https://nyti.

ms/3fuHivA

This is the story

of the woman who forced
the police to start
treating sexual assault
like a crime.
 Opinion

The Rape Kit’s

Secret History
By Pagan Kennedy
June 17, 2020

MARTY GODDARDʼS FIRST FLASH OF INSIGHT CAME IN 1972. It all

started when she marched into a shabby townhouse on
Halsted Street in Chicago to volunteer at a crisis hotline for
teenagers.

Most of the other volunteers were hippies with scraggly

manes and love beads. But not Marty Goddard. She tended to
wear business clothes: a jacket with a modest skirt,
pantyhose, low heels. She hid her eyes behind owlish glasses
and kept her blond hair short. Not much makeup; maybe a
plum lip. She was 31, divorced, with a mordant sense of humor.
Her name was Martha, but everyone called her Marty. She
liked hiding behind a man’s name. It was useful.

As a volunteer, Ms. Goddard lent a sympathetic ear to the

troubled kids then called “runaway teenagers.” They were
pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out. She was surprised to
discover that many weren’t rebels who’d left home seeking
adventure; they were victims who had fled sexual abuse. The
phones were ringing with the news that kids didn’t feel safe
around their own families. “I was just beside myself when I
found the extent of the problem,” she later said.

She began to formulate questions that almost no one was

asking back in the early ’70s: Why were so many predators
getting away with it? And what would it take to stop them?

Ms. Goddard would go on to lead a campaign to treat sexual

assault as a crime that could be investigated, rather than as a
feminine delusion. She began a revolution in forensics by
envisioning the first standardized rape kit, containing items
like swabs and combs to gather evidence, and envelopes to
seal it in. The kit is one of the most powerful tools ever
invented to bring criminals to justice. And yet, you’ve never
heard of Marty Goddard. In many ways she and her invention
shared the same fate. They were enormously important and
consistently overlooked.

I was infuriated when I read a few years ago about the

hundreds of thousands of unexamined rape kits piled up in
warehouses around the country. I had the same question that
many did: How many rapists were walking free because this
evidence had gone ignored?
 Take for example, the case of
Nathan Ford, who sexually assaulted a
woman in 1995. Although a rape
kit was submitted to the police, it went
untested for 17 years.

During that time, he went on to

assault 21 other people, before being
convicted in 2006.
And I had another question: How could a tool as potentially
powerful as the rape kit have come into existence in the first
place? For nearly two decades, I’d been reporting on
inventors, breakthroughs and the ways that new technologies
can bring about social change. It seemed to me that the rape-
kit system was an invention like no other. Can you think of any
other technology designed to hold men accountable for
brutalizing women?

As soon as I began to investigate the rape kit’s origins,

however, I stumbled across a mystery. Most sources credited a
Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, with developing the kit
in the 1970s. But a few described the invention as a
collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and an activist, Martha
Goddard. Where was the truth? As so often happens in stories
about rape, I found myself wondering whom to believe.

Mr. Vitullo died in 2006. Ms. Goddard, as far as I could tell,

must still be alive — I couldn’t find any obituaries or
gravestones that matched her name. An interview in 2003
placed her in Phoenix, and so I collected phone listings for
Martha Goddard in Arizona and called them one after another.
All those numbers had been disconnected.

Little did I know that I would have to hunt for six months
before I finally solved the mystery. I would learn she had
transformed the criminal-justice system, though her role has
never been fully acknowledged. And I would also discover that
Louis Vitullo — far from being the inventor of the rape kit —
may have taken credit for Ms. Goddard’s genius and insisted
that his name be put on the equipment.

I pieced together dozens of obscure marriage and death

notices to try to find her family members; read through
hundreds of newspaper articles to establish the timeline of
events; and even hired a researcher to dig through an archive
of Chicago police department files from the ’70s. Finally, I
managed to speak to eight people who knew or worked with
her. From these sources, and two oral-history tapes in which
she told her life story, I cobbled together what happened.

Volunteers answering telephones at the Metro-Help crisis center in Chicago, where Marty
Goddard counseled teenage girls who had been raped. Gene Pesek/Chicago Sun-Times

Back in that Chicago crisis center, Marty Goddard encouraged

teenagers to confide in her, and she began to realize just how
many of them had been molested.

At the time, most people believed that sexual abuse of children

was rare. One psychiatric textbook from the 1970s estimated
that incest occurred in only about one in every million families,
and claimed that it was often the fault of girls who initiated sex
with their fathers. Meantime, it was still legal in every state in
America for a husband to rape his wife. Sexual violence that
happened within a family was not considered rape at all. A real
rape was a “street rape.” It happened to women stupid enough
to be in the wrong places at the wrong times.
In Chicago, rape seemed like some sort of natural disaster, no
different from the arctic winds that could kill you if you
wandered out in the winter without a coat. “Chicago was not a
city you wanted to venture out into after dark,” wrote the
activist Naomi Weisstein. “Rape was epidemic.” In 1973, an
estimated 16,000 people were sexually assaulted in and around
Chicago. Only a tenth of those attacks were reported to the
police and fewer than a tenth of those cases went to trial; an
infinitesimal fraction of perpetrators ended up in prison.

