We're in a unique county in Ohio," says Detective Franz. Anywhere else in the state, Mr. Cotton probably would have had to plead to a felony. It was a date rape, but the victim was credible. Like many victims, she was intimidated at first by the process. But we did our job, and she hung with us."
Shannon Smith says she heard about Cotton's legal woes in Cleveland, but didn't know any of the details. She recalls feeling no particular concerns about going to Marcus Cotton's house with two girlfriends in the early morning hours of July 6, 1991.
MARCUS COTTON'S Fourth of July parties in Paradise Valley are renowned among the Valley's black athlete crowd. The booze flows, the music is hot, the food is tasty and the house is big and beautiful.
In the early morning hours of July 6, Shannon and two girlfriends drove to Cotton's home. Shannon says she was tired, but agreed to tag along for what she expected would be a short visit. The trio arrived around 2 a.m., and found about 25 people-most of them drunk-still partying hard.
Shannon's version of what happened next: A guy Shannon calls Eight-Ball-Leonard Russell, a former ASU running back and now a budding NFL star-dunked her in the pool. She went inside the house to dry off. Cotton soon gestured at her from the pool area to toss him a towel.
She didn't mind doing that, but then he grabbed her, threw her into his pool and jumped in after her. He was holding me in his arms in the water," Shannon says. He tried to kiss me. I said, `Stop.' He said, `What's the matter?' `I don't like you, Marcus.' He pulled off my shirt.
Nobody could see what was going on, except for this fat guy I'd never seen before. Marcus pulled my shorts to the side and tried to have intercourse with me for a few seconds. I kept saying no, no, no. Marcus told his friend to lock the doors to the house. He's so big and he had this crazy look. He said if I peeped he was going to throw me into the party buck-naked. He pulled my shorts down. Things were happening so fast. I didn't know what to do."
Shannon isn't certain-Things were blurry"-but she believes Cotton carried her naked up a flight of stairs, out of view of the partygoers. No one knew where Marcus had taken me," she says. This is blurry. The girls I was with didn't know where me and Marcus stood. They just figured I had gone off with him on my own."
In his bedroom, Shannon says, Marcus had his way with me. I tried to talk to him. I heard that when someone attacks you, you should just talk to them about anything to bring the human aspect back to them. But he just said, `Shut up and give me head.'"
Cotton then forced her to have sexual intercourse with him. The more I screamed when he was doing this the more excited he got," she recalls. He put all his weight on me. He threatened to throw me over the balcony. I was scared and I basically complied."
After he was done, Cotton ordered Shannon to shower. She says she rinsed off and wrapped a towel around herself. Cotton was holding a video camera when she came out of the bathroom, Shannon says, and yanked the towel off her. Cotton then fetched her clothes. Distraught, she went to wake her sleeping girlfriends and leave.
Cotton's housemate, Terry Hicks, says he bumped into Shannon as she walked down the stairs. It was like nothing happened," Hicks tells New Times. She didn't say anything about Marcus attacking her. She wasn't screaming. The first thing I said to her was, `You complain about athletes all the time and here you are, back over here.' I would always tell her, `You're being used and abused by these guys,' but she'd never listen."
Shannon's version of her conversation with Hicks is far different: I was coming out of Marcus' room when we bumped into each other. I had tears in my eyes. I was whimpering. He just kind of stuttered something to me and he left. That was it. He saw how upset I was."
What happened in Cotton's bedroom is known only to Marcus Cotton and Shannon Smith. But how Shannon behaved after her alleged rape is crucial to her credibility. Her friend Denise Brooks recalls the moment vividly.
She woke me up and said, `Hurry up, we have to get out of here,'" Brooks says. She was shaking. Something was very wrong with her. After we left, she told me everything that had happened. I was so mad at her. `Why didn't you holler and scream?' She told me she was terrified to death of what Marcus was going to do to her. We talked about her calling the police and she wanted to."
SHANNON SMITH SAYS she planned to call the police after she returned to her parents' home in Tempe. She took a long shower, then called the Tempe Police Department.
