Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime.
Speaker 3: Bill Thomas.
Speaker 5: This episode of Mind Over Murder contains subject matter which
may not be suitable for all listeners. Listener discretion is advised.
Hello and welcome to Mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly
and I'm Bill Thomas. We're joined today by Sarah Winman
here to talk to us about her amazing new book
that can sent a lanemark trial and the decades long
struggle to make spousal rape a crime. Stara, thank you
so much for joining us again. We appreciate you being here.
Speaker 3: It's good to be back. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: We have to figure out when was the last time
you were here. It's a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3: Now, was it for Evidence of Things seeing my last anthology?
I think that's it was.
Speaker 2: It was, and we had a fantastic conversation, although somehow
I didn't discover until just this moment that you're actually
from Ottawa, Canada.
Speaker 3: That's true if I am Canadian by birth and sometimes
by inclination, but I'm also a very proud American. It
cuts both ways.
Speaker 2: I think we're going to try to show everybody that
Canadians and Americans can get along just fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, Sarah and Bils just mentioned the last time you
were here. Where we're chatting about your previous books and
the true crime genre, including evidence of Things seen.
Speaker 3: Refresh our listeners.
Speaker 5: On those just in case they want to buy one
for their crime loving family member this holiday season.
Speaker 3: Sure So Without Consent is my third book of nonfiction.
My first two were The Real Lolita on the real
life case that inspired the great and forever controversial novel.
My second book, Scoundrel, is on essentially a wrongful exoneration
of a convicted murder of a teenage girl ended up
convincing very prominent people, including William F. Buckley Junior, that
he did not commit the crime, and he was released
from prison from death row and then came very close
to killing another woman just a few years later. So
that book tracks the whole arc of that crazy story.
I've also edited several anthologies, and the two that are
probably most relevant for your listeners, most recently and most
evidence of Things seen True Crime and Era of Reckoning,
which collected essays and features about true crime but looking
at larger systemic issues. And it was a follow up
to Unspeakable Acts, True Tales of Crime, Murdered, Deceit and Obsession,
which came out in twenty twenty, which asked the question
what did true crime look like in the aftermath of
the first season of Cereal when this moment, which has
now lasted well over ten years and been trenched true
crime as a real bona fide genre. And that book
is actually a favorite among my students.
Speaker 5: So I have a couple copies on my classroom shelf
and they're always if they're looking for a good piece
of like long form fiction that they can read in
just a couple of minutes when we've got ten minutes
at the end of class.
Speaker 3: I'll always tell them, like, go get that one. That
one's really good. Thank you, And that's exactly why I
put it together, and also evidence of things seen. What's
interesting too, is that at the time I've put those
anthologies together, there used to be an annual anthology called
Best American Crime Reporting. We'm ceased, but now it's been reconstituted.
I forget the exact title, but the first volume just
came out this ball, so it's essentially doing what Best
American Crime Reporting did and to some degree what my
two anthologies did as well. Oh that's very cool.
Speaker 5: All right, I'm gonna have to get that title from
you so that we can put it on our list,
our holiday list. You're here today to talk about your
newest book, and it is about a rather troubling topic,
which is marital rate. So again, for anybody who may
have a sensitivity around this type of issue, we would
encourage you to maybe let this be an episode that
you skip for now, but please do eventually come back
to it once you've learned a little bit more about
the book. But let's go ahead and actually talk about
marital rape. The definition does seem self evident, but define
what that is for us in a legal sense.
Speaker 3: I think it's important to first state that this was
called into question because for centuries, the very idea that
a ma could rape his wife was not considered to
be a legal It was essentially a legal fiction because
the idea, according to common law, is that once a
woman married her husband, she was his property and he
essentially had the perpetual right to consent no matter what,
whether this was sex that she wanted or sex that
she did not, because her sole purpose was to be
a wife and therefore property. But it took until the
early to mid nineteen seventies for activism to really get
around to changing rape orform laws generally, and then looking
at the laws with respect to marital rape, because so
many state laws had exceptions where they would talk about
sexual assault or rape and there would be a line
essentially I'm paraphrasing here a man a woman other than
his wife. The essentially the assault could happen to a
woman who was a stranger, be an acquaintance, but if
there was any relationship that was marked by marriage and
a contract or a civil ceremony that therefore whatever happened
in the marital bedroom was not considered to be a crime.
And of course these activists were like, this is ridiculous,
These exceptions should be gotten rid of. So starting in
nineteen seventy five, and interestingly enough, South Dakota was the
first state to get rid of their marital rape exception.
That wouldn't last because it was that one blipit of
time when South Dakota had a democratic legislature and women
who were like, we need to change, we need to
reform the rape laws. So seventy five, South Dakota is
the first, and then over the next couple of years, Iowa, Delaware,
and Michigan changed their laws. South Dakota repeals theirs, and
they wouldn't put it back until nineteen ninety. But a
law comes Oregon in nineteen seventy seven and they get
rid of their marital repe exception and reform the laws.
