughan, had stolen her cell
phone and was using it to call prostitutes, and Marvin
says he took that information to the police. He didn't
have me thank but from that point on it what
he did would director. I have no idea. And around
that same time, another woman had a run in with Vond.
(01:29):
She was one of the very first person that ever
weighing into HOW, but she happened to get away from HOW.
From I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Algorithm
and I'm ben Key Brick at eleven am. On February,
just over a month after Tierra Batty disappeared, Darren Von
(01:51):
contacted a woman who placed an ad as an escort
on backpage dot com. That's the same site that Von
would later use to contact Africa Hardy. The woman who
will call Sarah, came forward with her story after Vaughn
was arrested and she saw his picture on the news.
Detective Ford looked into it. He found the report that
(02:11):
Sarah had initially filed, and then went out to interview her.
How did it make you feel when you saw him
on the news? Ford recorded this interview. With the way
it's recorded, you can hear him well and how do
you spell your last name? But many of Sarah's responses
aren't audible. Luckily I got access to Detective Ford's report
(02:32):
about this interview, so try to fill in some of
the gaps. When the audio isn't clear. I'd prefer to
hear things firsthand from Sarah, and I reached out to
her for comment, but I couldn't get in touch. You
can tell from the get go that she doesn't trust police,
which makes sense given her story. And I know it's
hard for you to believe, but we're here to try
(02:53):
to help himself. Okay, how did you wind up meeting
this guy? You had a back page ad, so you
were in Chicago, you drove the Gary. Okay, so you
met him at one house and he asked you to
drive to another one. Now, how did you find it?
Did he give you directions to it? Or did you
(03:13):
put it like in your phone for GPS? So he
just told you kind of how to get there. Now,
in the report, do you say that it's fourteen East Court?
East fifty Court was the street that von lived on
with his brother, and the address Sarah had given police
was just across the street from where Vaughan was staying.
(03:35):
What happened when you get to the house. When you
when you meet him the first time, Sarah says that
as she was getting out of the car, Vun ambushed her.
He put a knife to her neck, and he told her,
you're going to listen to me. Get in the fucking house.
What did he look like the guys? Sarah says that
(03:57):
because of Von's facial ticks, the way he ground his teeth,
she thought that he used to be addicted to crack,
used to be okay, So he put a knife to
your next and he said, you're gonna listen to me.
Sarah says Von took her to a back room in
the house. He made her hand over her cell phone
and car keys and told her that if she did
(04:18):
what he said, then he'd let her go. But she
didn't believe him because she saw duct tape and gloves
in the corner of the room, and he started asking
her questions. He was asking about your car, who knows
you're there? And he took your cell phone right so
you're saying that these are all science and NFL like
you were probably wind up dead. Okay. I used to
(04:40):
work in narcotics a lot, and I did undercover words.
I have the same sign as you do. When things
started going weird, I started going, okay, it's time to
get out of here. Sad's about and half behind. Sarah
says that Von then repeatedly raped her. He seemed to
be toying with her. He would stop and tell her
he was going to let her go, only to then
(05:01):
begin again. At one point, she tried to escape, but
he caught her and started beating her and tighter wrists
behind her back with a small rope any other weapons
against jubisides tie you off. After hours of holding Sarah
at knife point, choking her and raping her, Sarah says
that Von gagged her through a coat over her head
(05:24):
and drug her outside to her own car, some of
the staff and outside with him punching you and choking you.
This part of the story reminded me of something. It
reminded me of an incident that Vaughan's brother, Reginald, had
described police. Reginald said Vaughan had once called him at
work out of the blue. It was like like the
(05:44):
only time he's ever calling me over. And when he said,
you say, you know he brought a chap back to
the house and they got your food anything doing it,
I think it really told me is because of the
neighbor across the street. So now to be clear, Vaughan
(06:04):
just told his brother that he'd gotten into a fight
with a woman. He didn't tell his brother about any crimes.
