Looking around, she saw that she was standing in a dark hotel room. The clock on the nightstand said 4 a.m.
A man was sleeping on the other side of the bed.
Jake Gardiner. The only man in the world Amy hated. The only man she knew who hated her.
"Oh, my God," Shackelford thought. She dropped to her knees and began groping for her clothes: bra, panties, the new dress she'd worn to her friends' wedding.
As she struggled into her clothes, she made her way to the bathroom. Her throat was so dry she could barely breathe. Shackelford stuck her head under the faucet and gulped and gulped, unable to take in enough water to satisfy her thirst. Suddenly aware of her body, she realized she'd had sex that night.
"I can't believe it," she thought, crumpling to the floor. "I cheated on Cory."
She couldn't comprehend what had happened. At 23, a recent graduate of Texas Christian University, Amy's life followed certain principles, placing a high premium on chastity and fidelity. For 18 months, Shackelford had been dating Cory Curry, a senior at TCU, but they had agreed to wait until marriage for sex. She'd dated her previous boyfriend for two years without having sex. And friends knew all about Shackelford's soapbox issue: unfaithful lovers and spouses. She hated cheaters.
Shackelford returned to the bedroom crying and punched the sleeping Gardiner in the chest.
"What happened?" she demanded, holding onto the wall for support.
Gardiner sat up in bed. A fellow TCU grad living in San Diego and working for a medical devices firm, Jake Gardiner--which isn't his real name--had run into Shackelford at a fraternity brother's wedding reception the night before, on July 14, 2001.
"Do you want me to get up?" Gardiner said nonchalantly. "Hey, you told me you were single."
"I'm not single," Shackelford screamed, verging on hysteria. "I'm in love and I want to marry him. I don't know what I'm going to do."
She was furious when Gardiner chuckled and rolled his eyes.
Still crying, Shackelford grabbed her purse and headed for the door. "Why don't you give me a call when you know what you're going to tell Cory?" Gardiner said casually.
When Shackelford emerged from the elevator into the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel, a female employee, taking in the mascara running down her face, asked, "Are you all right? Can I help you?"
Shackelford asked her to call a cab, then changed her mind when she got her sister Sara on the phone. "Come pick me up at my building," she said, still sobbing. She left the hotel and began walking the four or five blocks to Renaissance Tower, where she worked in Blockbuster Video's advertising department.
Sara Shackelford, a freshman at SMU, had never heard her big sister sound so distraught. Amy was so relentlessly upbeat, so determined to see the good in everyone, that Sara called her "Pollyanna." Amy was cute with a capital C: black hair, blue eyes, dark fringe of eyelashes and perky attitude. In fact, at Plano Senior High, Amy had been the "Wildcat" school mascot. At TCU, she'd performed on the football field in a horned toad costume as "SuperFrog," the personification of school spirit.
Racing downtown, Sara called Amy back, begging her to go back to the hotel, to find some place safe.
"I don't care if I get hit by an 18-wheeler," Amy said. When Sara pulled up to her building, Amy jumped in the car and blurted out, "I cheated on Cory."
Knowing how much Amy hated infidelity, Sara couldn't believe what she was hearing. "What do you remember?" Sara asked.
"I don't remember anything," Amy said, still sobbing.
Sara assumed that Amy had had too much to drink and passed out, but her sister didn't seem to be drunk now--she wasn't slurring her words or stumbling. Amy didn't have a reputation as a heavy drinker anyway.
The sisters drove to Amy's apartment and tried to get some sleep, Amy rising occasionally to throw up. Later that morning, Sara pressed Amy: How much did she drink? Amy counted four drinks over two-and-a-half hours. She realized her last complete memory was Jake Gardiner knocking a drink from her hand at the wedding reception at the Adolphus, then insisting on bringing her another.
Five minutes later, they were on their way to Medical City Dallas Hospital, Sara on her phone to their mother. The sisters had already made some connections. "Mom, I don't want you to panic," Sara said, "but Amy's been drugged and raped."
In the weeks and months that followed, Amy Shackelford would discover evidence that she was the victim of a sexual assault involving GHB, or gamma hydroxybutyrate. Though Gardiner admitted to police and in an interview with the Dallas Observer that he had sex with Amy that night, he insists it was consensual and denies that he gave her GHB or any other drug. Instead, Gardiner claims Shackelford was the sexual aggressor that night and lied to police.