It was a time — much like our own — when millions of people

felt that the police had failed them. Chicago was still reeling
from the 1969 killing by the cops of Fred Hampton, the
chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, while he’d been
sleeping in his own bed. The Chicago Police Department was
notorious as a brutal, occupying force in black neighborhoods.
Citizens’ groups were demanding review boards to reform
officers’ behavior.
Chicago, circa 1971. Gary Settle/The New York Times

Amid all that, Ms. Goddard began asking questions that might
seem so obvious to us today, but were radical in her own time:
What if sexual assault could be investigated? What if you
could prove it? What if, instead of a “she said” story, you could
persuade a jury with scientific evidence?

A lot of men didn’t like her style. But Ray Wieboldt Jr., heir to a
Chicago department-store fortune, did, and in 1972 she was
hired as an executive at the Wieboldt Foundation, a charitable
family fund that rained down money on progressive causes.

The Wieboldt name became her secret weapon. “I could say,

ʻI’m Marty Goddard from the Wieboldt Foundation’ and people
would just let me in their doors,” she recounted. And so she
Wieboldt-ed her way in to meet with hospital managers and
victims’ groups and began asking her relentless questions
about rape.

Crime labs did not yet have the ability to test DNA; the first
use of DNA forensics would not come until 1986, when British
investigators used the technology to hunt down a murderer
who raped his victims. But they could analyze pieces of glass,
fingerprints, splatter patterns, firearms and fibers. Police
investigators could find biological clues to help establish the
identity of a suspect by, for instance, comparing blood types.

Ms. Goddard wanted to figure out why — even with all this
evidence — no one seemed able to prove that a sexual assault
had occurred. She learned that victims usually ended up in a
hospital after an assault. The cops might dump a shivering,
weeping woman in the emergency room and yell out, “We got
a rape for you.” As they cared for the victim, the nurses might
wash her off or throw away her bloody dress, inadvertently
destroying evidence.

The cops didn’t seem to care. Instead, they would isolate the
victim in a room and lob questions at her to try to determine
whether she was lying. A Chicago police training manual from
1973 declared, “Many rape complaints are not legitimate,” and
added, “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.” Officers would routinely
ask women what they’d been wearing, whether they’d
provoked the attack by acting in a seductive manner, and
whether they had enjoyed the sex. “An actual rape victim will
generally give the impression of a person who has been
dishonored,” according to the manual.

In the early days of forensic science, the 19th century, rape

exams sought primarily to test the virtue of women. A doctor
would be called in to examine a woman’s vagina and then
report on her motives. Was she a trollop, a harlot, or a pure-
hearted innocent who spoke the truth?

In 1868, a British publication, Reynolds’s Newspaper, reported

on one such exam. The surgeon “gave such evidence as left no
doubt that the prosecutrix could not have been so innocent as
she had represented herself to be.” The magistrate “said no
jury would convict on such evidence, and he should discharge
the prisoner.”

In other words, 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.

Even in the 1970s, the forensic examination remained a

formality, a kind of kabuki theater of scientific justice. The
police officers wielded absolute power in the situation; they
told the story; they assigned blame. And they didn’t want to
give up that power.

Ms. Goddard’s insight was that the only fix for this

dysfunctional system would be incontrovertible scientific
proof, the same kind used in a robbery or attempted murder.
The victim’s story should be supported with evidence from the
crime lab to build a case that would convince juries. To get that
evidence, she needed a device that would encourage the
hospital staff members, the detectives and the lab technicians
to collaborate with the victim. On the most basic level, Ms.
Goddard realized, she had to find a mechanism that would
protect the evidence from a system that was designed to
destroy it.

EVEN AFTER MONTHS of searching for Marty Goddard, I hadn’t

been able to find her, or even figure out the names of her
family members. But I did manage to track down Cynthia
Gehrie, an activist who’d been swept up in Ms. Goddard’s
crusade.

The two women met at a gathering for anti-rape activists in

1973 and soon they were strategizing over lunches and
dinners, notebooks by their plates. At the time, Ms. Gehrie
worked a day job at the A.C.L.U.; she was so impressed by Ms.
Goddard that she volunteered to be her sidekick as they
figured out how to force men in power to reckon with the rape
epidemic.

Denouncing rape at a 1979 rally organized by the National Organization for Women at Daley
Center Plaza in Chicago. Chicago Sun-Times Collection/Chicago History Museum, via Getty
Images

Their timing was excellent, because 1974 was the year that
everything flipped in Chicago. Women who had once been
ashamed were now speaking out.

In October, a delegation of suburban women gathered before

the members of the Illinois General Assembly. One described
how she’d tried to fend off a sexual attacker with a fireplace
poker. After the assault, she had carefully saved the bent poker
and handed this piece of evidence to police detectives. Then,
she recounted through tears, the police returned the poker to
her straightened out. The idiots thought she had wanted them
to fix it.

A mother stood before the committee and said that her little
girl had been molested on her way to kindergarten. The police
were already familiar with the attacker, a pedophile who had
infected at least one child with venereal disease. And yet he
was roaming free.

A nurse at the meeting explained how medical staff handled

rape cases — and in the middle of her testimony, announced, “I
am a rape victim myself.”

