May 5, 2025 • 51 mins
This week on Wicked Words, years ago author Pagan Kennedy wondered about the history of the rape kit, a crucial tool for investigators today. Who designed it? She found out that it was Martha Goddard, a pioneer who wanted to help police catch sexual predators using forensics. But sometime after she made history, Goddard vanished. Listen to Kennedy’s story at the center of her book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
So the police officer they're supposed to decide whether there
even is any evidence, which is obviously not an evidence
based evidence system if you're already deciding who's lying.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:55):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true cases.
This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad,
and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind
their stories. This week on Wicked Words, years ago, author
Pagan Kennedy wondered about the history of the rape kit,
(01:18):
a crucial tool for investigators today, who designed it. She
found out that it was Martha Goddard, a pioneer who
wanted to help police catch sexual predators using forensics. But
sometime after she made history. Goddard vanished. Listen to Kennedy's
story at the center of her book, The Secret History
of the Rape Kit. I read a New York Times
(01:42):
review of your book. I can't really remember the last
review I read from the Times that had zero criticism
about the I mean zero. What do you think resonates
with readers? I know you're doing a lot of interviews.
What do you think it is about this project that
has really kind of caught the attention of readers today.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
You know, I really thought a lot about how to
tell this story. You know, I really wanted to deliver
new information to people, and really important information. But I
think it's very important to wrap it in a story
in the right way, and so I thought a lot
about that. And the Marti Goddard story is several mysteries
(02:24):
at once, kind of stacked up. And one mystery is
what happened to her because she was key to creating
the national system of sexual assault evidence that we have now.
I mean, she really was the person behind the scenes
who made it happen at a lot of levels. Then
(02:45):
after she did that, she just disappeared to the point
where it was really when I came looking for her.
It was really really took me forever to find her.
So there's the mystery of what happened to her, There's
the mystery of how did she bring about this massive change,
you know, as an activist in Chicago with seemingly very
(03:06):
little political power. And then you know, really it's about
the mystery of evidence. What is evidence? Who gets to
say what evidence is? Who controls everything about evidence? Is
about the power structure in criminal justice and in our
world now there's all this argument about what is even
(03:27):
true Now. It was a struggle to rethink evidence from
the point of view of survivors, you know, in the
nineteen seventies that Marty Goddard was a part of. And
so I really it was also my own story in
terms of, you know, I was molested as a kid.
I mean also at the heart of this is if
(03:49):
something like that has happened to you or somebody, you know,
how do you deal with that longing for justice that
you're never going to get And what if you don't
have the evidence? What if you know something happened to
you and you don't have the evidence of it. So
I tried to weave in all of that and more
into the book and keep it all keep it moving
(04:11):
very quickly by kind of always having one pot or
the other boiling at all times in the story.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Well, that's a good nonfiction narrative right there. Where do
we start with this story with you? Is it you
and your journey trying to figure out who is the
name behind the rape kit and how it is not accurate?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah? I mean, for me, the story started in twenty eighteen.
The rape kit was very much of the news because
people might remember there was a huge scandal then about
untested backlogged kits and these were literally almost half a
million kits that were sitting in police warehouses or it
had been thrown away. And when I say police warehouses,
(04:58):
I mean moldy basements with sometimes pigeons flapping around, you know,
and mice eating them, you know, or literally lying there
in black trash bags as if they're about to be
thrown away or just thrown away. And so I think
when you know survivors who had gone through a very
(05:19):
very difficult and invasive forensic exams to create this evidence
found out about this, there was a huge amount of anger.
You know, these headlines were out there and I suddenly
had the thought, you know, it didn't actually surprise me
so much that the police would destroy or hide this evidence.
(05:41):
But what did surprise me was what I really thought
about it was that there was this national system for
collecting evidence of sexual assault, and that you know, of
course it doesn't always work as we would want it
to work, but it potentially had such power to potentially
take down, you know, somebody very powerful, a Catholic priest,
(06:04):
head of a school, serial predator who had been hadn't
been found for years. It also had the potential to
free innocent black men who are all too often put
in prison for rape and are kind of framed for it.
And so that also, that power to exonerate people is
(06:26):
really important part of the kit. So this thing kind
of I was kind of like, how did this ever
get created in a world that seems to be you know,
in the rest of our designed environment, it seems like
there's not a lot of care taken to prevent sexual
abuse or you know, if you go on to social
(06:46):
media or something, it's not like it's designed to keep
people from being harassed or stocked or you know, any
of that. So it just seemed kind of amazing to me.
So I really suddenly wanted to know all the origins,
how did this ever come into being? Because I also thought, well,
this tells you more than just the story of the kid.
(07:08):
It tells you how something like this that challenges power
could come into existence. So my first stop was Wikipedia
of twenty eighteen, and on that Wikipedia there was not
very much information, but it did say that a police
officer named Louis Futtulo in Chicago had been the sole
(07:31):
inventor of the kit in the nineteen seventies, and it
was called the Vitulo Kit after him because he was
the inventor, so he was no longer alive and there
was not really much information out there about him. So
I kept looking for other people who might be involved,
and I kept seeing this name, Martha Goddard or Marty Goddard.
(07:53):
Being a longtime reporter, my first question is, well, okay,
is she dead or alive? Because that tells me what
to do next. I couldn't find any obituaries, any memorials,
any indication that she was dead, you know, and almost
always when I go looking for somebody, if they're dead,
(08:14):
there's something it's very clear. So I had to assume
she was alive. At that time, and so I was
just hunting and hunting for her. So without knowing it,
I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of looking
for this mysterious Marty Goddard. And while I couldn't find her,
I kept finding all kinds of things that made her
(08:36):
story just appear before me in technicolor. Because I found
these pretty obscure oral histories. She had done these long interviews,
audio interviews where she told her story, and I began
to find people she had worked with and talk to
them who had also been involved in her projects, or
(08:58):
had been working on the rap task for us in
Chicago or whatever. The story just began to emerge before me.
And that story was you know this, she begans when
she tells her story in these oral histories. She begins
in nineteen seventy two, when she was she's a divorce
a and just divorced, just moved to Chicago. She's you know,
(09:23):
I have pictures of her. She's this blonde woman with
big goggly glasses and always looking incredibly sharp. She was
very determined to be taken seriously, so she was always
kind of in those suits that women had to wear
in the nineteen seventies with the silk shirts and the
sometimes like the little bow ties and the you know,
(09:45):
the jackets and the briefcase and all of that. So
she starts with the day or the days when she
began volunteering. She was working at a nonprofit, but she
was volunteering at a what they can called a runaway
hotline in Chicago, and that was for kids living on
(10:06):
the street to call in and get help. And you know,
this is the hippie the height of the hippie movement,
so they were calling them runaways, and the idea was
these kids that sort of run away to have fun
and be hippies and headed to San Francisco or whatever
that was. That was sort of the idea. But she
walked in and the hotline was housed in this old,
(10:29):
falling apart townhouse in downtown Chicago, and it was staffed
all by students and hippies, sort of hippie long hair people.
So she really didn't fit in. She was this very
professional looking person, but she sat down and began taking calls,
and what she discovered was these kids were running away
(10:49):
from home because many of them were fleeing from abusive
family members. In fact, she began to see what was
sort of before everybody's eyes in the early seventies, but
nobody was talking about or able to see, which was
that there was just a tremendous amount of child sexual abuse,
(11:11):
which was thought to be incredibly rare at that time.
There was really like not even a full understanding of
child abuse at that time. She was thinking, if this
is so prevalent, there must be so many predators out there,
and she began getting involved in trying to help these,
especially the girls who ended up on the streets, who
(11:31):
would often be blamed. They would be called like prostitutes,
and nobody would seem to think, well, how did that happen?
How does a thirteen year old girl end up on
the street, and who's to blame for that? You know,
the girl herself would be blamed and the police would
holler away to juvenile hall or something. So she got
very involved in that, and in nineteen seventy four things
(11:54):
really started to shift into high gear because there was
the anti race movement really was getting started in America,
and in Chicago, there was a huge amount of outrage
starting to happen on the part of women who had
been assaulted and the police hadn't done anything, and so
(12:14):
in fact, the attitude of that time, not just in
Chicago but everywhere was that you really couldn't prove that
a sexual assault had happened. It was just always going
to be a he said, she said, There's sort of
no way you could ever get evidence of it, you know,
going back into the police training manuals of the time,
they would say, like women almost always are frequently lie.