GHB--a club drug often known simply as "G"-- has far surpassed Rohypnol as the substance of choice in drug-rape cases. Dallas, in fact, is the national epicenter of GHB activity--according to a local narcotics officer--with the largest manufacturers and suppliers based in Dallas and Plano. "More is made here than anywhere else," he says. A cap of G--"enough to get you naked"--can be purchased illegally at clubs such as Area 51, the Shadow Lounge, Club 7, The Maze and Club Reservoir in far North Dallas. It's often given away by dealers hoping to encourage business. "These are the pretty people," the officer says. "These guys get around pretty girls or titty dancers, and they use it on them."
Dallas authorities, however, seem in the dark about the prevalence of GHB and its distinctive effects on drug-rape victims. Police treated Shackelford's report of sexual assault with indifference, then carelessness. The Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences didn't process the toxicological evidence from her rape kit for nearly six weeks and mistakenly reported there was no GHB in her urine. When an independent laboratory test, paid for by her parents, found higher than normal levels of GHB, SWIFS insisted on yet another test.
Finally, Dallas police detectives refused to forward her case to the district attorney's office. The sergeant in charge of the sexual assault squad, in fact, acknowledges that the Dallas Police Department has never forwarded a drug-rape case to the district attorney's office for prosecution. While police departments in some other major cities have changed their investigative tactics in response to increasing numbers of drug-rape reports, DPD appears to be well behind the curve. And SWIFS, the lab that processes toxicology tests from rape kits, is arguably using unrealistic and outdated scientific criteria for testing these samples.
To be sure, drug-rape cases are complicated affairs, with men and women typically offering wildly varying accounts of who was the aggressor, who consented to what and whether he or she was "into it" when the sex started. But Amy Shackelford's experience illustrates how police can torpedo a drug-rape case, making the victim feel violated again. "I would advise anybody to never report it," says Amy's mother, Linda Shackelford. "Amy's been victimized by [Gardiner], by some of her friends and by the Dallas Police Department."
At least 36 drugs, including Rohypnol and Ketamine, can be used to aid sexual assault. But several properties make GHB the perfect drug for a rapist, says Trinka Porrata, a retired Los Angeles narcotics cop. GHB is cheap, easy to obtain and nearly impossible to detect. It's also deadly.
"It's the most dangerous drug I saw in my years as a cop," Porrata says. "You can die so easily from a one-time single dose." From her tiny apartment in Pasadena, California, Porrata, 54, now runs Project GHB, a nonprofit foundation created after the deaths of several teen-agers from the drug. She's built the organization into a national clearinghouse for information on GHB and now teaches police officers, emergency room physicians and rape crisis teams around the country how to recognize the symptoms of GHB and other rape drugs. A major problem, Porrata says, is the lack of training among law enforcement officers on handling drug-aided sexual assault, from interviewing victims to collecting evidence.
GHB, once popular among body builders as a muscle-growth stimulant and sleep aid, hasn't been available over the counter since 1992, but in the early '90s, it emerged as a common club drug. In smaller doses, it produces feelings of euphoria. Today it can be purchased from foreign Web sites under the guise of anything from body-builders' weight belt cleaner to fingernail polish remover, with names like Blue Nitro, Revitalize Plus and Serenity. It's widely available in Dallas clubs and on college campuses.
Rohypnol and Ketamine are much harder to get: Rohypnol is no longer available legally in the United States, though it's often smuggled in from Mexico. Ketamine, an animal anesthetic, is sometimes stolen from veterinarians' offices.
GHB has several advantages over other date-rape drugs: For one, it's easy to disguise. Unlike Rohypnol pills, which leave a blue residue when dissolved, GHB is clear and odorless. Though it is sometimes salty, it can be easily mixed into an alcoholic drink, soda or water.
It's also easy to dose: A quick squirt of GHB into a margarita can knock out a 120-pound woman. And it's fast-acting: Symptoms of disorientation, confusion and extreme intoxication can appear within 15 minutes.
People under the influence of GHB often describe it as being in a "waking dream," with flashes of awareness of people and surroundings that Porrata calls "cameo appearances." Though often able to perceive people as shapes or hear them speak, drugging victims talk about being unable to form words, lift their limbs or think coherently, then...nothing.
Within four hours, the victim may abruptly wake up, with no memory of what has happened and an intense thirst. GHB is quickly absorbed, generally leaving the body within six to 12 hours after ingestion. Then it is undetectable in blood and urine above naturally occurring levels. "You have to have a urine specimen collected within 10 hours and blood within six hours to show GHB, or it will be gone from the system," says Dr. Gary Wimbish, head of Forensic Toxicology Consultants, based in Milford, Texas, south of Waxahachie. Rohypnol, by contrast, stays in blood and urine for up to three days. Even if a victim gets to a hospital and is tested for GHB, though, many crime labs aren't set up to test for it.
