What Police Never Checked

By August 2014 the hunt for accusers was an organized, resource-intensive operation. It even ran backward into Daniel’s college years: the day after Ligons’s report, a detective called Eastern Michigan University to ask whether he’d ever been a suspect there. He hadn’t. Scott Adams 00149.

The women that search turned up got nothing like that scrutiny. Turvey and Mares, reviewing the whole file, found that many were never asked for a precise location, date or time. Only two of the thirteen, Morris and Gardner, were asked whether a condom was used, which decides how much biological evidence there is to look for. Turvey & Mares, Forensic Report (July 1, 2020), at 11–12.

Ligons told Davis she could tell he was circumcised and didn’t know whether he had pubic hair. After her, the detectives’ own checklists record “didn’t ask.” The closest anyone came was Gregory asking Morris whether anything about it “looked different”; she said no. The detectives did ask Daniel, in his June 18, 2014 interrogation: was he circumcised, did he groom, did he have any identifying marks. So they knew the questions. After Ligons, they stopped asking the women. Scott Adams 00064; Turvey & Mares at 11–12; Holtzclaw interview with Dets. Davis and Gregory, June 18, 2014, Scott Adams 00024–00025; Gregory interview of Morris; OCPD case-summary checklists.

They never asked how the pants worked either. Every accuser who described exposure through the fly got the same few questions, unzipped or pulled down or over the top, and nothing more. Hill said she “didn’t know if it was through his pants or over the top really.” Ellis “did not see him take his penis out of his pants.” Morris said he unzipped and “moved the flap,” and nobody asked her another thing about it. Not one woman was asked how a man gets an erect penis out through the fly of duty pants, under a loaded gun belt, past compression shorts that have no fly. Gregory interview of Hill, Sept. 19, 2014; Davis reports on Ellis; Gregory interviews of Morris; see the clothing page.

An investigator who wanted to know whether it happened, rather than to confirm that it did, asks the mechanical questions any one of these women could have answered if she’d seen it: Did he reach in through the fly or pull something down from the top? What was under the pants, and what color was it? Did you see a second layer, and did it have an opening? Did he use one hand or two, and for how long? Did he have any trouble? What did he do to put it away? Then the same questions to Daniel about his own uniform, and a demonstration with the actual pants and shorts if the answers didn’t line up. The answers either converge on one physical description or they don’t. Nobody in this case asked any of them, so nobody had to find out.

The scene work was just as lopsided. A few allegations got real attention: Ligons’s car and Daniel’s patrol car were processed by CSI, the bedroom where Grate said she was raped was searched under a warrant, cameras near the Ligons stop were pulled and sent to the OSBI, phone records were subpoenaed for three of the women, and Morris and Ellis were driven back to their locations. Most of the thirteen got none of it: no scene visit, no layout, no canvass, no phone records. Turvey and Mares found that for the great majority of the allegations there was no crime-scene processing at all. Turvey & Mares at 15; Scott Adams (CSI and subpoena reports). The prosecution then stood up in front of the jury and called the locations, times and routes “corroboration,” with AVL maps and dispatch logs showing Daniel’s car had been where the women said. Of course it had. He stopped these women; nobody disputes that. What the GPS can’t say is what happened during the stop, and for the great majority of those encounters nobody did the work that could have.

A recording settles who first said Daniel’s name, when the allegation took shape, and whether other accusers came up. The conversations where that mattered most in this case weren’t recorded.

Ligons’s first interview: unrecorded. Carla Johnson’s first interview: unrecorded, because the detectives hadn’t expected her to be home and brought no recorder. Trial Tr. 3540–42. Terri Morris had been talking for several minutes before the recorder came on at the July 10 jail interview; that afternoon two officers checked her out of jail and drove her to the location she had picked, and neither the drive nor the map they used made it into any report. Trial Tr. 3272–73, 3279–82, 3303–04. Syrita Bowen’s first interview: two recorders, both failed, interview went ahead anyway. Trial Tr. 3487–88; Standard Supplement Report on Syrita Bowen, Oct. 10, 2014.

