After rape, disbelief from police -- twice

A woman turns to police after a brutal rape and faces scrutiny. A month later, her attacker returns, but police still don't believe her.

[Times photo: Janel Schroeder-Norton] A woman prosecutors say was raped twice is seen with her pit bulls, Bonnie and Clyde, through the window where the rapist entered her Pasco House.

By CARY DAVIS

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 26, 2001

The woman's left eye was black and swollen, her mouth bloody with 15 broken teeth. She said she had been raped.

She turned to the New Port Richey Police Department for help. But within days, a detective found reason to doubt her story.

"I believe that you were battered," Jackie Pehote said. "But I do not believe it happened the way you say."

A boyfriend beat her up, Pehote thought, or someone the victim had brought home from a bar. Detectives did not even send out a semen sample for testing.

Twenty-nine days later, the woman once more called for help. She said she had been raped again. Same man. Same method.

When police got to her home, the woman's hands and feet were still bound, just as they were in the first incident. She did not attempt to free herself because she thought she needed more proof this time.

It wasn't enough for Detective Pehote.

For four months, the police basically did nothing. It was only after the victim's chance encounter with the suspect that detectives made an arrest, charging John A. Casteel with both rapes. He lived three blocks from the victim and had just finished serving a 14-year prison term -- for rape.

Casteel's trial begins Monday. In preparation, his defense attorney asked Pehote, the department's 2000 officer of the year, why she didn't believe the victim, even after the second attack.

"It just didn't seem possible," Pehote replied, "that the same person within a month would be raped again."

The first attack

With Casteel's trial pending, Pehote would not comment on why she refused to believe the woman was raped. Neither would her boss, New Port Richey police Chief Aage Madsen. It is clear from court records, though, that Pehote thought the evidence was scant.

The victim called 911 at 5:17 a.m. on Dec. 5, 1998, shortly after the first attack. She did not use the word "rape."

"Somebody broke into my house and hurt me," the woman told a dispatcher. "Please send me an ambulance."

The dispatcher sent out the call as a "signal 21," so officers thought they were responding to a burglary. The 41-year-old woman expanded her story after they arrived.

She remembered getting hit in the eye by something cold and hard, not a fist. She said she resisted at first, and her attacker punched her stomach. Then he bound her hands with rope and her ankles with pantyhose, held a knife to her throat and raped her repeatedly. The woman is not identified in this story because of the nature of the crime.

She spent the night in the hospital, where a nurse took a semen sample. The next day the victim recounted every detail she could remember. She could not describe her attacker's face, she said, because it was pitch dark in her house and she was blindfolded most of the time.

Pehote was not the lead detective, a job that fell to William Barrus. But records show that Pehote, the department's chief detective, played an important role in directing the investigation.

Three days later, it was Pehote who told the woman:

"We'll continue our investigation for a while yet, but just so you know, we're coming up with dead ends all over the place. We're coming up with discrepancies in your interviews."

Several things bothered Pehote.

An evidence technician concluded that a glass pane removed from the back door, the suspected point of entry, could only have been dislodged from inside the house. The police speculated that the woman removed the glass pane to make it look as if someone had broken in.

Pehote had other questions: If the woman was bound while she was raped, why were there no bruises on her wrists and ankles? And why no blood on the bed?

Pehote said she thought the woman probably had been victimized by someone she knew and concocted the story about being raped by a stranger.

The victim objected.

"I didn't let anybody in my house," the woman told Pehote, her voice rising in anger. "I did not let anybody in my f------ house!"

Detective Barrus said in a deposition that he believed the victim's story. "I really wanted to clear this case because I sincerely felt this happened to her and, you know, it was a very big case for a small police department like us. So I worked hard on it."

But that hard work did not include the simple act of sending out for testing the semen sample taken from the victim.

On Dec. 21, 1998, 16 days after he began his investigation, Barrus relegated the case to the inactive list.

A false alarm?

In the days after the first attack, the victim had an alarm system installed in her house. At 2:14 a.m. on Jan. 3, 1999, it went off.

Her alarm company called the woman, who was asleep on the couch, and told her to check her back door. It was open.

At 2:33 a.m., two New Port Richey patrol officers arrived. According to the woman, the officers never asked to come in and look around. They just asked her if she was okay. After she said she was, they told her to "close the door and stay right there."

"I waited," she said. "I was on the phone with the alarm company. . . . (The alarm company dispatcher) said, "Well, we'll stay on the line until they actually come inside.' And (the dispatcher) said, "They haven't come in yet?' And I said, "No.' She said, "Well, go to the door and find out why they haven't come in.' I go to the door, and they're all gone."

Officer Rich Baker said in his deposition the woman specifically told them not to come in.