GHB has another lure: It is highly addictive, and unlike Ecstasy, which can cause "limp-noodle syndrome" in males, GHB is a sexual stimulant--which often provides the drug with its own alibi. A GHB victim may lose her inhibitions. To outsiders, she appears to be highly intoxicated, voluntarily drinking and interacting sexually with her rapist.
GHB's reputation as a club drug obscures the fact that it can be unpredictable and deadly. Nationwide, emergency room admissions from GHB nearly quadrupled from 1998 to 2000, and at least 235 people have died of GHB overdoses since 1995, with 11 in 2002. The problem was bad enough that Congress in 2000 passed the Hillory J. Pharias and Samantha Reid Date Rape Drug Prohibition Act, named for two teen-age girls who died after being drugged with GHB. It reclassified GHB as a drug having no medical use, making its possession a felony.
This year, the federal government stepped up its efforts to crack down on GHB suppliers. In September, the DEA arrested 115 people for Internet trafficking in GHB and its clones in 84 cities across the United States and Canada, seizing enough chemicals for 25 million doses. One month later, local police arrested 65 people in Dallas, The Colony, Rowlett, Addison, Plano and Richardson, breaking up a trafficking ring selling GHB, Ecstasy, steroids and cocaine. An officer involved in that bust says the dealers were distributing GHB and Ecstasy through local nightclubs.
Police agencies are well aware of the drug's use by sexual predators. Gail Abarbanel, director of the nationally recognized Rape Treatment Center in Santa Monica, estimates that 15 to 20 percent of all rapes are aided by drugs. While no state or federal agency tracks drug-facilitated sexual assaults, Wanda Davenport, senior staff counselor at the Parkland Rape Crisis Center, says that in the past three or four years she's seen a "significant" increase in the number of Dallas rape victims with symptoms of being drugged. Though she's never seen a case reported soon enough to obtain a positive urine test, the symptoms often match GHB.
"They are saying they've gone out with friends or with someone they've met, they remember taking a drink, then feeling a little nauseated, losing consciousness, waking up someplace and they don't know how they got there," Davenport says. "Most of the time, they feel confused. They have lapses in memory and the fear that goes along with that." Davenport believes that few women actually report the assaults.
Amy Shackelford, however, was determined to be different--to do the right thing and report the crime. She didn't know she'd have a hard time convincing Dallas police she'd been raped in the first place.
Amy Shackelford curls up on an overstuffed sofa in her apartment off Greenville Avenue. It's tasteful but spare, as befits a 25-year-old advertising coordinator just starting out. At several points in her story, her eyes fill with tears. But she believes that if Gardiner used GHB on her, he might use it on someone else. She wants her story to be told.
Before the night of the wedding, Amy says, she had the perfect life. "My worst fear was being called a bitch," Amy says. "I wanted to be everybody's favorite person."
That desire to please was one reason her relationship with Jake Gardiner troubled her so.
The day after the assault, the Shackelford sisters arrived at Medical City about 2 p.m., but a physician explained that the hospital wasn't equipped to do a forensic rape exam. He advised her to go to Parkland hospital, so the two girls jumped back in their cars and drove south. By the time they arrived, it was 3 p.m.--17 hours after her encounter with Gardiner began.
Amy remembers that the two DPD detectives who appeared at the Parkland Rape Crisis Center to talk to her seemed sympathetic. Amy recounted what she remembered of July 14. She'd gone to the 6 p.m. wedding with four friends from TCU; her boyfriend Curry had chosen not to attend, instead heading home to Austin for a family vacation. When they arrived at the reception about 7 p.m., Amy had a glass of wine and ate a few appetizers. About 45 minutes later, Amy got another drink, this time a gin-and-tonic.
About 8:30 p.m., everyone sat down for a big steak dinner, accompanied by two glasses of wine. An hour later, dinner was finished and everyone mingled, dancing, drinking and reminiscing. A friend brought Amy, by now pleasantly buzzed, another gin-and-tonic. She had taken only a few sips when someone bumped her arm, sending the drink flying.
She turned and saw the blue eyes, dark hair and round face of Jake Gardiner.
Their history made her uncomfortable. Amy remembered an incident that happened at the beginning of their freshman year at TCU. For his new friends' amusement, Gardiner played a tape of himself on a radio show in his hometown, calling up girls to ask them to homecoming and repeatedly being rejected.
"I remember not laughing," Amy says. "Why would he play that for us?"
A few years later, after she broke up with a longtime boyfriend, Amy flirted with Gardiner during the summer of 1998. They saw each other several times, but Amy was uncomfortable with his roaming hands. She told him she didn't want a physical relationship. Gardiner seemed to accept that, but a few nights later, they were watching a movie with a group at a friend's apartment when she fell asleep on the couch and woke up to find Gardiner's hand in her pants, fondling her. Furious, she told him off. "I was so mad and offended," Amy says.