Tempe P.D. advised Shannon to call Scottsdale P.D. after she gave them Cotton's address. An officer from Scottsdale met with her and a girlfriend at Los Arcos Mall. But the Scottsdale cop soon figured out that Cotton's house was in Paradise Valley. He then drove Shannon to the Paradise Valley police station. By this time, it was early afternoon, about 12 hours after Cotton allegedly raped her.
She met first with Officer Julie Newell. She was compassionate," Shannon says of Newell. She understood how humiliated I was. I wanted Marcus stopped, but I was confused. She understood my fears, and my biggest fear was my name coming out."
Soon, however, Newell's sergeant, Brian McFarland, took control of the case from Newell. McFarland didn't write about his interview of Shannon until several days later. But Julie Newell did document the goings-on that day:
[Shannon] was provided a few minutes to consider whether or not she desired the case to be pursued further and then stated that she felt she could not hold up under the pressure of the publicity."
Paradise Valley Town Attorney Charles Ollinger says the police learned that day through a crime computer about Cotton's recent conviction in Ohio.
A call to Parma Heights would have revealed the general similarities of the Ohio and Arizona cases, and would have raised red flags with most investigators. But Paradise Valley never contacted anyone in Ohio.
BRIAN McFARLAND'S approach to the Marcus Cotton case defied basic fundamentals of rape investigation, according to respected texts on the subject. When attempting to understand the dynamics involved in reporting a rape," wrote Robert Hazelwood and Ann Burgess in their 1987 book, Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation, one must not look only at the victim herself, but at her social network and her community as well...It is necessary to establish a rapport with the victim through empathy and professionalism."
The authors added, The victim should be referred to, or preferably introduced to, support services, which have systems designed to assist her through this emotionally traumatic period in her life."
Paradise Valley sergeant Ron Warner says he doesn't know if rape counselors were called in the other five forcible rape cases reported to the department since the start of 1990. A rape crisis caseworker at Phoenix-based CASA says, We have our business cards out at the various law enforcement agencies, and we always encourage the police to make them available."
But Paradise Valley said nothing about rape-crisis counseling to Shannon Smith. In fact, Brian McFarland spooked the young woman. He wasn't mean or anything," she says, but you could tell he doubted me, I just knew it. And the business about going to the hospital? He never said it was hard-core evidence they were after. I thought the exams would be to see if I had contracted an STD [sexually transmitted disease] or was pregnant. After you get raped, you don't want anyone looking down there and poking around."
Shannon says she went home on the afternoon of July 6 not sure what to do. She told her brother, Phil, on the telephone what had happened, but she couldn't bring herself to tell her parents:
My dad hugged me when he saw me crying. `What's wrong?' I said, `Daddy, I can't tell you, I just can't.' He called some people from the church anyway and they came over and prayed with me. I was in a bad way."
Paradise Valley police detective Alan Laitsch telephoned Shannon a few days after the July 6 incident. She agreed to meet him at the Tempe Public Library.
The detective was a breath of fresh air after her dealings with Brian McFarland. But McFarland's previous insistence that her name probably would be plastered all over the media continued to haunt her.
I told the detective at this point that I wanted to put this behind me and get a fresh start in a new town," she says. But I really was torn. Really torn."
Laitsch gave her his business card and told her to call if she changed her mind. Shannon went home and carefully weighed the pluses and minuses of pursuing the case. She had heard Cotton was showing a videotape of her alleged rape. But that wasn't the bottom-line reason she changed her mind:
It kept coming back to me, if he did this to me and he did something to some girl in Ohio, then what's gonna stop him?"
SHANNON SMITH'S brother wanted badly to get to the bottom of what had happened in Paradise Valley.
At first, I called the police for information more than anything else," Phil says. I was angry at Cotton for what he had done, and I also was mad at my sister because of the crowd she had been hanging with. Then I got really livid at Sergeant McFarland's attitude and his apparent lack of follow-through. Before they ever investigated it, they dropped it."
Shannon says she tried to call Detective Laitsch several times after their meeting at the Tempe Library-including the next dayÏbut her calls were routed to Brian McFarland.