A few days later, about 70 women from a group called Chicago

Legal Action for Women, CLAW for short, flooded into the
office of State’s Attorney Bernard Carey, and plastered the
walls with messages like “Wanted: Bernard Carey for Aiding
and Abetting Rapists.”

The rape problem had suddenly become Mr. Carey’s problem,

and he desperately needed to look as if he had an answer.

A movement was beginning — an awakening, like #MeToo.

The fact that many of these activists were well-off white
women forced politicians to pay attention. Black women in
Chicago's poorest neighborhoods were most at risk of sexual
violence, but their stories rarely made it into the newspapers,
and rape was all too often portrayed as an affliction of the
suburbs. Throughout her career, Ms. Goddard would wrestle
with this disparity and try to overcome it. In 1982 she told an
Illinois state legislative committee that “the lack of services on
the South and West Sides of Chicago where a majority of our
black victims reside” was “totally disgraceful.”

Now, though, in the early 1970s, she had just one obsession.
She was determined to convince Bernard Carey that the
problem could be solved, if he only had the will to do it. One
day she showed up unannounced at his office and to her
surprise, he welcomed her in. “I don’t know what the answer
is,” he told her. But he had a new plan: He was going to let
women like Ms. Goddard help figure out the rape problem for
themselves. He appointed her and Ms. Gehrie to a citizens’
advisory panel on rape. Their mission to investigate the
failures in policing and suggest sweeping reforms.
Marty Goddard finally had what she wanted: permission to
get inside the police departments.

With her new investigative powers, she headed to the Chicago

crime lab building to ask police officers what was going wrong.
Years later, she described what she had learned there in the
oral history tapes. The cops blamed hospital workers, saying:
“We don’t get hair. We don’t get fingernail scrapings.” The
slides weren’t labeled, and they’d been “rubber-banded”
together so that they contaminated one another. “So there
goes that. It’s worthless,” the detectives told her.

The problem, she realized, was that no one had bothered to tell
the nurses and doctors how to collect evidence properly.

What if hospitals could be stocked with easy-to-use forensic

tools that would encourage medics, detectives and lab
technicians to collaborate instead of pointing fingers?
Gradually, these concepts solidified into an object: a kit
stocked with swabs, vials and instructions.

Somewhere along the way, Ms. Goddard had befriended Rudy

Nimocks, an African-American police officer who had handled
incest cases and been horrified by what he’d seen. Ms.
Goddard and Ms. Gehrie described Mr. Nimocks as a mentor.
(He would be in his 90s now; I made multiple attempts to
reach him without success.) According to several sources, Mr.
Nimocks warned Ms. Goddard to proceed carefully. He told
her that she should take care not to challenge the men in the
crime lab directly. And he said that she’d need Sgt. Louis
Vitullo, the head of the microscope unit, on her side.

Sergeant Vitullo was a scruffy cop-scientist, with a lab coat

pulled hastily over his rumpled shirt and the pale, haunted
look of a man who spent hours peering at murder weapons.

One day, Ms. Goddard found Sergeant Vitullo at his desk,

introduced herself, and presented him with a written
description of the rape-kit system. She must have been
blindsided by what happened next.

“He screamed at her,” according to Ms. Gehrie. “He told her

she had no business getting involved with this and that what
she was talking about was crazy. She was wasting his time. He
didn’t want to hear about this anymore.” Ms. Gerhie said Ms.
Goddard called her minutes later to vent about being thrown
out of Sergeant Vitullo’s office.

“Well, that didn’t go so well!” Ms. Goddard said wryly.

As far as Ms. Goddard knew at that moment, the rape-kit idea

had just been killed off.

INVENTION, ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN — these are not just

technical feats. They are political acts. The inventor offers us a
magical new ability that can be wonderful or terrifying: to halt
disease, to map the ocean floor, to replace a human worker
with a machine, or to kill enemies more efficiently. And those
magical abilities create winners and losers. The Harvard
professor Sheila Jasanoff has observed that technology “rules
us much as laws do.”

When it comes to sexual assault, there are many inventions I

can think of that help men get away with it — from the date-
rape drug to “stalkerware” software. More striking is how few
inventions, how little technology and design, has been devoted
to keeping women safe.

Think about our public spaces, and how much they reinforce
the power of men. If you grew up as a girl, you were taught to
map out potential sexual attacks when you walked through
any city. A hidden doorway, an empty subway platform, a
pedestrian bridge with high walls — such places pulse with
threat.

In my high-school driving class, the instructor lectured us

about the dangers that lurked in empty parking lots. “Ladies,
you don’t want to be fumbling in your purse if someone jumps
out of the bushes,” he said, and suggested that we hold the car
keys in one hand as we hurried to the car. Even as a teenager, I
remember thinking how crazy this sounded. If there were
rapists lurking everywhere, couldn’t the grownups do
something about that?

I learned that the streets did not belong to me. Nor did the
stairwells or the empty laundry rooms at midnight. I still
remember the sense of defeat my first week as a college
student on a pastoral Connecticut campus in the 1980s. I’d
been aching to explore its tantalizing forests and hidden
ponds. But then the freshman girls were herded into a lecture
hall, and the head of public safety told us that if we wanted to
walk from one building to another at night, we should first call
the escort service that squired females around and protected
them from rape.

