Nutshell Crime Scenes

The​ rape kit is a cardboard box containing ordinary items anyone might own: envelopes, combs, swabs, nail clippers. But the packaging together of these things in Chicago in the 1970s enabled the standardisation of evidence collection following a sexual assault, greatly increasing the likelihood of prosecution. At the time, US state laws tended to define rape as something that occurs when the accused ‘has carnal knowledge of a female’ who is ‘not his wife’ and this takes place ‘forcibly and against her will’. Under this definition, men could not be raped and wives could not be raped by their husbands. Sexual violence was conceptualised as something that happened outside the home, perpetrated by violent strangers. If the accuser had known the alleged rapist, if there were no signs of struggle, who was to say a crime had been committed? The question for police and prosecutors was whether the victim had consented, and because rape usually occurred without other witnesses, only the victim could prove this.

Unlike other kinds of victim, the raped person was treated as a suspect. It was the victim who had to submit to an invasive medical examination, the victim who was interrogated. When a woman went to a Chicago hospital after a sexual assault, she would be asked to remove her clothes so they could be used as evidence. Police would cross-examine her and ask whether she had seduced her assailant. Had she enjoyed it? A 1973 training manual advised cadets that ‘many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover.’ Afterwards, the victim would be sent home in a police car for all her neighbours to see, wearing paper slippers and a surgical gown. One Chicago sexual assault unit had pink underwear strung over its office sign. On at least one occasion, a police officer in the city asked a woman to strip off to display her injuries and then shared the photographs with his friends. Similar things happened to women across America and Europe; but even so, the Chicago Police Department, with its culture of misogyny, corruption and racism, was an unlikely birthplace for a revolution in the approach to cases of sexual assault.

When the journalist Pagan Kennedy began investigating the origin of the rape kit she looked it up on Wikipedia. Its invention was credited to Sergeant Louis Vitullo of the Chicago Police Department, whose name appeared on what became known as the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit. But another name was also associated with it: Martha ‘Marty’ Goddard. In 1972, Goddard started volunteering at Metro-Help, a Chicago crisis centre for homeless teenagers, fielding calls from desperate girls, many of whom had been abused but were treated as criminals and charged with prostitution or vagrancy. Around the same time, she got a job at the Wieboldt Foundation, a charity established by a wealthy Chicago family, which enabled her to lobby on behalf of victims. In 1973, there were around sixteen thousand sexual assaults in the Chicago area, but fewer than fifty cases reached trial, with only a handful of convictions. Goddard began meeting victim advocates, prosecutors, hospital management and police to try to understand the reasons for this.

Police officers argued that hospital staff were to blame because they failed to collect evidence properly. DNA identification was not yet possible, but with proper samples, a suspect’s blood type could be determined and the presence of semen confirmed. Doctors didn’t collect hair or fingernail scrapings. They contaminated evidence on clothes, cutting through bullet holes and knife slashes, or threw them away. A standardised process would ensure that evidence was admissible and would improve the experience of victims. Goddard set up a meeting with Vitullo, then in charge of microanalysis at Chicago police’s crime lab and presented her idea: an evidence kit.

After the St Valentine’s Day Massacre – a Chicago gang shooting in 1929 which left seven people dead – local businessmen funded a team of forensic experts to examine the bullets and bloodstains. Chicago’s crime laboratory, established soon after that, pioneered ballistics study, using techniques like split-image comparison, in which a pair of microscopes were linked to one eyepiece and bullets rotated to see whether their scratches matched, which would mean they had been shot from the same gun. The lab also analysed hair and fibres, casts of footprints and tyre tracks, and discovered new serological techniques. At the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the lab sold souvenir boxes containing bullets that had supposedly been ‘fired from a Machine Gun taken from Chicago Gangsters’. The murder of eight nurses in their student residence one night in 1966 returned the lab to public attention. When fingerprints were found at the scene, the microscope unit swiftly matched them with FBI records and identified the killer. Photographs of Vitullo scrutinising the murder weapon, a hunting knife, were splashed across the newspapers.

Vitullo and Goddard are both now dead, but Cynthia Gehrie, an activist who worked closely with Goddard, remembered Goddard telling her that when they met Vitullo had ‘screamed’ at her for ‘wasting his time’. But then he asked to see her again: he had changed his mind and made a prototype kit. Other sources corroborated this story, including one who said that Vitullo had pressured Goddard into naming the kit after him. Kennedy wonders whether this was in fact a strategic decision on Goddard’s part: it was the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance, a non-profit organisation she established, which in 1978 trademarked the kit under Vitullo’s name.

Other rape kits were developed around the same time in California and Pennsylvania, but Kennedy dismisses them as ‘unscientific’. The Californian kit, which collected evidence from suspect and victim, was accompanied by advice for the police: if the victim seemed ‘a sleazy freelance prostitute’ they could end the examination – a neat excuse for any officer who wasn’t keen on wiping a suspect’s penis across a microscope slide. The Chicago kit was the first to be rolled out systematically. Goddard’s real innovation was not the kit itself, but the set procedure and the training that accompanied it, ensuring that samples were collected, labelled and tracked properly, and that victims were treated sensitively.

