The voice on the 911 tape sounds calm, maybe even
weary. It’s 1:55 in the morning, and a woman is asking for a police
officer to come to her apartment building to check on “a whole bunch
of black guys” at her door. “They keep knocking and walking
away,” she says.
The conversation is brief, with no tangible urgency.
The woman indicates she knows these guys “through a friend.”
She doesn’t mention being scared, never says, “Please
hurry.” She certainly never reveals that the real reason she’s
calling is that two of these men have just brutally raped her.
But her placid tone is a façade. Only 18 years
old, she’s alone in her apartment and so terrified that she has
dialed 911 as a three-way call to keep the one friend she can rouse at this
hour of the night — a guy she “met” a week earlier on the
Internet — on the phone to give her silent moral support.
He’s still on the line with her as she watches
a Springfield police cruiser pull into her parking lot. She positions
herself in the front window of her apartment, only to be blinded by the
spotlight waved by the officer in the car. Realizing that she must not have
been seen, she goes out her front door and stands on the balcony,
frantically waving her arms at the cop.
The officer either doesn’t see her or chooses
to ignore her distress signals. Within 10 minutes, the squad car pulls
away.
And over the course of the next three years, that
police officer — Renatta Frazier — completely overshadows the
rape case. It was Frazier’s story, not the rape, that occupied the
attention of the city of Springfield from January 2002, when the daily
newspaper kicked off a media frenzy with a report that Frazier could have
prevented the rape; through August of that same year, when Frazier resigned
from the Springfield Police Department; through October, when Illinois Times discovered
that the previous accounts were false; and finally, through April 2004,
when the city paid Frazier and her attorney almost $1 million to settle her
lawsuit.
All but forgotten in the wake of this turmoil was the
woman with the counterfeit calm on the 911 tape. Over the years, as her
intimate tragedy took a weird detour into a case about race discrimination
in the Springfield Police Department, the woman found no motivation to make
her voice heard.
That night, for myriad reasons, she couldn’t
bring herself to tell the dispatcher, “I’ve been raped.”
Now, however, she’s ready to use the phrase.
“I was raped by those guys, I was raped by the
police department, I was raped again by the state’s attorney’s
office,” she says. “And then I was raped by [Frazier and her
supporters] using my case to win a huge settlement.”
It’s hard to stereotype a person who has
been purposely rendered anonymous, but Jane Doe — as she wants to be
called, citing a concern for her own safety — manages to be
surprisingly nerdy.
She wears glasses, no makeup, and minimal jewelry.
Her wardrobe and hairstyle emphasize practicality. She’s smart,
articulate, polite, and funny. She is mature for her age, but then again,
she’s just 21.
She’s proud of herself for surviving the rape
and its aftermath and especially proud to have recovered enough to talk
about it. Still, she arranges for an interview that lasts several days to
be conducted in the presence of her mother.
What happened to Jane in the early hours of Oct. 31,
2001, was the kind of horrific landmark that splits a person’s life
into “before” and “after.” Both mother and daughter
say that the Jane who existed before the rape was “a regular
teenager,” albeit a rather independent one.
She had just graduated from high school in one of
Springfield’s bedroom communities, where she was a member of the
National Honor Society and an officer in several extracurricular-activity
groups — “a model student,” her mother says. Unlike her
siblings, whose grades tended to fall if they took a part-time job, Jane
could work full-time and keep making straight A’s. “She needed
that to stay busy,” her mom says.
She suffered the usual adolescent yen to be part of
the popular clique, but for Jane, the ache was exacerbated by her position
as the middle child in a family full of jocks and cheerleaders. She
doesn’t seem bitter about it now, but she prefers the unvarnished
truth to her mother’s glossy recollections.
“She didn’t give herself a lot of credit
for the amount of people who looked up to her. She wasn’t in that
clique with those popular jocks per se, but there were people who thought
she was pretty special,” Mom says, tossing in a comment about
Jane’s being overweight and having problems getting dates. “She
wasn’t the homecoming queen, but so what? She had other things going
for her, and I never could get her to see that.”
“You’re tripping, Mom,” Jane
chuckles. “I didn’t have anybody who thought I was
‘special’ or whatever when I was in school. Think about all the
friends who were my age, walking all over me.”
It wasn’t just school; Jane felt unpopular with
her own family. They didn’t attend her sporting events and caught her
band performances only because they were already at the game to watch her
siblings play on the field or lead cheers. “Everybody cared about
everybody else in the family except me,” she says. “I was
independent. They made me independent.”
She says the one person she really wanted to please
was her dad, a Springfield police officer who had divorced her mother when
Jane was in grade school. But he was tough to impress.
“I felt like I was never good enough for
him,” she says.