“No way!” I thought.

And yet, at that time I was struggling to understand — and

forgive myself for — having been molested as a small child.
And though I never did use the campus escort service, I also
never felt that the campus was mine.

But this is not how it has to be. It’s entirely possible to create
public spaces and tools for everyone. Our environment and
technology can foster a sense of equality and pluralism.

At the same time that Marty Goddard was trying to reinvent

forensic technology, the disabled community was radically
transforming the design of cities by pushing to make streets
and buildings wheelchair-accessible. A wheelchair ramp does
more than just allow someone to roll into a building; it also
sends out a message that the people in those wheelchairs are
important and worthy of dignity. This is the power of
invention.

You can see why the idea of a rape kit might have been
offensive to Sergeant Vitullo and other police officers. Like
many of the great technological ideas, this one blasted through
the assumptions of the day: that nurses were too stupid to
collect forensic evidence; that women who “cried rape” were
usually lying; and that evidence didn’t really matter when it
came to rape, because rape was impossible to prove.

Now here was this proposal for a cardboard box packed with
tools that would allow anyone to perform police work.

Despite his original reaction, Sergeant Vitullo mulled over Ms.

Goddard’s idea. He must have found it intriguing. He studied
the plans she’d shown him. And he began to see the sense in it
all.

One day, Ms. Gehrie told me, Sergeant Vitullo called up Ms.
Goddard and said, “I’ve got something to show you.” When
Ms. Goddard arrived in his office, Ms. Gehrie recalled, “he
handed her a full model of the kit with all the items enclosed.”
Sergeant Vitullo had assembled a prototype for the rape kit
and added a few flourishes of his own. And now, apparently, he
regarded himself as its inventor.
The Chicago Police Star, the official publication of the Chicago Police Department, published a
feature about Sergeant Louis Vitullo and the rape evidence kit in its January 1979
edition. Chicago Police Star

Another friend of Ms. Goddard’s confirmed this story. Mary

Sladek Dreiser, who met Ms. Goddard in 1980, told me that Ms.
Goddard always praised Sergeant Vitullo in public. But in
private, she described him as a petty tyrant who would “only
go along with the kit if it were named after him.”
 The rape-kit idea was presented to the public as
a collaboration between the state attorney’s office and
the police department, with men running both sides...
...and little credit given to the women who had pushed
for reform. Ms. Goddard agreed to this, Ms. Gehrie
said, because she saw that it was the only way to make
the rape kit happen.
In the mid-1970s, while still at the Wieboldt Foundation, Ms.
Goddard began working nights and weekends to found a
nonprofit group called the Citizens Committee for Victim
Assistance. The group filed a trademark for the Vitullo
Evidence Collection Kit in 1978, ensuring that her creation
would be branded with a man’s name. For years afterward, the
newspapers called the rape kit the “Vitullo kit.” When he died
in 2006, an obituary headline celebrated him as the “Man Who
Invented the Rape Kit.” His wife, Betty, quoted in the obituary,
said that her husband was “proud” of the rape kit “but he
didn’t get any royalties for it.” The obituary hailed Mr. Vitullo
as a pioneer in a new form of evidence collection that
transformed the criminal-justice system. There was no
mention of Ms. Goddard.

Even if her name wasn’t on it, Ms. Goddard finally had

permission to start a citywide rape-kit system. What she didn’t
have was any money to create the kits, distribute them, or
train nurses to use them. She had to raise all those funds
through her nonprofit group, which represented survivors of
sex crimes.

This seems strange. After all, state governments covered the

cost of running homicide evidence through the crime lab, so
why should sexual assault be any different?

And yet it was. And it still is.

Money problems have always haunted the rape-kit system.

Testing a rape kit is expensive; today it costs $1,000 to $1,500.
Except in the highest-profile cases, police departments have
often pleaded underfunding, and let the kits pile up. That’s
why victims themselves have had to bankroll crime labs. In
the past decade, groups like the Joyful Heart Foundation have
helped raise millions of dollars to test rape kits. The money
sometimes comes from bake sales, Etsy crafts and feminist
comedy nights.

Fundraising was even harder in the 1970s, however, when

most foundations wouldn’t give money to a project with “rape”
or “sex” in its title. And so Ms. Goddard had to resort to
finding money wherever she could. This is where Hugh Hefner
enters the story.
Bunnies talking with a supervisor at Chicago Playboy Club, circa 1966. The Playboy Foundation
gave Ms. Goddard a grant for the rape-kit project. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.

Chicago was built on soft-core porn, and Mr. Hefner was one of
the city’s most prominent moguls. Men in suits sidled into his
clubhouses for three-martini lunches, celebrities swanned into
his mansion for glittering fund-raisers, and a blazing
“Playboy” sign scalded the downtown skyline.

Mr. Hefner regarded the women’s liberation movement as a

sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and
guilt. And so his philanthropic Playboy Foundation showered
money on feminist causes. In the early 1970s, for example, the
Playboy fortune provided the seed money for the A.C.L.U.
Women’s Rights Project, which was co-founded by a little-
known lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the mid-1970s, Ms. Goddard applied to Playboy for a $10,000

grant (the equivalent of about $50,000 today) to start a rape-
kit system. And she got it.