The worst one is Adaira Gardner. She spent about two and a half hours in a car with Davis and Homan immediately before she testified at the preliminary hearing. No report. No recording. Davis conceded she may have told Gardner “we have some things to back up what you said.” The defense found out about the trip at trial. And there was nothing to back up what she said. No stain, no fluid, less of her DNA on the fly than a car door handle carries. The physical evidence didn’t support Gardner’s story; it cut against it. If Davis said it, that isn’t preparation; it is telling a witness the evidence is on her side before she testifies, and it wasn’t. A prosecutor later did the same thing, telling Gardner she was the only accuser with physical evidence and that her testimony would help the other women. Trial Tr. 4019–20, 4084; Spence Aff. ¶14; Gardner Dep. 147:4–6.

None of this was accidental. Lt. Timothy Muzny, the Sex Crimes supervisor, testified that the women who said nothing happened, more than two-thirds of everyone contacted, generally got no report and no recording. Recording only the yeses was, in his words, “directed by command.” Asked whether the women who denied anything were therefore missing from the record, he said: “That’d be correct.” Trial Tr. 2401–02. For the women who said no, nothing survives at all: no notes, no audio, no video, no report. Just names on a list.

State’s Exhibit 408The list of women who said no

What a real contact log would look like, in any investigation where the denials are meant to count for something: for each woman, the date and time of contact, how it was made (door, phone, jail visit, card left), where, by which detective, how her name got on the list (which query, which packet), what she was told the contact was about, whether she was given the “tip” premise, what she was asked, her answer in her own words, whether she was shown a photo, whether the contact was recorded, whether a report was written and its number, and any follow-up. That is what the surviving reports contain for the women who said yes. Exhibit 408 shows that for the women who said no, none of it was kept, or none of it was created.

In survey terms, Exhibit 408 is a list of completed interviews with one answer category, and nothing in the record supplies the denominator. Investigators say they approached more than forty women. Nobody documented how many names were on the lists in total, how many were attempted, how many were never found, how many were reached and refused to talk, how many were reached by phone rather than in person, or how many said no and then, after a second visit or after Daniel’s face was on the news, said yes. Without that, “34 said no” could be 34 of 50 or 34 of 120. Trial Tr. 2401–02, 2461:16–2462:3; OKC 0394–0395; Turvey & Mares at 8.

On June 18, 2014, Daniel sat in a Sex Crimes interview room for the better part of an afternoon. He signed a body-search waiver. Detectives took four buccal swabs and the uniform pants he was wearing. That is the complete list of what they collected from him. Scott Adams 00013, 00025, 00072–00117.

Nine months after the verdict, on camera, the two lead detectives explained the rest. His underwear: “Didn’t take them.” Gregory: “Daniel had said that he had washed the underwear.” Asked whether she believed that, Davis: “I guess believe and hope. Most people change underwear, usually.” His other uniforms: “Why do we need another uniform? We don’t have other victims that had been assaulted yet.” His phone, that night: “Take it for what?” The pockets of the pants they did take: “Why?” Gregory–Davis interview for Michelle Malkin Investigates, Sept. 19, 2016 (transcript). Disclosure: Michelle Malkin is married to UNCUFF president Jesse Malkin.

They didn’t take his compression shorts. He’d told them what he was wearing; nobody asked for them, no warrant was sought, and the pair he had on that day was never collected. Ligons’s oral-sodomy allegation was hours old when he walked in, and a penile swab could have carried her DNA if it happened. None was taken. The pants they did take were never screened with an Alternate Light Source, never tested for what kind of fluid was on them, and the pockets, the built-in control for ordinary transfer, were never swabbed at all. Scott Adams 00104, 01391; Trial Tr. 1146, 4078–79, 4084; Ruddock Dep. 30:8–11, 33:5–17 (Mar. 21, 2019); Gregory–Davis interview for MMI, Sept. 19, 2016.

Nor did they go back for anything. The other alleged encounters ran from December 2013 to June 2014, on other shifts, in other pairs of uniform pants. Those pants were never collected. His home computer was never examined. Scott Adams 00104; OKC 0884–0938.

A database hit shows Daniel ran a name. AVL puts a car on a street. A phone record shows a call. None of that says what happened during a stop.

Carla Johnson is the best contact corroboration in the case: AVL shows Daniel’s car stopped on Jordan for about nine minutes and then following the streets she said she walked. It shows a stop. It says nothing about the stop. Scott Adams 05857–59, 12825.