(12:39):
You can't trust them. So the police officer is supposed
to be the judge the jury. They're supposed to decide
whether there even is any evidence, which is obviously not
an evidence based evidence system if you're already deciding who's lying.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
I remember reading that you were saying in these manuals
that officers were told, you know, much of this is
because their boyfriend or their husband's a cheater and they're
trying to get revenge. So, yes, that seemed that was
startling to me when I read that. One thing I
wanted to bring up because I know we're framing the
seventies and where we are right now. I just did
a story on my other show with Poul Holes, which
(13:21):
is Buried Bones, about the Miranda rights, the origin of that, which,
of course was a series of sexual assaults. What I
did not know, and I told one of my classes
where I teach a true crime at the University of Texas,
I said, I did not know that even now, what
happened with the women who accused Miranda of you know,
(13:42):
assaulting them was they were all given polygraph tests and
you can still do that. And I just thought, how
is that even possible when this is a tool quote
unquote that can't even be admitted in court, let alone,
you know, it must be used for intimidation or something.
I was stunned by that, and I'm sure that there
are a lot of other things that would surprise me
(14:04):
about how police officers are able to get quote unquote
the truth from people who come to the station and
claim something.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, that's fascinating. I actually didn't know that Miranda was
a sexual assault case, and that actually makes a whole
lot of sense. Yeah, because you're being told that anything
you can say will be used against you, which of
course it's doubly true. It's sexual assault cases because the
survivor is almost always treated, it is often treated like
(14:31):
a suspect, and that's the fight, that's the struggle. We're
still having today. You know, just seems so hard to
shift that culture away from treating the accuser as a
suspect or a liar.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
So in the seventies we have a don't believe her movement,
it sounds like, and this is of course disgusting to Marty.
I'm sure she's learning more and more about this stuff.
And you were saying, was it seventy sixty you said,
was when this anti rape movement was really gaining steam here?
Speaker 2 (15:04):
It was around seventy four. This is when the first
women are coming out of law school. I mean, Barrital
rape is still legal at this time. There's very little
understanding of child abuse, so it's just the norm that
sexual assault happens. If it happens to you, it's probably
your fault. So yeah, so she because of Chicago had
(15:26):
this big scandal on its hands and the police department
there were scandal upon scandal in Chicago because the police
department there were actually a secret police group inside the
Chicago Police called the Red Squad. They also had this
in other cities, but it was very especially kind of
(15:47):
woven into the Chicago Police department, which was the secret police,
and they were sort of the Dirty Tricks Gang. They
would blackmail people they didn't like. They would definitely target
African America anybody well, they would target anybody who brought
up police abuse. They targeted African American men. They were
(16:08):
sort of entangled with Nazi movements. They were, you know,
so there was in this police inside the police, and
they had these secret files. And Marty Goddard actually was
pretty she was being followed during some of the time.
When she began working on the Rape Task Force in Chicago,
(16:28):
she did see a file against her. But then the
files from the Red Squad just like quote unquote accidentally
all went up in flame. So I went and tried
to find the secret file, because there is still in
Chicago an archive of what's left of the Red Squad
files from the seventies, well sixties, seventies, but couldn't find
(16:53):
anything there. So if she did have a secret police
file on her, it was destroyed. But you know, you
can get the whole the whole vibe. It was very much,
very difficult. The police were the Chicago police was really
were really known to be the worst in the country
in terms of being very much a political group that
(17:16):
would just hurt the enemies of the then the democratic machine. Anyway,
she Marty Goddard, because of her activism, was made a
head of the Citizens Committee on the Rape Task Force,
and that gave her the power to go in and
talk to kind of whoever she wanted to figure out
(17:36):
what was going on, why there was so little effort
to investigate sexual assault cases. And so she talked to
hospital administrators, nurses, er docs, you know, people in the
crime labs, police officers. She just talked to everybody. And
this was something really interesting about her, which she's just
(17:57):
a very curious person who wanted to make things work
and get everybody on board. And so she could kind
of go into these different spaces and make allies. She
was very good at kind of showing up in her
nice suit and shaking people's hands and making allies and
then just sort of pulling things together. And so along
(18:20):
the way she became convinced or decided, you know, well
what she analyzed when she diagnosed what was going wrong.
Of course, there's a big kind of cultural problem with
the police really treating survivors quite badly. You know, there was,
of course the culture, but then at the practical level,
just people in the nursing staff in the hospital. They
(18:43):
were just focused on when somebody came in after a
violin attack. They just wanted to help them and treat
their wounds, and so that they would try to collect evidence,
but nobody had taught them how, so they just kind
of do what they needed to do, throw everything in
a bag and send it over to the crime lab.
And then the crime lab opens this bag and here's
(19:04):
this clothing that has been torn up by the doctors
as they tried to get to the patient and they
you know, in slides that hadn't been correctly stored and
just a jumble of stuff, so they would throw it out.
So that was what was happening to a lot of
the evidence. So it became clear that you needed to
train everybody. You needed to get them to all talk
(19:27):
to each other, and you needed them to all be
on board and create one unified system. She I think
it was she who probably did have you know, talked
to a lot of people and tried to establish exactly
what happened. It's a little hard, but it seems like
she had the idea of using the kit a kit
to kind of be the object that moved from place
(19:48):
to place, and kept everybody on the same page. I
should say that she did not invent the kit, nor
did Louis Viattulo, who was credited with it. There were
actually rape kits in existence then they weren't used widely.
They were used sort of here and there, like as
experiments sort of or and many of them were quite bad.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
In what way bad like inadequate.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Well, I found one from nineteen I found I didn't
find the kit. I found the instructions from a nineteen
seventy three kit that said that if you thought that
the woman accusing rape was a quote ced prostitute, then
you didn't need to collect evidence. Wow, you should collect
evidence if she was a thirteen year old girl headed
(20:38):
to Sunday school. But maybe if she was a quote
bar maid, you didn't have to do it. So again,
it was like actually codifying that police bias right into
the tool. So there's nothing magical about a rape kit.
A rape kit can be very bad. So anyway, Marty
Goddard brought this, she was told by a friend in
(20:58):
the police department, you've got to get Louis Batulo on
board because he's in the crime lab. He was sort
of Chicago famous at that time because he'd been helped
to solve some big cases and he had just had
a lot of power inside the police department. So she
went to him proposed to this idea and or some
(21:20):
idea that she had, and according to her big collaborator
at that time, Cynthia Gary, he threw her out of
the office initially and yelled at her for sort of
presuming to come in. But then days later he had
created a prototype of what they had discussed, and so
(21:44):
she did end up working with him, you know, But
she went on to found a nonprofit, Get all the
hospitals on board, run all the trainings, raise all the money,
think up you know. Really, there was so much about
the kid that wasn't in the box. It was a
sense of design, It was an attitude of looking at
it from the survivor's point of view. Part of the
(22:05):
original kit was a very simple didn't have that many
tools in it, and it had a very simple set
of checklists so that if you were trained, and you
didn't need a ton of training, you could follow this
and everybody would know exactly what evidence was collected and
how to collect it. So it was very much about
(22:26):
creating a system and then housing all these samples, biological
samples that had been collected in exactly the same way
so that it was standardized.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
I wonder if we can go back and do a
little bit of a timeline of collecting evidence for sexual assault.
Raye Paul and I on Barry Bones do talk about,
you know, cases from the seventies and the fifties that
are sixties that have been solved with DNA evidence that's
been collected in a lot of time. It's that semen swabs,
which for some reason always surprises me or right, they
(23:00):
are often in cases like you know, I think it's
a Knoxville, Tennessee where there was a suspected serial killer
of young girls, and so you know there is biological
evidence there. What's your understanding of when they first started
thinking about collecting anything, I mean, my goodness, in the
early nineteen hundreds. I don't even know if they would
have known what to capture what not to capture.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Well, I think the cases you're talking about are where
the survivors are dead. So the survivors, the non survivors,
the victims are dead, right, So that was really different
like collecting from a dead body. We're talking about collecting
from somebody who's alive, you know, again, it becomes much
more of you know, it's if somebody's dead, it's clear
(23:44):
that violence has occurred. Yeah, so it's a very different
process when the survivor is alive and accusing somebody, especially
somebody in power.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Do you know when that would have started with survivors.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
It's a very hazy history, which I actually traced back
to the witch trials because there was very you know,
Matthew Hale, who was in English, I don't know if
he was a judge. I guess he was a judge
in the sixteen hundreds, who was the man who formulated
a lot of the ideas that underlay marital rape. It
(24:19):
was the idea that, you know, a woman was property
of her husband, so she couldn't be sexually abused because
she was property. And he also was involved in some
witch trials. But you know, the idea of a witch
trial was you're investigating somebody's body to see if they're
a liar, essentially, and that idea, you know, and then
(24:44):
you have, like in the Victorian era here and there,
and even early twentieth century, you have female accusers being
examined to see if they're virgins, you know, it's just
a long chain of is she a liar? Is she
a slut? You know, And so by the early seventies
(25:06):
when this is happening, I mean, they certainly would have
you know, of course, any situation where the victim is dead,
that becomes a whole different kind of case. You know,
there were really obvious cases or if you had maybe
a sympathetic police officer or something. You know, it was
just they would bring people in, they would collect their story,
(25:30):
they might collect evidence, but it wasn't like there was
any real system in place, and it was again very
much under the control of the police officers to decide.