Her collaboration with the Playboy Foundation turned out to

be a surprisingly ideal one, in large part because Ms. Goddard
had a friend on the inside: Margaret Pokorny (then known as
Margaret Standish). Ms. Pokorny brainstormed all kinds of
ways to support the project that went beyond the big check.
For instance, she recruited Playboy’s graphics designers to
create the packaging for the kit. And when Ms. Goddard
needed volunteers to assemble the kits, Ms. Pokorny came up
with a creative solution: old ladies.
A personal photo of Margaret Pokorny in her office at the Playboy Foundation.

“I’ve got this great idea, Marty,” Ms. Goddard recalled Ms.
Pokorny saying. “Everybody just loves the Playboy bunny and
these older women, they want something to do.” So one day a
horde of them showed up in the Playboy offices, swilling free
coffee as they assembled sexual-assault evidence kits.

In 1978, Marty Goddard delivered the first standardized rape

kit to around 25 hospitals in the Chicago area for use in a pilot
program she had designed — “the first program of its type in
the nation,” according to a newspaper article.

The kits cost $2.50 each and contained test tubes, slides and
packaging materials to protect the specimens from mixing; a
comb for collecting hair and fiber; sterile nail clippers; and a
bag for the victim’s clothing. There was a card for the victim,
giving her information about where to seek counseling and
further medical services.
 9
7

The New York Times, which described the initiative as a

collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and Ms. Goddard, said that
the “innocuous looking” box “could be a powerful new weapon
in the conviction of rapists.” The Times noted that one of the
most important features of the system was deceptively low-
tech: “Forms for the doctor and the police officers involved are
included, as are sealing tape and a pencil for writing on the
slides. Anyone who handles the box must put his or her
signature on printed spaces on the kit’s cover.” There would be
a paper trail that showed how the evidence had traveled from
the victim’s body to the crime lab.

By the end of 1979, nearly 3,000 kits had been turned over to
crime labs. One of them had been submitted by a bus driver
who’d been abducted and raped by 28-year-old William
Johnson. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, and the
Vitullo Evidence Kit was credited with winning the day in
court.

By now, Ms. Goddard’s friend Rudy Nimocks had been

promoted to head the sex homicide department. He told The
Chicago Tribune that the new system had improved evidence
collection. But perhaps more important, the kit worked magic
in the courtroom. “In addition to the kits being very practical,”
he said, “we find that it impresses the jurors when you have a
uniform set of criteria in the collection of evidence.”

In other words, the rape kit, with its official blue-and-white

packaging and its stamps and seals, functioned as a theatrical
prop as well as a scientific tool. The woman in the witness box,
weeping as she recounted how her husband tried to kill her,
could sound to a judge and jury like a greedy little opportunist.
But then a crime-lab technician would take the stand and show
them the ripped dress, the semen stains, the blood. When a
scientist in a lab coat affirmed the story, it seemed true.

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. Doctors, nurses and forensic
scientists backed up her version of the events — and the kit
itself became a character in the trials. It, too, became a
witness.
The checklist for collecting evidence inside the top of the rape kit. Sara Stathas for The New York
Times

That’s another reason Ms. Goddard may have been willing to

trademark her idea under Sergeant Vitullo’s name. It was as if
in order to invent, she also had to disappear. The rape kit
simply never would have had traction if a woman with no
scientific credentials had been known as its sole inventor. It
had to come from a man.

The word “technology” is part of the problem. It’s a synonym

for “stuff that men do.” As the historian Autumn Stanley
pointed out, a revised history of technology taking into
account women’s contributions would include all sorts of
“unimportant” inventions like baby cribs, menstrual pads and
food preservation techniques. Sometimes the only way that
women could navigate this world was to let a white man in a
lab coat become the face of their radical ideas, while they
themselves shrank into the background.

During World War II, for instance, a team of six “girls” figured
out how to operate the world’s first all-purpose electronic
digital computer, called the ENIAC. In 1946, one of them, Betty
Holberton, stayed up half the night to ensure that the
computer would ace its debut in front of the newspaper
cameras. And yet she and the others were treated like
switchboard operators, mere helpers to the male engineers.
Ms. Holberton went on to invent and design many of the
essential tools of computing during the 1950s and ’60s almost
invisibly, while her male colleagues were celebrated as
geniuses of the age.
Ms. Goddard, certainly, had mastered the art of vanishing. Her
friends and collaborators from the 1970s had lost touch with
her, and were just as flummoxed by her disappearance as I
was. But they remembered her in vivid, disconnected flashes. I
often felt that I was spying on her through keyholes into other
people’s minds.

“She made miniature rooms,” Margaret Pokorny said,

describing how Ms. Goddard spent hours with tweezers and
tiny brushes constructing fairy-tale interiors inside of boxes.
The rooms were scattered all around Ms. Goddard’s
apartment, as if a dollhouse had been dissected.