After she rejected his romantic overtures, Amy says Gardiner held a grudge, at one point sending her a nasty three-page e-mail calling her manipulative. She showed the e-mail to her roommates and then deleted it. They graduated from TCU in May 2000 barely speaking to each other.
Then in March 2001, just before he moved to San Diego, Gardiner invited Amy to lunch to smooth things over. "I didn't want him to hate me, so I said OK," Amy says. She told a co-worker that she was meeting "a lunatic" for lunch. "If somebody gets shot at Chili's, you know I'm not coming back to work," Amy joked.
Lunch was indeed awkward. As they chatted, Gardiner suddenly brought up their encounter three years earlier, confessing that he hadn't dated anybody since Amy's rejection. "Why is he still thinking about this?" Amy asked herself. "There wasn't anything there. Move on." But out loud she said: "There was miscommunication. I didn't want to do the rebound thing."
The meal ended on a strange note. "I don't have anybody like you in my life that I don't speak to," Amy said, trying to be conciliatory. "Good for you," she says Gardiner told her. "But I do have people I don't talk to, that I hate, that I hold grudges against."
Since that meeting in March, Amy had not heard from Gardiner. But she wasn't surprised to see him at the wedding; the groom was Gardiner's fraternity brother. After Gardiner knocked the drink from her hand, Amy didn't really want another. But Gardiner was so insistent she finally gave in. When he returned, Amy noticed that her drink was fuller than the others she'd been given that night, and that it had no straw. As she started to drink, she remembers Gardiner watching her intently.
That was her last clear memory of the evening, Amy told the detectives. She went from buzzed to trashed in the space of 10 minutes.
From there, her memory faded sharply in and out. Gardiner asking her to dance. Dragging her onto the dance floor, holding her up, her legs like Jell-O. Fuzzy, indistinct people saying things she didn't understand. Sitting on Gardiner's lap on a couch in a hotel hallway, kissing him.
Then on a bed. Naked. Unable to move. Gardiner on top of her. Moving between her legs.
Then nothing until 4 a.m., when she snapped out of it.
Amy gave the detectives Gardiner's name. They filled out their report and left; the hospital nurse gave Amy some brochures about rape and advised her to come back for pregnancy and AIDS tests. Amy went home with her parents, took a bath and fell asleep. Her father took the opportunity to call Curry in Austin, and he rushed to Dallas, arriving at about 1 a.m.
Amy didn't want to see him. "I totally felt like it was my fault," she says. "I was embarrassed." Curry believed she'd been drug-raped, but as word spread the next day among their close-knit group of friends, the attitude from some was, "Are you sure you didn't accidentally do something you regret?" She was furious when she received a message from Gardiner on her cell phone: "Have you figured out what you're going to tell Cory yet?", the same thing he'd said to her in the hotel room. (He called her a week later and left another message. "Since I haven't heard from you, I'll call Cory myself." Amy felt he wanted to rub it in her face.)
The next day, she says, she got a call from Detective Colleen Shinn of Dallas police. "I have to call you within 72 hours," Shinn reportedly said. "Do you want to press charges?"
Amy thought that Shinn, unlike the detectives who met her at Parkland, seemed indifferent and cold, making the call only because it was required. Like many victims of sexual assault, Amy had misgivings about pressing charges. "I don't know," Amy said. "Do we have to wait for the results of the tests?"
"Yes, probably," Shinn told her.
"OK," Amy said.
After hearing about the detective's phone call, Amy's father started seeking information on drug rapes. Gary Shackelford, who is president of the Dallas division of Blair TV, a media sales firm, had sat on a Collin County grand jury and knew several prosecutors. A few days later, Amy and her parents met with Collin County prosecutor Doris Barry. As soon as Amy finished describing her symptoms, Barry told them: "It sounds like GHB."
Amy had never heard of GHB; the only rape drug she'd heard about was Rohypnol.
Barry assured them that police didn't need a positive toxicology test for GHB to prosecute the case. What mattered was that Amy had not been able to give her consent to sexual intercourse. If they didn't believe the Dallas police detective was aggressively pursuing the case, Barry said, they had the right to ask for another detective. She referred them to a lawyer to help them navigate the process, and the Shackelfords hired Barry Sorrels, a highly regarded criminal defense attorney. Urging them to let the police do their job, Sorrels would later bring in toxicologist Wimbish and investigator Eugene F. Gee Jr.
A week had passed and Shinn had not called back, so Amy called her. Still getting the feeling that the detective wasn't interested, Amy and her father talked to Sergeant Patrick Welch, supervisor of the sexual assault unit, on a conference call. Gary asked if they could get an investigator who was more sympathetic.