Nevertheless, she moved in with him for her final
year of high school, after the tension between her sister and her mother
became too much of a distraction. She stayed with her dad until her senior
year was almost over, then moved in with a girlfriend’s family. Then,
in August 2001, Jane and the girl rented an apartment together in the Lake
Victoria neighborhood.
They didn’t realize it was a high-crime area
until it was too late. Of course, Jane’s police-officer dad would
have told her, if she had asked.
“But I wasn’t speaking to my father at
that point in time, so it didn’t matter what he thought about
it,” she says.
And her mom sighs: “Exactly.”
Jane’s move away from her family
wasn’t just a physical departure; it was also a move toward
independence and a chance to discover her own identity.
Like many young people, she approached this mission
through a series of impromptu experiments: How much should I drink? How
does it feel to get high? How wide should I draw my social circle? How
promiscuous do I want to be? Her research had just begun.
She found herself falling in love with a co-worker
who happened to be black. This attraction contradicted not only her
upbringing but also her own instincts.
“I knew my family was totally against blacks
and whites dating. I was totally against it,” she says. “A week
before I started dating [my boyfriend], I thought it was the most
disgusting thing I’d ever heard of in my life.”
But “G,” as Jane calls him, made her feel
special. He flirted with her, smiled at her a lot, and told their friends
that he thought she was beautiful. “And the boyfriend I had before
that told me I was fat every day that I was with him,” Jane says.
She also noticed herself drinking more than before,
thanks to friends who were old enough to buy beer legally. But she figures
that would’ve happened even if she had stayed at home.
“I came from a small town, so drinking was
pretty much what small-town people do, to be completely honest. So, yeah, I
would’ve been around drinking whether I was hanging around those
people or not,” Jane says.
However, on at least one occasion in August, she got
so drunk that she doesn’t remember what happened and thinks she
passed out. G later told police that on that night, he invited friends into
the bedroom while he was having intercourse with Jane and that she
performed oral sex on them. Jane doesn’t believe that happened, but
she’s not sure.
“I’m not ruling it out, because it
could’ve possibly happened,” she says, “but I don’t
think it did.”
A few months later, she tried marijuana for the first
time, courtesy of one of her restaurant co-workers, but she denies trying
any harder drugs. In fact, she says, she broke up with G sometime in
August, when she reached into his pocket and found crack cocaine. They
didn’t socialize again, she says, until Oct. 30, the night she was
raped.
G had called earlier that week to suggest
getting together, and on that night, he came over to her apartment. They
had sex and then went to a party together, after which Jane dropped him off
at his house and drove back to her apartment, arriving around 11 p.m.
Her roommate was out of town, so Jane was alone. She
had dinner, made a phone call, and went to bed. The next thing she knew,
she heard knocking at the door.
Through the peephole, she saw a screwdriver. It was
her favorite screwdriver — one with interchangeable bits — and
she had loaned it earlier that day to a neighbor named Ace, who needed it
to assemble his new waterbed. When she opened the door, the man she thought
was Ace asked to use the phone and said that his buddy — a taller,
heavier man — needed to use the restroom. Jane said sure and went
back to bed, telling them to lock the door on the way out.
Instead, they assaulted her. In the account she gave
police hours later, Jane described how the men used her long hair to yank
her out of bed and onto to the floor, then took turns raping her. The
taller man muttered an apology, but Ace grew increasingly hostile, at one
point using her phone to call someone to “come hit this,”
saying, “We got to punish this bitch.” When the taller man
left, Jane pushed Ace out the door and locked it with the deadbolt and a
safety bar.
Immediately she got online and sent a message to a
male friend in Tennessee to call her. He told her to call the police. But
Jane didn’t want her father to find out what had just happened to
her. She dialed 911 only after her attackers returned to knock on her door
a second time.
How the responding officer — Renatta Frazier
— spent almost 10 minutes waving a spotlight from the parking lot
without seeing Jane remains a mystery (Frazier declined to comment for this
story). More than once, in the months after the rape, Jane returned to the
apartment building at night and tried shining her headlights toward the
window. “I can see everything all the way back to the dining
room,” Jane says.
So she has her own theory about why Frazier never
knocked on her door. “I think she did see me and that she was too
lazy to get out of her car,” Jane says. “I mean, there is no
way in hell that she did not see me.”
When the police car drove away, Jane took a bath,
still sobbing to her Tennessee friend on the phone. Her calico cat crawled
into the tub to comfort her, then followed Jane to the bedroom and snuggled
under the covers with her. They slept until the phone rang about 6:45 a.m.
It was Jane’s roommate, calling from another
time zone. As soon as Jane heard her friend’s voice, she became
hysterical and told her about the assault. Her roommate immediately phoned
an aunt, who called 911 and headed directly to the apartment, arriving
moments before police.
