Case 350: Alice Sebold & Tony Broadwater

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Everyone who saw her immediately noticed that something was wrong. She walked slowly, staring straight ahead, seemingly in a daze. Her cheek and lips were cut, her face swollen, and her dark hair tangled and dirty. Her clothes were wrung inside out and appeared to be soaked with blood. When someone approached and asked if she was alright, she didn't respond. She kept walking. Did you see her, someone said. She's really fucked up. Look at the blood. The woman was clutching a purse and some books, and although she couldn't or wouldn't speak to anyone, she seemed to know where she needed to go. She crossed the street and turned west onto Waverly Avenue, then stopped in front of Marion Hall, a co-ed dormitory for freshmen on the university campus, about three blocks from the university campus. Two students sitting on the stoop got up quickly when they saw her and rushed to hold open the doors, helping her inside. In the lobby, she approached another student who was serving as an overnight security guard and finally broke her silence. I was raped in the park, she said. Will you call the police? wasn't a student. He had dropped out of high school to join the Marines, but he'd grown up in a south side neighbourhood only about a mile away and he knew the area well. Tony had spent about 18 months in the Marine Corps, during which time he was stationed thousands of miles away in California. He trained as a communications officer, but his military career ended early when he developed an issue with his wrist and received a medical discharge. Around the same time, his widowed father was diagnosed with stomach cancer, so Tony decided to return home to Syracuse to help out. He'd found a job with a telecom company installing telephones, and in the fall of 1981, he was working, helping his dad, and catching up with friends and family around town in his free time. On this particular Monday evening, Tony was standing on the sidewalk on Marshall Street waiting for his friend to come out of a shop. It was a little after 6pm when Tony happened to look across the street and saw someone he recognised, a Syracuse police officer named Paul Clapper. Clapper stood out in a crowd. He was over 6 feet tall and had bright orange hair and an orange moustache. Tony remembered him as a beat cop who'd patrolled his old neighbourhood back when Clapper was a rookie and Tony and his five brothers were kids. Tony stepped into the street and called playfully to Clapper, "Hey, haven't I seen you somewhere before?" Clapper thought he recognised Tony too, and responded in kind, "Don't I know you?" Clapper hadn't seen Tony in the years since he moved to California, and when Tony approached, the officer initially confused him with one of his brothers. The two men laughed about this and chatted briefly before going their separate ways. Alice Seabold had been in her dormitory that afternoon when she realised it was getting late and she needed something to eat before her evening class. She was majoring in creative writing and had been accepted into an honours workshop in fiction which was scheduled to meet that night. Even though it was nearing 6pm and she'd promised her parents she wouldn't go out alone after 5, her dorm was only a few blocks from Marshall Street. Deciding to make a quick trip for food, she hurried to a shop and purchased a bottle of soda and a peach flavoured yoghurt before heading back towards campus. She was thinking about her upcoming class, when all of a sudden the thing she had feared most over the past four weeks happened. "As if out of nowhere," she later wrote, "I saw my rapist crossing toward me." He was looking right at her and rapidly closed the distance between them as he crossed the street. He was a short and muscular young black man and as she studied his face, images from the night she was attacked flashed through her mind. She thought about the eyes and mouth of the man in the tunnel and remembered the stench of alcohol on his breath. Alice felt numb as she watched the man come closer and closer. She was certain she knew his face, and worse, she could tell he recognised her too. He was smiling confidently and called out to her, just as he had when she tried to leave the tunnel that terrible night five months earlier. "Hey girl," she heard him say, "don't I know you from somewhere?" It took all of her strength, to keep walking. When she passed by without acknowledging him, the man in the street started to laugh. Alice went all the way to the end of the block before she dared turn around. When she did, she couldn't believe what she saw. The man was standing beside a policeman who was very tall and had bright orange hair and a moustache. The two men were smiling as if sharing a joke. "My devastation was a pleasure for him," she thought. "He was shooting the breeze, sure of his safety. He had no fear. He was laughing because he'd gotten away with it." Back at her dorm, Alice called the police. When they arrived, a sergeant took her back to Marshall Street in his patrol car in case the man was still there. As he circled the block, the sergeant began telling Alice about a relative of his who had also survived a rape. As he talked about it, he started hitting the empty passenger seat beside him harder and harder with his nightstick. Suddenly, he spotted three young black men standing together near the road. He pointed at them and asked eagerly, "What about those three?" "No," Alice said. "The three men were too tall." Alice was about five and a half feet, and the man who'd attacked her was only slightly taller than she was. The sergeant pulled over anyway. Telling her to wait, he grabbed his nightstick and rushed at the men, chasing them into an alley out of sight. When he came back, he was sweaty and excited. "That'll teach 'em," he said with satisfaction, before starting up the car and driving Alice back to the station. Alice was in a bad mood, but he didn't give a damn about what happened next. Alice didn't even notice the man. Once again, she was given mugshots to look through, but she didn't see the man from Marshall Street among them. As she stared at page after page of faces, she told an officer, "They all just blur together. I don't think he's here." When Officer Clapper learned about Alice Sebald's report that Monday night, he realized he was the policeman she'd seen, which was the police officer who had been working for her for the past year. She told the officer that the police officer had been working for her for the past year, and that the police officer had been working for her for the past year, which meant Tony Broadwater was the man everyone was looking for. He gave this information to Sergeant Lorenz, and on Wednesday October 14, Tony was arrested and charged with rape, sodomy, assault, sexual abuse, and robbery. Up to this point, the Syracuse police had shown little to no interest in Alice's case. In the five months