Welch declined to assign another detective. Gary asked if police could at least arrest Gardiner or search his apartment for evidence. Welch explained that wouldn't happen. "We're not going to go out and arrest an innocent man," Gary recalls Welch saying. Amy burst into tears.
Shinn called Amy the next day. "Do you want to press charges?"
"Yes," Amy insisted, setting up a meeting with Shinn.
On July 31, 2001, Amy and her parents went downtown to meet with Shinn, who told her parents to wait in the lobby. She accepted Amy's written statement and the names of various witnesses and said she would follow up, but the detective wasn't encouraging.
"She said they had never prosecuted a date rape or drug-facilitated rape case in Dallas, because the tests never came back positive," Amy says. Welch later confirmed that to the Observer. Shinn, aware that the Shackelfords had tried to remove her from the case, spoke briefly to Amy's parents. Getting the impression that Shinn perceived them as pushy parents and Amy as a spoiled little rich girl, the Shackelfords made an effort to be deferential and courteous.
"She never warmed up," Gary says, and the meeting lasted less than 20 minutes. It seemed everything was riding on the urine toxicology test due from the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences, or SWIFS, which processes the forensic evidence collected by the Parkland Rape Crisis Center.
For several weeks, Amy heard from friends the detective had called. "Shinn said I was tampering with witnesses, because I was in communication with these people," Amy says. "I told her I wasn't telling them what to say but just to let them know that she was going to call them."
Amy's accusation against Gardiner polarized her friends, which divided into two camps: those who believed her and those who didn't.
Curry and Amy's previous boyfriend told the detective--and later, Sorrels' investigator--that they had never had sex with Amy, that she was adamant about waiting for marriage. Her problems with Gardiner were well known to her former roommates at TCU; they backed up Amy's version of the nasty e-mail and strained relationship. Another close friend who didn't attend the reception said that if she had seen Amy and Gardiner together, she would have been "alarmed and would have thought something was really wrong."
One eyewitness told investigator Gee that he saw Gardiner "flailing about" and knocking the drink from Amy's hand. But other eyewitnesses saw nothing that struck them as amiss. They said Amy didn't appear drugged, just very drunk. Another said he saw the couple walking toward the hotel elevator about 1 a.m., with Amy walking unassisted. He thought little of it; he figured they'd "hooked up" for the night.
But as the party wore on, no one but Gardiner had significant interaction with Amy. As the reception ended and the remaining partiers crowded around a piano, one noticed Amy, Gardiner's arm around her, sitting apart from the group. Everyone who hadn't left was drinking heavily. How good was their judgment about Amy's condition?
Amy's reaction the next day also contributed to several friends' disbelief. Before she went to the hospital, a weepy Amy had told one woman that she'd "cheated" on Cory and didn't know how it happened. The bottom line for the disbelievers, however, was that they couldn't accept that a friend would drug and rape someone.
Instead of contacting a San Diego officer to search Gardiner's apartment or car for GHB, about a week after the assault, Detective Shinn apparently called Gardiner, who told her that they were both drunk and that the sexual encounter was "mutual." He insisted he'd put nothing in Amy's drink and said he was willing to take a lie detector test.
"I have no memory of anything," Amy later argued with Shinn. "How could it be mutual?"
The Observer spoke with Gardiner, who has now moved from San Diego to Fort Worth, and he repeated his offer to take a lie detector test.
"You're more than welcome to talk to me about it," Gardiner said. "They [the police] investigated it and found conclusive evidence there was nothing to pursue. They told me there would be no further investigation. They said there was significant conflicting evidence between what Amy told them and what witnesses told them."
Gardiner says he'd never heard of GHB until the police asked him about it, and that Amy lied to police by telling them they had no previous relationship. "That's completely false," Gardiner says. But Amy denies that she told police she and Gardiner had no prior relationship. In Amy's written statement, given to Shinn, she took three pages to explain her history with Gardiner.
The night of the wedding reception, Gardiner says, they both had too much to drink. Each of them, however, knew what they were doing, he says. "I was drunk, but not enough not to remember all the details of what happened between Amy and I," Gardiner says. "She had too much to drink, but she wasn't drunk enough not to make a choice.
"She asked me if I had a hotel room," he says. "She was with me at the front desk, where we both asked for a hotel room. Me, I'm not very smart, I paid for it."
He says that Amy's claim she was drugged is simply a way to avoid taking responsibility for her actions, because she feared losing her boyfriend. "From the beginning of everything, it was Amy being interested in me," Gardiner says. "She consensually at all times had chosen to be physical with me. We had had four or five physical encounters," he said. They did not involve intercourse.