The report taken by the officers that morning
mentions that Jane had called police earlier and noted that a cop had
circled the parking lot without contacting Jane. The report clearly states
that the rape had been committed before Jane ever called 911; nothing about
the timeline detailed in this document is fuzzy. Yet somehow, for reasons
no one has ever explained, word went out first to the department and then
to the media that Frazier could have prevented the rape.
Perhaps, at the moment it was first uttered, it
seemed like a harmless fib. But it festered and grew until it claimed
Frazier’s career. When the lie was revealed, public outcry forced
several police and city executives to retire. In all the commotion, Jane
felt forgotten.
“Everybody’s making Renatta Frazier look
like the victim here, and she’s not the victim,” Jane says.
“I am.”
The first story connecting Jane’s rape and
Renatta Frazier was published Jan. 4, 2002, on the front page of the State Journal-Register. Jane
says that it pushed her over the edge.
“I went in the bathroom, locked the door, broke
open a razor, and slit my wrists,” she says.
It wasn’t just the story; the story was simply
another straw. As if dealing with the rape weren’t enough —
“It’s not something they teach you in health class,” Jane
says — she found herself so utterly bereft of support that she can
almost laugh about it now.
“After the rape, they put me on Zoloft, and it
made me crazy,” she says. “I went from being mad at the world
to wanting to kill myself.” Several times, she parked her car on the
railroad tracks in the hope of being hit by a train; each time, her phone
rang and a friend talked her into driving forward. Almost daily, she says,
she held a knife to her wrist but lacked the courage to cut herself. The
incident with the razor was as close as she came, and even that
didn’t require medical attention.
But there were other signs of her despair. In the
first year after the rape, Jane moved seven times, each time farther from
her family. Jane says they seemed intent on using the rape to prove
that she never should’ve been living on the East Side in the first
place.
“Everybody told me if I hadn’t been
hanging out with those people, I wouldn’t have been raped. And maybe
they didn’t say, ‘It was your fault,’ but the way they
were putting it, it made me feel like it was my fault,” Jane says.
Their strategy backfired. Instead of listening to her
parents, Jane says, “I literally dropped out of my family’s
life.” Gravitating toward the wildest crowd she could find, her
downward spiral soon landed her in jail after she got into a fistfight with
a roommate she believed had stolen her money. Jane’s next stop was a
homeless shelter.
“I think most people have to hit rock bottom
before they can start going up again,” she says.
She stayed about two months at Helping Hands. While
there, she swore off alcohol and drugs. She found a new job and got help
renting an apartment. She attended counseling sessions at Prairie Center
Against Sexual Assault. She began dating “J,” a guy she met at
a rave, and says he was a positive influence on her.
“I was still making wrong decisions when it
came to friends,” she says, “but J would always tell me,
‘I don’t know why you’re hanging out with these people,
you could do so much better.’ ”
In hindsight, Jane wishes that she had made
different choices — not about living in Lake Victoria or hanging out
with “those people” but about insisting that her file be kept
closed. She made the request within hours of the rape, still fearful of her
father’s interference, but she now says he could have ensured that
her case was handled properly. Instead, she believes, the investigation was
botched.
The morning after the rape, Jane sat in an SPD
detective’s office and thumbed through mug books looking for her
attackers. She recalls leafing past several familiar faces, all friends of
G’s, until she found the guy she thought was Ace. She told the
detective where Ace lived — in an apartment close to hers — and
sure enough, Ace gave a statement admitting that he had borrowed
Jane’s screwdriver and returned it to her late on the night of Oct.
30.
Furthermore, Ace mentioned that his cousin Shawn
Greene had helped him assemble his waterbed and may have gone with him to
return the screwdriver. Both men denied having sexual relations with Jane,
and they submitted DNA samples.
A few weeks later, Jane realized that she had picked
out the right face but the wrong name. The man in the mug book wasn’t
Ace, but it was someone Ace knew, and knew well enough to have given her
screwdriver to, Jane says. But because she had originally insisted that Ace
was the rapist — and because Ace confirmed her story about the
screwdriver — the detective never interviewed the man she picked out
in the mug book.
When the results of the DNA testing came in, there
was evidence implicating Greene — but no one else — in the
crime. Jane attended Greene’s plea hearing expecting to hear him
testify about the identity of the other rapist, but he did not. Instead, he
simply pleaded guilty and is now serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence
for sexual assault.
Less than two months after Greene’s
incarceration, focus shifted to Renatta Frazier. On the one-year
anniversary of the rape, an Illinois Times investigation revealed not only the true timeline of
events but also evidence of SPD’s hostile attitude toward the rookie
officer. At a special City Council meeting called in response to the
revelation, then-Mayor Karen Hasara decided to turn over to the media the
internal-affairs files on Frazier. Jane’s detailed rape report
— the one she had requested be sealed — was among those
documents.
Jane felt violated all over again.
“Nobody cared about me at all,” she says.
“I felt like they were just walking all over me.”