And I don't know for certain that the incident Reginald
was describing has anything to do with Sarah, but I
wonder Regardless, Vaughan forced her into the car and started driving,
and she felt certain that he was taking her somewhere
(06:24):
to kill her. They got the t Brawway and he
got stuck at a red light and it's a pool hall.
We got on twenty Broadway and there was two old guys,
two old gentlemen that was standing outside. Sarah managed to
get the gag out of her mouth and she screamed
(06:45):
for help. They say what they heard was somebody in distress,
and they looked and they see a woman tied up
in the back feet of the car. The men snapped
into action. They were armed, so they pulled out their
guns and stopped Vaughan at the intersection. They helped to
call at the light, and they were trying to make
(07:05):
him get out the car so they can get the
young lady out, and one of the guys shot off
his pistol. One of the men fired a warning shot
and Vaughan ended up bailing out of the car and
running away. So basically, these people intervening for you shoot
(07:35):
a shot in the air. He takes off, run in
and the police show up. Sarah told police what had happened.
She gave them the address where she'd met Vaughan and
the fact that he'd said that his name was Darren.
And after she finished up with the police, she met
up with her boyfriend and it was actually while she
was talking to her boyfriend that she decided to go
to the hospital and get a rape kit because victim
(07:58):
went through several hours in an exam. They had someone
swabbing intimate parts of their body and taking pictures and
you know it's not done for fun. My name is
Dr Rachel Lovell. My area of expertise is around gender
based violence and I am a research assistant professor at
Case Western Reserve University. So a centual assault kit is
(08:23):
a set of items collected by healthcare professionals, primarily in
a hospital setting. The items can be swabs, combs, hair, photographs,
any number of things. Level says that about six of
sexual assault kits will have enough DNA to be analyzed
and submitted to a database. It has to meet a
(08:47):
certain number of criteria to be uploaded into CODIS that's
the us IS Federal DNA database. When a new sample
is uploaded to CODIS, it's compared against all the other
samples sun Vaughan's previous crimes. His DNA should have been
in the federal database. So if Gary police had analyzed
(09:07):
Sarah's rape kit and it had enough DNA, they should
have been able to link the kit to Vaughan. They
would have discovered he was a registered sex offender living
just across the street from the address that she had provided,
And they also would have found out that Vaughan had
been convicted for an almost identical crime to the one
Sarah described. Now, to be clear, we can't know for
(09:29):
certain what would have happened if police had tested Sarah's
sexual assault kit, but it seems quite plausible that they
would have been able to arrest Vaughn before he committed
any more murders. But that's not what happened. Did the
police ever follow up with you or take any steps
to to investigate this? Is there any reason you didn't
(09:50):
want to prosecute him for it? Well, heage you, right.
Sarah is saying there that she didn't press charges because
police told her quote, if he had paid you then
it wouldn't have been rape. Right. That's the exact same
logic that Vaughan had used to justify his rape in Texas,
(10:10):
And according to Sarah, that same logic was now coming
from the Gary Police Department. You can hear Detective forward
Si after he heard that, well, and like you said,
I'm sorry, is that happened. I'm going to continue to
work on this, and i am going to check the
(10:30):
rape kit. It's actually a Gary Police department. I'm going
to get that. I'm gonna send it down to the
state Lab. So if there is any you know, DNA
evidence will be trying to put that together. Instead of
analyzing Sarah's sexual assault kit, police let it sit on
a shelf for over a year. Sarah's kit was part
(10:52):
of a backlog that's frustratingly common across the US. They
are thought to be hundreds of thousands of untested kits.
The exact numbers are hard to come by. This victim,
how a sexual assualt kit collected, and the idea that
nothing would be done from that, that that would just
be put on a shelf, I think is painful to
think about. Dr Lovell says that many people are shocked
(11:17):
when they find out how many sexual assault kits never
get tested. How can you have so many rape kits
that were not tested, Like, how could you not test those?