And this sets up the case that's at the heart
of my book Without Consent, which was called Oregon versus Rideout,
which was the first time that a woman who was
still living with her husband charged him with rape, and
it led to trial so just for readers to excuse me,
just for listeners to note, by the time this trial
starts in December of nineteen seventy eight, Oregon is just
the fourth state to make marital rape of crime, and
that there was still such a long way to go. Canada,
my home country, would not make marital rape of crime
until nineteen eighty two. I think France wouldn't until the eighties,
and many Western countries were still under their own idea
of common law. That it just took a lot of
time and a lot of rethinking to change this idea,
and understandably such a big change, and with a trial
that was about to become a big media spectacle, a
lot of people couldn't wrap their heads around it. And
that was the back draw for Oregon versus right out.
Speaker 2: Before we go to Oregon versus ride out, one quick question, Sarah,
the handful of states that you just mentioned didn't strike
me on a first listen as being necessarily the most
progressive or lefty or whatever. I'm not trying to make
this a political conversation, but what do you make of that?
In other words, these were middle of the country, fairly conservative.
In a number of examples, what do you think the
origins were of those decisions by legislatures to change marital
rape laws on a state by state basis.
Speaker 3: That's a really good question, and I think it's just
a it's a question of which activists were agitating and
adding the attention of which legislators, and also that there
were specific legislators who could put a bill forward in
their state House or state Senate, and if they were
particularly passionate about a cause, that could go a long way.
I mean, for example, we think Iowa is a red
state now, but it wasn't always right. And in the
nineteen seventies, I think there were more legislators that were
more receptive to this idea than they might be now.
And these landscapes in general, and not just with respect
to sexual assault and rape laws, but it's constantly shifting ground.
In the seventies, it was a time of great activism
and progressivism, but it was also a great time of
cynicism and distrust in government. But also things were changing,
not just at the legislative level, but also at the
judicial level. Bro v weighed at this time in a
late nineteen seventy eight was about five years old, right,
The equal Credit Opportunity Act had passed in nineteen seventy four,
and that finally gave women the right independently to get mortgages,
to get credit cards, and not have to get their
husbands to sign the mortgages or sign the paperwork to
get anything financial financially related. The er the Equal Rights
Amendment still seem like it might have a chance to pass.
Right her control was finally gettable first if you were
a married couple, and then if you were a single woman.
So this was all in the air and the ether
at the time that these laws, and specifically the marital
rape exceptions were starting to go away.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned all sorts of the
issues that came up for women the access to mortgages
and credit cards, because I think a lot of our
younger listeners probably do not know how really recent a
phenomenon is that women have that ability to get a
mortgage under their own name without a male co signing.
It's definitely When that came up in class the other
day on a subject I honestly can't even remember at
this point, I had girls who were amazed, what do
you mean women haven't always been able to get credit
cards in their own name. I'm so glad that you
brought that up, because I think there's a lot of
people who don't understand how really recent those advances are
for women, which.
Speaker 3: Is, we think that this is dusty old history, but
it really is not. And the fact that I can say,
just over fifty years ago, marital rape was not a
crime in any state in North America, it still boggles
my mind because it should be agent history, but it's not.
And part of the reason is that it just people
weren't thinking about it as something that was worth fighting
for and worth changing. But I think that working on
this book really impressed upon me that all it takes
is a few people who are really driven and who
are really willing to put themselves on the line, and
even if they seem like they're in the deep minority,
that they can gain a foothold and thus convince other
people that some of the ideas that might be seen
as overly radical eventually become mainstreamed. We're now living in
a time when some really terrible ideas are becoming mainstreamed,
but conversely, some really wonderful ideas that seem so far
out can also become mainstreamed, and I think that what happened,
particularly after this trial and over the course of the
next fifteen years, really shows that.
Speaker 2: It's funny that when we're talking about this, it is
important that we all make note of the fact that
this isn't ancient history, and that this is quite recent.
And as we've talked about in other issues on mind
over Murder, it's also handled on a state by state basis.
So in this example, this is an Oregon case. It
is I remember, it had national implications and it got
a tremendous amount of publicity back in seventy eight, So
can you kind of walk us through the case a
little bit?
Speaker 3: So first it would help to upset the scene for
who this couple was. So their names were Greta and John.
Write out. Greta was twenty three at the time that
she accused her husband John of raping her in front
of their young daughter. John was twenty one at the time.
They had been married by this point for a couple
of years, so their daughter had been born a few
months for the wedding and their relationship. She was originally
from the Midwest, he was from Oregon, born in Bred.
She had come to Oregon. After she followed her older sister,
but the relationship had become distant and she didn't really
have a lot of friends or a community, and she
struggled to get work. She had dropped out of high school,
just dreamy and unfocused. Eventually she found a job at
a restaurant and that's where she met John. And at
the time, he would have been about eighteen and she
was ninety And at first the relationship wasn't particularly serious.
She was having some fun, but then she got pregnant,
and once that happened, the relationship really started to turn.
And it was really marked by the cyclical nature of
intimate partner violence. So they would fight a lot. He
would demand sex. She would either beg off or go
through with it, even though she didn't really want to.