After that, Jane’s case was hopelessly
subsumed by the Frazier’s story, and every article and broadcast was
like picking a scab.
“It was like I couldn’t get away from it.
I couldn’t heal because they weren’t letting me,” Jane
says. “I would read the paper and just burst into tears — like,
why does the public care? Why does this have to be so huge? Why does my
sexual assault have to turn into the case of the century?”
As recently as last month, Frazier was featured in
local media, publicizing the release of her book. Titled The Enemy in Blue, the book ends on
a high note, with Frazier receiving a settlement amounting to more than
$800,000 delivered with a verbal apology and a hug from Mayor Tim Davlin.
Jane, on the other hand, has had no such happy
ending.
“I want to basically feel the same way that
[Frazier] does right now — she has closure, and I don’t,”
Jane says.
Last month, Jane filed a lawsuit against Frazier,
attorney Courtney Cox, and Rickey Davis, an SPD lieutenant who is a Frazier
supporter and a plaintiff in another race-discrimination lawsuit against
the city. Jane’s attorney Stephen Hedinger alleged in his complaint
that Frazier, Cox, and Davis defamed Jane in their efforts to settle their
own lawsuits. Through their attorney, they have denied those allegations.
Much of Jane’s complaint is based on a
November 2003 encounter with Cox and Davis. She was at home alone when
Cox’s assistant, Judy Carson, rang her doorbell. Carson introduced
herself and asked whether Jane would be willing to discuss the Frazier
case, and Jane agreed. But as she opened her door, Cox and Davis appeared
and joined Carson. Jane says that their questions were so upsetting, she
even tried telephoning her father for help.
“Everything they asked me, they were pointing
me toward saying that the rape never happened,” Jane says. Instead,
they wanted her to admit that she had consented to have sex with Greene.
She refused.
Months later, Cox laid out a similar scenario in an
eight-part series aired on WICS (Channel 20) during the February sweeps
period. The series also featured protracted interviews with Frazier and
with Greene, who proclaimed his innocence from the Graham Correctional
Center. In her book, Frazier credits the WICS series with pressuring the
city of Springfield into settling her lawsuit.
To Jane, that admission links Frazier’s
settlement directly to the surprise visit from Cox. Even though Frazier
wasn’t present, Jane holds her responsible. “She’s
involved because she hired Courtney Cox,” Jane says.
And Jane’s mother agrees: “It’s
kind of hard to feel sorry for [Frazier] from our point of view.”
As tough as it was for her to watch the series, Jane
says that it gave her a glimmer of hope because Greene appeared on camera
backing up her belief that the man in the mug book — the man she
assumed was Ace, the man Channel 20 dubbed “Suspect B” —
was the one who had been especially brutal during the rape.
“When I heard Shawn saying that, it made me
think, ‘OK, I’m not crazy,’ ” Jane says.
Last week, Hedinger filed another civil suit on
Jane’s behalf, this time against Greene, in an effort to compel him
to repeat the account he gave Channel 20 under oath. If that suit succeeds,
Hedinger hopes to convince the state’s attorney to file charges
against Suspect B.
Jane faces an uphill battle if she wants to get the
rape investigation reopened. The state’s attorney’s office has
been criticized for not prosecuting sexual-assault cases more aggressively.
And in September, Greene formally recanted his guilty plea by filing a
postconviction petition alleging that he received ineffective
representation from Sangamon County Chief Public Defender Brian Otwell.
Jane and Frazier have never met, but if they did,
they might be surprised to discover how much they have in common. Both are
strong-willed, rebellious souls who see no virtue in conforming. Both have
experienced homelessness and severe depression, and both attribute their
survival to their Christian faith. Both have a certain disdain for the
Springfield Police Department.
And both have now achieved some measure of stability,
although at differing magnitudes. Frazier took her cash settlement and
moved her family to a new home in Georgia. Jane, on the other hand, lives
in an apartment on the near West Side of Springfield with J, who is now her
fiancé, and their 4-month-old daughter.
“I didn’t have $800,000 to pick myself
back up. I had to pick myself back up from nothing,” Jane says.
“I have what I have today because I worked for it.”
The baby, Jane says, was a complete surprise, because
doctors had told her she would be unable to have children as a result of
medical complications associated with the rape.
“I think I was put here on the planet to be a
mom. I have never been happier in my life [than] since the day she was
born,” Jane says. “She has made everything go away, all the bad
in the world.”
Her family’s acceptance of this biracial baby
has helped mend Jane’s relationship with them all, especially her
mother, who can’t help but dote on her first grandchild.
But an even bigger change, Jane says, is her sense of
self-worth, won in her survival of the rape. “I’ve been able to
rekindle relationships with my family because I have higher
self-esteem,” she says. “The rape and the Renatta Frazier case,
too — it’s all in one, whether I want it to be or not —
has made me a stronger person.”
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2005.
