The first rape kits were given to hospitals in 1978. Chicago was the testing ground. According to a Tribune article from the time, more than two dozen Cook County hospitals received the kits, courtesy of the Chicago Hospital Council. Police had long insisted that corroborating evidence of sex crimes was near impossible, so Bernard Carey, then state’s attorney, explained the kits would be used to create a process for establishing evidence of a sexual assault. At the end of the article, there was a name, Louis Vitullo, a Chicago police sergeant and analyst in the crime lab who specialized in microscope work. The invention of the kit was credited to him. Vitullo had made his name a decade earlier by identifying the fingerprints of mass murderer Richard Speck.
But Vitullo didn’t invent the rape kit — at least, not alone.
Neither did Carey, whose office positioned the project as a collaboration with Vitullo.
About six years ago, journalist Pagan Kennedy — who has made inventors and the development of pioneering ideas her specialty — became obsessed with knowing who did create the first kit. She suspected the answer might not be Vitullo, partly because, in the earliest reports about the kit, another name floated in the mix of Illinois activists, politicians and police commanders involved with its development: Marty Goddard, which is what everyone called the otherwise formal Chicago woman named Martha Goddard.
By the time Kennedy, who lives in New England, sorted out the actual origin of the kit — a fraught puzzle recounted with absorbing detail in her new book, “The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story” — she had a broader portrait of how a country, and particularly a large city like Chicago, came to change its views about sexual assault.
“The rape kit was in the news when I started, mainly because, years after it was first tested, there was a huge backlog of untested kits,” Kennedy said. “That backlog started almost immediately in the ‘70s. I realized I had never really thought about the kit itself, which is a fascinating object: Everyone has heard of it but most of us have almost no idea what’s in it or how it works. Once you consider that, it’s not surprising nearly a half a million kits were going discarded. I mean, growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s myself, attitudes were different. I doubt I knew if sexual assault was even illegal then.”
After years of reporting, “The Secret History” lays out how Goddard (with internal police help from Vitullo) became the architect and catalyst of the rape kit, as well as its primary fundraiser and tireless champion. And then, a decade or so later, Goddard seems to vanish. As Kennedy noted in an interview, the invention of the rape kit was not entirely Goddard’s or Vitullo’s: “The idea had been floating out in the ether since the early ‘70s.”
But Goddard gave it shape and potential.
Goddard also understood that a science-based evidence kit developed by a woman in the 1970s (one with no background in science) would have a lot of trouble being taken seriously by male leaders in police departments and hospitals. So Goddard’s nonprofit, the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance, filed a curious trademark for the rape kit:
They named it the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit.
Four years ago, it was a Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit — a cardboard box illustrated with light blue lettering and a very ‘70s silhouette of a woman, containing bags for a victim’s clothing, glass slides, combs and consent forms — that became an artifact in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, after Kennedy wrote a piece for the New York Times about its Chicago lineage. It was also a Vitullo kit that, having become standard issue in Chicago, was adopted by New York City police in 1982. Since then, responding to almost institutional nationwide foot-dragging towards testing evidence kits, Illinois became the first state to mandate every kit must be tested; in 2020, the state created an online database for tracking kits; two years later, Gov. JB Pritzker announced its backlog of untested kits older than 180 days was zero.
But that also means kits are languishing for six months.
“Illinois became a leader in a lot of areas (associated with the kits),” said Sarah Beuning, general counsel and director of policy work for the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault. She added: “We would always like (the testing time) to be quicker. If you’re waiting for a prosecutor to press charges, six months is still a long time to wait.”
Still, consider that as recently as the 1970s, as Kennedy’s reporting paints in excruciating detail, attitudes were medieval. Incest was seen largely as the fault of young girls seducing parents. Rape was defined as forced sex with anyone not married to the perpetrator. (In fact, marital rape wasn’t illegal in all 50 states until 1993.) As Kennedy writes: “Girls were put on notice that stairwells, laundry rooms, parking garages, running trails in parks and the entire world after midnight were made by and for men.” Women “were allowed to share those places, so long as we didn’t get too comfortable in them.”
She found a Chicago police handbook from 1973 that questioned the truthfulness of most people who report rape, chalking up sexual assault claims to women who want “revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with a roving eye.”
By 1980, rape kits had become commonplace in Chicago, but results were mixed: More than 3,000 kits had been given to crime labs for testing. Evidence collected in those kits started to lead to convictions. But Chicago was also shuttering its only sexual assault hotlines, and local crime statistics suggested the problem was getting worse. Goddard told the Tribune that the general Chicago attitude was indifference: “For a city this size, it is absolutely unforgivable so few resources are available to a woman who is raped.”