And so what I think Marty Goddard and the other
activists of the seventies were doing was trying to take
(25:50):
the power, you know, out of the individual police officer
and say, look, we're going to collect evidence from everybody
who wants evidence collected. Anybody who's accusing and they want
evidence collected. It was essentially creating a new norm, a
norm that if you're a survivor in theory, you have
the right to have evidence collected from you if you
(26:13):
want it. That that belongs to everybody.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
What is the rule now, Is it that anybody who
comes in, male or female and says I've been the
victim of a sexual assault, it is their right to
have their evidence tested? Or is there any discretion for
anybody either at the hospital or at the police department.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Well, in theory, that's how it works. In practice, and
we can get into this later, there's all kinds of
reasons why it doesn't always work that way and often doesn't,
and that just the hurdles that survivors have to go
through to even get to the point where they're getting
a forensic exam or very high. And so a lot
(26:57):
of people just simply don't have access to the system
at all, just because they may not have a car
to get to a hospital something like that. So as
I've been touring with around after this book, you know,
I just hear so many stories, for instance, male victims
being turned away because somebody tells them, oh, the rape
(27:18):
kit isn't for you, which is not true. You know.
One of the other big problems right now is something
that happened later. You know, as the rape kit comes
into becomes a national system in the eighties, there's entirely
new kinds of nurses. There's forensic nurses being trained, and
there's now you know, the system is built out even
(27:41):
further more and more to where we have the idea
of trauma informed care and you know nurses who are
specially trained to help survivors and all of that. But
right now there's just not enough forensic nurses. So often
also the people who are the nurses or doctors that
you know, somebody might counter it's not their fault, but
(28:02):
they haven't been trained, and they're any er where there's
a huge amount of time pressure and stuff. So there's
all kinds of reasons why it does not work as envisioned.
But I think the idea there's something just important in
the idea that everybody has the right to file evidence now,
and that I never thought, even when I was working
(28:23):
on the book, I never thought, oh, that could be
taken away. You know, even if in practice we fall
short of that norm, that that idea that we have
that I thought we all shared that every person who's
believes that they've been sexually assaulted has the right to
report it and be examined and see if there's DNA
(28:46):
evidence or other evidence that is now being chipped away
in Idaho a law passed this summer, so anybody under
eighteen has to get the parental consent in order to
file sexual assault evidence.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
That's such bullshit. Yeah, but what is that? What is
that coming down to? I mean, what is the politics
behind that? It's the agreement that children shouldn't be making
their own decisions? Is that what the push for that was?
That parents have to be more involved? The lack of
parental rights? Is that what this is?
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah, there's a far right movement around. In fact, in Idaho,
any procedure, even a minor one involving a minor, the
parent have to give consent. But that of course includes
going through a forensic exam. And so of course if
the parent is actually the perpetrator.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Or doesn't believe it.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Or doesn't believe it, or somebody else in the family
it's the perpetrator, you know, then that's a big problem.
But the upshot is that, you know, in Idaho and
potentially in more and more states, we could see this idea.
I thought, you know that it seemed like we all
share that any survivor who wants to report what happened
(30:02):
to them and have evidence collected that they had that
right that's not anything that I think we can take
for granted anymore.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Let's go back to the nineteen seventies. So you know,
Marty is having a conversation with Vittulo and next thing
we know, he's got this prototype for the kit. Do
they get along on this process or is she done
with this process once she gives him the idea? And
where do we go from there?
Speaker 2 (30:29):
So yeah, when you read, you know, it's hard to
know exactly. I have a lot about that in my
book trying to parse that out, But it doesn't seem
like once she had the prototype they were working together
that much. And in fact, if you go back and
as I did, and look through a bazillion newspaper articles
and can kind of reconstruct the story, she then takes
(30:49):
the lead, and she's quoted everywhere in the newspapers and
sort of doing everything. So she now has the prototype,
she has the go ahead to create a system in
Chicago using this kit. She doesn't have the money. She
started a nonprofit like as the Mechanism to do this,
(31:10):
but so she needs to raise all this money. She
can't get any funding because this is not the kind
of thing that well healed philanthropic organizations are funding at
that time. So this is kind of one of the
many bizarre twists in the story was that her friend
at the Playboy Foundation, Margaret who is now name Margaret Pcorney,
(31:35):
reached out to her and said, look, I think you
can get funding here. Strangely enough, the Playboy Foundation. Playboy,
of course, was the big industry in Chicago. The Playboy
magazine was making a lot of money, and Hugh Hefner
was this real Chicago personality, and there was this huge
building in the center of town that said Playboy. They
(31:56):
were funding a lot of civil rights and feminists, activism
and work. I didn't know that. How Why why? I
think it made sense in a weird way for you Havener,
because he wanted women to be liberated and sexually free,
and if women are being sexually assaulted all over the place,
that's not going to happen. He also funded Ruth Bader
(32:19):
Ginsberg's projects at the ACLU as she got her start,
so it kind of weirdly made sense for him. Anyway,
they did get this grant to do this pilot program,
and they got a lot of help from the Playboy staff.
The designers helped did sort of a logo for the kit.
(32:40):
There's a kind of groovy seventies women on it. They
gathered volunteers there and had everybody put together these kits
and made thousands of kits and got them out into
the hospitals and started up this very very ambitious program
across Chicago and then across the entire state. And part
(33:02):
of the training that the nurses had to have and
the doctors was that they were going to take this
kit into the courtroom. They probably take the actual kit,
but they were going to talk about what they had
done and present it to the jury. And so the
kit itself had to look really official and scientific, and
(33:23):
the whole process had to be kind of put in
this language of you know, scientific evidence, because again, you know,
the accuser was not going to be believed by the jury,
especially at that time, and so what you had is
people who are kind of in a white lab coats
talking on their behalf and saying, well, we did this test,
(33:44):
and we did this test, and we did this test,
and that really did start to help to win cases
and persuade juries. You know, this was at a time
before DNA identification existed. If they had, say blood in
a sample of blood. You know, they couldn't really narrow
(34:04):
down who was the suspect that much. You could do
blood typing, you could do HLA take typing, you could
do these other kind of tests. You're not really you're
maybe eliminating, you know, a third of people out there
are two thirds or something like that, but you're not
really saying with any certainty who the suspect is. So
(34:26):
Marty continued to you know, really advocate for this. It
became you know, you see, if you're following it through
the newspapers, you suddenly see exploding headlines all over the country. Wow,
there's this new rape kit system. It's it seems to
really be helping to solve cases. It seems to work
really well. You see other cities adopting it. And she
(34:48):
was given money by the Justice Department to go around
the country and help other cities and states set up
their programs. So that's what she did in the early eighties.
And she worked really hard and burned out very badly,
which I think is part of the why she disappeared.
But because of the work she and all these other
(35:10):
people did, wonderful people did back then, there was now
these kits all over the country storing biological evidence. So
when DNA identification did come along in the late eighties nineties,
you now, these kits are just so much more valuable
and so much more convincing to a jury where you
can say, Okay, look, you know, we had three women
(35:33):
accusing this guy, and we have one kit that shows
that he's definitely the person whose blood is in this kit.
So that kind of evidence really is much more convincing
to juries.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
I remember, you know, when I'm in Texas, when Dallas
got a new DA, the first black DA, Craig walk
in and one of the first things he did was
go and test all of the outstanding sexual assault kits
and other biological evidence, and it came back something like
I feel like it was like twenty five percent of
(36:12):
the people who had been you know, arrested and convicted
in those cases were exonerated just based on what he
did with these kids. Was there a way to trace
or tell the story of one of these kits where
it leads to an exoneration or a conviction. I'm wondering
if there's like a little map of where all these
(36:33):
kits that came from Goddard's mind, you know, where they
came from.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Not really to be honest, because by the time the
kits are really everywhere, they're already becoming slightly different everywhere.
That was the thing, and I think she had really
wanted a standardized system. We still don't have one. People
became aware of the backlog of kits in the twenty tens,
(36:58):
but they the backlog started as soon as you had
DNA testing. So you know, you can imagine, like DNA
testing becomes available, it's super expensive. A city like New York, say,
already has ten thousand kits or something, and now they
all need to be tested. And honestly, police departments did
have tend to have pretty much money, but for whatever reason,
(37:20):
it was not put into testing the kits. So immediately
you start to see backlogs in the nineties, so a
lot of there were all these kits on file that
have been filed, but many of them had not been tested.
And that only became an issue decades later because of
some amazing activists who worked super hard to bring it
(37:42):
to everybody's attention. But that was you know, that was
one of the problems, is like in theory, yes, this
is an amazing way of finding finding serial predators. But
in practice, if you're not actually testing the kits, you know,
that may not happen. I'm glad you brought up the exonerations.