Before cutting off the interview and threatening to sue the paper for libel, Gardiner encouraged the Observer to contact Lindsey Williams, who had "walked in" on him and Amy "being physical" one time at TCU. "I imagine Amy was in control of that physical encounter," Gardiner says.
The Observer interviewed Williams, who was Amy's roommate at TCU when she briefly dated Gardiner. Now living in Houston, Williams says she saw Amy and Gardiner kissing during the relationship, which lasted less than three weeks. At first, Williams says, Amy thought Gardiner was funny, smart and cute, but she ended it after discovering he was "pushy, demanding and couldn't take no for an answer. He couldn't keep his hands to himself. They never had a sexual relationship."
Williams also remembers reading the e-mail Gardiner sent. "It wasn't your average gripe-out e-mail," Williams says. "He was verbally attacking her."
Williams knew Amy's stance on sex before marriage. "Amy wouldn't cheat on someone she was in love with," Williams says. "But if she was going to cheat, it wouldn't be with [Gardiner]. She couldn't stand him."
About eight weeks after the incident, in early September, Amy got a call from Shinn. The lab results were in. "It showed you had gin-and-tonics," Shinn reportedly said, "but no drugs."
"It showed gin-and-tonics?" Amy asked.
Well, no, Shinn said, it showed that alcohol was present, but no drugs. When Amy asked how that affected the case, Shinn said she didn't know. A few weeks later, Shinn called her with the police department's decision: They would not be forwarding her case to the district attorney's office for prosecution. As far as police were concerned, the case was dead.
Wimbish, the toxicologist hired by Sorrels, would later point out to Shinn that the SWIFS report didn't determine that no GHB was present in Amy's urine. SWIFS uses a certain drug assay, or test, that reports GHB only if it measures more than 10 micrograms per milliliter of urine. Since GHB occurs naturally in the body in very minute amounts, 10 micrograms is considered by SWIFS to be the cut-off level for eliminating false positives.
After listening to Amy's symptoms, Wimbish called the case "textbook GHB." Unfortunately, that meant authorities would probably find nothing in her urine, since she didn't get to a hospital until midafternoon the next day. To make sure the results were correct, Wimbish recommended that Amy's urine sample be sent to another lab capable of testing for GHB at lower levels. Detective Shinn agreed to the proposal. Wimbish located a lab in Utah, and Amy's sample was shipped to them by SWIFS, careful to maintain the evidence chain of custody required for prosecution. Shackelford's parents ponied up $250 to have the test done.
At the same time, the swirl of doubt from friends and police sent Amy into a deep depression. Amy's sister and parents watched as she fell apart. For three months after the assault, she slept at her parents' home, often in her mother's bed. "She was so depressed, it was hard to be around her," says Sara, who began to wonder if her sister would ever recover. Weepy, haunted by suicidal thoughts, Amy started seeing a therapist.
In November, the Shackelfords received encouraging news from Sorrels and Wimbish. The Utah lab test was positive for GHB; its assay indicated the GHB in Amy's urine was at or above the 10-microgram level. Euphoric, she drove to Fort Worth to share the news with her boyfriend. "He grabbed and hugged me," Amy says. "We were so happy. We thought we had a slam-dunk case."
Not so fast. The Utah lab said the sample was too small to quantify the GHB level precisely and asked for a larger sample. "It hadn't crossed that barrier from scientific possibility into probability," Wimbish says. Dr. Elizabeth Todd, head of SWIFS' toxicology lab, balked at sending the remainder of the sample to Utah. If the defense wanted to do its own test, she pointed out, there wouldn't be enough left. Sorrels, however, told Todd that the defense wasn't entitled to do its own testing.
Then Todd raised the issue that the GHB detected by the Utah lab might have been caused by decomposition of the urine. When Wimbish argued that decomposition was only an issue in post-mortem blood samples, Todd agreed to send the rest of the sample to yet a third lab, National Medical Services, in Philadelphia.
More waiting.
At the end of January 2002, as the scientists argued about the validity of the positive test from Utah, Amy went to Parkland for her six-month follow-up and AIDS test. Two days later, using a special code, she called the hospital to get the results, which were negative. Amy mentioned GHB to the woman who answered the phone.
"Are you the girl I talked to the other day?" the woman asked.
"No, why?" Amy asked.
"I guess you girls are all over the place," the woman said. "I mean, this happens all the time. Seriously, we get dozens of girls in here every single weekend that report drug rape." After Amy explained that police didn't seem to care about her case, the woman asked if Parkland had done a rape kit, which collects any evidence that would help prosecute the case, including semen, urine and blood, among other things.
"Well, yeah, I had it on the day I came in," Amy said.