From Cynthia Gehrie, I learned why Ms. Goddard might have

been so driven to escape into Lilliputian fantasies. Ms. Gehrie
told me that in the late 1970s, her friend had flown to a resort
in Hawaii for a vacation and returned to Chicago a different,
and broken, person. “I was raped,” Ms. Goddard had told Ms.
Gehrie, pouring out a harrowing account of how a man had
abducted her.

“He drove her to a remote location,” Ms. Gehrie said. “He

taunted her with the knife. She told him she would do
whatever he wanted. Finally, he drove her back to the resort.
She was astonished when he let her go.” Ms. Gehrie can’t
remember whether Ms. Goddard reported the rape to the
police, but she’s always wondered if her friend’s prominence as
a victims-rights advocate had made her a target. The attacker
had won her trust, Ms. Goddard said, by pretending to be a
supporter of her cause.

In one obscure interview I found, Ms. Goddard herself

mentioned that rape and the scars it left on her body. And, she
said, the attacker had infected her with herpes.

I was heartbroken for her, and more determined to find her

than ever. By now she had become “Marty” to me — I could
think of her only as a friend. I surmised, from the string of
addresses she’d left behind, that she had been spiraling into
poverty. She would have been 79. Was anyone caring for her? I
felt less and less like a journalist chasing down a story. What I
really wanted was to save Marty Goddard before it was too
late.

Through the 1980s, Ms. Goddard kept fighting for the rape-kit
system despite her growing exhaustion. It was “one incident
by one incident by one incident,” she said later. “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 pediatrician
to nurse to nurse practitioner” and train each person who
interacted with the victim and the rape kit. “I felt I had to save
the world, and I was going to start with Chicago and move to
Cook County and move to the rest of the state. And there was
something in the back of my mind that said, ʻGee, maybe the
circumstances will be such that at some time I can go beyond
the borders of Illinois.’”

She was right. In 1982, New York City adopted Ms. Goddard’s
system because “its effectiveness was demonstrated in
Chicago,” according to The New York Times. Within a few
years, the city had amassed thousands of sealed kits
containing evidence, and the system was putting rapists in
prison.

Ms. Goddard had envisioned a kind of internet of forensics at a

time when the internet itself was in its infancy. The idea was to
standardize practices in crime labs everywhere and encourage
police departments to share data to catch perpetrators who
might cross county and state lines. And she had personal
reasons for grinding away at the problem, for making it her
obsessive mission. The man who had brutalized her in Hawaii
still walked free. She knew this because she’d seen him, she
told a friend at the time.

She had been walking to the attorney general’s office in

downtown Chicago when her attacker materialized out of the
crowd and locked eyes with her. It must have been a waking
nightmare. Had he been stalking her? Had it been a chance
encounter?

I don’t know. She was under an extraordinary amount of

stress; maybe she was mistaken. I am working from
fragments — from bits and pieces of her friends’ memories.
What I do know is that Ms. Goddard began to drink; that she
depended now on cheap sherry to dull the pain. She was
dragging herself from city to city, evangelizing for the rape kit,
sleeping in dive motels, giving everything she had until there
was nothing left.

In 1984, the F.B.I. held a conference at its training center in

Quantico, Va. Expert criminologists flew in to discuss a new
system that would detect the serial killers and rapists
operating across state lines. But to the dismay of Ms. Goddard,
who attended the conference, the country’s top lawmen
demonstrated little empathy for victims.

“So, this one man gets up,” a professor known as an expert in

sex crimes, Ms. Goddard remembered later. The professor
flashed slides on the screen, a twisted parade of naked female
corpses. He made little effort to protect the identities of the
dead women. Ms. Goddard was horrified at the way he
“couldn’t wait to show the bite marks on the breasts” of one
victim, as if to share his titillation with the audience.

That kind of attitude might have gone unremarked at a police

convention, but there were lawyers, victims’ advocates and
nurses at this conference and they “didn’t appreciate it.” Just
as dismaying, this so-called expert described “interrogating”
women who’d been raped, as if they were the criminals.

“I went nuts,” Ms. Goddard said. She gripped the arms of her
chair, “saying to myself: ʻCalm down. Don’t say anything.’”
AFTER THE PRESENTATION, Ms. Goddard approached one of the
organizers and said, “Something’s wrong here, and I really
object.” Working on the fly, Ms. Goddard gave a presentation
about her pilot project in Chicago, explaining how the rape-kit
system worked. Afterward, “two guys from the Department of
Justice” approached her and asked her to replicate her
program all around the country. She was finally given enough
funding to travel to more than a dozen different states and
help start up pilot programs.

“I don’t know how my cat survived,” she said of those years. “I

was gone all the time.”

She was tired out. And “so many people were downright
insulting.” They’d ask her why she was an authority on
forensics: “Are you a cop? An attorney?” Ms. Goddard was
drinking heavily. She began to step away from her prominent
role in criminal justice. She moved to Texas, and then Arizona.
And finally she faded from public view so thoroughly that I
believe she must have decided to disappear.

Her friend and former colleague Mary Dreiser kept in touch.