The Chicago Police Department wouldn’t foot the bill for the kit; Goddard was left to fundraise. Most philanthropists weren’t keen to get involved, but one local entrepreneur cared little for respectability. In 1965 Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, had established a foundation to fund organisations promoting individual freedoms, including abortion. Hefner made millions objectifying women and once declared of feminists that ‘these chicks are our natural enemy,’ but sexual liberation was central to his politics. The August 1973 issue of Playboy included a letter co-signed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the new Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union thanking the foundation for its ‘generous support’. Metro-Help also received funding from the Playboy Foundation, and while volunteering at Metro-Help, Goddard met Margaret Standish, the foundation’s assistant director. She applied for a $10,000 grant. ‘I took a lot of flak from the women’s movement,’ Goddard remembered decades later. ‘Boy, was I roasted for that.’ Standish offered further support, hosting galas at the Playboy Mansion and inviting pensioners to the Playboy offices to put kits together. Even the boxes bore the magazine’s touch: its graphic designers were responsible for the logo on the kit, which showed a long-haired woman in profile. As Kennedy emphasises, Goddard was careful to distance herself from radical feminists, but she still attracted the attention of the Red Squad, a police intelligence unit that infiltrated the Black Panthers and women’s groups.

The final kit was about the size of a hardback and cost $2.50. A label on the front had a form for medical staff to fill in, and another for police to give the time and date when they had picked up the victim. ‘SEAL HERE WITH EVIDENCE TAPE’ was written in the lower right-hand corner. All the text was printed in cool blue. Inside were swabs, combs, nail clippers, glass slides, envelopes for samples and paper bags for clothes. The kit also included a ‘procedure checklist’, a form to record the victim’s consent, another to note findings and a card providing information on counselling and treatment for victims.

In 1978 Goddard delivered the first kits to 25 hospitals in the Chicago area; by the end of 1979 about three thousand kits had been used. Before the kits, almost a third of the evidence collected from sexual assault victims in Cook County, Illinois had been inadmissible; after they were introduced, that figure fell to 2 per cent. Other cities soon followed Chicago’s example, with New York adopting the Vitullo kit in 1982. A few years later, Goddard received $99,000 from the Department of Justice to set up pilot programmes in fourteen states. ‘Imagine how many years it took us to go from state’s attorney to state’s attorney to cop to detective to deputy to doctor to paediatrician to nurse to nurse practitioner,’ Goddard said. ‘I felt I had to save the world and I was going to start with Chicago.’

In the early 1980s, when Kennedy was at college, she went to an editorial meeting of a feminist newspaper at which there was a discussion about ‘newly emergent legal definitions of rape’. ‘I had no knowledge of [Goddard’s] crusade back then,’ she writes, but ‘I now see how the ripples she stirred had spread out in concentric rings to touch me, along with so many other women coming of age back then.’ As a student, she witnessed a Take Back the Night march and saw the phrase ‘rape culture’ graffitied on campus buildings, yet she fails to show that such events were part of a broader movement, along with rape kits, consciousness-raising and lobbying for legal reform. Kennedy thinks that anti-rape organising began after feminists were ‘emboldened by the victory’ of Roe v. Wade in 1973, but it predated this, emerging from the women’s liberation movement. Women in California organised an ‘anti-rape squad’ in 1970 and the first Rape Crisis Centre opened in Oakland in 1971 (it closed this year); New York Radical Feminists held a rape speakout in 1971. By 1973, at least sixteen anti-rape groups had been established across the US.

In her book Inventology (2016), Kennedy explored the way innovations like the wheeled suitcase and the mobile phone were brought into being. In The Secret History of the Rape Kit, she underscores the politics of this process: inventions used by women – like cradles and bras – are rarely seen as technologies, and when women invent things men have tended to get the credit. Sybilla Righton Masters invented a mechanical corn mill in 1715, but the patent was filed by her husband in accordance with US law at the time. Kennedy places the ‘Vitullo’ trademarking alongside this story. Another possible comparison is with the Del Em kit, which she doesn’t mention.

In the early 1970s, Harvey Karman, who wasn’t clinically qualified, ran an underground abortion service in Los Angeles. He inserted a flexible tube, known as the ‘Karman cannula’, into the uterus, attached to a syringe for suction. This technique was less invasive than the usual scraping method and so quick that it was nicknamed the ‘lunch-hour abortion’. Women’s liberation activists running their own self-help clinic began studying Karman’s method. One member, Lorraine Rothman, noticed a dangerous oversight: there was no valve to stop air passing into the uterus. Using easily acquired materials – aquarium tubing, a Mason jar – Rothman made a menstrual extraction device called the Del Em. The idea was that women could use the Del Em to extract their menses regularly – which would also remove very early pregnancies. Karman never patented his cannula, yet in the medical world his name, not Rothman’s, is usually linked to menstrual extraction. Both this method and the Vitullo kit are associated with men, even though in both cases a woman made the invention workable; both inventions made use of commonplace objects; both refashioned technologies to make them work for women.