Their daughter was born, but he had shipped out to
the military in Georgia. They were together, and then they weren't.
She eventually took the daughter to back to the Midwest
for her parent to live with her parents. He was
trying to wove her back, and it was just a
very volatile relationship and eventually she looked at her options
and realized there just weren't that many and so she
went back to Oregon with John and resumed their married life.
But he was having trouble getting work. He had an
extra marital affair, maybe more was in school, and so
by the time October tenth, nineteen seventy eight, rolled around,
they were fighting. He was demanding sex, she was trying
to go to work. She leaves the house, he's trying
to stop her. They have another fight. Eventually he gets
her back into the apartment, and Greta alleged that the
assault happened in their home. Their daughter comes in. She
had in an earlier let me start that again. A
little while before that alleged assault happened, she had called
nine one one and been referred to the Salem Women's
Crisis Center, which was an early instance of a domestic
violence shelter. And because of being there, and it was
nineteen seventy eight, it was the first time that Greta
learned of this new law that made marital great a crime.
So the night before the alleged incident, she and John
were over at a neighbor's house and at one point
the subject comes up and she says something like, well,
if you do something, you know that there's this new law.
So something does allegedly happen, and it takes a couple
of days, but John is arrested for the rape of
his wife, and it's initially reported very soberly in the
local papers in Salem Morgan, but Greta's named, and the
reporter who did that justified it by saying she could
figure out that this was an important case. There'd never
been an arrest under this new law, and she was
married to him, so she couldn't really leave her name
out of it, and in doing so, that really snowballed everything.
Because once a sexual assault victim is in the papers,
once she's in the papers forever and reported on again
and again. So initially the coverage was just limited to
the local papers, local TV stations, maybe the Associated Press,
United Press International, like the Newswires. But in early December
nineteen seventy eight, a feature reporter for the Los Angeles
Times named Betty Liddick gets wind of it and decides
to report on this for the paper. She flies up
to Portland, drives down to Salem, meets Greta, meets John,
meets various family members, meets various people from the Salem
Women's crisis Center, and really it's that that is the
piece that really puts a foothold in terms of getting
national coverage and people to realize it's not just a
sexual assault case involving a man and a woman, but
the stakes are much higher that this is the test
case for organs rape law that got rid of the
marital rape exception, and it really will be the case
that gets people talking all across the country and beyond
about the very idea that a man can rape his wife.
Speaker 5: So this really did service the litmus test very much
for this particular thing. And that's and again I think
that there are going to be a lot of our
younger listeners who don't realize just how important this actually was.
Speaker 3: And I'm also very intrigued.
Speaker 5: Again, just from an educator's point of view, I'm wondering
how often this case gets listed in a list of
landmark cases, because I certainly hadn't heard of it until
I read your book.
Speaker 3: So it depends on which foreigners of academia you are in.
But certainly law professors know about it, some feminist scholars
know about it, but without consent, to the best of
my knowledge, is the first book on marital rape written
for a trade like a regular audience by a trade
book publisher in about forty years.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And I think that's really a testament to how little
the subject gets discussed even in feminist circles. Certainly in
the mid to late eighties and early nineties, when this
activist campaign to get every state to make marital rape
a crime was really at its height, there were feminist
scholars like Diana Russell wrote a really important book called
Rape and Marriage that was first published in eighty two
and then revised in nineteen ninety, And in the introduction
to the revised book, she talks about how difficult it
is to get the attention of domestic violence counselors and
those working in the field because they're like, we're already
have enough on our plate dealing with women getting hit
by their husbands and beat up. We can't get talking
about barrittle rape is just like almost a bridge too far,
and she just couldn't believe it. But it's just that
there it was a really difficult to focus on multiple
things at once, which is notoxically why the campaign to
make marital rape a crime in every state probably succeeded
Because it was so narrowly focused. It was, let's do
this one thing to get rid of marital rape exceptions
and really make sure that rape laws fold in every
conceivable form of sexual assault, not just by strangers but
by those most intimate to you. But the flip side
of it is that it's just a subject that a
lot of people understandably don't want to deal with. It's
very difficult. Sexual assault in general is such a thorny
subject to discuss because of how the ripple effects of
trauma work. It certainly impresses upon me that not everybody
reacts to trauma in the same way. But certainly, if
you have an acute instance of, say, sexual assault by
a stranger, that can have ripple effects for the rest
of your life. But then when you have repeated sexual assault,
potentially by an intimate partner or spouse, it's not just
that you know, it happens and then it's over. You
may have children with this person, you share finances with
this person, they're sleeping in the same bed next to you.
You can't really get away from them so easily. And
of course, as we know, the most dangerous time in
an intimate partnership is when, particularly the woman who may
be the victim she's trying to lead, and because that
is the time when things are most volatile. So these
are all the things I was thinking about as I
was writing this book. That is for sure.
Speaker 2: You mentioned something a moment ago, Sarah, about news reports
when Greta had charged John with rape in the write
out case and her name was appearing in the press.