since she was attacked, the investigation had been considered inactive, and police hadn't spent any time looking for the man who beat and raped her. But in October, after her second report resulted in Tony's arrest, both the police and the district attorney's office were suddenly eager to proceed. Although there was a suspect in custody and a newfound enthusiasm to prosecute, there really wasn't any new evidence linking Tony Broadwater to the crime. Alice had recognized him on Marshall Street, and that was it. Back in May, right after the assault, police had found a pocket knife near Alice's lost eyeglasses outside the tunnel where she was raped. They'd collected the knife as possible evidence, but never actually checked it for fingerprints. After arresting Tony, they finally tested the knife and recovered a partial print, but it was too incomplete to be of any use. They couldn't compare Tony's blood type with the semen from the rape kit, because the sample collected at the hospital had been too contaminated with Alice's own blood, due to the severity of her injuries. As for the single pubic hair, it was turned over to a forensic chemist for microscopic comparison with Tony's pubic hair, which he voluntarily provided. The analysis concluded that the hair from the rape kit was consistent with Tony's hair, but that just meant there was no clarity that he couldn't be ruled out. Even in 1981, investigators knew it wasn't possible to use hair comparison to positively identify a person. As the assistant district attorney who worked on the case, Gail Ebelhair, explained to Alice, even hairs taken from the same head can vary. The sum total of evidence prosecutors had against Tony was Alice's eyewitness identification, and she was able to identify him. To bolster this single piece of evidence, she was asked to identify him again, this time in a formal police line-up a few weeks after she'd seen him on Marshall Street. But at the line-up, she didn't recognise Tony, and instead chose the man standing beside him. Afterwards, assistant DA Ebelhair bluntly told Alice, "You chose the wrong one." As a rape victim, Alice was painfully aware that any mistakes she made fuelled negative sentiments towards her, particularly judgement and blame. She'd experienced this over the past five months from friends and family, and she understood it would be much worse in a courtroom. She knew that her failure to recognise Tony in the line-up made her look confused and unreliable. She also realised that her initial identification of Tony on Marshall Street could be portrayed as an incident of racially-charged hysteria. As she later wrote, Tony's defence attorney could now argue that, "A path to the future." panicked white girl saw a black man on the street. He spoke familiarly to her, and in her mind, she connected this to her rape. In short, she was accusing the wrong man. Alice understood all of this. Sergeant Lerans and Assistant DA Ebelhair surely understood it too. Tony and his attorney anticipated that after he wasn't chosen in the line-up, the charges against him would have to be dropped. But instead, Ebelhair took the case to the grand jury that very same day. Ever since she walked out of the tunnel after the attack, Alice absorbed the unbidden judgments of others. Students who whispered behind her back, family members who treated her like she was made of glass, and even a psychiatrist who remarked that surviving rape was the only way to save her life. Alice was not alone. Alice was not alone. Alice was not alone. People didn't understand what she had been through, but that hadn't stopped them from assuming they knew how she should feel about it, or how she should behave as a result. The truth was, Alice was seething with anger at the man who had come out of nowhere and changed her life into a permanent before and after story. A sensitive young person, highly attuned to other people and their needs, was a man who was not alone. Alice was a man who was not alone. Alice was not needs, Alice concealed her rage from almost everyone. An exception was in her poetry class, a workshop-style writing group led by a professor who encouraged Alice to express how she really felt. One day in class, Alice shared a poem she had written about the rape entitled Conviction. It read in part, I could take those solid red balls and slice them separately off as everyone watched. I have already planned what I would do for a pleasurable kill, a slow, soft ending. First, I would kick hard and straight with a boot into you, stare while you shot quick and loose contents a bloody pink hue. Next, I would slice out your tongue. You couldn't curse or scream, only affect. A face of pain would speak for you, your thick ignorance through. Thirdly, should I hack away those sweet cow-eyes with the glass blades you made me lie down on? Or should I shoot with a gun close into the knee, where they say the cap shatters immediately? I need the blood of your hide on my hands. I want to kill you with boots and guns and glass. I want to fuck you with knives. Come to me. Come to me. Come die and lie beside me. When Alice read Conviction aloud to her classmates, some of her fellow students complimented the piece, but others expressed disbelief, disgust, and discomfort. Alice was unapologetic. Writing, and poetry in particular, allowed her the freedom to express herself and not care whether other people liked it or agreed with her. But a courtroom was a different story, and she knew that when she appeared in court, she had to consider how other people perceived her. After all, the entire case was built on her testimony. Whether people liked her and agreed with her would make all the difference between winning a conviction or letting Tony Broadwater go scot-free. Recalling that Prosecutor Ebelherr had likened being in a courtroom to being in a court room, Alice inferred that she needed to play the role she had been cast in - that of the innocent victim. Even though she was an innocent victim, she couldn't just be herself on the witness stand, because judges and juries had their own beliefs about how a real victim looked, sounded, and behaved. Alice's understanding of the situation was confirmed at the grand jury hearing the moment jurors were allowed to ask the rest of the jury. Alice was the only person in the jury who knew what was going on. One juror immediately asked her, "Alice, why were you coming through the park alone at night?" "Didn't anybody warn you not to?" asked another. "Didn't you know you're not supposed to go through the park after 9:30?" a third juror said. "Didn't you know that?" Like all witnesses in court, Alice swore an oath before testifying that she would tell the whole truth. But, as you can see, she was not the only one who swore an oath. She was the only one who swore an oath. But, as she later put it, "If you do that and nothing else, you lose." Suppressing her true feelings of anger and indignation, Alice pretended to agree that she shared some of the blame for what happened to her. "I told them I was stupid," she later wrote about her grand jury testimony, "and that I shouldn't have walked through the park." The grand jury voted to indict Tony Broadwater, who was the judge of the trial. When the trial was over, Alice said, "I thought I had put on the best show of my life." Tony pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and a trial date was set for the following spring. He was offered a plea bargain, which he refused. His brothers warned him that he was being railroaded, but Tony didn't see how that could be possible. "They can't," he insisted. "There's nothing to railroad me with." He had no criminal history. His juvenile record consisted of two accusations of stealing money, once when he was 12 and once when he was still in high school. