Authors: Stephen G. Michaud,Roy Hazelwood
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
It was a vulgar spectacle played out among the tired old river towns of the lower Hudson Valley, a notorious, cynical, race-baiting hoax sparked by a troubled teen’s false—and confused—accusations of kidnap and rape.
Under a pale autumn sun early on November 24, 1987—the Tuesday before Thanksgiving—fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley of Wappinger Falls, New York, left her home, ostensibly headed for school. Instead, Brawley took a bus thirty miles west across the Hudson to see a former boyfriend, Todd Buxton, then resident in the Orange County Jail in the city of Goshen, New York.
After visiting the young man, she boarded an eastbound bus in the company of Buxton’s mother, Geneva, and rode twenty miles to Newburgh, where Geneva Buxton lived.
The next bus back across the Hudson from Newburgh to Wappinger Falls departed at six, but Tawana Brawley was reluctant to board it.
She told Mrs. Buxton she was having trouble at home with Ralph King, her mother’s companion. He’d recently grounded her, she said, for staying out until five in the morning.
King kept going “on and on” about it, and “wouldn’t let go” of the matter, Brawley complained.
This was not an isolated incident in the King-Brawley household.
Glenda Brawley, thirty-one, had on numerous occasions disciplined her daughter for running away or spending the night with boys. “And there were numerous reports of fights specifically between Mr. King and Miss Brawley,”
The New York Times
later reported. “When [Tawana] was arrested on shoplifting charges the previous May, the police had to intervene to prevent Mr. King from beating her at the police station.”
Ralph King’s personal history of violence predated his acquaintance with Glenda Brawley. In 1969, King was accused of stabbing his then-wife multiple times. While awaiting trial for the assault, King shot her to death. He spent seven years in prison for the crimes.
The grand jury impaneled to take testimony in the Brawley case would hear abundant testimony of what the
Times
called “strains” between Tawana and King.
“One witness said Mr. King ‘would watch her exercise’ and talked about the girl ‘in a real sexual way,’ sometimes describing her as ‘a fine fox,’ ” the paper reported. “Another witness said Miss Brawley referred to Mr. King as ‘a filthy pervert.’ ”
At about 8:00 p.m. on the twenty-fourth, Tawana Brawley finally did board a bus in Newburgh. She asked the driver, with whom she was acquainted, to drop her in Wappinger Falls. He explained that the town was not on his route at that hour. The best he could do was nearby Wappinger.
As it happened, Tawana was familiar with Wappinger. Her family had lived in the former mill town until earlier that month, when they were evicted from their town house at the Pavilion Condominiums, 19A Carnaby Street. Tawana still had a key to the vacated unit.
The truth of what else happened to Tawana Brawley on
the night of the twenty-fourth may never be publicly known. She declined to appear before the grand jury, which was left to piece together a summary of her account from what she told authorities over the course of three brief interviews.
According to the summary, the last reliable report of Brawley’s whereabouts on the night of the twenty-fourth was as she stepped down from the bus in front of a Mobil station in Wappinger.
Then, according to the grand jury’s summary of the teenager’s version of events, “a dark, four-door car with two men inside approached, and a white man wearing a black jacket with a silver badge hit her, pulled her by the hair into the back seat and got into the back seat himself.
“Ms. Brawley was lying down on the seat and did not see what the driver looked like. She recalled being at a place where there were three men dressed in dark clothes, but did not know where she was, although she thought she was in the woods. She was struck again on the head by the man who had previously hit her. One of the men was tall with blond hair and a mustache. He was also wearing a shoulder holster. She recalled feeling cold. The men urinated on her and in her mouth. Ms. Brawley had no recollection of what happened after that, nor of what happened to her on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday.”
The grand jury noted it was never clear from Tawana Brawley’s few contacts with authorities, or from comments attributed to her by relatives and other witnesses, exactly what sort of sexual assaults she claimed to have suffered. At various times she seemed both to allege and to deny that she had been vaginally raped and forced to fellate her assailants. She never could locate for police the woods where the alleged assaults took place.