"She denied our entry," said Baker, who also had responded to the woman's house for the first assault. "She said everything is fine and there was no need to enter her house."

New Port Richey police Capt. Martin Rickus said the agency has no specific guidelines on how officers should investigate burglar alarms.

The officers stayed at the woman's house for five minutes.

'How could you be so stupid?'

The woman didn't feel safe after police left.

She said she picked up a butcher knife and did a cursory walk-through of the house. Finding nothing, she returned to the couch, tucked a loaded .38-caliber handgun under a pillow beside her and went back to sleep.

The rapist, who prosecutors said had been hiding somewhere in the house, struck again minutes later.

According to the woman's deposition:

"He says he's back, and I know what he wants, and I better not fight him or he'll hurt me worse than he did the first time."

She submitted.

Afterward, she called 911 and described the attack to the detective on duty, Jackie Pehote. The detective was not sympathetic, according to the victim, and asked her:

"How could you be so stupid to move back into your house?"

The woman wanted nothing to do with Pehote, who then called Barrus to the scene. Later, the two detectives compared notes.

". . . The gist of it was that she didn't believe the nature of the allegations," Barrus said in his deposition. He added that he "had the feeling that Cpl. Pehote wanted me to handle this second one."

Detectives were again hampered by the woman's inability to provide a description of her attacker.

Pehote noted her doubts in her police report: "I interviewed (the victim) twice and I did find that she was not consistent in her stories. At this time I'm still trying to determine what actually happened."

Unlike earlier interviews with the victim, these conversations were not taped. Pehote's explanation: "We tried it, but we didn't know the recorder wasn't working. The batteries apparently had died out."

On Jan. 5, despite her doubts, Pehote sent the rape kit from the second assault to a state lab for testing. The kit from the first incident, meanwhile, was still at the Police Department.

The next day the woman arrived home to find on her doorstep a milk crate filled with items the attacker had stolen from her house: a tool kit, a Tiffany lamp and a miniature replica of a church.

There was also a note:

"You are a truly beautiful lady. I only wish we could meet differently. If you would like to meet on different terms, leave your porch light off and I will contact you about meeting in a public place."

Pehote asked the victim and her boyfriend for a handwriting sample. Neither matched the note. She checked with neighbors and found nobody who witnessed the milk crate being dropped off. At that point, Pehote said, the case "pretty much got put on a back burner."

Breakthrough

On April 26, 1999, four months after the second attack, the victim went to an Amoco station in New Port Richey to buy cigarettes and soda. She saw her attacker.

She waited for the man to leave, then approached the female store clerk. The clerk said the man was her boyfriend. The woman called Pehote, who visited the clerk and got the name of the man: John Casteel. Pehote ran a background check and learned that Casteel, now 43, had been convicted of raping a Jacksonville woman in 1983. He was released from prison in October, two months before the first attack on the New Port Richey woman.

On May 6, Pehote went to the address on Casteel's driver's license, a house where he rented a room.

Casteel said he had sex with the woman on two occasions and that it was consensual. He also admitted stealing items from the victim's house. Pehote did not record the interview, explaining later: "That's when our recorders were all -- now we have no recorders."

She arrested Casteel the same day for failing to register as a sex offender. The rape charges came two weeks later.

It was not until June 2 that police sent for testing the rape kit from the first attack -- a seven-month delay. DNA tests eventually linked Casteel to both attacks.

His DNA had been in a state database since 1996, which raises the question: Could the second attack have been prevented if Barrus had promptly sent for testing the semen sample from the first, 29 days earlier? It seems unlikely. Back then, the minimum turnaround time for a high priority case was four weeks.

'I'm dead inside'

The victim did not want to discuss publicly how police handled her case, fearing that could jeopardize the outcome of Casteel's trial. But during a recent tour of her house, she spoke candidly of how her life has changed.

She has had surveillance cameras mounted in every room, wired to three VCRs. She acquired two pit bulls, Bonnie and Clyde. They provide protection and company. When you're afraid to leave your house at night, she said, life gets awfully lonely.

Before all this happened, the woman was happy and, she says proudly, beautiful. She points to pictures of herself on her bedroom wall taken when she was 30 -- and a L'eggs pantyhose model.

She used to wear a size 8. Now she wears a 14, but not because she's gained that much weight. "I want everything to be baggy so people can't see my body."

In her 30s, she wore braces to improve her smile. Over the last two years, she has had four operations to replace her broken teeth.

She broke up with her boyfriend shortly after the second assault and hasn't had a date since.

"Basically, he killed me," she said of Casteel. "I'm dead inside. I will never have sex again. I'll never have a nice smile. And I just started getting pretty when I hit 40."

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