And that's a, you know, a very understandable, legitimate question.
But the problem is even worse than many realize. The
kit is a symptom of a much larger problem. Doctor
(11:38):
Level was part of a project called the Sexual Assault
Kit Initiative. The initiative was to analyze all the backlogged
rape kits in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Cleveland is located,
and Level and her team then look through all the
police records from when these kits were submitted. What we
really found through our research is that many things as
part of those investigations were not completed. It that includes
(12:01):
taking victims statements, offender statements, running someone's criminal history, you know,
all the sort of traditional investigative practices. Kids weren't tested
because lots of things weren't done on these cases. These
cases were close pretty quickly. I think one of the
most important things that people should understand is that the
investigations are often not what you see in TV. People
(12:24):
have a sense that law enforcement has the resources to
thoroughly follow up on all of these leads and test
whatever they want. And you know, do all these sorts
of things. You sexual assaults in particular, the departments are
under resource, they're not followed up on. And this is
what happens when you don't follow up on them, sexual
(12:45):
offenders continue to offend. I was curious what had led
Cleveland to analyze all the rape kids in its backlog.
Why did they decide to go test their untested kids,
Like many things came out of something really bad. On
Halloween in two thousand and nine, they found the bodies
(13:05):
of eleven decomposing women in the house of this man
named Anthony soul so Well was under investigation by Cleveland
police for rape. In two thousand and nine, so Well
killed eleven women and buried them in and around his
Imperial Avenue home. Neighbors remembered that stench of rotting flesh
so wrongly attributed to raise sausage store next door. When
(13:28):
they were sort of following up on these women's bodies,
they identified that several reports had been made from women
who were able to escape from Anthony Sowell and said
that he had raped them and that they had taken
him back to this house, and one of these women,
maybe more, had a sexual salt kit collected that wasn't
tested at the time. Ohio saw a backlog of thousands
(13:50):
of untested rape kits. The plain Dealer reported that one
from two thousand nine was later linked to so well,
but by then he had killed at least four or more.
You never know sort of the counterfactual, So what had
happened had they done that? However, if those cases had
been followed up on, you know, there's a strong likelihood
that he might not have been able to murder the
(14:12):
subsequent victims. You know, the story I'm working on right
now actually has a lot of eerie similarities. People reporting
it to police, reporting the house, and you know it
wasn't followed up on and led to more sexual assaults
and murders. I don't know, it's really hard looking from
the outside kind of understanding how this stuff can happen,
(14:33):
or how someone can kind of throw so many obvious
red flags that don't seem to get caught. You know,
the departments are under resource, they're under reported, they're not
followed up on, and when you don't solve those crimes,
they continue to go on. And commit sexual assaults as
well as other crimes. The Sexual Assault CAN initiative is
sort of pulling off a band aid and showing actually,
(14:55):
there's much worse under here than what we thought, and
really trying to transform the way we think about sexual
assault and how to investigate it. I asked Dr Lovell
how we ended up with this rape kit backlog in
the first place. You have to start with the fact
that DNA testing wasn't really available until the late nineties,
(15:17):
but earlier on police did collect biological samples, not for
DNA testing but for blood typing. When DNA testing did
become available, it was expensive, it was very cost prohibitive,
so police departments only really tested kits where there was
a very strong likelihood that it was going to go
to prosecution and the testing could take sometimes years to
(15:40):
get the DNA evidence back. So by and large, most
jurisdictions may have started to test the kids going forward
when it became cheaper, or primarily those where the victim
wanted to prosecute and the offender was a stranger. That's
the only kids that they were really testing. They never
really thought about going back to the old ones. To
(16:01):
be fair, they didn't know what was going to be
in there. They didn't know how many would have hits.
