KCPD detective tells rape victim who says she’s not OK, ‘Well you’re alive, right?’
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot from rape victims about how retraumatized they’ve been by the police officers who took their reports. By cops who were insulting, cops who were indifferent, cops who not only sympathized with the accused but in one case slapped handcuffs on the victim instead of the perp.
Yet I’d never actually seen a police interview for myself until Heather Woodward recently sent me a copy of the Kansas City Police Department video of her April 26, 2019, meeting with Detective Zac Usher of the sex crimes unit.
Every rapist should have to watch a tape like this one on an endless loop, because it’s excruciating and because I’m not sure they always realize the damage they’ve done. But the rest of us can learn from it, too — for starters, what not to say to a victim.
When Usher tells Woodward he’s glad she’s doing better now, for instance, she says no, she isn’t. His rejoinder? “Well you’re alive, right?” By that standard, yes, all of us are doing better than we might be.
“Playing devil’s advocate,” he says, he asks her to tell him why a court would believe her: “This is what the defense attorneys are going to do. … This is our justice system.”
And yes, it is. Just watching the interview is difficult because Woodward is in so much pain, looking away, sometimes focusing on the wall as she speaks, and laughing when things get too intense, as if trying to put the cushion of a laugh track between herself and her own not at all funny story. But it’s also hard because Usher seems so uncomfortable.
‘Jesus, this is painful.’
“He’s not sure he believes her,” says Jackson County District Attorney Jean Peters Baker, who agreed to watch the video with me and share her thoughts on it.
When Usher says, “Well you’re alive, right?” Baker shakes her head. “So are you, buddy.”
When he says he’s going to play ‘devil’s advocate,’ she shouts, “No! Don’t!”
“Jesus, this is painful,” Baker says as the interview goes on and on. “He doesn’t believe her and thinks if he keeps going, he’ll crack a hole in her story. He’s saying, ‘Convince me you’re not a nut.’ This is almost like a teaching session of all of the perils of the criminal justice system.”
Why, Usher asks Woodward, did she wait so long to report? “I guess because when you’ve been silenced as long as I have, and in the ways that I have, what is talking about it going to do? It’s going to be a situation where somebody says to me, ‘Why didn’t you fight back? Why did you go to his house?’ And then, if he’s found not guilty, he will have a legal argument that in fact he didn’t rape me.”
She also had a mountain of self-blame to climb. “And if I can’t protect even my own self from me, hearing that from somebody else is unbearable.”
“So you’re afraid you’re not going to be believed?” Usher asks her.
“Yeah, I guess so, but I’m willing to do that now,” says Woodward, a nurse and mother of three. “I’ve been reading and learning, and I feel prepared in a way I never was before to say this is not OK and that my silence not only hurts me, but it hurts all of my sisters. I want to fight.”
When Usher says, “You’re done with not fighting?” she hears that as a reproach. As in next time, do better, OK?
Too few questions about the crime
Woodward was at police headquarters that day to finally put on the record that 15 years earlier, a man she’d once been involved with had raped her. She’d asked to talk to him about a painful part of her past. Had wanted to talk to him as someone who’d known her when she was at a low point over the abuse she’d suffered as a child.
Usher nods and writes down what she says. He isn’t, you can see on the video, trying to intimidate her or get rid of her. He does say he’s sorry this happened to her. At least to me, he seems to be reaching for the right thing to say. But because he doesn’t seem to know what that might be, he winds up making her feel worse anyway. And unintentionally or not, winds up being part of the reason that even now, less than 1% of rapes result in a felony conviction.
Baker says Usher isn’t asking nearly enough about the actual crime, that “he’s a little out of his element.” That he’s letting Woodward wander all over the place, in ways that would have compromised her case later, if there had been any “later.”
Everything she’s telling him, about other rapes in her past, going back to her childhood, is supplied to the accused and would have been used against her if the case had gone to court.
It not only didn’t but couldn’t have, at least in part according to Baker because Usher so mishandled the interview: “Based on that interview, no way we’d file that.”
Instead of starting by playing “devil’s advocate,” Baker wishes he had started with the presumption that “I get to fight for her.” Because he didn’t, “now I don’t. It’s too late.”
“People like her do get raped over and over,” Baker said. Former child victims, she means. “Molestation victims are marginalized, so they’re good picks. If you’re someone who’s been a victim a lot, you don’t fight back.”
Previous attacks aren’t supposed to be relevant in court. And we never ask, Baker says, “Were you burglarized before? Ohhh, this is your second burglary? What’s wrong with your house?”
Watching this interview, Baker said, she can’t help but worry about all of the others who were victimized as children decades ago and who she’s sent over to the Kansas City Police Department to give a statement. “I hope they got treated better.”
It’s never too late to report, Baker said, for one thing to get it on the record for other victims, who might want to bring an advocate with them to an interview. “Even short of prosecution, there’s a reason you do this.” But inadvertently or not, Usher took that satisfaction from Woodward, too: “She didn’t get her moment.”
Couldn’t file complaint about detective
In his later interview with Usher, the man Woodward accused said yeah, they did have sex that day, but it was completely consensual. He’s in the payday loan business, and Usher’s report notes that he thinks “she may have jokingly stated no way we shouldn’t be doing this,” since both were involved with other people at the time. But she wasn’t serious about that, he told Usher.
He “continued stating if Heather had said ‘no’ or ‘get off of me’ or anything like that, he would have stopped.” He also told Usher, “I think we fooled around one time after” the day she says he raped her. And then, he said, they talked and laughed like the longtime former lovers they were.
Woodward says she knows they were never in contact of any kind again after he raped her, because she was planning to give him hell if he ever called her again, and he never did.
Not only was he “not that kind of person,” the accused man told Usher, but neither was she: “If someone like Heather was raped, they would go to police on the day it happened.”
Usher noted that he “appeared nervous throughout the interview” and “stated several times how shocked he was.” He didn’t respond to my messages looking for comment for this column.
Usher didn’t, either. He forwarded my request to talk to him to a Kansas City Police Department public information officer, who said they don’t talk about open investigations, which this unfortunately is not.
Woodward tried to file a complaint about Usher but got a letter back that said no, she couldn’t do that. Because, wait for it, she’d waited too long before speaking up.
When I called her to relay that Baker does believe her, and though it doesn’t change the disposition of the case, wanted her address so she could send her some flowers, Woodward burst into tears.
“That’s the nicest thing the system has ever done for me,” she said. On what happened to be her 48th birthday, just that acknowledgment felt like the most unexpected possible gift.
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