But one day in about 2006 or 2007, Ms. Dreiser was distressed
to dial Ms. Goddard’s number and discover it had been
disconnected. Ms. Dreiser’s husband, a lawyer, asked a
detective to find Ms. Goddard. She turned up in a mobile-home
park in Arizona. “She was happy I had tracked her down,” Ms.
Dreiser said.
Marty Goddardʼs last home was in an apartment complex in Phoenix. Adriana Zehbrauskas for
The New York Times

By the time I started searching for Ms. Goddard a decade later,

she had moved out of that trailer and her most recent listing
suggested she lived in a dumpy apartment building alongside
a Phoenix highway. That phone, too, had been disconnected, so
I’d assumed that she had moved on once again, perhaps to a
nursing home. But just in case, I called up the building’s
management office and asked if the people there could tell me
anything about Marty Goddard.

“Unfortunately, I can’t,” said the woman who answered the

phone. There were rules about protecting the privacy of
residents.

But rules are meant to be broken. So I called back. “Listen,” I

said, “just hear me out.”

I then plied the woman in the management office with a brief

— and, I hoped, heart-melting — tribute to Ms. Goddard’s
genius and her sacrifices.

It worked. “OK,” she said, “let me check into it.” Hours later,
she called me back. Marty Goddard had indeed lived in their
apartment building, she said, then paused.

“And I’m very sorry to tell you that she passed away.”

The news walloped me. Ms. Goddard had died in 2015, at the
age of 74, but there had been no obituary. No announcement.
I’d searched for pictures of headstones, remembrances,
funeral announcements, and I’d found nothing. This woman
who had done so much for the rest of us. How could this be?

Paradoxically, at the same time as Ms. Goddard was fading

from sight, her name no longer in the papers, the advent of
DNA forensics was giving the rape kit a new kind of
superpower.

In 1988, a court ordered Victor Lopez, a 42-year-old repeat

felon accused of violent attacks, to submit to a blood draw. He
would be the first defendant in New York State to be linked to
a crime through DNA analysis — and the case would prove the
dazzling effectiveness of this new tool. The DNA test showed a
strong match between Mr. Lopez’s blood and the semen
collected from one of his victims. Mr. Lopez was convicted of
three sexual assaults and sentenced to 100 years in prison.
One juror, John Bischoff, told The New York Times that “the
DNA was kind of a sealer on the thing. You can’t really argue
with science.”

When Ms. Goddard began her work, crime labs could establish
only a fuzzy connection between a suspect’s blood and the
swabs inside the kit — for instance, by showing that the blood
type was a match. But now, DNA markers could reveal the
path of a perpetrator as he left his semen or blood at multiple
crime scenes.
 Starting in 2003, several women across the country
accused a man named Nathan Loebe of sexual assault,
but
those accusations had never stuck.
 After the Tucson police received a grant to test a
backlog of rape kits, they discovered that DNA from
several of the kits matched Mr. Loebe. Rape-kit
evidence revealed the
pattern of his attacks, and last year he was sentenced
to 274 years in prison, including for 12 counts of sexual
assault.
But DNA testing was expensive. Compounding that problem
was the sheer success of the rape kit system: Victims now felt
encouraged to report their assaults and submit to exams,
which meant that police departments were flooded with
evidence.

And so, just as the rape-kit system began to succeed, police

departments strangled it. They began hiding away thousands
of untested rape kits deemed too expensive to process.
New York was among the first cities to set up a rape-kit
system, and almost immediately it fell behind in processing. It
amassed a huge backlog — 16,000 untested kits by the year
2000. The women (and some men) who submitted to rubber-
gloved exams did so because they hoped against hope that the
police might actually catch a perpetrator. Little did they know
that their evidence could be thrown in a warehouse — or even
in a trash can.

In 2000, Paul Ferrara, the director of Virginia’s crime lab, said

that backlogs were growing all around the country and “cost
lives.” The year before, the Virginia Beach police had had to
release a rape suspect because potentially incriminating DNA
couldn’t be processed quickly enough, and the suspect went on
to murder a woman.

It is striking how much Ms. Goddard’s trajectory mirrored that

of her invention. In the early 1990s, just when she might have
risen to national prominence, she drifted south. She retired,
though she was only in her early 50s, and eked out a living
with some help from friends. By the 2000s, she had sobered up
and spent her days clipping newspapers, tracking the issues
that she most cared about. And then — this part hurts my
heart — she pursued a degree in forensics at a local
community college.

Ms. Goddard had founded sexual-assault forensics, and yet

she now lacked any of the bona fides required to be recognized
as an expert. Nothing came of her studies, and she never
really worked again. Ms. Goddard herself had been
warehoused.

I know all of this because just a few months ago, I finally

cracked the case of why and how she disappeared, thanks to
some clues I found in the announcement of her brief 1966
marriage in a Michigan newspaper. Working through a chain
of obituaries and phone records and small newspaper items, I
tracked down a number for Scott Goddard, who I thought must
be Marty Goddard’s nephew.

One day I cold-called him and left a message. It turned out that
he was the right Scott Goddard. His father had died in a freak
accident in 1980, and after that, his aunt became like a second
mother to him. “When I was 9 or 10 years old, she took me to
the Grand Canyon. And I remained close with her for her
entire life,” Mr. Goddard said.

