In the early 1970s, rape had reached epidemic proportions in Chicago, with an estimated 16,000 people were sexually assaulted in the metropolitan area.
But less than a tenth of the cases were ever reported to the police and few of the perpetrators were ever apprehended.
Moreover, the Chicago Police Department’s training manual had a dim view of the victims themselves.
“Many rape complaints are not legitimate,” the manual declared. “It is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with a roving eye.”
In essence, the police considered females who claimed sexual assault to be either liars or prostitutes.
Enter Martha “Marty” Goddard, a 30-something visionary disturbed that sexual predators were escaping justice for their crimes. A divorcée with close cropped blonde hair and owlish glasses who used the moniker Marty because she liked hiding behind a man’s name, Goddard would go on to create what is known today as the first standardized rape kit.
It included proper forensic tools — swabs, vials, combs to collect hair and fiber, glass slides for microscope study, sterile nail clippers, bags for the victim’s clothing, instructions for gathering evidence, envelopes to protect the evidence, along with cards informing victims where to seek counseling and medical services — and forms for the doctors and police officers handling each case.
Goddard’s inspirational story, one that would have a shockingly tragic ending, is compellingly detailed for the first time in journalist Pagan Kennedy’s page-turner about the woman who ignited a feminist revolution in forensics.
“Goddard would go on to lead a campaign to treat sexual assault as a crime rather than as a feminine delusion,” writes Kennedy in “The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story (Vintage). “The kit is one of the most powerful tools ever invented to bring criminals to justice.”
“Sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide what they felt about the victim — whether she deserved to be considered a ‘victim’ at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing what had actually happened.”
The author called it, “A kind of kabuki theater of scientific justice.”
Goddard had first witnessed the horrors of sexual abuse when she volunteered to work at a crisis hotline counseling runaway teenage girls who were pregnant, homeless or homicidal. Many had fled their homes often enduring sexual abuse by parents, relatives, gym coaches, and neighborhood boys.
Goddard had come to the realization that “incontrovertible scientific proof” from a crime lab was required to bring sexual perpetrators to justice. Police departments had been disposing of evidence when it suited them — even an assault, Goddard discovered, by a Catholic bishop on a child.
She soon learned that hospitals lacked the forensic tools to prove rape, nor did doctors and nurses know how to collect evidence, and that her idea for a rape kit was a necessary tool.
With persistence, Goddard was appointed by the Illinois State’s Attorney Bernard Carey to a citizens’ advisory panel on rape to investigate failures in the police department and to suggest reforms.
But Goddard was soon advised that in order to succeed in her mission to win over the lab boys who decided on forensic procedures, she needed male support. As it turned out, that man was Sgt. Louis Vitullo, a cop-scientist who headed the microscopic unit at the Chicago Police Department crime lab. But he initially rejected the rape kit concept, calling her idea crazy.
Having second thoughts, however, he invited Goddard back to see a prototype of the kit she had actually described — but the ambitious and sly Vitullo now claimed himself as the inventor. Goddard’s rape kit would be introduced as a collaboration between the police department and the state attorney’s office —with no credit to Goddard.
If she had gotten the credit, the author explained, it would reveal the long-time failings of the police department.
The outspoken Goddard was now viewed as a threat and was followed by a secret police unit called the Red Squad.
As Kennedy asserts, “The Chicago Police Department [in the 1970s] was rotten with thugs, white supremacists, racketeers, blackmailers, and sadists — and “electrocuted, framed, spied on and burned people they viewed as threats.”
With her lack a scientific or medical background, it was claimed, Goddard’s rape kit never could have been produced under her name. And as the author contends, Goddard had to play ball with the corrupt police department. Meanwhile, hospitals still didn’t know how to handle the kits and, moreover, it was expensive to run test results through a crime lab.
After Vitullo’s death, Goddard appealed to an unexpected benefactor, the creator of the nude centerfold, Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner, and his progressive philanthropic Playboy Foundation. Hefner provided $10,000 in seed money to initiate a rape-kit system.
Meanwhile, Goddard was hired as an executive with the Wieboldt Foundation that funded progressive causes. She was able to meet with victims’ groups and hospital executives to propose using rape kits to study DNA forensics. With all the evidence, why was there no proof that a sexual assault had occurred, Goddard asked. And why were women asked if they enjoyed the sex?
Graphic designers created new packaging and elderly women assembled the first kits that were distributed to some two dozen hospitals in Chicago — “the first program of its type in the nation,” a Chicago newspaper reported at the time.
The New York Times called the rape kit a “powerful new weapon in the conviction of rapists.” And Kennedy writes, “Ms. Goddard had invented not just the kit but a new way of thinking about prosecuting rape. Now, when a victim testified, she no longer did so alone. The kit itself became a character in the trials — and a witness.”
Naturally, the author sought to interview this creative visionary. But what she discovered trying to track her down was a shocker.
Kennedy learned that Goddard herself was a victim of sexual violence. She had been abducted, violently raped at knife point and sodomized while on vacation in Hawaii in the late 1970s. Infected with herpes, she turned to alcohol to dull the pain of chronic flareups, exhaustion and bladder infections. And then she disappeared.
A detective tracked her to a mobile-home park in Arizona and then to an apartment building in Phoenix before the final sad news that Goddard had died in 2015 at age 74.
There was no obituary, no funeral announcement — only a request that her ashes be thrown to the winds in Sedona, Ariz.
She had become a hermit living out her final days in a mobile home and clipping newspapers.
Goddard’s rape kits weren’t initially successful in law enforcement circles. Detroit police had long been dumping rape evidence in abandoned parking garages, and some 400,000 untested rape kits were discovered around the country.
However, in 2015, the US Justice Department appropriated $45 million to deal with the backlog.
As the author, herself sexually assaulted in her early twenties by two men who were never apprehended, writes:
“Doggedly, Marty and her allies spread one simple message: rape was a crime, and the victims deserved respect. And across the country, young women like me felt the reverberations of her work.”
“Sexual assault was no longer an unsolvable crime.”