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, and the victim hadn't chosen him in the line-up. He'd fully cooperated with the investigation in every way, giving his hair, blood, and fingerprints voluntarily. He was not the only one who was accused of stealing money. He was also the only one who was charged with burglary. He was the only one who was charged with burglary, and offering to take a polygraph. He was a military veteran, gainfully employed, and serving as a caretaker to his terminally ill father. What happened to Alice was a terrible crime, but he had nothing to do with it. He was innocent. It was as simple as that. Tony Broadwater's trial began on May 17, 1982. It lasted just eight hours, spread out over two days. Officer Clapper testified that he and Tony had recognized one another on Marshall Street, recalling, "I saw him and we made eye contact, and I believe that we just, you know, nodded at the same time." He confirmed that Tony was speaking to him when he said, "Hey, haven't I seen you somewhere before?" and that he had replied, "Don't I know you?" He hadn't heard Tony say, "Hey, girl," or seen him interact with Alice at all. A forensic chemist testified that Tony's pubic hair was consistent with the hair from the rape kit. The judge then interrupted and asked the chemist to clarify, saying, "But even with that testimony, you cannot say positively, based upon, say, a reasonable degree of chemical certainty, that the defendant is the person." The chemist replied, "No, sir, I cannot." The doctor who had seen Alice in the hospital after the attack testified about the extent of her injuries and confirmed that Alice had been a virgin when she was raped. This was a fact that the prosecutor seemed intent on emphasizing at every opportunity. When it was finally Alice's turn to testify, she repeated yet again the agonizing details of the assault in Thorndon Park, then described how she had recognized, at least, Tony Broadwater on Marshall Street. She admitted she hadn't chosen him in the police lineup, but explained that it was only because she'd gotten flustered and upset when the man beside him, known as Number 5, stared her down. The prosecutor asked Alice whether she knew which numbered position Tony was in during the lineup. The truth was that she did. She knew Tony had been Number 4. She had guessed this after leaving the lineup room, and Sergeant Lorenz and Gail Ebelhair both confirmed it. But in her trial testimony, this isn't what she said. "If I told the truth," she later wrote, "I could say that the moment I picked Number 5, I knew I was wrong and had regretted it. If I lied, if I said, 'No, I do not,' I knew I would be perceived as telling the truth, in my confusion between 4 and 5." Alice wanted to win, and to win, she needed to be perceived as telling the truth, even if that meant she had to lie. She made her choice. "No, I do not," she lied. Tony testified in his own defense that he had not attacked and raped Alice, and had in fact never met her before. Nor had he noticed her looking at him on Marshall Street on the evening of October 5. He confirmed that he was only talking to Officer Clapper when he'd asked, "Haven't I seen you somewhere?" where before. He also pointed out that he had two scars on his face and a chipped tooth, which Alice had never included in her description of her attacker. She had described the shape of the rapist's mouth, his hairline, and the distinctive shape of his nose, none of which matched Tony's features, and she had sketched a drawing of the man from memory. Surely she would have mentioned Tony's scars and broken tooth if he had been the man in the tunnel. Immediately following the prosecutor's closing argument, the judge presiding over the trial announced he was tossing out one of the charges, a weapons charge, since the pocket knife found near the tunnel couldn't be linked to Tony and Alice had never actually seen a knife during the attack. On every other charge, he pronounced Tony guilty. Two months later, on Tuesday July 13, 1982, for the crimes of rape, sexual abuse, sodomy, robbery, and assault, Tony was sentenced to the maximum possible punishment. Eight to twenty-five years in state prison. Tony was shocked. Total numbness, he laid a record feeling. I was just paralysed. Casefile will be back shortly. Thank you for supporting us by listening to this episode's sponsors. Thank you for listening to this episode's ads. By supporting our sponsors, you support Casefile to continue to deliver quality content. For Alice Seabolt, the trial's outcome felt like a heavy blow. The door shutting behind her. Winning a guilty verdict and prison term for the man she believed was responsible for violently upending her life provided the closure she needed to finally move on. For Tony Broadwater, there was nothing metaphorical about the door that shut behind him after the trial. He was taken to Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Comstock, New York, which a government oversight agency's report had described as a garbage heap. Great Meadow has since been shut down, but when Tony arrived in the summer of 1982, the crowded facility was nicknamed "Gladiator School" due to its reputation for constant violence. It also had the highest rate of inmate suicides and suicide attempts of any prison in the state. Tony was just 21 years old. Prison was intensely violent. And he thought he might die. In August of 1984, two years into his sentence, he was stabbed in the face during a fight that broke out among other inmates who were working in the prison kitchen. He needed stitches to stop the bleeding, but one of his friends who was also stabbed in the fight died. Tony lost another friend to suicide, and there were others over the years who simply disappeared. Living with constant loss and threat of violence, Tony lost another friend to suicide, and there were others over the years who simply disappeared. Living with constant loss and threat of violence, living with constant loss and threat of violence, Tony lost another friend to suicide, and there were others over the years who simply disappeared. Living with constant loss and threat of violence, was a trauma