"No, I mean do you know if they processed it?" she said. "Apparently it costs so much money to process those things that they don't even send them through unless they have the guy in custody." (SWIFS says that it processes as much of the rape kit as Dallas police request.)
Amy hung up. She knew SWIFS had tested her urine, though a DNA test wasn't required since Gardiner hadn't denied they had sex. But she now had doubts: How had the forensic evidence been stored? Had there ever been a chance to establish the presence of GHB? It seemed she was caught in a Catch-22. The police wouldn't prosecute if there wasn't a positive test for GHB.
But a negative test at the 10-microgram level used by SWIFS didn't mean it wasn't there.
It's easy to imagine what happens when detectives get a report of drug rape, especially when the victim and alleged perpetrator know each other. They're often regarded as "he said, she said" cases, impossible to take before a jury and obtain a conviction.
Detective Colleen Shinn declined to comment for this story. Her supervisor, Sergeant Welch, also declined to comment on the Shackelford case but agreed to speak generally about GHB and sexual assault.
Welch points out that several years ago, urine samples weren't routinely gathered at Parkland's rape crisis center in sexual assault cases. The prevalence of rape drugs changed that. "We incorporated taking a mandatory urine sample from the victim at Parkland," Welch says. SWIFS now screens for common rape drugs as well as alcohol and narcotics.
But one national expert on GHB considers SWIFS' cut-off level far too high. "Any level that the lab could detect it at is important," says Dr. Ashraf Mozayani, head of the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office. She's co-author, with Marc A. LeBeau, chemistry unit chief of the FBI's laboratory and the agency's foremost expert on drug-facilitated sexual assault, of Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault: A Forensic Handbook. LeBeau has shown in a recent study that average levels of GHB in the human body are about 1 microgram per milliliter.
"When you are testing for drug-facilitated sexual assault, there shouldn't be a cut-off level," Mozayani says. "If we find it, it's most likely from ingestion. The natural levels of GHB in the body are so minute, they usually don't show up. So the presence of GHB in the test is important. If the symptoms are also there, you go and look at the suspect to see if he has access to the drug."
The prospect of getting a false positive for GHB because of decomposition is not an issue for urine samples, Mozayani says. "The GHB doesn't rise in the urine sample, only in post-mortem blood. As long as they put it in the refrigerator, that's fine. That's standard procedure."
Mozayani believes that a level of 10 is definitely high enough to take the case to the prosecutor and to court. "It doesn't matter if it's 10 or 9 or 7, it's there," Mozayani says. But she points out that the toxicology test is only one piece of the evidence. "You could go to court without having any positive test. You just have to educate the jury about the symptoms."
The DPD's Sergeant Welch does believe that drug-rape cases can be successfully prosecuted, particularly if police find other types of evidence such as internal injuries or witnesses who can testify to the victim's actions before and after. But in his five years as head of the sexual assault unit, he says, "We haven't had a single case that was confirmed of drug-facilitated sexual assault. None of the toxicology has shown that it was in their system. It's my belief that there have been some cases out there. But we haven't been able to prove that based on toxicology tests."
To date, the DPD has not referred any GHB sexual assault cases to the district attorney's office, Welch says.
Dr. Todd of SWIFS declined to discuss Shackelford's case. "We would not want to prejudice future legal or court issues that relate to work done at our laboratory," she says. "We are in the process of looking at a different method for our GHB assay, which will probably be looking at lower levels. We would like to move it to an assay that would be more efficient and possibly have a lower limit of detection."
While Dallas police appear to have little faith in solving drug-rape cases, one suburban neighbor has a recent conviction to its credit. In October, thanks in part to quick work by a Mesquite police detective, the Dallas County District Attorney's Office took a GHB rape case to trial even though it lacked a positive toxicology report.
In April 2000, David Wayne Casey Jr. of Mesquite was charged with aggravated sexual assault after he invited a 19-year-old waitress at a topless bar to his house in Mesquite to watch movies on TV. They were not strangers; Casey, who bought and sold cars, knew her and the woman's former boyfriend.
About 11 p.m., after she had consumed one-and-a-half Mike's Hard Lemonade drinks, Casey, 30, and several of his buddies encouraged the woman to drink a vodka shot. Within minutes, she later testified, her vision was blurred and she began passing in and out of consciousness. Over the next three to five hours, Casey sexually assaulted her while he or the other men took pictures.
At 5 a.m., she woke up naked, wrapped in a sheet on the floor. The young woman had urinated and defecated during the assault, so the men had washed her clothes. She dressed herself and left, driving a few miles to her former boyfriend's apartment. He took her to Mesquite Medical Center, which sent her to Parkland. An officer from the Mesquite Police Department met her there to take her report. Blood and urine samples were drawn about 10 a.m.