When we look at a lot of reports on sexual
assault in twenty twenty five, oftentimes reporters, media folks will say,
we are not mentioning the name of the victim. That
seems very common now to not mention the name of
the victim, But fifty years ago that wasn't really the practice.
Do you know when that transition took place where we
tend to keep the victim's name out of the press.
Speaker 3: I think it varied. Even in reports in the nineteen seventies,
it was considered to be highly unusual or the victim
of an alleged rape or sexual assault to be named.
But I do think that it changed for good in
the early nineteen eighties. And I think the case that
really did it was what was colloquially urbed the rape
at Big Dan's Tavern in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, that was Marrito A film later.
Speaker 3: Yes, accused Jonie Foster playing the victim. And because of
the horrific nature of the crime and a number of
other factors. I mean, it involved just in the Portuguese
community in New Bedford. She was from that community, her
the perpetrators of the crime were from that community. But
it was also televised and the stations that televised it.
When the victim, Cheryl Arugo, got on the stand, her
name was not bleeped out. And because of that, because
people suddenly realized who it was, and in the community
they had known, but now her name was out there nationally,
it was considered to be a grievous error, and in
part because it really ruined her life. Even though the
perpetrators of the sexual assault were convicted, most of the
community blamed her and she was basically scorned from public life.
She had to leave, She took her kids to Florida.
She had she clearly had severe post traumatic stress disorder
and eventually died in a car crash and her blood
alcohol limit was way over the limit.
Speaker 2: Oh so tragic, very tragic.
Speaker 3: And so after that, I think it became clear that
one had to take very good care when sexual assault
victims are named. I also bring this up because there
are other sexual assault victims in my book that are named,
and they are in fact victims of John write out
much later on, But when those trials happened, initially their
names were not in the media. But both of the
survivors independently decided that they wanted their names out there
because they wanted other people to know what had happened
and that there was no stigma and there was no shame.
So my attitude is when I talk about that case,
I usually don't name them in the context of this
podcast because I try to renew my consent. For example,
one of the women actually came to my book event
in Portland, organ which is only an hour're outside of Salem,
and even then I said, is it okay if your
name comes up while we're having this Q and A
in front of an audience. Are you okay with that?
She said, yes, it didn't as it turned out, But
I think it's important whenever you have the chance to
renew consent relating to a sexual assault survivor, that is key.
Don't just assume that it's a blanket thing with Greta.
It's a little trickier because her name was already out
there through reasons far beyonder control, and not just her
married name, but her maiden name. But while I was
writing the book, interestingly enough, I was actually using a
pseudonym for her birth name because I wasn't sure what
was going on. She was still alive, I wasn't able
to contact her for a variety of reasons, and then
I learned that she had died. And once I learned that,
then I felt or okay about publishing her name as
it was. But I also think that that's worth discussing.
Just because you are dead doesn't mean that you don't
have the right to some kind of informed consent. And
that is the strange irony of this book. It's called
without consent, But I never got Greta's consent, not for
lack of trying, but just that was just the nature
of that's the nature of reporting. No one is entitled
to any source talking to them. And I think in
light of what would happen with Greta, as we'll discuss,
she absolutely had the right to privacy after it was
violated multiple times and perpetually.
Speaker 5: And of course, we want to spoil the book because
we want people to buy the pafriction.
Speaker 3: Butte yes, tell us a.
Speaker 5: Little bit about how John write Out's lawyer mounted a
defense for him, because that is the I believe the
youth would say. It's a rage baity sort of thing,
and I hate that I do that, but every once
in a while I just have to. But yes, particularly,
let's talk about how John red outslawyer mounted to defense,
and then anything else she wanted to bring in about
the trial that will not spoil.
Speaker 3: Well, it's important to set out that the trial happened
as it did in large part because of a pre
trial hearing where the judge allowed greta sexual history to
be brought in as evidence. So it meant that the
jury could hear about her past abortions, about an extra
male of marital fair that she had while she and
her husband were separated, about basically some joking conversation with
a good friend about their supposed lesbian tendencies. And really
she was doing this toatrol John because she felt like
she was trying to get him to admit certain proclivities
that he just wasn't admitting. It was very I don't
know this is the kind of thing that like young
people who aren't necessarily the most intelligent might engage with.
I don't know us to say it was a joke
that went seriously all right because for very pointed cross examination.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
mindover Murder.
Speaker 3: John stiff fence lawyer Charles Bert was pretty well known
in the legal community in Salem, who's very self spoken.
He was fairly short. He'd had a bout of polio
that messed up his spine and reduced his height, but
he used that to his advantage because people had underestimated
him and so his defense was too oold. Number one,
if there was any sex between Greta and John, it
was consensual. But also this law in Oregon shouldn't stand
because why is the privacy of what happens in the
marital bedroom, Why should it be under any kind of
legal consideration. So in his opening statements he said, maybe
being raped is the risk of being married. Wow, it's
a lot. Yeah. No, working on this book, I felt
like I was essentially marinating in rage bait beaked some
incredibly outrageous things, not just in the courtroom, so in
various op eds and TV it was just unbelievable. At times.