Would it be worth it to test these kids? And
there was a lot of conversation about should we only
test the stranger ones or the non stranger ones, because
the idea is that DNA will help you identify someone,
But if you already know who raped you, what's the
point of testing. What they didn't foresee from that is
(16:24):
that kids can hit to each other. So here's one
person who might have sexually assaulted for acquaintances, and although
each person had their own police report, the kids have
now linked them together. We also have a strong research
to show that because offenders often sexually assault strangers and
(16:46):
non strangers, one person's known offender is somebody else's unknown offender.
So when the kids hit to each other, you now
have a name suspect. They didn't really have a larger
sense either about how many of these kids would be
hitting to each other. Here's these seasoned law enforcement officers
and I would be sitting in meetings and they would be,
(17:06):
you know, just shocked at the number of rapes that
this person had been connected to and how different the
rapes were in terms of victim preference and age and
gender and raise and all these sorts of things. They're like,
how did we never would have put these together had
it not been for DNA because they're so different? Was
this a shock to researchers as well? I think the
(17:29):
number was a little shocking when you started to pull
the ball together. I mean, in Kyoga County, a fourth
of these cases are linked to known serial sex offenders,
so they know that they're connected to some other sex
crime or they're connected to another rape kit. Almost a
quarter of the kids that were analyzed contained a DNA
sample that matched the sample in another kit or a
(17:51):
sample from a noon sex offender. Can we say then
that of these offenses are serial offenses or does that
work for some reason? I think you can extrapolate to that.
There's also researchers from the Detroit Sacchi Project about a
third of their's were connected to more than one sexual assault,
(18:11):
so we estimated at being at and then in terms
of absolute numbers, how many are we talking about with?
So as of December, there was about eight hundred and
fifty known serial sex offenders. And again that that's the
ones you know. Don't forget though, that sexual assault is
the most underreported violent crime and still eight hundred and
(18:35):
fifty known people who are connected to some other rape. Yeah.
It's it's kind of like if you compared it to
like murder something like that, right, if you thought about
eight hundred serial killers active in this county, that that
would sound completely insane. Uh, And it does sound completely
insane with serial rape to right, right, you know, to
(18:57):
what extent has this actually led to, you know, opening
back up investigations or convictions? So u Kyoge County started
completely new investigations for seven thousand rape kits from nineteen
three through two thousand and eleven UM. They just finished
(19:17):
testing and investigating all of those. Over eight hundred defendants
have been indicted. It shows that you can get convictions
from old sexual assault cases when there are sufficient resources
for victims in terms of victim advocacy and victim support,
and there's sufficient um political will to make sure that
these cases are investigated and prosecuted. Cuyahoga Counties investigation into
(19:41):
their rape kit backlog has been an enormous success, in
part because they had buy in at the county, state,
and national level after they'd begun addressing the problem at
the county level. They got federal funding from the Sexual
Assault Kit Initiative, a national initiative to end the rape
kit backlog, which launched in tw Cayuga County has the
(20:01):
most number of convictions relative to the number of kids,
and there's several reasons for that. Most notably is that
Calga County is one of the first ones to do this,
so it's an early adopter jurisdiction is before the federal
money was available to do this, so they kind of
got a head start. And the other head start that
they got was that the state Crime Lab paid for
(20:23):
the testing of all the kids, so they didn't have
to use resources to pay for the testing, but instead
put those resources towards investigation and prosecution. So they really
got a large number of staff and personnel. So they've
seen a very large number. Over eight hundred defendants have
now been indicted. Do you know how many of those
(20:43):
eight hundred were kind of already in prison for something else?
For sure, some of them were in prison for long
periods of time, But for all indicted defendants, we looked
at their criminal histories and the median amount of time
that they had been in cars rated that could be
jail or prison was around six months. Some of them,
(21:05):
you know, were convicted of murder and had life sentences,
but overall they weren't incarcerated for long periods of time. Yeah.