Marty Goddard with her nephew Scott Goddard, who was a college student at the time of the
photo. Courtesy Scott Goddard

He told me that his aunt — who’d always been so busy, so

engaged — had turned into a hermit in the 2000s. She
withdrew into her trailer in the mobile-home park, with her
newspaper clippings fluttering everywhere, surrounded by the
miniature model rooms she still loved to build. She was
vanishing, shrinking down to nothing.

“When she passed, I inherited about 50 boxes of stuff,” he said,

including a tiny toy chest filled with dolls for the doll children
to play with.
He told me that when he was a boy, his aunt had taken him
through the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of
Chicago — a place she visited many times. Here they had lost
themselves in those perfect shadow boxes, peering into, say, a
Georgian dining room with crystal wine glasses, like
fragments of diamonds, arranged on a silver tray. Beyond the
chandelier and the French windows, a painted garden
beckoned, with a lily pond and trees wilting in the summer
heat, and paths you could follow into even stranger
dreamscapes. You could imagine opening up one of the
postage-stamp-sized books to hear the crack of its gold-leaf
spine and read the secrets contained in its mouse-print text.

A detail of one of Marty Goddardʼs dioramas. Sara Stathas for The New York
Times

I can’t tell you what drove Marty Goddard into her dioramas.
People around her tended to believe she wanted to escape into
her imagination. But I think maybe she was exploring the dark
magic of ordinary things, the way the most forgettable object
can be converted into evidence. Some underwear, a pack of
cigarettes, the note scrawled on the scrap of paper — how
strange it is that any of these furnishings of your life could one
day be used to reconstruct your own assault or murder. I
wonder if she was building tiny crime scenes peppered with
clues, if somehow she was leaving a message about what had
happened to her.

Mr. Goddard told me that about 2010, “depression started to

set in,” and his aunt became a furious alcoholic. Her once steel-
trap mind wandered. Worse, she raged and accused, believed
friends plotted to kill her. “In the last few years, she alienated
most of her family and friends,” he said.

THE RAPE KIT WASNʼT DOING SO WELL EITHER. In 2009,

investigators toured an abandoned parking garage that the
Detroit police had appropriated for storage and where officers
had been dumping evidence for decades. In the dank building,
with pigeons fluttering over their head, the investigators
wandered past a blood-stained sofa and a bucket full of bullets
and shells. In one of the parking bays, they found the rape kits
— what would turn out to be a trove of 11,000, most of which
had never been tested. Some of the kits had been collected as
far back as 1980. The victims ranged in age from 90 to one
month old.

It wasn’t just Detroit. Investigators in cities around the

country had begun to open up their own warehouses, and they
too discovered towers of untested rape kits.

By 2015, the backlog of untested rape kits in the United States

had grown to an estimated 400,000.

In 2016, the Justice Department announced a new sexual

assault kit initiative and $45 million to tackle the backlog.
More than 25 states have committed to testing warehoused
evidence. Despite the government funding, the cost of these
initiatives still largely fell on women’s groups and the victims
themselves, who organized dinner parties, Facebook charity
drives and comedy shows.

So far, the efforts have paid off. Five states and the District of
Columbia have cleared their backlogs. Testing thousands of
kits has led to a bonanza of DNA identifications and hundreds
of convictions. Scientists are also using rape-kit data to show
that there are more serial rapists than we ever suspected. In
one study of rape kits in the Cleveland area, researchers found
that more than half of them were connected to other cases.

In other words, when a victim decides to go to all the trouble of

driving to an emergency room and submitting to a rape-kit
exam, it’s because she believes that her attacker will rape
someone else. And quite often, she’s right.

When Ms. Goddard died, she asked that her ashes be thrown
to the winds in Sedona, Ariz., along the red cliffs. Old friends
like Cynthia Gehrie and Margaret Pokorny didn’t even know
she was gone. She left behind those boxes of tiny furniture.
And, also, a nationwide forensics system that might never
have existed but for her.

Writing this, I dreamed of one day seeing one of the original

kits displayed in the Smithsonian, among the parade of great
American inventions. Mary Dreiser told me she might have
saved one of the kits distributed in 1980. I asked her to hunt for
it, and there it was, in the back of a closet, yellowed after
decades in storage. The kit was emblazoned with the logo of a
female face, as if to declare that this — among all the man-
made objects in the world — had been created by and for
women.

Today, a new generation of inventors are figuring out how to

speed up the testing of rape-kit DNA, to improve the design of
the kits, and to draw new insights from sexual-assault
analytics. This story of feminist technology is still unfolding.
Half a century after Marty Goddard answered the calls of
teenage rape victims, survivors and their advocates are
assembling a vast net of evidence, and it is tightening, ever so
slowly, around the perpetrators.

Cover Illustration by Michael Mapes, photographed by Jens Mortensen for The

New York Times. Additional illustrations by Nicholas Konrad; Additional
reporting by Nicholas Konrad and Jessia Ma.

Photographs by: Sara Stathas for The New York Times (Rape Kit, Copy photos
of Cynthia Gehrie and Marty Goddard), Chicago Police Star (Louis Vitullo),
Chicago Sun-Times (Bernard Carey), Cody O'Loughlin for The New York Times
(Copy photo of Margaret Pokorny), Pima County Attorneyʼs Office (Nathan
Loebe).