When the records were actually checked, they sometimes cut the other way. Florene Mathis was certain Daniel had stopped her in December or January. The records showed it was a different officer. Trial Tr. 2426–27, 2467–68. Regina Copeland’s “corroboration” came from a detective on the phone walking her through Google Maps until she picked a house. Trial Tr. 2903–04; Scott Adams 03332. The bedroom where Rosetta Grate said she was raped was eventually processed: chair, underwear, panties, all negative for semen, no DNA. Forensic Examination Report SD-14-399, pp. 1–2; Taylor Dep. 105:9–20.

The State leaned on the idea that the women had told someone before police arrived. Look at what that came to. Johnson has phone records showing she called her roommate minutes after the stop; the voicemail was deleted that night and the roommate’s memory is all that’s left. Trial Tr. 3511–18, 3535–38; Scott Adams 05857–59. For Ellis, Bowen and Hill, the “disclosure” is a relative on the witness stand a year and a half later recalling that she came home upset. People come home upset for all kinds of reasons, and being stopped and questioned by a police officer is one of them. Trial Tr. 1359, 1381, 3039–40, 3423–24. For Copeland, Grate and Barnes it’s less than that; Barnes’s witness couldn’t say whether the conversation happened before or after the police came to her door. Trial Tr. 2145–48, 2613–20, 2884–91. Lyles and Gardner said they told a boyfriend and a friend; neither testified. Mathis told no one. Raines said no five times. Trial Tr. 2307, 2322–24, 3551, 3644–46.

A phone record proves a call. A relative’s memory proves a memory. Each can show when a story existed. None of them is independent proof that what the story describes happened.

Carla Johnson said the touching was over her clothes, then under, skin to skin, at the preliminary hearing, then over again at trial, and agreed on cross that she’d testified both ways. Trial Tr. 3527–30, 3542–43. Kala Lyles told Davis the officer pulled his pants halfway down, and in the same interview that he exposed himself through the zipper. At trial she picked the zipper: “He didn’t pull his pants down.” Trial Tr. 3652–53, 3661–63, 3726, 3736–37. Morris added a condom at trial that no earlier statement mentions. And Ligons told Davis on the morning of the stop that she’d smoked two marijuana joints before driving; by the time she was under oath it was a single hit. Scott Adams 00061; Prelim. Tr. I, 249, 255–56; Trial Tr. 627.

Turvey and Mares put it plainly: police “ignored the investigative requirement to recognize and consider alternate suspects on multiple occasions.” Turvey & Mares at 17–18.

Terri Morris was the only accuser ever shown a photo lineup. She refused it once, then looked at it on June 24 and couldn’t choose between Daniel and Officer J. Dutton. Officer Jeff Sellers, who had also stopped her within months of the incident, wasn’t in it. That mattered because of what Morris described, an officer taking sex from a woman he’d stopped on the street, and what OCPD already knew about Sellers: it had fired him in 2006 after an internal investigation into claims he had sex with a prostitute, then reinstated him. An officer with that history, who had stopped this woman, belonged in her lineup. He wasn’t in it. Trial Tr. 3293, 3317–18, 3350, 3364; Ken Raymond, “City police officer fired after internal investigation,” The Oklahoman, Jan. 31, 2006. Kala Lyles insisted the officer who raped her was the one who’d ticketed her before. Daniel never ticketed her; Officer Allan Cruz did. Cruz was never investigated. Trial Tr. 4255–56; Scott Adams 02102; Turvey & Mares at 18. Sherry Ellis described a Black man shorter than her own 5′11″. Daniel is neither. Davis went through the shift roster for that night, found one Black officer on duty in the sector, A. Edwards, and ruled him out because the databases showed he had never run Ellis’s name. That was the extent of it. An officer who assaults a woman on a dark street doesn’t run her name first, which is exactly why the absence of a record proves nothing. Trial Tr. 3090:12–3091:21 (Davis, cross-examination). Carla Raines told Gregory about “some black officer with vice” who exposed himself to her before she told him anything about Daniel; the only identification she ever made was pointing at the man in the suit at counsel table. Trial Tr. 2183, 2200, 2204–05, 2221–22, 2245–46.