I think you know, when I talk about this, people
kind of assume that the idea that if you have
(38:04):
more kits, you're supporting the car sooral system, or you're
supporting putting more people in prison. But the fact is,
number one, we don't want to put the wrong people
in prison. Number two, you know, the kids have taken
gotten a lot of people out of prison, and whatever happens.
I'm not going to get into the issues. I not
(38:25):
smart enough to figure out how the prison system should work.
But whatever happens, we need to know who is attacking,
violently attacking, and sexually attacking people like I think that
information is extremely important to know what we do with it,
how we treat that, how we decide what we decide
(38:46):
to do with especially the serial predators, that's another big issue.
But certainly knowing who those people are, being able to
identify them and being aware of what they're doing and
hopefully able to stop it in some way like that,
that's just an incredibly important thing. And it doesn't necessarily
you know, honestly, there's so few convictions for sexual assault.
(39:09):
It's not like any of this it's going to make
it's making a lot of people go to prison or
any of the right people.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Well, you had a question that you were trying to
solve at the beginning of your research, which is what
exactly happened Marty. You said that in the eighties she
was touring and lecturing and educating and everything and got
burned out. So what did you find happened you know
after that time? Is this when she vanished kind of
(39:40):
from the newspapers and everything.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
She vanishes. And I was interviewing a number of people
who had worked with her in the seventies and knew
her or were friends with her, and even they didn't
know what had happened. They wanted me to find her.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Was she married or with kids or any family or anything.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Well, one thing I was in touch with Cynthia Gary,
who had worked with her, you know, had been studying
police violence in the early seventies and worked really closely
with Marty Goddard at that time and was also on
the Rape Task Force. And so I was pumping Cynthia.
She didn't know what had happened to Marty, but she
(40:21):
knew a lot about Marty, So I was sort of
pumping her for any clues that I thought would lead
me to Marty Goddard's present day whereabouts, you know, family members, what,
you know, anything. So I was hitting Cynthia with after
we talked, with like a lot of emails, like I
found this thing, do you think this is connected to
remember this? And in the midst of that, Cynthia sent
(40:43):
me this suddenly remembered something and sent me this string
of emails that I got. Well, I was hiking. It
was really weird. I just remember how shocked I was
that day that Cynthia suddenly remembered In the late seventies,
Marty had gone on vacation to Hawaii and when she
came back, she called Cynthia and said that she had
(41:04):
been violently assaulted. And this was already with when she
was working in Chicago, with running this system as far
as I've been able to nail it down, and you know,
getting those emails and then it was just very raw
because Cynthia had just you know, all the memories had
(41:26):
come back and they were just very raw and jumbled.
But then as I began to talk to more people.
I would ask them about this if they knew about it,
and I gathered more and more different points of view,
you know, people telling me about, yes, this happened to her,
and I had actually in these oral histories, there was
one where Marty had mentioned something happening to her and
(41:48):
then I the tape with actually was not very good,
and she had mentioned something very brutal, and I thought
maybe it was in childhood or something, and then I
realized she was talking about this particular attack. And then
I was eventually able to talk to her sister, and
you know, whatever nail it all down. But the upshot
was she was very violently attacked. She began drinking much more,
(42:11):
she began traveling all around the country and doing this work,
and people just lost track of her. And you know,
I eventually did find out what had happened and why
she had vanished, and you know, I can't answer all
the questions, but I had a pretty strong story, and yeah,
I learned a lot about you know, what happened after
(42:33):
that and sort of why she disappeared and why she
wasn't able to ever be part of this forensic system
that she really helped to create ever again.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
And I don't know if we mentioned this, but part
of the interesting thing about your book is she had
known that people would not take this seriously if the
kit were named after her, after a woman. That's why
she sort of pushed Vitulo to be the name on it.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Is that the document that is really surprising is that
there's a trademark document from nineteen seventy eight which is
filed by Marty Goddard, her nonprofit you know under the
ageis of her nonprofit, and it is for a sexual
assault evidence kit called the Viatulo Kit. So it was
(43:21):
clearly her decision to call it this, and a rape
kit doesn't need to be named after any person, and
now isn't you know now would be called the mostly
it's would be called the sexual assault evidence kit. Officially,
everybody calls it the rape kit. But you know, now, like,
why does it have to be named after person? You know,
(43:42):
at the time, you know, as far as I've been
able to reconstruct the story, it was just very clear
that the police department and the State Attorney General's office
really wanted credit for this, and that you know, again
you're with this system is going to take power away
from the police department. They're not in control of it
(44:04):
entirely anymore, and so you know, I think that that
was a very smart calculation on her part. Again, you know,
she had been told by her friend inside the police
department it's really important to get Batulo on board, so
you know, that may have been part of it. Exactly
what happened and what that conversation is like, I don't
(44:26):
know if we will probably ever know.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
What do you think the legacy is here? Because while
the rape kit, of course is very important, it sounds
like her being out there being a face, really being
an activist seemed to be as important. Am I right
about that?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah? And I think also, you know, one of my
obsessions is really the politics of design and the fact
that everything we have, everything we interact with, is designed
by people and they have agendas. Every tech chnology that
comes along creates winners and losers. It's designed for certain
(45:04):
people and gives certain people more power, and it may
take power away from other people. In this case, I
think it was so important to have more of a
survivor's point of view in the design of this system,
that it is designed around the idea that it's an
(45:25):
evidence based evidence system that every survivor will be listened to,
every bit of evidence will be collected, and we're not
going to prejudge people. So, you know, I was really
interested in making that more obvious to readers, and also
to think about what are the problems with our designs,
design now and our technology now, and who is it helping,
(45:49):
who's it hurting? And who gets to design and create technology.
That's an huge amount of power to have.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Do you think that one of the next big steps
would be making sure that not only you know, everybody
is able to have their evidence collected, whether the police
believe them or not. You know that everybody has that right.
But also I wonder about the training of the nurses
(46:19):
who are not trained specifically to collect this evidence, or
the doctors. Is there any standardized training with how to
deal with survivors of sexual assault? You know, while we're
in a hectic area and whether it's a hospital or
you are wherever it is, that seems that it could
be as traumatizing, you know, for a survivor, the collection
(46:40):
of all this.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
You know, really it's a matter of money, and we
could use thousands more forensic nurses. You know that would
be amazing. Another big problem is that the way that
evidence is defined, the kid itself and the way that
evidence is defined hasn't changed very much since the nineteen seventies.
(47:02):
So when I do talks, I kind of show the
original kit and then I show one of the kits today,
because there's probably more than a thousand in America. It's
also a complete tower of babble, you know, it's complete
chaos out there. So this is another thing. It's not
helpful to have all different kits with all different rules,
(47:23):
which is you know, for the nurses. That's not good either.
But anyway, the kit, you know, from the seventies, it's
all on paper, it's in cardboard. The kit today still
almost all on paper, but just much more of a mess.
You know. The original one was very carefully edited and
doable in a reasonable amount of time. The new kits
(47:45):
can have dozens and dozens of envelopes, most of which
you would never use. They're all there. It's like, if
this totally rare event happened, use this envelope, you know,
because committees and crime labs keep packing them with more
and more stuff. There's just been no standardization. There's been
(48:05):
and again talking about design justice. There's been no kind
of sense of what the nurse needs, especially if she
hasn't been trained in forensics, you know, which is what
we seem to be doing now. That wasn't supposed to happen.
But if that's what we're doing now, you know, the
kit should be very very easy to use, and it
can you know, there can be a lot of things
(48:28):
that shouldn't be in there, Like the crime labs I
learned are part of the problem in that they seem
to have all the power they want to create new
different kits. That has asked the nurses to do things
that they want, whether that's what should happen or not.
So an example of that would be some of the
kids might ask for what medication the survivor is taking,
(48:53):
even if that includes psych medication. That's not something the
crime lab needs to know or should know. They might
even ask to see the whole account of the testimony,
which also the crime lab should not be seeing that
because the job of the crime lab is to test
samples and to come back with accurate tests. It's not
(49:14):
to judge. Again, it's not to judge which kits they
should process based on how they feel about the victim.
And I would also say the craziest thing to me
is all that it's still all on paper. Yeah, in
a twenty first century world.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
You know, we're not saying what happened to Marty after
all of this and her profile goes down. But do
you think that she understood the impact that her work
had or would have. I sometimes feel like it's such
a shame when people die before they see you know,
how prolific their one idea was and how much of
(49:52):
an impact. I know there's so many improvements that need
to be made, But do you think that she had
a sense that she really moved the needle on the
way other people did.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
I think for a time she did. Yeah. I mean
it's hard because it's a whole many, many span of years,
but I think there was definitely a period when she
understood and she wanted to get back into forensic and
forensics and wasn't able to.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked,
Right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give
them a listen if you haven't already. This has been
an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(50:50):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked
(51:11):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook
at wicked Words pod
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
So the police officer they're supposed to decide whether there
even is any evidence, which is obviously not an evidence
based evidence system if you're already deciding who's lying.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:55):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true cases.