further complicated by the shock and overwhelming emotions which he had to face on his own due to the stigma of being a convicted rapist. Visits or letters from friends and family on the outside were rare. Tony later described his prison experience as a time of intense hatred, frustration, pain, and disbelief. Just like Alice, he'd crossed paths with someone who'd appeared out of nowhere and changed the course of his life, dividing it forever into a before and after. Also similar to Alice, he'd tried to be honest and cooperative with the police, but they hadn't believed or helped him at all. Unlike Alice, Tony had thought that telling the truth in court would be enough. But in his case, just as Alice had predicted, if you do that and nothing else, you lose. Alice's plan to move on after the trial didn't turn out the way she hoped. She struggled for years, dropping out of graduate school, drifting between jobs and cities, and abusing alcohol and drugs. In the 1990s, she learned about the work of Dr Judith Herman, a psychologist and researcher who worked with victims of sexual abuse, and identified similarities in her patients and combat veterans who experienced a newly recognized condition called post-traumatic stress disorder. Alice realized that she was suffering from PTSD too, and that her trauma had to be faced, it couldn't be ignored, and it wouldn't just go away. Around this time, she moved to California to give graduate school another try and to focus on her writing. While there, she began writing a memoir about her rape and its aftermath. At the time, she had no idea the full extent of that aftermath. Throughout the 1990s, Tony Broadwater petitioned for parole multiple times with emotional pleas. "It hurts me. It hurts me just to be convicted of a crime like that," he told the board at his first hearing. But, claiming to be innocent was a non-starter for parole, so his application, according to the board, was no longer valid for parole. The allegations were always denied. When pressed by the board to admit his guilt, Tony said he was willing to admit that he was guilty of being convicted of the crime, but that was as far as he could go. A member of the parole board retorted, "No one is guilty of being convicted of a crime. Either you're guilty of committing the crime or you're not guilty of committing the crime. You're talking in circles." Broad informed Tony that he wouldn't win parole if he never admitted that he was a rapist. But, even with his chance at freedom hanging in the balance, Tony couldn't do it, losing his second application for parole as well. The third time he was eligible, he didn't even bother applying. He resigned himself to serving the full 25 years behind bars. In 1999, Alice Seabold published her memoir, which she gave the darkly ironic title of "Lucky". In it, she wrote about all the excruciating details of her rape and assault that Sergeant Lorenz hadn't wanted to hear. Critics praised the book as a story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist and a powerful new plea to break the silence. She laid bare not only the details of what happened to her in the tunnel, but also gave an honest and unsparing account of her mental and emotional state throughout the criminal investigation and trial. She wrote at length about what Assistant DA Gail Ebelhair had called "superficials", the elements of the case that were assumed to work in Alice's favour, even though they had nothing to do with the crime. These included the fact that Alice was a virgin who hadn't been drinking and that she wore frumpy clothes. She also included the fact that Alice was white and Tony was black. Alice revealed various things the police and the District Attorney's staff had told her about Tony Broadwater, including that he had a criminal record and had already been to prison. They also told her that he'd tricked her into not recognising him in the line-up by bringing along a friend who was a look-a-like. And when Alice's best friend was also attacked and raped two years after Tony was incarcerated, the police suggested that Tony might have arranged the rape from prison as a form of revenge against Alice. None of this was true. The same year Lucky was released, Tony received an unexpected conditional release from prison, earned through a combination of time served and good behaviour. As he walked out of prison, he felt like kissing the ground outside the gate. So much had changed while he was locked up. His father had long since passed away from cancer and Tony's five brothers hadn't kept in touch. He returned to his hometown of Syracuse but was faced with rebuilding his life from less than zero. He was now a convicted felon and a registered sex offender. Most people kept their distance. He couldn't find a job, and when he tried to enrol in vocational training classes, his status as a sex offender got him barred from the campus. Tony desperately wanted to clear his name. He contacted the Innocence Project after his release, hoping they would take his case. The Innocence Project offers free legal representation in cases where scientific advancements can provide proof of innocence for people convicted of a crime. To date, the Innocence Project has has used DNA testing to help overturn hundreds of wrongful convictions. Many people have been exonerated only after serving lengthy sentences for crimes they didn't commit. Unfortunately, the Innocence Project wouldn't be able to help Tony. The biological material from Alice's rape kit had been destroyed in 1989, so he couldn't use DNA testing to prove his innocence. As Tony had trouble finding work, money was tight, but he still hoped to find a lawyer to work on overturning his conviction. One local attorney agreed to take his case, only to disappear with Tony's personal copy of the case file as well as his $1,400 deposit. Another attorney expressed a willingness to look at his claims, but since Tony's files had been stolen by the first attorney, he had little to start with and soon gave up. It seemed to Tony like no one was interested in the details of his case at all. But what he didn't know was that millions of people around the world were extremely interested in his case, which they had learned about by reading Lucky. A few years after Alice's memoir was published, she had followed it up with a novel called The Lovely Bones, which became a runaway bestseller. The Lovely Bones is a fictional story of a teenage girl who is raped and murdered by a serial predator who hides in plain sight. From heaven, the girl watches her family and community grapple with the complicated aftermath of the crime. Praised by reviewers as triumphant, savagely beautiful, and a stunning achievement, The Lovely Bones sold millions of copies, catapulted Alice into fame, and in 2009 was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. When fans of Alice's novel considered her real-life experience as a young rape victim, many were inclined to view Lucky and The Lovely Bones as