***If you want to read the latest in this ongoing investigation, please read Part I -- New News on the female detective that helped to pursue charges against a rape victim. It appears she has a history of looking out for the predator and not the rape victim. Tomorrow I will share Part II. - ST
Getting it all wrong
Matt Westerhold
Mar 12, 2022 12:00 PM
- Cry Rape: A two-part series
- Saturday: Turning on victims
- Sunday: Methods and practice
PORT CLINTON — The Ottawa County sheriff's detective who pressed for falsification charges against a woman who reported an unwanted sexual encounter in 2020 had a history of turning on alleged victims and siding with their alleged assailants.
In fact, the detective, who resigned from the sheriff's office last year, on at least two other occasions appears to have wanted women charged after reporting potential sex crimes and told the men accused she would develop evidence against them if she could, according to reports she wrote.
Arica Waters, a now former Put-in-Bay police officer, was actually charged with making a false alarm after she talked with the detective about an unwanted sexual encounter. Waters was acquitted at trial in December, however, when a judge determined the investigator, who was a witness against Waters, got it wrong.
The same detective, who worked for Ottawa County Sheriff Steve Levorchick, similarly hoped to have a woman charged in 2013, when she told a man accused of rape that the woman who accused him "certainly could be charged for filing a false police report," according to the report the detective filed after that investigation. The man did not want to pursue charges, that report states.
But the investigation the detective conducted that might have caused the greatest level of hardship and trauma for women involved a registered sex offender. The detective employed the same victim blaming approach when she interviewed that suspect.
"I asked McClain Durst if he would be willing to call the girl and confront her about filing a false police report," the investigator told the then 25-year-old Durst, who was accused by a teenager of rape in January 2013.
The report the detective filed went further.
"I explained to McClain Durst that I needed his help to prove he didn't rape her," she wrote in the report.
The detective made it clear to Durst that she would have no hesitation filing felony charges against the girl, who was 16.
"If I could prove that a false report was filed I would charge for that," she told Durst, according to the report.
An expert who reviewed the report of that Durst investigation said the detective lacked the proper training to investigate sex crimes.
"She did not follow best practices when interviewing the victim and she missed several clear signs that Durst is a predator who had been stalking the young woman," said Lisa Avalos, a professor with the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University. "I am really surprised she did not pick up on the clues provided in the interview."
Avalos is a nationally recognized expert in the field and author of numerous studies about violence against women.
The detective should have known Durst was dangerous, but in the end little was done to protect his victim, or subsequent victims, according to Avalos.
The sheriff's detective interviewed Durst first and then others that Durst told her to talk to, before she talked with the girl. When she finally did talk with the victim the interview was confrontational, at times. The Register reviewed an audio recording of that interview.
The girl described behavior that suggests she was being stalked by Durst — he would show up where she worked or if she was getting gas he would pull up at the gas station next to her, or drive by her home.
The detective, however, construed it that the girl was "building a relationship" with Durst, who was eight years older than the victim.
"I told (her) that based on what she is telling me as well as what others have told me that I believe what happened was she had some type of a relationship with McClain Durst whether it was friends or maybe it got too serious too quick and she didn't know what to do," the detective's report states. "I further explained that it was alright and kids her age do things like this all the time. However in this case the person is a convicted sex offender."
In the recording of the interview, a school official who was there can be heard telling the victim that "young girls are some times attracted to 'bad boys.'"
At the time he was accused, Durst already was a registered sex offender who was just released from prison after serving five years and was still on probation. He was prohibited from communicating with any female under the age of 18, under the conditions of his release.
Mark Mulligan, the Ottawa County prosecutor at the time, agreed to a plea deal for Durst to charge him with contributing to the unruliness of a minor and recommending a short jail sentence. The girl and her family were not informed of the deal prior to when he pleaded guilty. Durst would be incarcerated only briefly as a result of the plea deal.
