In my
last post, I described the events surrounding the Cape Cod murder of fashion journalist Christa Worthington.
Three years after her death, despite books, magazine articles, and television news segments dedicated to the case, the investigation was still ongoing.
This isn't to suggest that the police weren't active in their pursuit of the killer. To the contrary, some accused them of being overzealous in their investigation. The ACLU was none too pleased, for example, when police cast an incredibly wide net and asked every man in Truro (population: ~2,000) to give voluntary DNA samples.
One man who agreed to an oral swab was Christopher McCowen (left). Four months after Worthington's murder, McCowen, a trash collector whose route included Worthington's house, consented to a DNA sample. It wasn't until more than three years after the murder that the police announced a positive match between McCowen and the DNA found on and inside of the victim at the crime scene. Christopher McCowen was arrested for the rape and murder of Christa Worthington in April 2005.
Whatever stereotypes you may hold about residents of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, McCowen likely doesn't fit them. At the time of his arrest he was 33. He had a reasonably extensive criminal record, mostly involving burglary and trading in stolen goods, but also including at least one domestically-related restraining order. His IQ has been alternatively reported as 76, 78, and 81, in any case just a handful of points above the cut-off for a classification of Mild Mental Retardation. In short, he was an African-American garbage collector that didn't fit into the murder mystery script many had been writing for the case.
McCowen's arrest seemed to lead to as many questions as answers. First, what took so long? Police blamed a backlog at the crime lab as well as other logistic hurdles for the more than three-year delay between McCowen's agreement to give DNA and the positive test match.
Second, where did the rape charge come from? They found the attacker's DNA on and in the victim, so of course it was rape, you might suggest. But interestingly, for all the media coverage of this investigation over the course of 3+ years, no one ever talked about it as a rape-murder. It was always just a murder case. Yes, the District Attorney revealed that Worthington had engaged in sexual activity within hours of her death, but this was always depicted as a consensual act with a mysterious suitor. There was no physical or forensic evidence to suggest that the sex in question was anything but consensual.
Take a look at how District Attorney Michael O'Keefe (left) described the evidence of sexual activity, as related in a book written shortly after the murders but before McCowen's arrest: "It's DNA of an unknown male that's consistent with someone having had sexual relations with the victim." Hardly the language of sexual assault.
Further evidence of O'Keefe's confidence that the pre-murder "relations" were consensual can be found in some of the other, more colorful descriptions of the victim's sexual proclivities in the same book. In fact, by some reports, Worthington's family was so distressed by his derogatory comments regarding Christa's alleged promiscuity that they sought O'Keefe's removal from the case.
So where did the rape charge come from? If you ask McCowen's defense attorney, Bob George (left), it cropped up as soon as police arrested the Black trash collector. According to George, McCowen had consensual sex with Worthington before her murder but did not kill her. But police, according to George, couldn't wrap their minds around that idea. George's claim was, and still is, that once the DNA match arose, so did the rape charge, simply because no one investigating the crime could imagine this wealthy, White New Englander agreeing to have sex with the Black trash collector. "As soon as they see the black garbage man, it's rape," George is quoted as saying in the New York Times.
Would Worthington have engaged in consensual sex with McCowen? Neither I, Bob George, or anyone else really knows. That's a question for a jury to decide, and as their verdict (and alleged comments made during their deliberations) later indicated, they didn't think so. Of course, earlier remarks by the very same District Attorney who would fight to convict McCowen suggest otherwise, implying as they did that the victim was not averse to casual sex with mere acquaintances and had already gotten pregnant by a local fisherman who was married with 5 children of his own at the time.
But what is clear is that the prosecution's theory for the case started to look very different once McCowen was arrested. Whether it was because of his race, his lack of education, his vocation, or some combination thereof, the prosecution clearly thought that the presence of McCowen's DNA at the scene was enough to charge him with and convict him of rape.
The all-important third question to arise from the arrest is what was the rest of the evidence against McCowen? Of the multiple finger and palm prints found at Worthington's house and in her car, none matched McCowen. Forensic examination uncovered DNA from at least three unidentified men under Worthington's fingernails, none of which matched McCowen either.
No, the rest of the prosecution's case, beyond the DNA match that defense attorney George argued was the result of consensual sex, rested in a statement submitted into evidence by police investigators, in which they claimed that McCowen confessed to the crime. As with everything else in this case, though, the so-called confession proved to be less than clear-cut.
In addition to defense claims that McCowen's low IQ rendered him unable to fully process and respond to all that went on around him during his interrogation, George argued that the police were overzealous in their pursuit of this statement. Experts testifying for the defense argued that aspects of McCowen's statement indicated a pronounced likelihood of a false confession, including his tentative grammar and consistently evolving story.
Complicating matters further, the police had not followed the chief piece of advice offered by those research psychologists who study false confessions–they hadn't recorded the interrogation. By most accounts, a 6-hour interrogation like McCowen's would have produced hundreds of pages of transcript. Instead, all the prosecution could offer was a 27-page statement written by one of the detectives and not filed until 8 days after the interrogation.
Though he would initially deny even knowing Worthington, McCowen eventually came to stick to the story that he had engaged in consensual sex with her. His defense would argue that afterwards, Worthington had a confrontation with a friend of McCowen's who had accompanied the defendant to the house, a local drug dealer who committed the murder.