This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad,
and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind
their stories. This week on Wicked Words, years ago, author
Pagan Kennedy wondered about the history of the rape kit,
(01:18):
a crucial tool for investigators today, who designed it. She
found out that it was Martha Goddard, a pioneer who
wanted to help police catch sexual predators using forensics. But
sometime after she made history. Goddard vanished. Listen to Kennedy's
story at the center of her book, The Secret History
of the Rape Kit. I read a New York Times
(01:42):
review of your book. I can't really remember the last
review I read from the Times that had zero criticism
about the I mean zero. What do you think resonates
with readers? I know you're doing a lot of interviews.
What do you think it is about this project that
has really kind of caught the attention of readers today.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
You know, I really thought a lot about how to
tell this story. You know, I really wanted to deliver
new information to people, and really important information. But I
think it's very important to wrap it in a story
in the right way, and so I thought a lot
about that. And the Marti Goddard story is several mysteries
(02:24):
at once, kind of stacked up. And one mystery is
what happened to her because she was key to creating
the national system of sexual assault evidence that we have now.
I mean, she really was the person behind the scenes
who made it happen at a lot of levels. Then
(02:45):
after she did that, she just disappeared to the point
where it was really when I came looking for her.
It was really really took me forever to find her.
So there's the mystery of what happened to her, There's
the mystery of how did she bring about this massive change,
you know, as an activist in Chicago with seemingly very
(03:06):
little political power. And then you know, really it's about
the mystery of evidence. What is evidence? Who gets to
say what evidence is? Who controls everything about evidence? Is
about the power structure in criminal justice and in our
world now there's all this argument about what is even
(03:27):
true Now. It was a struggle to rethink evidence from
the point of view of survivors, you know, in the
nineteen seventies that Marty Goddard was a part of. And
so I really it was also my own story in
terms of, you know, I was molested as a kid.
I mean also at the heart of this is if
(03:49):
something like that has happened to you or somebody, you know,
how do you deal with that longing for justice that
you're never going to get And what if you don't
have the evidence? What if you know something happened to
you and you don't have the evidence of it. So
I tried to weave in all of that and more
into the book and keep it all keep it moving
(04:11):
very quickly by kind of always having one pot or
the other boiling at all times in the story.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Well, that's a good nonfiction narrative right there. Where do
we start with this story with you? Is it you
and your journey trying to figure out who is the
name behind the rape kit and how it is not accurate?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah? I mean, for me, the story started in twenty eighteen.
The rape kit was very much of the news because
people might remember there was a huge scandal then about
untested backlogged kits and these were literally almost half a
million kits that were sitting in police warehouses or it
had been thrown away. And when I say police warehouses,
(04:58):
I mean moldy basements with sometimes pigeons flapping around, you know,
and mice eating them, you know, or literally lying there
in black trash bags as if they're about to be
thrown away or just thrown away. And so I think
when you know survivors who had gone through a very
(05:19):
very difficult and invasive forensic exams to create this evidence
found out about this, there was a huge amount of anger.
You know, these headlines were out there and I suddenly
had the thought, you know, it didn't actually surprise me
so much that the police would destroy or hide this evidence.
(05:41):
But what did surprise me was what I really thought
about it was that there was this national system for
collecting evidence of sexual assault, and that you know, of
course it doesn't always work as we would want it
to work, but it potentially had such power to potentially
take down, you know, somebody very powerful, a Catholic priest,
(06:04):
head of a school, serial predator who had been hadn't
been found for years. It also had the potential to
free innocent black men who are all too often put
in prison for rape and are kind of framed for it.
And so that also, that power to exonerate people is
(06:26):
really important part of the kit. So this thing kind
of I was kind of like, how did this ever
get created in a world that seems to be you know,
in the rest of our designed environment, it seems like
there's not a lot of care taken to prevent sexual
abuse or you know, if you go on to social
(06:46):
media or something, it's not like it's designed to keep
people from being harassed or stocked or you know, any
of that. So it just seemed kind of amazing to me.
So I really suddenly wanted to know all the origins,
how did this ever come into being? Because I also thought, well,
this tells you more than just the story of the kid.
(07:08):
It tells you how something like this that challenges power
could come into existence. So my first stop was Wikipedia
of twenty eighteen, and on that Wikipedia there was not
very much information, but it did say that a police
officer named Louis Futtulo in Chicago had been the sole
(07:31):
inventor of the kit in the nineteen seventies, and it
was called the Vitulo Kit after him because he was
the inventor, so he was no longer alive and there
was not really much information out there about him. So
I kept looking for other people who might be involved,
and I kept seeing this name, Martha Goddard or Marty Goddard.
(07:53):
Being a longtime reporter, my first question is, well, okay,
is she dead or alive? Because that tells me what
to do next. I couldn't find any obituaries, any memorials,
any indication that she was dead, you know, and almost
always when I go looking for somebody, if they're dead,
(08:14):
there's something it's very clear. So I had to assume
she was alive. At that time, and so I was
just hunting and hunting for her. So without knowing it,
I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of looking
for this mysterious Marty Goddard. And while I couldn't find her,
I kept finding all kinds of things that made her
(08:36):
story just appear before me in technicolor. Because I found
these pretty obscure oral histories. She had done these long interviews,
audio interviews where she told her story, and I began
to find people she had worked with and talk to
them who had also been involved in her projects, or
(08:58):
had been working on the rap task for us in
Chicago or whatever. The story just began to emerge before me.
And that story was you know this, she begans when
she tells her story in these oral histories. She begins
in nineteen seventy two, when she was she's a divorce
a and just divorced, just moved to Chicago. She's you know,
(09:23):
I have pictures of her. She's this blonde woman with
big goggly glasses and always looking incredibly sharp. She was
very determined to be taken seriously, so she was always
kind of in those suits that women had to wear
in the nineteen seventies with the silk shirts and the
sometimes like the little bow ties and the you know,
(09:45):
the jackets and the briefcase and all of that. So
she starts with the day or the days when she
began volunteering. She was working at a nonprofit, but she
was volunteering at a what they can called a runaway
hotline in Chicago, and that was for kids living on
(10:06):
the street to call in and get help. And you know,
this is the hippie the height of the hippie movement,
so they were calling them runaways, and the idea was
these kids that sort of run away to have fun
and be hippies and headed to San Francisco or whatever
that was. That was sort of the idea. But she
walked in and the hotline was housed in this old,
(10:29):
falling apart townhouse in downtown Chicago, and it was staffed
all by students and hippies, sort of hippie long hair people.
So she really didn't fit in. She was this very
professional looking person, but she sat down and began taking calls,
and what she discovered was these kids were running away
(10:49):
from home because many of them were fleeing from abusive
family members. In fact, she began to see what was
sort of before everybody's eyes in the early seventies, but
nobody was talking about or able to see, which was
that there was just a tremendous amount of child sexual abuse,
(11:11):
which was thought to be incredibly rare at that time.
There was really like not even a full understanding of
child abuse at that time. She was thinking, if this
is so prevalent, there must be so many predators out there,
and she began getting involved in trying to help these,
especially the girls who ended up on the streets, who
(11:31):
would often be blamed. They would be called like prostitutes,
and nobody would seem to think, well, how did that happen?
How does a thirteen year old girl end up on
the street, and who's to blame for that? You know,
the girl herself would be blamed and the police would
holler away to juvenile hall or something. So she got
very involved in that, and in nineteen seventy four things
(11:54):
really started to shift into high gear because there was
the anti race movement really was getting started in America,
and in Chicago, there was a huge amount of outrage
starting to happen on the part of women who had
been assaulted and the police hadn't done anything, and so
(12:14):
in fact, the attitude of that time, not just in
Chicago but everywhere was that you really couldn't prove that
a sexual assault had happened. It was just always going
to be a he said, she said, There's sort of
no way you could ever get evidence of it, you know,
going back into the police training manuals of the time,
they would say, like women almost always are frequently lie.
(12:39):
You can't trust them. So the police officer is supposed
to be the judge the jury. They're supposed to decide
whether there even is any evidence, which is obviously not
an evidence based evidence system if you're already deciding who's lying.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
I remember reading that you were saying in these manuals
that officers were told, you know, much of this is
because their boyfriend or their husband's a cheater and they're
trying to get revenge. So, yes, that seemed that was
startling to me when I read that. One thing I
wanted to bring up because I know we're framing the
seventies and where we are right now. I just did
a story on my other show with Poul Holes, which
(13:21):
is Buried Bones, about the Miranda rights, the origin of that, which,
of course was a series of sexual assaults. What I
did not know, and I told one of my classes
where I teach a true crime at the University of Texas,
I said, I did not know that even now, what
happened with the women who accused Miranda of you know,
(13:42):
assaulting them was they were all given polygraph tests and
you can still do that. And I just thought, how
is that even possible when this is a tool quote
unquote that can't even be admitted in court, let alone,
you know, it must be used for intimidation or something.