I just would be reading this going why is going
on here? I have to synthesize all of this. But Yeah,
during the trial, Greta's sexual history was brought in. It
meant that it really attacked her credibility in Jurors would
talk about this in the immediate aftermath. So even though
the prosecution but on a case where they had twenty
seven witnesses attesting to what they knew of this alleged
sexual assault, some of the history of Greta and John's marriage.
A doctor was called where he had examined Greta in
the immediate aftermath of the alleged assault, and he said
that according to his medical li opinion, forced intercourse it happened,
but he couldn't comment on whether it was rape because
rape is a legal term, not a medical term. But
when Greta got on the stand, even though my reading
of it in twenty twenty five is that she was
a very effective witness, the cross examination really went after
her because of the prior sexual history being brought in,
and she got very rattled on the stand, and then
there were only four witnesses for the defense, but one
of them was John and he of course testified that
the sex was consensual. So when it finally came time
for the jury to deliberate, this is the other thing
that really slanted the verdict. They were only asked to
consider a charge of first degree rape. Before the trial happened,
the prosecutor had dropped additional charges related to assault and battery,
and there were pictures of Greta and the immediate aftermath
of the assault that showed she had definitely been beaten up,
so they you could have proven that charge if he
had wanted to. Then the judge instructed the jury to
only consider first degree rape, not any lesser rape or
sexual assault charges, so it meant they could only consider
a charge that carried a sentence maximally of twenty years
in prison. And the prevailing sentiment among the jurors was,
here was this twenty one year old man, pretty young,
starting his life. Do we really want to convict him
and sentence him to a twenty two year prison term,
especially when there is in their mind reasonable doubt, And
most of the reasonable doubt was Greta's testimony really credible.
Did they think that this marriage was actually over? Maybe
they were going to get back together. So ultimately, yes,
they did a quit John of the rape of his wife,
and this provoked a tremendous amount of outrage, and subsequent
events would stoke that outrage even more. But I think
there is a great irony that an acquittal led to
more outrage, which galvanized activists in a way that maybe
a conviction wouldn't have, because if John had been convicted
at the time, it would have been considered settled law.
But would it have meant that other states would have
criminalized spousal Right, It's hard to know. What I do
know is that the acquittal did spur things to happen,
and it did cause change to happen.
Speaker 2: Ironically, the decision to go with an all or nothing
legal strategy limited the jury's ability, perhaps to a stepped
down charge. As you said, it's very clear that Greta
was beaten up, and they could have gone with something
that would have been a lower level charge, but that
wasn't on the table by the time they got to deliberating.
Am I correct?
Speaker 3: That is correct? Yes, And obviously that increases the need
for considering beyond a reasonable doubt. The higher the charge,
the greater the stakes. Now, if there had been a
lesser charge, say a third degree sexual assault or battery
or simple assault, those could have been charges that could
have led to convictions, but the jury never heard that
and they were instructed to only consider that one charge
of first degree rate. And what was the makeup of
the jury in this case? I believe it was predominantly women,
which is interesting because there was a prevailing sentiment that
women were more likely to acquit men of sexual assault
because they would more harshly judge other women, And at
least based on the comments from the jury in the
immediate aftermath, a lot of it did focus on the
lesser charges, but many of it also focused on Greta's credibility.
And I did think that they viewed this twenty three
year old blonde woman as someone who they didn't have
to take very seriously and whose judgment they didn't really believe.
So as a result in dismissing your credibility, they could
have quit.
Speaker 5: John, was that surprising to you considering that it was
a jury of women, Because it made me throw your
book across the room.
Speaker 3: No, offense to your book.
Speaker 2: Oh and vet it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I read the verdict and I screamed out, come on,
throw the book through, I.
Speaker 3: Guess, but it's so frustrating. I think it's fair to
say that if that case played out today or even
a few years ago, there would have been a vastly
different outcome. And I know this because of the later
trials that did take place in balby John Wright out
as the defendant, one of which I observed first hand.
And I do think that lawyers have come a long
way in terms of understanding a lot of the nuance
about what it is to be a victim of sexual
assault and how deeply traumatizing this experiences, and that you're
just constantly re traumatized all the time. It doesn't just
start with the initial assault reporting it. It's going through
the rape kit, it's talking about it, not just in
anticipation of a cross examination by defense lawyer, but being
prepped by prosecutors, which was something that Greta herself said
was even more traumatic than the actual cross examination, because
you expect an adversarial experience. You don't expect that adversarial
experience coming from your own side. But at the same time,
I think that men who were lawyers in nineteen seventy eight,
like the prosecutor in general, his attitude struck me as
being very hasshearted about it all that here was, Mike,
here's the case. I guess it's the test case. I'll
go through as it. But you would make comments like
I vote that John doesn't get prison time on the
day that he was due to give closing arguments. So
I don't want to say that the prosecutor, Gary gort Maker,
ripped it, because I think that's a serious accusation, but
he definitely did not act like somebody whose whole heart
was in this case.