The next day, officer Shane Cannon interviewed her. Instead of waiting around for a toxicology report, Cannon quickly obtained a search warrant for Casey's apartment. In Casey's freezer, police found 64 grams of GHB in a Coke bottle. They also found Polaroid pictures of the victim naked. One showed vomit coming from her mouth; others were close-ups of her vagina. Cannon immediately arrested Casey. Lab tests would later show Casey's semen was present, but the test of the woman's urine came back negative for GHB.
Police discovered this wasn't the first time Casey tried this method of assault. During the search, police found photos of another unconscious woman being assaulted with an object thrust into her vagina.
Casey's defense: The sex was consensual, and the victim, who had since become a stripper, must have brought the GHB into the house and taken it herself. Convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to 20 years in prison, Casey has filed an appeal. (Casey's co-defendant was acquitted; his DNA was not found on the woman's body.)
"It was the perfect crime," says Dallas Assistant District Attorney Charissa Sloan, who prosecuted the case. "If the GHB hadn't been in his freezer, it would have been a stripper accusing a guy, with relatively no record, of rape." And if police had waited six weeks for a SWIFS toxicology report--and in the meantime called the suspect to advise him of the victim's allegations--the GHB would have been down the drain.
One jurisdiction that has had success in prosecuting GHB rape cases is San Diego, one of the cities targeted by the DEA.
San Diego Deputy District Attorney Timothy Walsh is one of the most knowledgeable prosecutors in the country about GHB-aided sexual assaults. Two years ago, he convicted a serial GHB rapist named Angelo Sherman. Seven women, including one assaulted in 1995, testified against Sherman.
Though Walsh had strong circumstantial evidence--the GHB symptoms, the amnesia, the after-effects--and the testimony of the victims, he had no positive toxicology results from any of them. He filed the case against Sherman anyway, bringing in LeBeau, the FBI's expert on GHB, who testified that the women's symptoms were not consistent with alcohol alone. Sherman, 34, was sentenced to 125 years in prison.
"I don't think we should get hung up on toxicology," Walsh says. "We were never able to find out what drug he used."
Walsh now teaches prosecutors, police and sexual assault nurses about GHB and its symptoms. "This is happening at enormously high levels across the country," he says. "It's only education and success of trials like Sherman's that will encourage prosecutors to pursue these cases."
Porrata of Project GHB says the bottom line is not which drug but did the victim give consent for sexual intercourse. "What I teach high school groups is this," Porrata says. "If I go out and get rip-roaring drunk and pull off all my clothes and pass out in the middle of the street, that is not consent to have sex with me."In February, Amy Shackelford learned that the Pennsylvania lab test was positive for GHB, but the test showed only that the level was between 2 and 10 micrograms per milliliter. Detective Shinn was polite but firm. They would not be filing charges against Jake Gardiner.
"I thought the police's job was to gather the information," Amy says, "not be judge, jury and executioner."
The news was a bitter blow, but the finality helped Amy pull her life back together. "Some of my friends as well as some of [Gardiner's] frat brothers felt that I was drunk and made it up because I felt guilty," Amy says. "It became so important to me to prove it. But it was a relief. I could let go, working on healing, on getting better."
Gary and Linda Shackelford spent about $10,000 for attorneys, experts and therapy for Amy. Linda believes her daughter would have been better off if she never reported what happened. "One of the sharpest memories I have is of SWIFS' defensiveness," Linda says. "Dr. Todd's attitude was the lab is perfect, I'm perfect, don't question me."
Amy and her family considered filing a civil lawsuit against Gardiner but rejected the idea after some research. A suit would have cost between $50,000 and $100,000 in expenses, and Amy didn't want money, she wanted Gardiner "behind bars." Finally, after a family discussion, the Shackelfords agreed to go public with Amy's story.
"I feel like he knew exactly what he was doing," Amy says, "how much to give me, when to grab me. I just want to do everything in my power so the next woman won't look at me and say, 'Why didn't you tell somebody?'"
Glenna Whitley is an award-winning Dallas-based investigative reporter and author of Stolen Valor, a book about some of the phonies who claim to be Vietnam War heroes. She lives in Dallas with her husband and two sons.
Next week in the Dallas Observer: Douglas Cade Havard, a 20-year-old SMU freshman, was arrested in his dorm room earlier this year for allegedly selling 10 gallons of GHB to an undercover cop and engaging in organized crime, among other charges. Havard, now a fugitive, didn't seem the type: high school salutatorian, class president, captain of the Winston School football team. But police claim that Havard was, in fact, an extraordinary street entrepreneur who delivered exactly what his young customers wanted most.