There was considerable physical evidence that connected Tawana Brawley to the interior of her family’s deserted condominium for the period November 25-28, the days for which she claimed no memory. The heat had been turned on
in the apartment. The denim jacket she was wearing November 24 was discovered in the apartment washing machine. Fibers indistinguishable from those of the apartment carpet were found on her person. An insulating material called Hollofil, recovered from combings of her pubic hair, matched the Hollofil found in a pair of white boots inside the apartment.
Moreover, between November 26 and November 28, neighbors reported they periodically saw a young woman answering Tawana Brawley’s description in and around the Pavilion complex.
Brawley’s family apparently began searching for her on the night of the twenty-fourth, although she was not officially reported missing for another four days. Sometime that evening, a black female identifying herself as Brawley’s aunt appeared at the Newburgh Police Department to report her niece had run away. She said Tawana was believed to be in Newburgh. On the twenty-seventh, Friday, another member of the family personally accused Todd Buxton’s sister of kidnapping Tawana.
At approximately 2:00 p.m. on Saturday the twenty-eighth, after visiting the Pavilion apartments on what she said was an errand to pick up the family mail, Glenda Brawley drove to the Wappinger Falls Police Department to file a missing person report on her daughter.
Asked by a desk officer why she waited four days, Glenda Brawley said that she worked nights, and did not have a car.
According to the grand jury report, about the same time Glenda Brawley was seen at the Pavilion complex that Saturday, an unnamed resident looked out her sliding glass door “and observed Tawana Brawley in a squatting position . . . a few feet from her family’s former apartment at 19A. There was no one else in the area.
“According to this witness, Miss Brawley, after looking around for a couple seconds, stepped into a large plastic garbage bag and pulled it up to her neck. She remained stationary
for another couple of seconds and continued to look around. She then hopped two times and lay down on the swampy ground beneath an air conditioner. . . . When she did not move, the neighbor called the sheriff.”
The
Times
reported that Eric Thurston, the responding Dutchess County sheriff’s deputy, found Brawley “smeared with feces and seemingly dazed; her jeans were scorched and torn, and racial slurs, including ‘Nigger’ and ‘KKK’ had been written on her body.”
Forensic tests would trace the excrement to a neighborhood collie named Remi, who was also the source of the feces discovered within a pair of denim pants found inside apartment 19A. Small wads of Hollofil were found in Brawley’s nose and ears, an apparent attempt to protect the orifices from the dog droppings.
At about the time Glenda Brawley was reporting her missing, Tawana Brawley was being taken by ambulance to a local hospital. There, emergency-room personnel found “KKK,” “Nigg,” “ETE SHI,” “NIGGER,” and “BITCH” written on her chest and torso with a black substance resembling charcoal. Traces of it were detected under Brawley’s fingernails.
Her hair was matted and jagged, as if someone had randomly sheared off clumps of it.
The only evidence of physical injury that physicians discovered, however, was an old quarter-size bruise behind the teen’s left ear, plus some swelling in Brawley’s left arm, where an IV had been inserted by ambulance paramedics on her way to the hospital.
No sticks or leaves or dirt or other detritus consistent with Tawana Brawley having spent a considerable time being sexually assaulted in the woods were discovered about her, in her, or on her clothing, either.
A rape kit examination disclosed no evidence of sexual assault or sexual intercourse. Brawley was discharged from the hospital at about 10:00 p.m. that Saturday night.
False accusers are a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of women who report stranger rapes each year, somewhere between 4 and 7 percent of the total, according to Hazelwood, who has studied the behavior of hundreds of what he calls pseudovictims.
Roy frequently consults in rape and assault cases where a false accusation is suspected, so it was no surprise that immediately after the Brawley case broke, Hazelwood received a telephone call from J. J. Thompson, a Dutchess County investigator.
Thompson wanted Roy’s opinion of Tawana Brawley’s truthfulness. Hazelwood in turn routinely asked for FBI clearance to offer his help. But the Bureau, concerned with the incendiary nature of the case, told Hazelwood not to have any official involvement in the investigation.
So Roy assisted unofficially. He reviewed the case for Thompson, and then served as an informal consultant to the ensuing official investigation.