Speaker 2: It's also, oh hard to look at this case from
nineteen seventy eight from a twenty twenty five perspective, and
I just think about how much we as a community
have talked about that we need to believe women when
they come forward or victims of any sex who have
suffered an injury of this type and are now coming forward,
and we know how incredibly difficult that is, that how
much stress there's been in the last I don't know,
five years, ten years. Then yes, emphasizing that we need
to listen to victims and take them seriously and believe
them and then let them tell their story and not
just dismiss it outright. But when we look back, this
is runs counter to what I was saying before about
how this isn't ancient history, but it was a very
different time nearly fifty years ago, and attitudes I think
have shifted. I was very surprised by your comment a
moment ago, Sarah, when you said that women were regarded
as being more judgmental. Then. I'm not sure that's the
case now. I wondered how you two would react to me.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's the case now, and I made
that loss of what I've experienced now attending criminal trials.
But I also think that generally jurors are more sympathetic
to nuance. They have a greater understanding. I think Me
Too really went a long way, and I think we
actually don't understand how are things actually went, which respect
to Me Too, because the backlash seemed to be so
vicious and so quick. But now, and I'm not sure
if you saw. Rebecca Tracer of New York Magazine wrote
a wonderful piece that came out the week that we're speaking,
called Me Too Forever, where she essentially talks about how
backlash and backlash to the backlash it's all happening simultaneously
that people can say, me too, went to bar But
actually there's more movement, and it's partly because as much
as we want to think that progress is linear, it
almost never is usually asymmetrical. Yes, on the one hand,
nineteen seventy eight isn't all that long ago, but look
at how much things have changed in society generally, what
is it a smartphone is less than twenty years old,
and how much has changed irrevocably because of having apps
and social media and the speed at which we're getting
news and the disinformation that's coming across like things change
very quickly at a moment's notice, but things can also
change back at a moment's notice as well. This wasn't
quite the case in seventy eight because the means of
delivering techology were a lot slower and we only had
what three major news networks. There were news wires, there
was obviously television and radio, and a lot of newspapers,
but it still was according to print deadlines. It wasn't
this constant churn that we have of the Internet. So,
on the one hand, things would be more favorable, I
think with respect to Greta if she was going through
a comparable trial. Unfortunately, the flip side is that there
are a lot of bad faith actors right now who
want to turn this idea of believing women into a weapon,
And a lot of what came through in the trial
was already weaponized against Greta in nineteen seventy eight, and
it might have been even further weaponized in twenty twenty five.
So that's the conundrum, which is that we've come a
long way, but so has the backlash, and considering all
of that, an equal measure is really important.
Speaker 5: Tell us about John right second trial on rape charges
that was in twenty sixteen. I believe what was the
ultimate outcome there?
Speaker 3: Yes, so many years had passed, almost forty years when
a reporter at the Salem Statesman Journal named Whitney Woodworth,
who had just started at the job a few months before,
was looking at the crime blotterer and noticed that a
man named John Joseph Rightout had been arrested for two
different sexual assault charges relating to two different women. One
was an on to get off again intimate partner and
one was an acquaintance whom he had met in church,
and she called up the prosecutors said, is this the
same John right Out from nineteen seventy eight?
Speaker 2: And it was, And it's a very distinctive name. To
my eye, it is. I don't think I've ever met
anybody named ride Out.
Speaker 3: They're a surprising number. I have found a number of them,
as it turned out. But yes, to me, ride Out
is so associated with this kidne these people that for
someone like Whitney coming across that, and she had just
done a cursory Google service wow, and that in the
nineteen seventy eight case was the first thing that came up.
So by this point John had bounced around between Salem
and underlying rural towns and northern California, particularly way up
north like Eureka, Hubbold County, and McKinleyville. But he had
come back around twenty thirteen, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen to
care for his aging mother, and he had met this
on again, off again intimate partner on Facebook. They had
initially known each other in high school, but she had
got on she'd married and had other relationships with other children.
They reconnected on Facebook and she decided to go to
northern California and try out living with him. It was
pretty bollattle. She broke up with him, went back, and
then he went He followed suit and came back to
Oregon and they resumed their relationship, in part because there
had been a fire and she lost her property and
some animals and she felt like she had nowhere to go.
So she calls up her farmer partners, Can I stay
with you in your trailer? And he says yeah, And
something happened in twenty sixteen which was essentially an alleged
act of forced sodomy rape, And there had been other
prior alleged incidents, but that was the one that made
her report, and because of that incident, because she was reporting,
he leaves a message on the answering machine of dis acquaintance,
whom he had met in twenty thirteen when an rape
had happened and she was trying to get her life
back together afterwards. She'd had a very difficult life. She
was also a repeated survivor, and she had been somewhat
recently widowed, had a child, so her church was really
important to her, and so meeting John through the church
and then for him to allegedly violate her in this
way was really just horrible. But she was moving through
it and doing her best, and then she gets this
voicemail and everything just comes back and all the PTSD
is just like right back where and she's worse off
than where she began. Yeah, so she is convinced to report.