The headline over a news story at sanduskyregister.com on July 5, 2014, "Lock your doors, hide your daughters," was a premonition of what was to come.
"Mark Mulligan refuses to talk about a convicted sexual offender set to be released from prison one week from today," the article states. "McClain Durst, 25, of Sandusky, spent just four months in Mansfield's Richland Correctional Institution for his role in an alleged rape of a teen in Oak Harbor earlier this year. Mulligan also declined to answer questions or make a comment about Durst back in May (when the plea deal was struck). He also has not allowed anyone from the Ottawa County prosecutor's office to comment."
Durst was released from prison a week later, and during the course of the next few years he raped numerous underage girls. He was in convicted in 2018 after a trial in which four girls alleged he raped each of them. Police in other counties also investigated at least two other rape complaints against Durst.
The description the girl provided the Ottawa County detective 18 months earlier — that she was stalked and then raped by Durst after he lured her into his car — is similar to the descriptions other girls gave in the other rapes. His victims said he used Snapchat, a social media app, to introduce himself and either began stalking them or arranged to meet them. He lured them into his car and raped them, they said.
Detectives from the Huron County sheriff's office conducted the subsequent investigations of Durst and an assistant Huron County prosecutor, Bambi Couch, took him to trial with testimony from four victims. In 2018, his rape spree was finally ended when a Huron County jury convicted him on rape and other sex crime charges. Durst was sentenced to 33 years in prison after that trial. He will be eligible for parole in 2050, when he will be age 61.
Avalos said part of the problem with sex crime investigations that fail and ultimately turn on the victim is with how they are handled by law enforcement agencies and prosecutors.
"There is likely no oversight and no accountability," she said.
There was no contact information made available by the Ottawa County sheriff's office for the detective who conducted the earlier, failed investigation of Durst. A deputy at the sheriff's office said she likely would not talk with a reporter for this article. The deputy was asked to give the former detective the reporter's contact information and asked to inform the detective this story was being developed and to ask the detective to call or email the reporter. The former detective, who also served on a federal task force fighting sex trafficking in Ohio, did not contact the reporter.
In October, Sheriff's Deputy Adam Leist was promoted to captain of operations, Sheriff Levorchick said. The detective who wanted to charge alleged victims with falsifying rape complaints resigned about a month later, the sheriff said, although she still testified at Waters' felony trial in December on the making a false alarm charge.
Levorchick, in response to a written inquiry, said he was not involved in the decisions made concerning the Durst investigation.
"I was not privy to the conversations between (the detective) and (now former Ottawa County) prosecutor Mark Mulligan," he wrote, although he acknowledged that "oversight of this office is ultimately my responsibility."
There is nothing in the detective's personnel file, or in the case file of her investigation of Durst, that indicates there was a review of the practices or the methods she used in the 2013 investigation, after Durst began raping other girls after his release from prison the following year, in the same way he allegedly raped the Ottawa County girl.
There also is no review or other information that the detective was spoken with about the missteps made during the investigation of the complaint made by Arica Waters, the woman who was falsely charged with lying about being raped. In that case, a judge determined the former Ottawa County detective misconstrued what happened and acquitted Waters at trial.
Levorchick has not commented about the Waters' case since the acquittal, but before it went to trial it was learned that there were two other rape complaints by two other women against the same man who Waters accused, the man who was the chief witness against Waters at trial. Levorchick was a captain with the sheriff's office in 2008 and investigated that earlier complaint, although he did not interview the suspect.
That woman decided she did not want to pursue an investigation just days after telling Levorchick and other law enforcement officers what happened. According to a report Levorchick wrote, which also includes a statement the woman signed saying she did not want to pursue charges, she told him she might have been a "willing participant" in what happened, although she also penned a six-page hand-written statement in which she reiterates that she was raped.
That 2008 investigation is currently under review by a special prosecutor and an investigator after a complaint was filed by a third party. Levorchick has declined to discuss that review and referred questions to his attorney." - Sandusky Register