I was stunned by that, and I'm sure that there
are a lot of other things that would surprise me
(14:04):
about how police officers are able to get quote unquote
the truth from people who come to the station and
claim something.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, that's fascinating. I actually didn't know that Miranda was
a sexual assault case, and that actually makes a whole
lot of sense. Yeah, because you're being told that anything
you can say will be used against you, which of
course it's doubly true. It's sexual assault cases because the
survivor is almost always treated, it is often treated like
(14:31):
a suspect, and that's the fight, that's the struggle. We're
still having today. You know, just seems so hard to
shift that culture away from treating the accuser as a
suspect or a liar.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
So in the seventies we have a don't believe her movement,
it sounds like, and this is of course disgusting to Marty.
I'm sure she's learning more and more about this stuff.
And you were saying, was it seventy sixty you said,
was when this anti rape movement was really gaining steam here?
Speaker 2 (15:04):
It was around seventy four. This is when the first
women are coming out of law school. I mean, Barrital
rape is still legal at this time. There's very little
understanding of child abuse, so it's just the norm that
sexual assault happens. If it happens to you, it's probably
your fault. So yeah, so she because of Chicago had
(15:26):
this big scandal on its hands and the police department
there were scandal upon scandal in Chicago because the police
department there were actually a secret police group inside the
Chicago Police called the Red Squad. They also had this
in other cities, but it was very especially kind of
(15:47):
woven into the Chicago Police department, which was the secret police,
and they were sort of the Dirty Tricks Gang. They
would blackmail people they didn't like. They would definitely target
African America anybody well, they would target anybody who brought
up police abuse. They targeted African American men. They were
(16:08):
sort of entangled with Nazi movements. They were, you know,
so there was in this police inside the police, and
they had these secret files. And Marty Goddard actually was
pretty she was being followed during some of the time.
When she began working on the Rape Task Force in Chicago,
(16:28):
she did see a file against her. But then the
files from the Red Squad just like quote unquote accidentally
all went up in flame. So I went and tried
to find the secret file, because there is still in
Chicago an archive of what's left of the Red Squad
files from the seventies, well sixties, seventies, but couldn't find
(16:53):
anything there. So if she did have a secret police
file on her, it was destroyed. But you know, you
can get the whole the whole vibe. It was very much,
very difficult. The police were the Chicago police was really
were really known to be the worst in the country
in terms of being very much a political group that
(17:16):
would just hurt the enemies of the then the democratic machine. Anyway,
she Marty Goddard, because of her activism, was made a
head of the Citizens Committee on the Rape Task Force,
and that gave her the power to go in and
talk to kind of whoever she wanted to figure out
(17:36):
what was going on, why there was so little effort
to investigate sexual assault cases. And so she talked to
hospital administrators, nurses, er docs, you know, people in the
crime labs, police officers. She just talked to everybody. And
this was something really interesting about her, which she's just
(17:57):
a very curious person who wanted to make things work
and get everybody on board. And so she could kind
of go into these different spaces and make allies. She
was very good at kind of showing up in her
nice suit and shaking people's hands and making allies and
then just sort of pulling things together. And so along
(18:20):
the way she became convinced or decided, you know, well
what she analyzed when she diagnosed what was going wrong.
Of course, there's a big kind of cultural problem with
the police really treating survivors quite badly. You know, there was,
of course the culture, but then at the practical level,
just people in the nursing staff in the hospital. They
(18:43):
were just focused on when somebody came in after a
violin attack. They just wanted to help them and treat
their wounds, and so that they would try to collect evidence,
but nobody had taught them how, so they just kind
of do what they needed to do, throw everything in
a bag and send it over to the crime lab.
And then the crime lab opens this bag and here's
(19:04):
this clothing that has been torn up by the doctors
as they tried to get to the patient and they
you know, in slides that hadn't been correctly stored and
just a jumble of stuff, so they would throw it out.
So that was what was happening to a lot of
the evidence. So it became clear that you needed to
train everybody. You needed to get them to all talk
(19:27):
to each other, and you needed them to all be
on board and create one unified system. She I think
it was she who probably did have you know, talked
to a lot of people and tried to establish exactly
what happened. It's a little hard, but it seems like
she had the idea of using the kit a kit
to kind of be the object that moved from place
(19:48):
to place, and kept everybody on the same page. I
should say that she did not invent the kit, nor
did Louis Viattulo, who was credited with it. There were
actually rape kits in existence then they weren't used widely.
They were used sort of here and there, like as
experiments sort of or and many of them were quite bad.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
In what way bad like inadequate.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Well, I found one from nineteen I found I didn't
find the kit. I found the instructions from a nineteen
seventy three kit that said that if you thought that
the woman accusing rape was a quote ced prostitute, then
you didn't need to collect evidence. Wow, you should collect
evidence if she was a thirteen year old girl headed
(20:38):
to Sunday school. But maybe if she was a quote
bar maid, you didn't have to do it. So again,
it was like actually codifying that police bias right into
the tool. So there's nothing magical about a rape kit.
A rape kit can be very bad. So anyway, Marty
Goddard brought this, she was told by a friend in
(20:58):
the police department, you've got to get Louis Batulo on
board because he's in the crime lab. He was sort
of Chicago famous at that time because he'd been helped
to solve some big cases and he had just had
a lot of power inside the police department. So she
went to him proposed to this idea and or some
(21:20):
idea that she had, and according to her big collaborator
at that time, Cynthia Gary, he threw her out of
the office initially and yelled at her for sort of
presuming to come in. But then days later he had
created a prototype of what they had discussed, and so
(21:44):
she did end up working with him, you know, But
she went on to found a nonprofit, Get all the
hospitals on board, run all the trainings, raise all the money,
think up you know. Really, there was so much about
the kid that wasn't in the box. It was a
sense of design, It was an attitude of looking at
it from the survivor's point of view. Part of the
(22:05):
original kit was a very simple didn't have that many
tools in it, and it had a very simple set
of checklists so that if you were trained, and you
didn't need a ton of training, you could follow this
and everybody would know exactly what evidence was collected and
how to collect it. So it was very much about
(22:26):
creating a system and then housing all these samples, biological
samples that had been collected in exactly the same way
so that it was standardized.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
I wonder if we can go back and do a
little bit of a timeline of collecting evidence for sexual assault.
Raye Paul and I on Barry Bones do talk about,
you know, cases from the seventies and the fifties that
are sixties that have been solved with DNA evidence that's
been collected in a lot of time. It's that semen swabs,
which for some reason always surprises me or right, they
(23:00):
are often in cases like you know, I think it's
a Knoxville, Tennessee where there was a suspected serial killer
of young girls, and so you know there is biological
evidence there. What's your understanding of when they first started
thinking about collecting anything, I mean, my goodness, in the
early nineteen hundreds. I don't even know if they would
have known what to capture what not to capture.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Well, I think the cases you're talking about are where
the survivors are dead. So the survivors, the non survivors,
the victims are dead, right, So that was really different
like collecting from a dead body. We're talking about collecting
from somebody who's alive, you know, again, it becomes much
more of you know, it's if somebody's dead, it's clear
(23:44):
that violence has occurred. Yeah, so it's a very different
process when the survivor is alive and accusing somebody, especially
somebody in power.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Do you know when that would have started with survivors.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
It's a very hazy history, which I actually traced back
to the witch trials because there was very you know,
Matthew Hale, who was in English, I don't know if
he was a judge. I guess he was a judge
in the sixteen hundreds, who was the man who formulated
a lot of the ideas that underlay marital rape. It
(24:19):
was the idea that, you know, a woman was property
of her husband, so she couldn't be sexually abused because
she was property. And he also was involved in some
witch trials. But you know, the idea of a witch
trial was you're investigating somebody's body to see if they're
a liar, essentially, and that idea, you know, and then
(24:44):
you have, like in the Victorian era here and there,
and even early twentieth century, you have female accusers being
examined to see if they're virgins, you know, it's just
a long chain of is she a liar? Is she
a slut? You know, And so by the early seventies
(25:06):
when this is happening, I mean, they certainly would have
you know, of course, any situation where the victim is dead,
that becomes a whole different kind of case. You know,
there were really obvious cases or if you had maybe
a sympathetic police officer or something. You know, it was
just they would bring people in, they would collect their story,
(25:30):
they might collect evidence, but it wasn't like there was
any real system in place, and it was again very
much under the control of the police officers to decide.