So two women independently make decisions to report their alleged
rate by the same man because of his actions. So
he's arrested in twenty sixteen. There is a trial in
March twenty seventeen. Both women testify, as do a number
of other witnesses. John write Out also makes the decision
to testify, probably because in his head he thought that
what happened in nineteen seventy eight where he was acquitted
with respect to the alleged rape of his wife Greta,
that he could beat the charges again. But he's actually
a really terrible way is on the stand.
Speaker 2: We were both shaking our heads when we got to
that place.
Speaker 3: I was listening. I was essentially wearing my headphones and
listening to the audio transcript because thankfully Marion County, which
is coach Cover Salem, Oregon, the public Records requests are
pretty generous, and they gave the audio, they gave me video.
It was unbelievable and I could just make transcripts of
my own volition from listening to it. So I'm listening
to him testify I met a residency in the Blue
Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and no one could hear me.
So I'm just like yelling, Oh my god, what Kevin
you're saying that? I just stopped mocking. And he was
a really bad witness. And when the prosecutor crossed examined,
and it was very clear, she's just going to go
to town on the guy. He just set himself up.
He had claimed, of course, that none of this was rape.
It was all consensual. They all wanted it.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 3: It just became increasingly clear, not just with this trial
but later that John RDA has no idea what actual
consent is and as a result, he cannot understand what
rape and sexual assault is because he doesn't even know
what sex that a woman wants would be. It's just
like that's how disordered his mind is. And that came
through in his testimony and his court appointed public defender,
did you know his best which wasn't that great, he
was no Charles Burnt. That's put it that way, And
ultimately right Out is convicted. The two charges was rape
and one was a side of me, and so he's
in prison. But then a couple of things happened. In
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, there are two different
appeals cases. In the first one, the Appeals Court and
organ rules that the sentence imposed by the judge was
actually too lenient and that there should be a resentencing
according to Oregon guidelines. Then the Supreme Court rules that
no one unanimous jury verdicts are unconstitutional. And at the
time of this verdict, only two states, Oregon and Louisiana,
which was the state that had the case that went
all the way up to the Supreme Court, they were
the only two states that had non unanimous jury verdicts,
which meant that if you had one or two jurors
who deviated from everybody else, you could still get a verdict.
So you could convict on an eleven to one or
a ten to two verdict. So in John Ridout's.
Speaker 6: Case, the rape charge on the acquaintance was fully unanimous,
but one juror voted to acquit on the sodomy charge,
and that's why they had to redo that entire case
all over again, which they did in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: And that was the trial that I attended.
Speaker 2: What was that like? Here you're on now picking up
as a writer and researcher, a journalist, but you've done
a lot of work that's involved going back, listening to transcripts,
reading transcripts, a lot of research, but it's all retrospective
now here you are. What's it like being in the
room in the modern era watching this thing unfold as
opposed to the way you'd worked on the earlier parts
of his history?
Speaker 3: A number of things I had covered civil trials in
the past, like bankruptcy cases, antitrust and civil lawsuits, but
a criminal trial is a little other thing altogether, and
it really varies by every state. So what I experienced,
I think is very much a Salem, Oregon type of
experience that I wouldn't necessarily experience in a major courtroom
in Manhattan or Brooklyn or any part of New York City.
So I'm sitting in the courtroom they do warder and
the listening to the prosecutor as he's asking questions of
prospective judges and really walking them through how to consider
a real world sexual assault. So he starts by asking
them questions about, let's say you park your car and
you leave your cell phone in the car and somebody
steals it. Were you asking for it? I'm paraphrasing badly,
but that was the gist, and I could see exactly
what he was up to, that he was trying to
eventually lead them to questions about what happens if an
intimate partner is sexually assaulted by her partner? Is this
something that she asked for? Did she consent to this?
And of course, unanimously, except for maybe Wonder who expressed
discomfort with the idea, they all got it. And eventually
he just straight up asked about what do you think
about marital rape? Is a sur crime? That they uniformly
said yes. And I was taken aback because I knew
that the nineteen seventy eight case would not be in
because it would have been deemed extremely prejudicial. The charge
relating to the acquaintance was also not brought in because
it was a retrial on the other charge, so she
did not testify, though she was present in the courtroom
as a spectator. So watching warder was very illuminating, but
really it was just another It was a It was
fully understanding just how much control the judge has over
the courtroom, and that is word or her word is law.
So he would just make weird comments, like he mentioned
the film Uncle Buck in just a Day. Why, yeah, what.
I think he was just trying for some weird humor.
I don't really want. I transcribed it and just yeah, exactly.
That was my reaction at the time. Weird. He's a
little bit of folksy. He'd been on the stand, he'd
been a judge since nineteen eighty five in Salem, so
it was very kind of small town type things. I mean,
he even there are only two media people. One was
myself and the other was Whitney Woodworth, the Salem Statesman
journal reporter mentioned previously. She came back to cover the
retrial as well, and she and I had gone out
for lunch, because that's what you do, you're the reporter
in parishions into talent. You make the acquaintance of the
local reporter. And she interviewed me for a piece and
we get back to the courtroom and the judge said, oh,
did our local reporter, take you up for lunch, and
I said, your honor, I bought my own lunch. This
is in the courtroom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's folks, and then there's intrusive. It just seems odd.