two connected stories. Thanks to the incredible success of The Lovely Bones, interest in Lucky surged. It was republished in paperback and went on to sell more than a million copies. Then, in 2019, 20 years after it was written, a production company called The Lovely Bones was able to sell more than a million copies of the novel. In 2019, 20 years after it was written, a production company called The Lovely Bones was able to sell more than a million copies of The Lovely Bones. In 2019, 20 years after it was written, a production company bought the rights to adapt Lucky as a feature film. Sometimes, when Tony was in prison, he invited other inmates to read a copy of his trial transcript and judge his guilt or innocence for themselves. More often than not, those who took him up on it said they couldn't believe he'd been convicted solely on the basis of Alice's testimony. The prosecutor, police. The police and judge had all believed that he was guilty, but those he was incarcerated with read the trial record and reached the opposite conclusion, telling him, Alice also had access to the trial transcript and court files when she was researching Lucky. With the additional insight into behind-the-scenes moments with the police and prosecutor, and the inclusion of her thoughts about revenge, trial strategy, and playing a role to win over a judge or jury, her memoir contained more complete details about the trial than any other source. She used a pseudonym for Tony in the book, calling him Gregory Madison, and for 20 years, most readers took it for granted that Gregory Madison was all the things police and prosecutors told Alice he was. A criminal with a prison record, and a repeat offender who had ways of escaping accountability. He finally met his match in Alice, whom the bailiff at trial called "the best rape witness he'd ever seen on the stand." For decades, Tony's raw trial transcript and Alice's literary memoir had been read by lots of people, but very few had read both. Alice used some excerpts from the trial in Lucky, mostly quotes from her own testimony. Tony eventually learned that Alice had published a book about the trial, but he didn't want to read it. He told his wife: "That's her story. That's nothing to do with me." He couldn't have been more wrong. The desire for a Hollywood adaptation of Lucky brought a new kind of reader to the story. Adapting the memoir would require detailed research, and anyone working on it would have the financial and legal resources of a film studio at their disposal. What's more, part of a professional screenwriter's job is to imagine how the film's audience is likely to perceive a given scene, or how they're likely to feel about each character. In 2010, independent producer Laurie Parker was hired to turn Lucky into a film script. As a sexual assault survivor herself, she felt strongly about the importance of telling Alice's story on film. Laurie started by reading the book. Then she read it again. She felt like she had missed something. A brutal crime had certainly been committed, but where was the evidence against Gregory Madison? She couldn't finish the screenplay until she understood how the prosecution had been so confident they had the right man. Laurie interviewed DA Gail Ebelherr, who confirmed that the film was a true crime, and that the film was a true crime. who confirmed that Alice's depiction of the investigation and prosecution was accurate. Parker also obtained a copy of the trial transcript. Reading it, she saw that the entirety of the evidence was Alice, Tony and Officer Clapper's testimony about the Marshall Street incident, and the chemist's evidence about the consistent pubic hair. That was it. Laurie contacted Officer Clapper and some other police who'd been involved in the investigation, but none could tell her anything more about the case against Gregory Madison. Laurie had an unusual reason to be sceptical about the Marshall Street incident in particular. She had actually once experienced something eerily similar. After surviving a sexual assault, Laurie had later been in a library when she happened to notice a stranger whose appearance triggered a panic attack. She was certain that the stranger in the library was her rapist, who, like Alice's, hadn't been caught. She was so frightened she couldn't move. She remained trapped in the library, frozen in terror, until after about half an hour, the panic attack finally began to subside. Then she took a second look at the man, and she realised he was not the man who raped her at all. He didn't. He didn't even look that similar. Laurie naturally couldn't help but think back to this unnerving experience when she considered Alice's powerful reaction to seeing Tony on Marshall Street, followed by her inability to recognise him weeks later, and the lack of any real evidence connecting him to the crime. After all her reading and research, Laurie concluded that Alice's rape was most likely still unsolved. Instead of reproducing the trial sequence, as depicted in Lucky, Laurie made the identity of the man Alice encounters on Marshall Street ambiguous. She dubbed Gregory Madison's character "short, muscular man" rather than "rapist", and at the end of the story, the question of whether he was who Alice thought he was remained unknown. Laurie's version was rejected, and the film was never made. A fresh attempt to adapt to Lucky began around 2019, and in 2019, acclaimed director and screenwriter Karen Moncrief was hired, and she wrote a new screenplay that faithfully followed the story as told in the memoir. However, even though Karen completed the script, she had done the same research and been plagued by the same doubts as Laurie Parker. Production moved ahead, with shooting set to begin in the summer of 2021, but all the while, Karen's discomfort with the lack of evidence against Gregory Madison, secretly nagged at her. The issue of whether to speak up about her doubts came to a head when the actor who was offered the role of Gregory Madison decided to turn the part down. He read the script, and found himself questioning how so little evidence had resulted in a conviction for such an atrocious crime. Without faith that Gregory Madison was actually guilty, making the film felt like perpetuating old and dangerous racist stereotypes, there was no doubt that the film was about to turn the part down. The film was about to turn the part down. why the production team was going out of their way to change the story. He didn't want to finance the film unless someone could explain to him why they needed to disguise the identity of a convicted rapist. The only possible reason he could think of was that maybe the story wasn't true. The financier of the film version of Lucky was a man named Timothy Mucciante. When he first read Lucky after signing on to provide funding for the film, he too was bothered by the lack of evidence at the trial, the strange outcome of the police line-up, and the behaviour of assistant DA Ebelherr. In