One measure of that was the unusual funding for the first kits.
As Kennedy points out, the money and support for gathering evidence of a homicide was automatically there, but to create rape kits, and pay for testing of the kits, Goddard began turning to institutions that supported feminist causes and more progressive sources in Hyde Park and North Shore country clubs. “And no one would touch it,” Kennedy said.
Until Goddard went to Playboy.
Margaret Pokorny (then Margaret Standish) was executive director of Hugh Hefner’s philanthropic Playboy Foundation. “We were always looking for somewhat off-the-wall projects no one would give money to,” Pokorny remembers now, in an interview with the Tribune. She’s long since moved to Boston and become a familiar name in that city’s civic and volunteer scene, but in the late 1970s in Chicago, the foundation she ran was aligned closely with women’s liberation. Goddard, an executive in her early 30s with the charitable Wieboldt Foundation (a spin-off of the family behind Wieboldt department stores), had been friends with Pokorny, who immediately involved Playboy’s resources.
“We gave Marty actual room to work on the kits,” she said. “We were invested in women’s issues in general — though it was a little like being in the heart of the beast. I had the box printed and designed by Playboy’s production team. We even created a line of credit for Marty so she could buy supplies for the boxes. Marty was so informed and so innovative, and we all knew how little was actually being done with this issue.” When it was time to assemble kits, Pokorny recruited a group of local elderly volunteers.
Goddard — who would later tell friends she had been sexually assaulted herself — had been known around Chicago in the ‘70s as one of the most vocal supporters of sexual-abuse survivors. “There were no casual conversations with Marty,” Pokorny recalls. “She was intense, and very aware of her physical presence.” She understood that a steamrolling confidence was required to lobby Chicago police to change procedures. She made friends within CPD, but also, Kennedy said, when Goddard approached Vitullo with the idea for the kit, he resisted to the point of tossing her out of his office.
Tristan Engels, Vitullo’s granddaughter, a forensic psychologist based in California (and Vitullo’s only living relative, she said), wrote a 2020 book celebrating her grandfather’s contributions, “The Power of Truth: The Life of Louis R. Vitullo and the Legacy of the Rape Kit.” The biography identifies him as a willing co-creator of the kit, alongside Goddard. She said in an interview with the Tribune that “the only time I ever saw him get angry was while he was watching football.” He didn’t talk much about the rape kit but whenever he did, “Martha was always part of those conversations.” She objects to some of Kennedy’s reporting, which she characterizes as a thin narrative about stolen credit.
Yet Vitullo, Pokorny said, “had made it clear to Marty that he wanted some credit. On the other hand, he was very helpful and did become a huge advocate for her work. The thing is that (the kit) wouldn’t have gotten finished without him, but it was not his idea.”
When Kennedy first started looking into this history, she was thinking about “the politics of invention and what inventions empowered women, because everything designed in the world or invented comes from a point of view, and that creates winners and losers.” The murky history of the rape kit, she said, “fit the history of patents and how often people who do all the work don’t get credit.” The invention of the tampon, for example, is credited to osteopathic physician Earle Haas; hundreds of additional patents for tampons were filed in the past century, mostly by men, “though for much of our history it was impossible for any woman to claim a right to her invention.”
Early systems for investigating sexual assault were “very disorganized,” she said. Soiled clothing was routinely discarded by hospitals. Slides containing samples were bundled so poorly crime labs rarely used them. (A Tribune story at the time found only a third of the evidence collected in sexual assault cases was considered useful.) Crime labs didn’t talk to hospitals; nurses and doctors hadn’t been trained on what to look for.
Like many people with strikingly original ideas, Goddard’s initial thought now sounds thuddingly obvious: she wanted to know exactly what it would take to convict a rapist.
Could a jury be swayed by scientific evidence collected after the crime?
The question came to her in 1972 when she was a volunteer for Metro Help’s crisis hotline (also funded by the Playboy Foundation), based in a Halsted Street townhouse. She was struck by how many teenagers who called would tell her they became runaways because of being molested at home. She wondered how a survivor might gather evidence. As useful as that collecting has been ever since, said Rebecca Campbell, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University who has studied sexual assault for decades, “the irony is these kits are most helpful in the kind of sexual assault cases that are the least common — a stranger attacks another stranger.” The majority of sexual assault cases happen between people who already know each other.