I was speaking to another researcher about how you assess
the threat of recidivism given that so many of these
crimes go unreported, so that kind of makes it hard
(21:25):
to figure out how much people are reoffending. Do you
have a sense of how the data from rape kits
is changing, or or should change the way we think
about reoffending. Yeah. I think that's a great question, and
in fact, sachy data the connection is made when the
victim reports and there's DNA collected, not at the time
(21:46):
of conviction, so you have a much more representative sample
of sexual assaults. I think the Sexual Thought Kit initiative
is telling us that serial offending is much more common
than previously assumed, because now we're getting a less biased
view of what that actually looks like, and that in fact,
law enforcement should start with the assumption that that they've
(22:07):
done this before. I guess I was just shocked at
kind of what people can do and how light that
punishment seemed to me as someone not familiar with this stuff. Yeah,
I think one of the sort of larger existential problems
with this is that individuals have to come back to
the community, right most of them. The problem is, oftentimes
(22:29):
the offenders will come out of prison worse than what
they went in, and there's no good treatment for sexual
offenders adult ones. There is some stuff around juveniles, but
for adult male sex offenders, the research is pretty consistent
that treatment is not very effective. What are we supposed
to do when these individuals are out? I don't have
the answer to that, but I think it's an important
(22:49):
conversation to have. I know that. For example, in Washington State,
there's this place called sex Offender Island. The first time
I heard someone talked about, I was like, sex Offender Island.
That sounds like a place I certainly don't want to go,
you know, like that sounds terrible, and it's a it's
a place where they have civilly committed individuals who are
the worst of the worst sexual offenders, and so this
(23:12):
is kind of like they've served their sentence. You can't
legally keep them in prison, but you can involuntarily commit
them kind of like a psychiatric condition. But it's essentially
an extra judicial prison or something. Yes, And sometimes some
offenders say, you know, put me in this because I
will continue to offend. And sometimes they're just civilly committed
(23:32):
by saying, you know, we've deemed you as being too dangerous.
I'm not suggesting that's the right answer, but you know,
I think these are conversations that should also be had
as well, like what do we do with individuals who
may have a hard time being reformed and they are
still a danger to society. I don't want myself for
(23:52):
my children to live next to that person. But at
the same time, that person has served their debt to society,
at least according to the core. Yeah, it seems to
me that like our kind of intuitions about these crimes
don't match up with the laws and the sentences. But
then it seems to me from your research that also
the reality of the crimes doesn't match up with our
(24:15):
intuition either, you know. So I don't know, just everything
is kind of messed up right now, I know, I know, Yeah,
I have no read you know, some of the other
things I could provide recommendations, I don't know what to do.
I think it's those are sort of philosophical questions, But
I think there is a larger story about, now what
how do we as a society handle violent sexual predators.
(24:54):
Dr Lovell's research shows that Sarah's story with a rape
kit that went unanalyzed, in a rap ape that went uninvestigated,
that story is far from unique to Gary. It's part
of a bigger problem occurring all across the country. But
when Marvin Clinton says that he heard about Sarah's story
and how the police hadn't followed up on the information
(25:14):
she'd given them were analyzed her rape kit, it didn't
shock him. I was surprised at all. They may have
feel like she was the words this person, so she
just stopped and the bell with them. It seems like, again,
if they had just taken her seriously, she could have
(25:36):
taken them to the house. They would have seen that
this guy was a registered sex offender who had almost
killed a woman in Texas, and they could have stopped
all of this from happening. Exactly. Yeah, that's so fu exactly,
But they would have took up seriously instead of making
her feel that her life was worth nothing, like we're
(25:59):
not noting what you're doing. We might travel had judging
on you, but we just want to know what's happened
and let her know that her life missed something. Clinton
said that Sarah's story reminded him of his own experience.