Timothy's view, the evidence as presented in Alice's memoir wasn't anything close to adequate to prove Gregory Madison's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And he knew quite a bit about criminal law because he was a former attorney. But, like Karen Moncrief, Timothy initially set aside his concerns about the paltry evidence, reasoning that the memoir must have been fact-checked and vetted by the publisher's legal department. And by the time he read it, it had been in print for over 20 years. If there had been a legitimate problem with the criminal case, surely someone else would have called attention to it already. What he didn't know was that Tony Broderick, the real Gregory Madison, had been trying to call attention to it for almost four decades. Timothy Mucciante also brought a unique perspective as a reader of this particular story. He was well-versed in spotting the shortcomings of the investigation and trial because of his legal background. But he also had something in common with Tony and the inmates who had read the trial transcript that most readers of Lucky did not. He was a convicted felon. The reason he no longer practiced law was because in the early 1990s he was convicted of multiple types of fraud. He'd faced federal charges after persuading three of his acquaintances to contribute $25,000 each into a scheme in which he said he would buy latex condoms and surgical gloves from the UK, trade them for live chickens in Russia, and finally sell the chickens for cash in Singapore. He was also convicted of selling counterfeit investment bonds to one of his legal clients and embezzling money from a client. Timothy had been sent to prison for a decade, meaning he had seen the justice system from both sides. He also knew a lot about rape, PTSD, and the stigma of victimisation because he was a sexual assault survivor too. When Timothy first read Lucky, he strongly related to what Alice Sebald had faced and overcome. So much of her story recalled experiences of his own, including intrusive flashbacks, the urge to numb emotional pain with alcohol and drugs, and the uncomfortable racial dichotomy that is all too common in the criminal justice system when a victim is white and the accused is not. Timothy recognised the long history of systemic persecution of black men by police and prosecutors, but Alice had addressed this in her book candidly. She'd even written that she wished her rapist had been white so that the influence of racism on the investigation and trial wouldn't have to be addressed. So again, he wondered, why change the race of the rapist now in the screenplay? Timothy pondered whether parts of the book could possibly be fictional. Not realising it was a fictional one, he tried googling Gregory Madison in Syracuse. Nothing. This prompted a bleak thought. Maybe Alice had made the whole thing up, and the memoir that was praised for breaking taboos about rape and giving voice to the voiceless was actually a very good con. Having swindled more than a few people himself, Timothy decided to follow his instinct. It takes a con to know a con, he thought. Around this time, Timothy was fired from the film production after failing to provide the funding he had promised. It was June of 2021. The film had been scheduled to start shooting that month. Instead, its ex-financier started randomly contacting private investigators in the Syracuse area. Eventually, someone called him back. Dan Myers was a veteran of the film industry, a veteran of the Syracuse Sheriff's Department, now retired and working as an independent investigator. Timothy asked him to find out whether the rape depicted in the book Lucky had really happened. Myers still had good contacts among Syracuse law enforcement, and in no time at all, he had Officer Paul Clapper on the phone. Clapper remembered Alice Sebald's rape and immediately assured Myers that it was a very real and a very brutal assault. He also revealed Gregory Madison's real name, as he still remembered Tony Broadwater. Then, to Myers' surprise, Clapper told him the line-up in the investigation hadn't been done properly and he suspected Tony had been wrongfully convicted. That was something Myers hadn't expected to hear. He updated Timothy Munciante, then followed his curiosity by tracking down Tony. On July 21 2021, he found Tony living with his wife in his old and increasingly dilapidated family home on Syracuse's south side. Secretly recording the conversation, Myers asked Tony if he knew that his rape trial was the subject of an upcoming Hollywood film. It's a lie, Tony said. The now 60-year-old suffered from joint problems and chronic pain, and leaned on a cane to get around. He was trying to make ends meet by collecting scrap metal and hauling trash. He and his wife lived alone and the house was missing most of its front windows, which he'd tried to cover with plastic tarps. Over the next hour, Myers stood on Tony's porch while he told his side of the story. It was the same story he'd been trying to tell for 40 years, but this time, it was the same story he'd been trying to tell for 40 years, but this time, the right person was finally listening. Dan Myers left Tony's house that day and went straight back to his office, which he shared with a local law firm. He approached one of the attorneys, a man named Dave Hammond, and told him that he'd just met a man who was the victim of a wrongful conviction. Myers gave his recorded conversation with Tony to Hammond, who listened to it and agreed to look at the case. When he learned that hair comparison evidence had been part of the trial, he requested help from his friend and fellow attorney, Melissa Swartz, who had special expertise with forensic evidence. Hammond and Swartz bought copies of Lucky, which neither of them had previously read. Between the chance encounter on Marshall Street, the police lineup, and the trial, the two attorneys were stunned. This painted a crystal clear portrait of prosecutorial misconduct. If what Alice had written was accurate, there were absolutely major problems with the case against Tony right from the start. The two then obtained copies of the trial transcript and discovered it was even worse. Forty years had passed since the trial, so none of the district attorney's staff who'd worked on the case were still there. Swartz asked the current DA, William Fitzpatrick, to read the trial. Swartz said that he had not read the trial, but that he could read the 214-page transcript of Tony's eight-hour trial and give his opinion. It only took him an hour to read the entire transcript, and he was taken aback by what he read and by what he didn't. The evidence just wasn't there. What did come through was an obvious racial bias on full display when Alice was asked to identify Tony in the courtroom, even though he was the only black person. However much compassion one had for the victim of a vicious crime who was struggling against the odds to seek justice, the truth was that Alice's eyewitness