And so what I think Marty Goddard and the other
activists of the seventies were doing was trying to take
(25:50):
the power, you know, out of the individual police officer
and say, look, we're going to collect evidence from everybody
who wants evidence collected. Anybody who's accusing and they want
evidence collected. It was essentially creating a new norm, a
norm that if you're a survivor in theory, you have
the right to have evidence collected from you if you
(26:13):
want it. That that belongs to everybody.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
What is the rule now, Is it that anybody who
comes in, male or female and says I've been the
victim of a sexual assault, it is their right to
have their evidence tested? Or is there any discretion for
anybody either at the hospital or at the police department.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Well, in theory, that's how it works. In practice, and
we can get into this later, there's all kinds of
reasons why it doesn't always work that way and often doesn't,
and that just the hurdles that survivors have to go
through to even get to the point where they're getting
a forensic exam or very high. And so a lot
(26:57):
of people just simply don't have access to the system
at all, just because they may not have a car
to get to a hospital something like that. So as
I've been touring with around after this book, you know,
I just hear so many stories, for instance, male victims
being turned away because somebody tells them, oh, the rape
(27:18):
kit isn't for you, which is not true. You know.
One of the other big problems right now is something
that happened later. You know, as the rape kit comes
into becomes a national system in the eighties, there's entirely
new kinds of nurses. There's forensic nurses being trained, and
there's now you know, the system is built out even
(27:41):
further more and more to where we have the idea
of trauma informed care and you know nurses who are
specially trained to help survivors and all of that. But
right now there's just not enough forensic nurses. So often
also the people who are the nurses or doctors that
you know, somebody might counter it's not their fault, but
(28:02):
they haven't been trained, and they're any er where there's
a huge amount of time pressure and stuff. So there's
all kinds of reasons why it does not work as envisioned.
But I think the idea there's something just important in
the idea that everybody has the right to file evidence now,
and that I never thought, even when I was working
(28:23):
on the book, I never thought, oh, that could be
taken away. You know, even if in practice we fall
short of that norm, that that idea that we have
that I thought we all shared that every person who's
believes that they've been sexually assaulted has the right to
report it and be examined and see if there's DNA
(28:46):
evidence or other evidence that is now being chipped away
in Idaho a law passed this summer, so anybody under
eighteen has to get the parental consent in order to
file sexual assault evidence.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
That's such bullshit. Yeah, but what is that? What is
that coming down to? I mean, what is the politics
behind that? It's the agreement that children shouldn't be making
their own decisions? Is that what the push for that was?
That parents have to be more involved? The lack of
parental rights? Is that what this is?
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah, there's a far right movement around. In fact, in Idaho,
any procedure, even a minor one involving a minor, the
parent have to give consent. But that of course includes
going through a forensic exam. And so of course if
the parent is actually the perpetrator.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Or doesn't believe it.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Or doesn't believe it, or somebody else in the family
it's the perpetrator, you know, then that's a big problem.
But the upshot is that, you know, in Idaho and
potentially in more and more states, we could see this idea.
I thought, you know that it seemed like we all
share that any survivor who wants to report what happened
(30:02):
to them and have evidence collected that they had that
right that's not anything that I think we can take
for granted anymore.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Let's go back to the nineteen seventies. So you know,
Marty is having a conversation with Vittulo and next thing
we know, he's got this prototype for the kit. Do
they get along on this process or is she done
with this process once she gives him the idea? And
where do we go from there?
Speaker 2 (30:29):
So yeah, when you read, you know, it's hard to
know exactly. I have a lot about that in my
book trying to parse that out, But it doesn't seem
like once she had the prototype they were working together
that much. And in fact, if you go back and
as I did, and look through a bazillion newspaper articles
and can kind of reconstruct the story, she then takes
(30:49):
the lead, and she's quoted everywhere in the newspapers and
sort of doing everything. So she now has the prototype,
she has the go ahead to create a system in
Chicago using this kit. She doesn't have the money. She
started a nonprofit like as the Mechanism to do this,
(31:10):
but so she needs to raise all this money. She
can't get any funding because this is not the kind
of thing that well healed philanthropic organizations are funding at
that time. So this is kind of one of the
many bizarre twists in the story was that her friend
at the Playboy Foundation, Margaret who is now name Margaret Pcorney,
(31:35):
reached out to her and said, look, I think you
can get funding here. Strangely enough, the Playboy Foundation. Playboy,
of course, was the big industry in Chicago. The Playboy
magazine was making a lot of money, and Hugh Hefner
was this real Chicago personality, and there was this huge
building in the center of town that said Playboy. They
(31:56):
were funding a lot of civil rights and feminists, activism
and work. I didn't know that. How Why why? I
think it made sense in a weird way for you Havener,
because he wanted women to be liberated and sexually free,
and if women are being sexually assaulted all over the place,
that's not going to happen. He also funded Ruth Bader
(32:19):
Ginsberg's projects at the ACLU as she got her start,
so it kind of weirdly made sense for him. Anyway,
they did get this grant to do this pilot program,
and they got a lot of help from the Playboy staff.
The designers helped did sort of a logo for the kit.
(32:40):
There's a kind of groovy seventies women on it. They
gathered volunteers there and had everybody put together these kits
and made thousands of kits and got them out into
the hospitals and started up this very very ambitious program
across Chicago and then across the entire state. And part
(33:02):
of the training that the nurses had to have and
the doctors was that they were going to take this
kit into the courtroom. They probably take the actual kit,
but they were going to talk about what they had
done and present it to the jury. And so the
kit itself had to look really official and scientific, and
(33:23):
the whole process had to be kind of put in
this language of you know, scientific evidence, because again, you know,
the accuser was not going to be believed by the jury,
especially at that time, and so what you had is
people who are kind of in a white lab coats
talking on their behalf and saying, well, we did this test,
(33:44):
and we did this test, and we did this test,
and that really did start to help to win cases
and persuade juries. You know, this was at a time
before DNA identification existed. If they had, say blood in
a sample of blood. You know, they couldn't really narrow
(34:04):
down who was the suspect that much. You could do
blood typing, you could do HLA take typing, you could
do these other kind of tests. You're not really you're
maybe eliminating, you know, a third of people out there
are two thirds or something like that, but you're not
really saying with any certainty who the suspect is. So
(34:26):
Marty continued to you know, really advocate for this. It
became you know, you see, if you're following it through
the newspapers, you suddenly see exploding headlines all over the country. Wow,
there's this new rape kit system. It's it seems to
really be helping to solve cases. It seems to work
really well. You see other cities adopting it. And she
(34:48):
was given money by the Justice Department to go around
the country and help other cities and states set up
their programs. So that's what she did in the early eighties.
And she worked really hard and burned out very badly,
which I think is part of the why she disappeared.
But because of the work she and all these other
(35:10):
people did, wonderful people did back then, there was now
these kits all over the country storing biological evidence. So
when DNA identification did come along in the late eighties nineties,
you now, these kits are just so much more valuable
and so much more convincing to a jury where you
can say, Okay, look, you know, we had three women
(35:33):
accusing this guy, and we have one kit that shows
that he's definitely the person whose blood is in this kit.
So that kind of evidence really is much more convincing
to juries.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
I remember, you know, when I'm in Texas, when Dallas
got a new DA, the first black DA, Craig walk
in and one of the first things he did was
go and test all of the outstanding sexual assault kits
and other biological evidence, and it came back something like
I feel like it was like twenty five percent of
(36:12):
the people who had been you know, arrested and convicted
in those cases were exonerated just based on what he
did with these kids. Was there a way to trace
or tell the story of one of these kits where
it leads to an exoneration or a conviction. I'm wondering
if there's like a little map of where all these
(36:33):
kits that came from Goddard's mind, you know, where they
came from.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Not really to be honest, because by the time the
kits are really everywhere, they're already becoming slightly different everywhere.
That was the thing, and I think she had really
wanted a standardized system. We still don't have one. People
became aware of the backlog of kits in the twenty tens,
(36:58):
but they the backlog started as soon as you had
DNA testing. So you know, you can imagine, like DNA
testing becomes available, it's super expensive. A city like New York, say,
already has ten thousand kits or something, and now they
all need to be tested. And honestly, police departments did
have tend to have pretty much money, but for whatever reason,
(37:20):
it was not put into testing the kits. So immediately
you start to see backlogs in the nineties, so a
lot of there were all these kits on file that
have been filed, but many of them had not been tested.
And that only became an issue decades later because of
some amazing activists who worked super hard to bring it
(37:42):
to everybody's attention. But that was you know, that was
one of the problems, is like in theory, yes, this
is an amazing way of finding finding serial predators. But
in practice, if you're not actually testing the kits, you know,
that may not happen. I'm glad you brought up the exonerations.