McFarland didn't seem in any mood to jump-start the investigation, she says, and she called several Valley police agencies for advice. She found the Phoenix Police Department most helpful.
They told me about CASA-the rape-crisis center-and they told me to put the clothes I was wearing that night into a plastic bag," Shannon recalls. They were professional and they cared. If this had happened in Phoenix, things would have gone so much different."
On July 15-nine days after the alleged rape-McFarland wrote a memo which said in part, I spoke to [Shannon] on the phone. She advised that she now wishes to support prosecution in the sexual assault that she reported to this agency on July 6, 1991...I advised her of the unlikeliness of successful prosecution without any corroborating evidence."
Recalls Shannon, What he said was, `You'll have to pick up and move on. You'll need six witnesses who saw what happened. This case is closed.' His exact words were, `It's old news. Goodbye.'"
McFarland also wrote in his memo, [Shannon] went on to say that they were having consensual sex on a previous occasion when the suspect brought out the video camera and forced her into performing sex acts with him on tape. She indicated that she mildly resisted his taping of their sex."
Shannon vehemently denies saying anything of the sort to McFarland. The sergeant didn't record the interview.
McFarland finally noted he had contacted county sex-crimes prosecutor Vince Imbordino: Upon review of the information in the report and the facts supplied over the phone, the county attorney said they would decline prosecution."
Imbordino tells New Times he doesn't recall if Paradise Valley officially submitted the Marcus Cotton case for consideration. I don't recall asking anyone about this case," he says. And we generally don't turn a case down unless we get a second opinion from someone else in the group."
Imbordino's supervisor, Cindi Nannetti, goes further. I've checked on this and it wasn't submitted in writing," she says. Sometimes we'll get an informal call from a detective. But we don't do anything official over the phone. We tell them, `Submit it.' There are several reasons why. Sometimes what they tell us isn't exactly what happened. Or we get an inkling of some prior bad act which would make the case stronger, and maybe we wouldn't need physical evidence. So many things."
THE MARCUS COTTON rape case has been simmering inside the Paradise Valley Police Department since Brian McFarland ended his final report, No further action taken."
Sources at the department say several officers are irate with McFarland for the way he handled the rape investigation and other cases. Things have been so tense that Police Chief Don Lozier issued a memo last December 30 titled Organizational Health."
While he didn't mention McFarland by name, everyone in the department knew Lozier was defending the sergeant when he wrote of character assassination and personal harassment ...Should the Town Council or the public become aware of the specific efforts to intimidate and harass, the image our Department currently enjoys would take a nose dive and we would all suffer."
Says Town Attorney Charles Ollinger: Granted, we have had some internal problems in our police department. There have been snakes in the grass concerning Sergeant McFarland and other problems. But you're trying to second-guess a rape investigation and to blame McFarland for everything, and that's not right. Sergeant McFarland is one of our better supervisors and officers."
Marcus Cotton is preparing for another season with the Seattle Seahawks. He is still living in Paradise Valley. I cannot believe that Marcus would rape anybody," says his pal Terry Hicks. Women naturally flock to him. He attracts women. When you start talking about rape, there's just no way." Shannon Smith says she tried to piece herself back together after the July 6 incident. (She finally did tell her father about it weeks later, but only recently told her mother.)
She discovered, however, that time wasn't healing her emotional wounds: I hate people who wallow in their own sorrow, but I knew I could not help myself. Finally, I told myself, `You need help, girl.'"
Shannon contacted a psychologist late last year. She says the counseling sessions have helped her enormously. Now, at least, she can talk about what she says happened.
Recently, she did a project on date rape" and explained her findings in class.
I stood there and I talked about my own rape," she says. It just came out. I really explained to the men that `No' means `No.' I told the women, `Don't send mixed signals,' though I didn't send any signals at all to Marcus that night."
She stops for a moment, then fixes her visitor with a pained expression: I wish I had told them one more thing. I wish I had said, `Don't get raped in Paradise Valley.'"
part 2 of 2
ANNETTE'S NEW JOB: SPYING... v4-15-92