She said the kits unwittingly shifted the emphasis to identifying who committed the crime, rather than making sure survivors had the health care for ongoing ramifications.
Hindsight, however, is 20/20.
“Back then we were just getting educated on the subject ourselves,” said Cynthia Gehrie, a friend of Goddard’s and former program director for the Chicago chapter of the ACLU. Goddard was trying to establish a system, and mindset, that didn’t exist yet.
Gehrie had a doctorate from Northwestern University and Goddard had not gone to college: “Marty was very self-conscious about her education, so she liked me to tag along because, as she said, it gave her legitimacy.” Gehrie said she knew about Goddard before they met because an ACLU colleague involved Goddard in a court case designed to help women get financial credit in their names; Goddard, who was divorced by her early 30s, had trouble getting credit without a husband to cosign. “Marty was the kind of person who couldn’t understand why, if there problem and a solution, people did not want to deal with it. But she was not trying to get attention for herself.”
State’s attorney Carey, who had been heavily criticized by both women’s organizations and police about the lack of prosecutions for sexual assault, had warmed to Goddard’s rape-kit idea. Gehrie remembers a meeting she attended with Goddard and police officer Rudy Nimocks (who would eventually lead the CPD’s homicide division): “(Vitullo) had been assigned to work with us too, and to our amazement, he shows up with a model of the kit.” She said that when Vitullo had kicked Goddard out of his office earlier, “it wasn’t because she introduced the idea,” it was because she had marched into the crime lab, unannounced. Gehrie recalls disputes about credit being more of an issue between the state’s attorney’s office and the CPD, with neither side wanting the other to claim credit.
Within a few years, most hospitals in Illinois had access to rape kits.
Goddard, who gained funding from various sources, made plans for outreach programs and imagined a nationwide database using evidence collected by the kits. In 1985, the Justice Department committed nearly $100,000 for Goddard to introduce a series of new protocols in 16 states for collecting evidence of sexual assault. But, as Kennedy writes, at this time, Goddard was increasingly reclusive. She had money issues. She was drinking heavily. Friends and even family members wondered where she had gone.
When Kennedy began her reporting, she wasn’t even sure if Goddard was still alive. “Part of the reason her story is hard to reconstruct,” Kennedy said, “is because a lot of the people I spoke to about her had never told their story to anyone yet.” She followed a trail of obituaries, brief newspaper stories, marriage notices, picking at any threads.
Goddard had died in 2015. She was 74, living in a cheap apartment in Phoenix. For a time, Kennedy writes, she studied forensics at a community college, likely hoping for some formal academic credibility, despite having changed how police handle forensics.
The future of the rape kit, said Michigan State’s Campbell, is “thinking of options.” She said we have “standardized the idea by now that after rape, people should want these kits.” And yet, despite the kits now being in circulation for nearly 50 years, despite many states having training in place for hospitals workers, there are plenty of hospitals that are still not well trained enough to use rape kits correctly. “If not done really well, it could be retraumatizing,” she said. Illinois state law mandates that kits are only handled by someone trained to use them. State law also says that a victim must be offered access to a kit within seven days (but victims can opt out of the process, in part or entirely).
“What a kit finds can push a burden of proof over the threshold needed for a conviction,” said Carolina Sanchez, director of advocacy services for the Chicago-based Resilience, which works with survivors of sexual assault. “But we also never ever tell (a survivor) what to do.” She said there are still so many misunderstandings and myths about the kits. She said, “There is still a lot of education and awareness left to be raised, with all of it.”
The backlog problem has never been settled, either.
According to the Joyful Heart Foundation, which was established in 2010 to end backlogs of untested kits, there are 17 states now with no untested kits older than 180 days. But California still has nearly 14,000, Texas has more than 6,000 and Indiana has 6,600. (Seven states, including New York, have yet to release any data on backlogs.)
In other words, headaches aside, much of what Goddard imagined came to fruition.
National databases for tracking evidence. Standard protocols for handling victims. The right to have evidence gathered. “We fall short of ideals, of course,” Kennedy said, “but Marty helped create this norm.” Or rather, she added, “I had thought that was the norm.”
Last summer, Idaho passed a law prohibiting minors from requesting a rape kit unless they have permission from a parent. And again, a lot of sexual assault originates within the family of victims. Kennedy sees the kit facing a future loaded with existential threats.
“But the initial thing remains inspiring,” she said.
“Marty worked under the radar, built a network with everybody who’d help. She made a radical system. No one can deny it. She forced into reality a remarkable idea, that anyone who had been through a sexual assault had the right to be taken seriously.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