I think you know, when I talk about this, people
kind of assume that the idea that if you have
(38:04):
more kits, you're supporting the car sooral system, or you're
supporting putting more people in prison. But the fact is,
number one, we don't want to put the wrong people
in prison. Number two, you know, the kids have taken
gotten a lot of people out of prison, and whatever happens.
I'm not going to get into the issues. I not
(38:25):
smart enough to figure out how the prison system should work.
But whatever happens, we need to know who is attacking,
violently attacking, and sexually attacking people like I think that
information is extremely important to know what we do with it,
how we treat that, how we decide what we decide
(38:46):
to do with especially the serial predators, that's another big issue.
But certainly knowing who those people are, being able to
identify them and being aware of what they're doing and
hopefully able to stop it in some way like that,
that's just an incredibly important thing. And it doesn't necessarily
you know, honestly, there's so few convictions for sexual assault.
(39:09):
It's not like any of this it's going to make
it's making a lot of people go to prison or
any of the right people.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Well, you had a question that you were trying to
solve at the beginning of your research, which is what
exactly happened Marty. You said that in the eighties she
was touring and lecturing and educating and everything and got
burned out. So what did you find happened you know
after that time? Is this when she vanished kind of
(39:40):
from the newspapers and everything.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
She vanishes. And I was interviewing a number of people
who had worked with her in the seventies and knew
her or were friends with her, and even they didn't
know what had happened. They wanted me to find her.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Was she married or with kids or any family or anything.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Well, one thing I was in touch with Cynthia Gary,
who had worked with her, you know, had been studying
police violence in the early seventies and worked really closely
with Marty Goddard at that time and was also on
the Rape Task Force. And so I was pumping Cynthia.
She didn't know what had happened to Marty, but she
(40:21):
knew a lot about Marty, So I was sort of
pumping her for any clues that I thought would lead
me to Marty Goddard's present day whereabouts, you know, family members, what,
you know, anything. So I was hitting Cynthia with after
we talked, with like a lot of emails, like I
found this thing, do you think this is connected to
remember this? And in the midst of that, Cynthia sent
(40:43):
me this suddenly remembered something and sent me this string
of emails that I got. Well, I was hiking. It
was really weird. I just remember how shocked I was
that day that Cynthia suddenly remembered In the late seventies,
Marty had gone on vacation to Hawaii and when she
came back, she called Cynthia and said that she had
(41:04):
been violently assaulted. And this was already with when she
was working in Chicago, with running this system as far
as I've been able to nail it down, and you know,
getting those emails and then it was just very raw
because Cynthia had just you know, all the memories had
(41:26):
come back and they were just very raw and jumbled.
But then as I began to talk to more people.
I would ask them about this if they knew about it,
and I gathered more and more different points of view,
you know, people telling me about, yes, this happened to her,
and I had actually in these oral histories, there was
one where Marty had mentioned something happening to her and
(41:48):
then I the tape with actually was not very good,
and she had mentioned something very brutal, and I thought
maybe it was in childhood or something, and then I
realized she was talking about this particular attack. And then
I was eventually able to talk to her sister, and
you know, whatever nail it all down. But the upshot
was she was very violently attacked. She began drinking much more,
(42:11):
she began traveling all around the country and doing this work,
and people just lost track of her. And you know,
I eventually did find out what had happened and why
she had vanished, and you know, I can't answer all
the questions, but I had a pretty strong story, and yeah,
I learned a lot about you know, what happened after
(42:33):
that and sort of why she disappeared and why she
wasn't able to ever be part of this forensic system
that she really helped to create ever again.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
And I don't know if we mentioned this, but part
of the interesting thing about your book is she had
known that people would not take this seriously if the
kit were named after her, after a woman. That's why
she sort of pushed Vitulo to be the name on it.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Is that the document that is really surprising is that
there's a trademark document from nineteen seventy eight which is
filed by Marty Goddard, her nonprofit you know under the
ageis of her nonprofit, and it is for a sexual
assault evidence kit called the Viatulo Kit. So it was
(43:21):
clearly her decision to call it this, and a rape
kit doesn't need to be named after any person, and
now isn't you know now would be called the mostly
it's would be called the sexual assault evidence kit. Officially,
everybody calls it the rape kit. But you know, now, like,
why does it have to be named after person? You know,
(43:42):
at the time, you know, as far as I've been
able to reconstruct the story, it was just very clear
that the police department and the State Attorney General's office
really wanted credit for this, and that you know, again
you're with this system is going to take power away
from the police department. They're not in control of it
(44:04):
entirely anymore, and so you know, I think that that
was a very smart calculation on her part. Again, you know,
she had been told by her friend inside the police
department it's really important to get Batulo on board, so
you know, that may have been part of it. Exactly
what happened and what that conversation is like, I don't
(44:26):
know if we will probably ever know.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
What do you think the legacy is here? Because while
the rape kit, of course is very important, it sounds
like her being out there being a face, really being
an activist seemed to be as important. Am I right
about that?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah? And I think also, you know, one of my
obsessions is really the politics of design and the fact
that everything we have, everything we interact with, is designed
by people and they have agendas. Every tech chnology that
comes along creates winners and losers. It's designed for certain
(45:04):
people and gives certain people more power, and it may
take power away from other people. In this case, I
think it was so important to have more of a
survivor's point of view in the design of this system,
that it is designed around the idea that it's an
(45:25):
evidence based evidence system that every survivor will be listened to,
every bit of evidence will be collected, and we're not
going to prejudge people. So, you know, I was really
interested in making that more obvious to readers, and also
to think about what are the problems with our designs,
design now and our technology now, and who is it helping,
(45:49):
who's it hurting? And who gets to design and create technology.
That's an huge amount of power to have.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Do you think that one of the next big steps
would be making sure that not only you know, everybody
is able to have their evidence collected, whether the police
believe them or not. You know that everybody has that right.
But also I wonder about the training of the nurses
(46:19):
who are not trained specifically to collect this evidence, or
the doctors. Is there any standardized training with how to
deal with survivors of sexual assault? You know, while we're
in a hectic area and whether it's a hospital or
you are wherever it is, that seems that it could
be as traumatizing, you know, for a survivor, the collection
(46:40):
of all this.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
You know, really it's a matter of money, and we
could use thousands more forensic nurses. You know that would
be amazing. Another big problem is that the way that
evidence is defined, the kid itself and the way that
evidence is defined hasn't changed very much since the nineteen seventies.
(47:02):
So when I do talks, I kind of show the
original kit and then I show one of the kits today,
because there's probably more than a thousand in America. It's
also a complete tower of babble, you know, it's complete
chaos out there. So this is another thing. It's not
helpful to have all different kits with all different rules,
(47:23):
which is you know, for the nurses. That's not good either.
But anyway, the kit, you know, from the seventies, it's
all on paper, it's in cardboard. The kit today still
almost all on paper, but just much more of a mess.
You know. The original one was very carefully edited and
doable in a reasonable amount of time. The new kits
(47:45):
can have dozens and dozens of envelopes, most of which
you would never use. They're all there. It's like, if
this totally rare event happened, use this envelope, you know,
because committees and crime labs keep packing them with more
and more stuff. There's just been no standardization. There's been
(48:05):
and again talking about design justice. There's been no kind
of sense of what the nurse needs, especially if she
hasn't been trained in forensics, you know, which is what
we seem to be doing now. That wasn't supposed to happen.
But if that's what we're doing now, you know, the
kit should be very very easy to use, and it
can you know, there can be a lot of things
(48:28):
that shouldn't be in there, Like the crime labs I
learned are part of the problem in that they seem
to have all the power they want to create new
different kits. That has asked the nurses to do things
that they want, whether that's what should happen or not.
So an example of that would be some of the
kids might ask for what medication the survivor is taking,
(48:53):
even if that includes psych medication. That's not something the
crime lab needs to know or should know. They might
even ask to see the whole account of the testimony,
which also the crime lab should not be seeing that
because the job of the crime lab is to test
samples and to come back with accurate tests. It's not
(49:14):
to judge. Again, it's not to judge which kits they
should process based on how they feel about the victim.
And I would also say the craziest thing to me
is all that it's still all on paper. Yeah, in
a twenty first century world.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
You know, we're not saying what happened to Marty after
all of this and her profile goes down. But do
you think that she understood the impact that her work
had or would have. I sometimes feel like it's such
a shame when people die before they see you know,
how prolific their one idea was and how much of
(49:52):
an impact. I know there's so many improvements that need
to be made, But do you think that she had
a sense that she really moved the needle on the
way other people did.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
I think for a time she did. Yeah. I mean
it's hard because it's a whole many, many span of years,
but I think there was definitely a period when she
understood and she wanted to get back into forensic and
forensics and wasn't able to.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked,
Right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give
them a listen if you haven't already. This has been
an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(50:50):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow Wicked
(51:11):
Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked, and on Facebook
at wicked Words pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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