Speaker 3: He was also very adamant that nobody use their phones
and no video, and eventually during the verdict, apparently an
AP reporter showed up and was trying to take video
and he just went off at the guy, just wow,
not happy about and Whitney and I are just showing.
We pulled up our bullet our notebooks that were like, no,
we're taking Oh it's okay.
Speaker 2: That's wow.
Speaker 3: So there was weird levity, and I don't know if
that was the point. I think that's just the way
that this judge ran his courtroom. But when it was
time for the actual testimony, I think what I was
really impressed with was just the stealiness the survivor who testified,
and she never expected to have to do it again,
and the prosecutor had really been worried that she wouldn't
be up for it and it would have been totally justifiable,
but she showed up and she told her story and
it was very smartly contextualized that This was a woman
who you know, had a lot of physical disability. She
took drugs, it affected her memory, but she was able
to describe what had happened because that was how severe
and deep the violation was. And it was very consistent,
Like I checked what she said then versus what she
said in twenty seventeen police reports, like it was pretty
consistent across the board, and that doesn't change because no
matter how much time passes, that trauma just stays with
you and you remember and it's encoded and it's there.
And she really put that forward. But she was also
someone who was really holding her emotions very close, and
it didn't hurt that. The cross examination by a different
public defender was also pretty ineffective. He didn't put on
a descent, which was also surprising. I mean, on the
one hand, right out didn't testify again, which was I
think the best call, but not calling any other writtnesss
was definitely a surprise, And there were some other things
where I really felt like he was not fully prepared.
So that was the sense I had of this trial.
But I was a little worried after testimony was over
and the jury had it because it needed to be
a unanimous verdict. This there was some cover if one
or two jurors decided that they might want to acquit.
So I thought it was going to take a while.
We'll see. I thought, at least they will want to
get lunch. I went back to my Airbnb. I had
a flat red eye schedule for later that day. If
it went to a second day, I would have to
get Intel Whitney or somebody else or whatever. Like forty
minutes passed before I get a call from the clerk,
the judges clerk, saying we have a verdict.
Speaker 2: They're back. Wow, Yeah, they're back.
Speaker 3: So I ran back and I was so worried. I
was like, I'm going to miss the verdict. Oh no.
And I get to the security. The security and the
survivor and her family and her victim advocate. They were
all right in front of me in the line. So
that's when ide I was like, Okay, the verdict is
coming in. And there were some other things I observed,
but it came through. He was found guilty again. He
was resentenced not only on this charge but the earlier
charge in according to that earlier twenty twenty appeals ruling.
So John write out is in prison. He is not
eligible for parole until twenty forty one. And on the
one hand, it is a case that it is a
story that has a beginning, middle, and end in an arc,
but it's also just sadness all the way down. If
he had been convicted for raping his wife, would he
has learned anything from it or would he have just
gone on to repeat offend again with the same kind
of impunity. We will never know that. But what we
do know is because he was acquitted, he felt that
he had that impunity to violate other women, and not
just the women whose sexual assaults he was convicted for.
I still don't have a full handle on what he
was doing between nineteen eighty when he last had contact
with Greta and his daughter in twenty sixteen when he
was arrested. I have rumors, I have suppositions, but nothing
that I could provably print in a book. So to me,
there are still unfinished strands of the story. But what
I do take comfort is that Greta was able to
rebuild her life away from public scrutiny, that just because
she had endured a tremendous trauma, it didn't stop her
from living it didn't stop her from seeing her daughter
grow up, to having grandchildren, to forging an independent life
for herself in total obscurity. And so that to me
is the best outcome I can think of for her,
that she was able to rest some degree of autonomy
back from a society and media that really took it
away from her. And also, of course her first husband
took that away too.
Speaker 2: I need to stop. We're at fifty seven minutes. So
do we want to steer That actually was a pretty
strong closing. Do we want to steer to a close?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, Sarah, it's been wonderful talking to you. Give
us the full name of the book again and tell
us where we can find not only Without Consent, but
all of your books as well. Of course, So it's
without consent a landmark. I'm going to get this wrong, amark.
Let's try this again. The book is without Consent, a
landmark trial and the decades long struggle to make spousal
grade the crime. It's published by Echo HarperCollins, which has
been the publisher of all of my books since twenty eighteen.
You can find it at my website at Sarah Wineman
dot com. You could purchase it as a hardcover and
eat book, but if you get the audiobook, which I
would encourage you to get through libro dot FM, a
wonderful independent retailer. I am the narrator.
Speaker 5: Listen to it, not onlate I actually listened to it
and I had the book in front of me.
Speaker 3: I did what I encourage my students to do and
follow it along. So you did a wonderful job narrating it.
By the way, thank you. The book is without consent.
Speaker 5: It is definitely something that I think everyone should consider
reading on their journey to understand more about the legal
system in America and how victims are treated.
Speaker 3: Sarah, thank you again for joining us. We really appreciate it.
I'm so glad to have had this discussion and thank
you both. It was wonderful.
Speaker 5: That is going to do it for this episode of
Mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder