[ad_1]
Beth Dubber / NetflixNetflix
Netflix Unbelievable tells the story of a horrible crime and a magnificent miscarriage of justice. In 2008, Marie, an 18-year-old woman from Washington, Lynnwood, Marie, is assaulted in her apartment by a man who ties her up and rapes her, taking pictures all the time. She reports the assault to the police, who quickly abandons his investigation and accuses him of having made a false report to the police. Two years later, in Colorado, detectives are investigating a serial rapist with exactly the same procedure, all without knowing what he might have hit before.
The case is true and is based on a joint survey of ProPublica and the Marshall Project conducted in 2015 by journalist T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, Pulitzer Prize winner. Their article, "An Incredible Story of Rape," tells the story of Mary (the middle name of the actual victim) and the detective hunt for the Colorado detective. Despite the fact that trauma can sometimes lead victims to report their attacks differently, the police corrected the inconsistencies in Marie's story.
"When the police started to doubt Mary, they assaulted her," Armstrong told National Public Radio last year. "The investigation focused on her credibility, and instead of questioning Mary as a victim, they started questioning her as a suspect."
The investigators confronted her and, under their pressure, Marie stated that she had made her initial request. Later, she was charged with making a false police report, a crime punishable by up to one year in prison. Marie accepted a plea agreement that sentenced her to counseling, probation and a $ 500 payment for legal fees, but not jail time. Just weeks after she was charged, another woman in Seattle said she was raped at home by an assailant who had tied her up and photographed her.
In 2011, Colorado detectives Stacy Galbraith and Edna Hendershot, officers from different departments in different cities, were working together to catch a serial rapist terrorizing women, completely unaware that Mary existed.
And just like the detectives, who chased the rapist separately before joining forces, Miller and Armstrong first reported the story before collaborating. Rather than write contradictory texts, the two journalists have teamed up.
"This is not the kind of story where you anticipate the competition," Armstrong told Longform in 2016. "It was a sexual assault that occurred in 2008, and [Miller] and I'm both working on this story seven years later. The chances of this happening are quite long. "
Beth Dubber / Netflix
Armstrong and Miller recounted the story in part by interviewing almost everyone involved – Mary, her former foster parents, Colorado detectives who solved the case and one of Washington's police officers who looted the case. missed, and the rapist. In a follow-up article describing the process by which they reported the story, reporters wrote that they had filed applications for registration of thousands of pages of documents from police and offices prosecutors in Washington and Colorado:
The files obtained through these requests included investigative reports filed by detectives in Lynnwood and elsewhere; photos of crime scenes and surveillance images collected by various law enforcement agencies; the two case studies of how the Lynnwood Police handled the investigation of Marie's rape report.
"Other news stories included extracting transcripts of television reports from the time that Mary was raped and then charged," Miller writes, "with court transcripts prepared from the conviction of the accused." O 'Leary in Colorado; review grant documents for Project Ladder; and exploit criminal justice literature to gain expert advice on how rape investigations should be conducted. conducted. "
In a decision that echoed in the Netflix series, the journalists decided not to focus the story on the rapist, Marc O'Leary. "There are a lot of details about his background, his life and what he's done.If you were writing a novel about the real crime, you'd put all this in," Miller said during the interview of Longform. "But we jointly decided that this story was not about [O’Leary]it was the police and their investigation and Mary. "
The reporters have adapted the story into audio for an episode of This American life and wrote a book on the case called, A false report: a true story of rape in Americaa. (A later edition has been renamed, Incredible: the story of the ceaseless search for truth by two detectives.)
And the reporters who reported on the national news are still in contact with Marie who, in 2014, filed a lawsuit against the city of Lynnwood for $ 150,000.
"She did not want to let this experience limit her in the way she lived the rest of her life," Miller said in an interview with NPR. "These days, she is a long-distance truck driver driving an 18-wheeler across the country, she and I talk a lot, and it seems like every time I talk to her, she's in a state. She's strong, and she's resilient. "
"I do not want to crack in the corner," said Marie herself at ProPublica in early September. "I did not want it to spoil the rest of my life, I did not want to give him satisfaction, I would not let him destroy me."
[ad_2]
Source link