identification of Tony was just not reliable. She said from the witness stand that she could not have identified him as the man who raped me unless he was the man who raped me. It was textbook circular logic. She was not supported by one shred of evidence. In D. A. Fitzpatrick's case, she was arrested for Patrick's view, there wasn't enough there to even prosecute Tony, and there certainly wasn't enough for a conviction. In the years since Tony's trial, advances in using DNA had produced a body of scientific evidence demonstrating that eyewitness identification in criminal cases is actually highly fallible. Witnesses may feel certain in their memory, but DNA evidence has proven again and again that they are often wrong. They aren't lying, but are simply mistaken in what they remember. According to the Innocence Project, eyewitness testimony was a factor in 70% of convictions later overturned by advancements in DNA testing. This problem is even worse when a has to identify someone of a different race to them. According to one study, an analysis of the testimony of over 5,000 trial witnesses found that a person is 56% more likely to make a mistake when asked to identify someone of another race. In New York today, state law even requires an official caution be read to juries about the inherent unreliability of cross-racial eyewitness identification. Another important risk factor leading to eyewitness mistakes is the influence of other people after the fact, especially authority figures such as the police and prosecutors. In Tony Broadwater's case, Sergeant Lorenz and Prosecutor Ebelhair both told Alice she hadn't chosen the right man in the lineup and confirmed to her which position Tony had been in. By doing so, they were priming Alice to identify him in the future, not because she recognized him as her rapist, but because she recognized him from the lineup. Ebelhair had also fabricated a bizarre story after the lineup and before the grand jury hearing, telling Alice that Tony and the man Alice chose instead of him were known criminals and lookalikes who went to lineups together all the time just to confuse and manipulate their victims. He uses that friend, or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do, Ebelhair told Alice. His friend gives you a look that's scary, he psychs you out. Meanwhile, the suspect looks down like he doesn't even know where or why he's there, like he got lost on the way to the circus. To attorneys Melissa Swartz and Dave Hammond, this conversation was the most egregious example of misconduct. The current DA Fitzpatrick was also disturbed. Tony should have been released when Alice didn't recognize him. Instead, the prosecutor at the time had doubled down and even told Alice a lie. The resulting outcome was, in Fitzpatrick's words, professionally sickening. Apart from Alice's testimony, the only evidence presented by the prosecutor during Tony's trial was the microscopic hair analysis comparing his pubic hair sample to the single hair collected from the rape kit. Using a multi-point comparison of the two hairs, side by side, a forensic chemist from the police department testified that Tony's hair was consistent with the hair from the rapist. The practice of comparing hair characteristics microscopically was used in criminal investigations at the time, even though the limitations of the practice were well known. The judge in Tony's trial had even questioned the forensic chemist who testified about the hair comparison, clarifying that two hairs being consistent didn't prove they had come from the same person. It was impossible to tell for certain whether the judge had taken the hair comparison evidence into account when finding Tony guilty. The judge had since passed away, so couldn't be questioned about it. However, it was worth noting that in 2015, the FBI published a report specifically criticizing forensic scientists who used a language such as "consistent with" when testifying about hair comparisons. "Saying one hair sample is consistent with another is misleading because, as then-FBI director James Comey wrote in a letter to state governors, such statements go "beyond the limits of science in ways that put more weight on a hair comparison than scientifically appropriate. Hair is not like fingerprints. There aren't studies that show how many people have identical looking hair fibres." After the FBI report and Comey's letter, an effort to review convictions where hair comparison had been introduced as trial evidence was undertaken in jurisdictions across the US. In Syracuse, DA Fitzpatrick had overseen such a review. However, Tony's conviction had not come up during the review because hair comparison analysis wasn't mentioned by his attorneys in any of his appeals. If it had been, his case might well have come to Fitzpatrick's attention six years earlier. DA Fitzpatrick supported Swartz and Hammond's motion for a review of Tony Broadwater's conviction, which they hoped to overturn. Fitzpatrick also reached out to Alice Sebold. Although it had been 40 years since the trial, he wanted to make sure she wasn't blindsided by this new turn of events. He wrote to her via email that the man convicted of raping her was trying to have his conviction overturned and mentioned that the hair analysis presented at the trial was no longer accepted as reliable or accurate in criminal cases. Alice wrote back, thanking him for the update and adding: "It sounds like Broadwater's attorney is doing the right thing on his behalf." A review of Tony's case was assigned to a local judge. Like everyone involved in the case, except for Tony, the judge sourced a copy of Lucky and read it. He was troubled by the very same scene that had bothered every other attorney who read it. The judge wanted to know, had the assistant DA Gail Ebelhair really told Alice all those things after the line-up, that she'd picked the wrong man, that Tony was number one? A review of Tony's case was assigned to a local judge. Chris Harris. It's hard when you want to show your love but you're too afraid to hug your nieces or your aunties or your sisters-in-law. I don't have a lot of pictures of my family members with me in them. I guess they just didn't want to be seen with me. Tony and his wife had even put off having children because Tony wanted to clear his name before passing it on to the next generation. But it had taken so long to be exonerated that they were now in their 60s and it was too late for them to start a family. Timothy Mucciante's planned documentary about Tony never got off the ground. According to court filings, Timothy failed to pay the film company he had hired and they parted ways. He had also asked Tony to sign a contract when they first met, which Tony only later realised had given Timothy all legal rights. rights to Tony's name, likeness and life story. After some back and forth in the courts, Tony was eventually able to nullify the contract, regain legal control of his story and gain ownership of the