It kind of go inside with each other. After Von's arrest,
(26:23):
Marvin says he learned police had lost the phone records
he provided them. They looked through the foul they didn't
have it, So we don't know what the other detective
deal with it, if you just threw it away or
whatever the case may be. But you told them this
whole story about how you had gotten the records and
called and spoken to this woman, and that a man
(26:44):
had called exactly that I had told him all the
novels did I called. I mean, it feels like at
least once you had told them that he had her
cell phone, you know that they should have been able
to track down where he was or something exactly. It
seems from both Marvin and Sariah's stories the police ignored
(27:07):
crucial leads early in and these errors may have left
Vaughn free to commit more murders. Personally, I think if
police had investigated either of these leads thoroughly, they could
have caught and arrested Vaughn and Africa Hardy and many
of the later victims would be alive today. But could
(27:30):
Vaughan have been stopped even earlier? He inclaimed he had
been doing this for twenty some years. If that's a
true analysis, death should have been more than seven victims.
Do you wonder if there are other victims out there?
We have a lot of missing females out here, some
(27:53):
of them uh center cold cases, but I mean they've
been missing for years. To think back when he said
he'd been doing it for twenty years, we got some
people that have been missing almost that long now, and
then just a coincidence that he said he'd been doing
it all this time and we got all these people
(28:13):
still missing. Possible or could actually be something to it
that we don't know. We can only go about what
he said now. They dismissed some of the ideas that
he had that they found not to be true, but
we don't know what else and what ain't see. There
were some stuff that he said that they looked into
(28:36):
and they weren't sure if it was true. Yeah, yeah,
they had their doubts about it. I mean even detective
Board say he had been looking at couple of cases
that he was trying to link to their van, but
he just had been able to link him. I know
of three cases man him was talking about, but he
(28:58):
found victims that were angle. His probably as was to
try to link the cases to damn man right now,
he just ain't been able to do that. But if
they do link some of all cases to him, I
wouldn't be surprised. Could Vaughan have been stopped even earlier
before any of these crimes? Was Von responsible for the
(29:23):
murders the algorithm had detected? And could police have caught
Vaughan if they had heated hard Groves warnings? How many
change gears here and switch the focus away from von
crimes and back towards hard Groves algorithm. I reached back
(29:44):
out to Hargrove to let him know what I found
out about Von and Von's confessions. Were you able to
get any audio out of the Gary police farm? You did?
Next time? On algorithm? You know I have tried over cases, um,
(30:04):
there are some cases that stick in your mind, and
this was a case that stuck in my mind because
number one, we had a we had a good defense
to the forensic evidence. If you can call it friends
of evidence, and his defense was that he had been
dealing drugs and that he owed the person he was
dealing with a lot of money. That's one of the
critical needs for law enforcement. There needs to be a national,
(30:30):
updated data set for homicide. All right is seven three pm.
I just checked my mail. I was looking for wedding
invitation and instead I found a piece of mail from
Darren Fond. I had written to him a couple of
months ago seeing if he had any interest in talking.
(30:53):
Open this up. Never gotten a piece of mail from
a serial killer before. This episode was written and produced
by me ben Key. Brick Algorithm is executive produced by
Alex Williams, Donald Albright and Matt Frederick. Production assistants in
(31:13):
mixing by Eric Quintana. The music is by Makeup and
Vanity Set and Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks to Christina Dana,
Miranda Hawkins, Jamie Albright, Rema l k Ali, Trevor Young,
and Josh Thane for their help and notes. Next week
we're gonna have a bonus episode where we address some
(31:34):
listener questions. If you have any questions, if you have
any tips about the investigation, really anything at all, please
call and leave a voicemail at a D eight five
zero one three zero nine. That's a D eight five
zero one three zero nine, or reach out to me
on Twitter. I'm at Ben Underscore keybrick kue b R
(31:54):
I c H. Would really love to hear from any
of you, even if it's just general thoughts about the show.
We're doing that to both address your questions and also
we've gotten some interesting tips already that we want to
look into, so we just need a little extra time
to research and then work on the next episode. Thanks.
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