Goddard was keenly aware of the kit’s limitations. Forensic examinations were too invasive for minors and so she introduced ‘Show and Tell Me’ dolls to the Chicago Police Department to help children explain what had happened to them: these rag dolls had button eyes, woollen hair and anatomically correct genitals. According to a 1981 article in the New York Times, when Goddard first tried to train police officers to use the dolls, they flung them about like ‘hot potatoes’ and ‘cracked jokes for about twenty minutes before the training session resumed’. The kits could not circumvent the racism of the justice system. Black women were less likely to report a rape: a Chicago activist called Vera Hubbard described establishment attitudes as ‘What the heck, it’s black on black, no big deal.’ There was a long history of false accusations against African American boys and men for assaulting white women. ‘In the history of the United States,’ Angela Davis wrote, ‘the fraudulent rape charge stands out as one of the most formidable artifices invented by racism.’ Black women knew that reporting assault might result in police violence within their communities. Access to help was also unequal. In 1982, Goddard told a state legislative committee that it was ‘no secret that the handful of services available for rape victims’ were located in wealthier neighbourhoods and not ‘on the South and West Sides of Chicago where a majority of our black victims reside’.

Properly collected evidence could, however, make wrongful convictions less likely. It could also bolster the word of African American women, as in the 1975 trial of Joan Little, an inmate in a North Carolina prison who stabbed a white guard with an ice pick while defending herself from sexual assault: the guard had pinned her down, held the weapon to her neck and demanded that she perform oral sex. The medical examiner who was the first to arrive on the scene carefully collected samples, including semen. Along with the autopsy report, which concluded that the wounds showed Little had acted in self-defence, this secured an acquittal, even though county detectives had destroyed other evidence, discarding bloody sheets and wiping fingerprints from the ice pick.

DNA testing began in the late 1980s and could be used even on old rape kits. At least it could if the contents were actually tested. In 2009, an investigation into the mishandling of crime-scene evidence in Detroit found more than eleven thousand rape kits dating back as far as the 1980s stashed in an old parking garage. Backlogs were discovered across the country; it was estimated that up to 400,000 kits had not been analysed. Police departments claimed they could not afford the processing, but as Kennedy points out, this doesn’t ring true: from 1977 to 2020, state and local law-enforcement budgets nationwide almost tripled. ‘Why would you put someone through this very invasive, whole-body exam, which is traumatising in itself, take their rape kit and just let it sit there?’ Natasha Alexenko, an activist whose own kit went untested for a decade, asked.

Eventually, the government announced $41 million in federal grants to help reduce the backlog, which states supplemented with their own funding. As tests were processed, cold cases were solved and serial attackers identified. The resulting data overturned long-held profiling beliefs: that serial rapists are rare; that each predator has a distinct modus operandi; that offenders are either ‘stranger’ or ‘acquaintance’ rapists. The data showed that serial rapists are not uncommon and that they are opportunists, attacking strangers, relatives and acquaintances alike. A victim who knows her assailant and who volunteers for testing may well hold the key to catching a serial offender.

When this scandal hit the headlines, Goddard was no longer working as a victim advocate. From the late 1980s, she had become increasingly reclusive, then disappeared altogether. Much of Kennedy’s narrative follows her search for Goddard. It turns out that she died in obscurity in 2015 after suffering from alcoholism, possibly as a result of burnout from all her lobbying and advocacy, all the horrific stories of assault she’d heard and her own experience of sexual violence. In the late 1970s, Goddard had been raped at knifepoint, leaving her with chronic herpes. Kennedy tracked down Goddard’s nephew, who remembered childhood vacations with his aunt. He told her that Goddard, who used to build tiny model rooms, had made a replica of the Little House on the Prairie and that they had visited the Art Institute of Chicago to look at its miniatures, those gilded scenes of domesticity. Kennedy wonders whether in these dioramas ‘Marty wasn’t building tiny crime scenes peppered with clues, if somehow she was leaving a message about whatever it was that tormented her’. She compares Goddard’s rooms to Frances Glessner Lee’s ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’. In the 1940s, Glessner Lee, the first American female police captain and a pioneer of forensic science, constructed dollhouse-size recreations of actual crime scenes to train investigators. Nutshell scenes, shoebox parlours, cardboard kits: as well as the interest in minuscule detail, the imposition of order and containment seems important here.

Goddard’s system didn’t solve the problem of the invasive nature of evidence collection. A victim of assault must keep on the clothes they were wearing during the attack, and remain unwashed. They must wait to be examined, no matter how long it takes. It’s little wonder that many do not come forward. At-home kits like the MeToo Kit aim to empower victims but have been criticised because self-collected evidence is more easily ruled inadmissible and because their use makes it less likely that victims will seek medical care. Earlier this year, a non-profit organisation called Enough handed out DNA-sampling kits to Bristol students, claiming this would ‘give power to survivors and deter perpetrators’. Yet the question in university sexual assault cases is often not whether sex occurred, but whether consent was given, or withdrawn. What about consent for certain acts and not others? Half a century after Goddard invented her kit, it is easier than ever to identify perpetrators, and just as difficult to prove a crime was committed at all.