footage that was filmed for Unlucky. In 2023, attorneys Melissa Swartz and Dave Hammond successfully sued the state of New York on Tony's behalf, winning a $5.5 million settlement for his wrongful arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, and forced registration as a sex offender. Tony and his wife hoped to buy some farmland and a house and use the money to live out their remaining years in peace, no longer having to collect scrap metal to get by. About a week after his conviction was overturned, Alice wrote a letter to Tony, which, with his permission, she also published online. It read, I want to say that I am truly sorry to Tony Broadwater and I deeply regret what you have been through. I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you and I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will. Of the many things I wish for you, I hope most of all that you and your family will be granted the time and privacy to heal. Forty years ago, as a traumatised, 18-year-old rape victim, I chose to put my faith in the American legal system. My goal in 1982 was justice, not to perpetuate injustice. And certainly not to forever and irreparably alter a young man's life by the very crime that had altered mine. I am grateful that Mr Broadwater has finally been vindicated, but the fact remains that 40 years ago, he became another black man brutalised by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him. Today, American society is starting to acknowledge and address the systemic issues in our judicial system that too often means that justice for some comes at the expense of others. Unfortunately, this was not a debate or a conversation or even a whisper when I reported my rape in 1981. It has taken me these past eight days to comprehend how this could have happened. I will continue to struggle with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail. I will also grapple with the fact that my rapist will, in all likelihood, never be known, may have gone on to rape other women, and certainly will never serve the time in prison that Mr Broadwater did. Throughout my life, I have always tried to act with integrity and to speak from a place of honesty. And so, I state here clearly that I will remain sorry for the rest of my life that while pursuing justice through the legal system, my own misfortune resulted in Mr Broadwater's unfair conviction, for which he has served not only 16 years behind bars, but in ways that further serve to wound and stigmatise nearly a full life sentence. Tony responded positively, to Alice's letter, telling the news outlet Syracuse.com, It comes sincerely from her heart. She knowingly admits what happened. I accept her apology. However, many in the general public were critical of Alice's apology, especially her assertion that the systemic issues in our judicial system were not a debate or a conversation or even a whisper at the time of her rape. Because Alice had written such an unsparing and candid memoir about the crime and the trial, she had already revealed incidents of explicit racism, such as when the police sergeant chased and presumably beat three black men in an alley while Alice waited in his patrol car. Lucky also described incidents of implicit racism, such as DA Gail Ebelhairs telling Alice that in a trial with a white victim and a black defendant, the superficial of race would be favourable to the victim. Syracuse University Law Professor Paula Johnson has summarised these same issues in a way that speaks directly to the concept of superficials as Alice understood them at the time of her trial. Whose life has value? Whose life does not have value? Who has credibility and who doesn't? Who is prone to criminality? Who is prone to victimisation? Some of Alice's readers wondered, whether they owed Tony an apology too. One woman who donated to an online fundraiser for Tony after his exoneration commented, I bought her books. I owe him. With Tony declared innocent, there was also the matter of the third person in the story, the still unidentified man who attacked Alice in 1981. According to Syracuse.com, in 1982, within weeks of Tony's death, Alice was found dead. Alice was found dead in a hospital in New York City. She was found dead in a hospital in New York City. She was found dead in a hospital Tony's conviction, another young woman was also raped in Thorndon Park. The 19-year-old was jogging in the park around 11pm when she was attacked by a young black man with short hair and a slim but muscular build. The police investigators had tracked down a suspect who reportedly admitted to several things that matched the details given by the victim. But for some reason, the man abruptly left the police station and was never arrested. At the hearing to vacate Tony's conviction, DA Fitzpatrick told the court that his staff had gone through records from 1980 through 1982 and found four rapes were reported in Thorndon Park during that time. None were solved. While the story told in Lucky portrays Alice Sebold as the victim and Tony Broadwater as the perpetrator, and the story told by the trial transcript seems to reverse their roles, how each of them ultimately feels about the roles they were asked to play and the choices they were faced with is a question they both still struggle to answer. The rapist came out of nowhere and shaped my entire life, Alice explained to journalist Rachel Aviv. My rape came out of nowhere and shaped Tony's entire life. Tony put it this way, we both went through the fire. You see movies about rape and the young lady is scrubbing herself in the shower over and over and I'm saying to myself, damn, I feel the same way. Will it ever be gone from my memory, my mind, my thoughts? No. And it's not going to be gone for her either. In her memoir, Alice directed powerful feelings of hatred toward Tony Broadwater, as the man she believed had raped her and made her think she was going to die. When she is asked about him now, she has only admiration for how he managed to survive under the weight of her mistake and all that was done to him because of it. Alice said to Rachel Aviv, what I thought was the truth and wrote about as the truth was not only never the truth, but the truth resided with Tony. He and his loved ones, have held a lonely vigil all along. When asked how he feels about Alice, Tony suggested they have so much in common that it would be impossible for them not to feel empathy for one another. I guess she's brave and weathering through the storm like I am, he said. She was a victim and I was a victim too. She went through an ordeal and I went through one too. But neither Tony nor Alice pretend that their story could be considered to have a happy ending. Alice confessed to Rachel Aviv, I still don't know where to go with this but to grief and to silence and to shame. Tony, speaking to the Washington Post, concluded, I'm going to be suffering and traumatized, just like her, for the rest of my life. Thanks for watching! I'll see you next time.