Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice

4. Detective Woodmansee

4 Detective Woodmansee For Tom Woodmansee, being a cop was not just a job; it was a calling. “I can think of no other field of worth that I could be a member of than that of law enforcement,” he wrote on his application to the Madison Police Department in 1990, when he was twenty-seven. Already, he seemed persuaded of his own moral rectitude. “I believe I have done a good job in keeping my sense of values and integrity and that I will continue to do so throughout my life,” he assured his employer-to-be. Yes, he had smoked marijuana and there were a few times, especially in college , when he had had too much to drink. And now and then he had a cigarette, a bad habit to be sure. But for the most part Tom Woodmansee was, in his own estimation and that of his fellow officers, upright and honest, sensitive and caring. He was tall, trim, and in excellent shape. He had played baseball in college, transferring from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire to the UW–Whitewater, a big baseball school, where he graduated in 1985 with a major in speech and a minor in Professional Business Retailer Distribution. For a while he studied martial arts. He still played baseball, softball, basketball, and golf. He was married, enjoyed chess, and sometimes rode a motorcycle. He was a well-rounded guy. In his seven years as a Madison police officer, Woodmansee had shown competence and courage. Just a few months earlier he played a pivotal role in nabbing two armed robbery suspects, both nineteen, who had commandeered a man’s car and forced him to drive to ATM machines . When the man escaped and called police, Woodmansee chased one suspect down on foot and “directed [his] body into the brick wall,” as 28 he put it in his report. Woodmansee later identified the other suspect from mug shots and handled the interrogation, getting the young man to admit his involvement and implicate his partner. Both were convicted. Woodmansee had a gentle, confident manner and a knack for winning other people’s trust. Early in his police career he worked undercover , from January 1992 to December 1993, primarily making drug arrests . He had no qualms about arresting people for marijuana, a drug he himself had used and possessed. As he later rationalized it, “I was not a police officer at the time.” In March 1996, Woodmansee got permission to conduct an alcohol-impact study. At his direction, thirty central-city officers and supervisors kept incident logs for scattered night watch shifts during a six-month period. The study found that alcohol was a known factor in more than half of all nighttime police calls, including 67 percent of sexual assaults, 80 percent of domestic disturbances, 82 percent of batteries, and all five of the most serious calls—two involving suicide and one each involving sexual assault of children, reckless endangerment , and weapons violations. Woodmansee expressed his frustration in his report. “I am concerned that our department and community have become almost immune and apathetic to the problems stemming from alcohol abuse,” he wrote. “There is no current system in place to proactively combat the problems stemming from alcohol abuse and its detriment upon our community and our department.” His suggestion: impose an “alcohol abuse enhancer” fee of twenty-five dollars on offenders in cases where alcohol is a direct factor, possibly using this to provide alcohol treatment to the indigent. Nothing ever came of this idea, but in January 1997, just as the results of his study were made public, Woodmansee was promoted to detective, which had the incidental benefit of bumping his pay from $44,668 to $46,774 a year. He was assigned, as new detectives often are, to sensitive crimes: child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault. It was an area where his ability to elicit the trust of those he encountered would prove invaluable, given the special challenges for investigators that these cases pose. Often there are complicated histories between perpetrators and victims, and sometimes people’s perceptions are so skewed by all this past history that getting to the truth is like peeling away layers of an onion; you get deeper and deeper without ever reaching a solid core. Detective Woodmansee 29 • Woodmansee’s approach was to be thorough—much...