Although the evidence would show there was no substantive reason to believe Brawley’s allegations—which under normal circumstances should have quickly faded away—reasonableness soon was the scarcest commodity in Dutchess County, where the investigation took place.
Two lawyers, Alton H. Maddox, Jr., and C. Vernon Mason, together with the Reverend Al Sharpton, an activist preacher from Brooklyn, appeared together on the scene as Tawana Brawley’s “advisers.” This “trickster trio,” as reporter Steve Dunleavy described them in the
New York Post,
proceeded to promote an epic hoax based on a single, bogus allegation of conspiracy.
A short while after Brawley reported her story, a part-time white local police officer named Harry Crist, Jr., committed suicide, apparently as a consequence of career and personal problems.
Because of Brawley’s accusations, Crist’s movements at the time of her alleged abduction were of understandable
interest to investigators. However, Steven A. Pagones, a Dutchess County assistant district attorney, came forth to say that he and Crist were friends, and that they had been together with a third white male, a state trooper named Scott Patterson, at the time of the alleged assault on Tawana Brawley.
Although no evidence connecting Crist, Pagones, or Patterson with Brawley has ever surfaced, her three black advisers seized on Pagones’s information as evidence of a cover-up.
“Mr. Pagones and his organized crime cronies are suspects,” Sharpton said on Geraldo Rivera’s television program. Sharpton repeated the accusation in several other venues.
“He was one of the attackers, yes,” Alton Maddox, Jr., said in a televised press conference, adding, “If I didn’t have direct evidence, I wouldn’t be sitting here saying that.”
One theory that Brawley’s three advisers floated had Pagones and Patterson actually killing Crist, staging the crime as a suicide.
Pagones finally filed a $395 million defamation suit against the three advisers and Tawana Brawley in 1988.
As the contrived controversy gained momentum, and national attention, New York governor Mario Cuomo named Bob Abrams, the state attorney general, as a special prosecutor.
Sharpton responded by comparing Cuomo and Abrams to Klan members. At one event, Maddox swore indignantly, “Robert Abrams, you are no longer going to masturbate looking at Tawana Brawley’s picture!”
Public opinion polls indicated that most New Yorkers, white and black, disbelieved Brawley’s account. Nevertheless, the comedian Bill Cosby put up a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for information. Boxer Mike Tyson gave Brawley his Rolex, and talk-show host Phil Donahue took his show to Dutchess County, where he broadcast live from a rally of Brawley supporters.
To a degree, Sharpton, Mason, and Maddox succeeded in making the truth of the case irrelevant. They promulgated a “could have been” theory that had resonance for many blacks distrustful of white authority.
Lateef Islam, a local activist who marched frequently in support of Brawley, told
Washington Post
reporter Dale Russakoff that at the time of the hoax he refused to dwell on the issues of truth.
“I was working on the fact that it could have happened,” Islam explained, a position Islam shared with many of Brawley’s supporters. “I’ve known incidents like that that happened, and I was angry at people who said it couldn’t have happened.”
Such crimes of course do occur. But there were two major reasons to conclude that this purported incident could not have happened in the way Tawana Brawley claimed. One, there wasn’t a scintilla of corroborative physical evidence, when there should have been a great deal of it. To the contrary, the physical evidence all pointed away from Brawley’s version of events. Secondly, as Roy would explain in his informal consultations with the task force, it was clear from the behavioral evidence that Tawana Brawley’s allegations were unsupported.
There are several routinely observed factors in false accusations of rape—although none should be taken as absolute proof that a self-described victim is lying. Many occur in truthfully reported cases as well.
Pseudovictims range in age from young girls to mature men and women, and come from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
In Roy’s experience, the motivation for falsely reporting a stranger rape often is a desperate need for attention. Many pseudovictims also are highly self-destructive, and in the past have tried less dramatic means of gaining attention, most commonly feigning illness.
When a police department questions a victim’s allegations,
as in the Brawley case, Roy advises them to check for recent stresses in his or her life, emotionally upsetting incidents such as Tawana Brawley’s clashes with her family.