By the early 1970s, rape had reached epidemic proportions in Chicago, with an estimated 16,000 people sexually assaulted in the metropolitan area. But less than a tenth of the cases were ever reported to the police and few of the perpetrators were ever caught.
Additionally, the Chicago Police Department’s training manual took a dim view of the victims themselves.
“Many rape complaints are not legitimate,” the manual said. “It is unfortunate that many women will claim that they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with one eye.”
Basically, the police considered women who claimed sexual assault to be liars or prostitutes.
Enter Martha “Marty” Goddard, a 30-year-old visionary concerned that sex predators were escaping justice for their crimes. A divorcee with cropped blonde hair and hazel glasses who used the moniker Marty because she liked to hide behind a man’s name, Goddard would go on to create what is known today as the first standardized rape kit.
It included the appropriate forensic tools – swabs, vials, combs to collect hair and fibers, glass slides for microscope study, sterile fingernails, bags for the victim’s clothing, instructions for collecting evidence, envelopes to protect the evidence, along with cards informing victims where to seek counseling and medical services — and forms for doctors and police officers handling each case.
Goddard’s inspiring story, one that would have a shockingly tragic end, is compellingly detailed for the first time in journalist Pagan Kennedy’s page about the woman who sparked a feminist revolution in forensics.
“Goddard would go on to lead a campaign to treat sexual assault as a crime rather than a feminine trick,” Kennedy writes in The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story (Vintage). “Kit is one of the most powerful tools ever invented to bring criminals to justice.”
“Sexual assault forensics began as a system for men to decide how they felt about the victim – whether she deserved to be considered a ‘victim’ at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or determining what had actually happened.”
The author called it, “A kind of kabuki theater of scientific justice.”
Goddard had seen firsthand the horrors of sexual abuse when she volunteered to work on a crisis hotline counseling runaway teenage girls who were pregnant, homeless or homicidal. Many had run away from their homes often enduring sexual abuse from parents, relatives, gym trainers and neighborhood boys.
Goddard had realized that “irrefutable scientific evidence” from a crime lab was required to bring sex offenders to justice. Police departments had disposed of evidence when it suited them—even an assault, Goddard found, by a Catholic bishop on a child.
She soon learned that hospitals lacked forensic tools to prove rape, doctors and nurses didn’t know how to collect evidence, and that her idea of a rape device was a necessary tool.
Persisting, Goddard was appointed by Illinois State Attorney Bernard Carey to a citizen advisory panel on rape to investigate failings in the police department and suggest reforms.
But Goddard was quickly advised that to succeed in her mission to win over the lab boys who decided on forensic procedures, she needed male support. As it turned out, that man was Sgt. Louis Vitullo, a police scientist who headed the microscope unit in the Chicago Police Department’s crime lab. But he initially dismissed the rape kit concept, calling it crazy.
However, having second thoughts, he invited Goddard back to see a prototype of the kit she had actually described – but the ambitious and cunning Vitullo now claimed himself as the inventor. Goddard’s rape kit would be presented as a collaboration between the police department and the state attorney’s office – to no credit to Goddard.
If she had taken credit, the author explained, it would have exposed the long-term failings of the police department.
The outspoken Goddard was now seen as a threat and was pursued by a secret police unit called the Red Squad.
As Kennedy states, “The Chicago Police Department [in the 1970s] it was rotten with thugs, white supremacists, extortionists, blackmailers and sadists – and “electricalized, framed, spied on and burned people they saw as a threat”.
With her lack of a scientific or medical background, it was claimed, Goddard’s rape case could never have been produced under her name. And as the author claims, Goddard had to play ball with the corrupt police department. Meanwhile, hospitals still didn’t know how to handle the kits, and moreover, it was expensive to run the test results through a crime lab.
After Vitullo’s death, Goddard turned to an unexpected benefactor, nude center creator Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner and his progressive philanthropic Playboy Foundation. Hefner provided $10,000 in cash to initiate a rape scheme.
Meanwhile, Goddard was hired as an executive at the Wieboldt Foundation, which funded progressive causes. She was able to meet with victims’ groups and hospital leaders to propose the use of rape kits to study DNA forensics. With all the evidence, why was there no evidence that a sexual assault had occurred, Goddard asked. And why were the women asked if they liked sex?
Graphic designers created new packaging and elderly women assembled the first kits that were distributed to about two dozen hospitals in Chicago—”the first program of its kind in the country,” a Chicago newspaper reported at the time.
The New York Times called the rape device a “powerful new weapon in punishing rapists.” And Kennedy writes, “Mrs. Goddard had invented not only the kit, but a new way of thinking about the prosecution of rape. Now, when a victim testified, she no longer did so alone. The set itself became a character in the trials – and a witness”.
Naturally, the author tried to interview this creative visionary. But what he discovered trying to find it was shocking.
Kennedy learned that Goddard himself was a victim of sexual violence. She had been kidnapped, brutally raped and sodomized while on vacation in Hawaii in the late 1970s. Infected with herpes, she turned to alcohol to numb the pain of chronic breakouts, exhaustion and bladder infections. And then she disappeared.
A detective tracked him down to a mobile home park in Arizona and then to an apartment building in Phoenix before the heartbreaking news that Goddard had died in 2015 at the age of 74.
There was no obituary, no funeral notice — just a request that her ashes be blown to the winds in Sedona, Ariz.
She had become a recluse living out her last days in a mobile home and cutting up newspapers.
Goddard’s rape kits were not initially successful in law enforcement circles. Detroit police had long been dumping rape evidence in abandoned parking garages, and an estimated 400,000 unproven rape kits were discovered across the country.
However, in 2015, the US Department of Justice appropriated $45 million to deal with the backlog.
While the author, sexually assaulted in her early twenties by two men who were never caught, writes:
“Persistently, Marty and her allies spread a simple message: rape was a crime and victims deserved respect. And across the country, young women like me felt the echo of her work.”
Sexual assault was no longer an unsolvable crime.
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Image Source : nypost.com