Chapter 1 | The Case: Amid the rape kit backlog, a detective follows new DNA evidence

LANSING, MICHIGAN — As Emily Zaballos strode toward the witness stand, she looked the defendant in the eye.

As she answered the lawyers’ questions about being raped in her own home, she didn’t cry. She didn’t even blink.

No, she told the jury, there was no way this man – Marshawn Curtis – could have misunderstood. She told him she didn’t want to have sex with him. She said no.

“I just wanted him out, away, off. I didn’t want his presence,” she said from the mahogany-colored witness box. “I didn’t want him there, period, which I made very clear.”

But Curtis was there for one thing, she said, and he was going to do it. He was going to rape her.

At the prosecution table, Annie Harrison sat perfectly still.

An Ingham County sheriff’s detective, Harrison had worked sex crimes for 11 years. She knew victims were unpredictable. At a hearing a few years earlier, a case had fallen apart when a woman walked off the witness stand in the middle of testifying, never to return.

Zaballos had every reason not to show up for this trial: childcare, work, time. She lived nearly 800 miles away. Yet here she was, confident and strong, one of the most convincing witnesses Harrison had ever seen.

When the prosecutor asked Zaballos how she felt about it all, she shook her head. Her voice grew angrier.

“This all could have been avoided,” Zaballos said. “This didn’t have to happen again.”

The detective’s expression betrayed nothing, but Harrison felt the same.

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Harrison started her law enforcement career as a corrections officer at the Ingham County Jail, where she worked for three years before entering the police academy in 2004. She spent seven years patrolling suburban and rural areas before applying for a promotion to detective.

During the interview, one of the questions was: What’s the most important characteristic a detective can have?

Harrison’s answer was immediate: Curiosity.

Her parents split up when she was 5, but both of them had always encouraged her to ask questions. One of her favorite board games was Scruples, which challenges players with moral dilemmas.

You are waiting at a red light at 4 a.m. There isn’t a car in sight. Do you go through the red light?

You work at a bank. Another employee is blamed for your error involving thousands of dollars. You cannot be traced. Do you own up?

You’re not physically ill but, emotionally, you’re exhausted. Do you call in sick?

Asking questions helped Harrison solve her first sexual assault case, back when she was still on patrol. When she got to the station one fall evening, there was a message waiting. A woman wanted to talk to an officer about a suspicious vehicle.

Back in the spring, the woman said, she had hooked up a bike trailer, belted her two small children into it and gone for a ride down a country road. A man in a pickup truck followed them, then tried to flag her down. He gave the woman an uneasy feeling. She rode home and called the police with descriptions of the man and the truck. But because she gave them the wrong license plate number, the officer did little besides take a report.

A month later, the man in the truck drove past her again.

The third time she saw the truck, it was in a parking lot. This time, she got the correct license plate number.

The threat was over; months had passed. But Harrison checked the license plate. It came back to a registered sex offender who had raped a 15-year-old and been caught masturbating in a cemetery.

He had recently been arrested on a warrant for failing to alert authorities he’d moved so they could update it on the registry.

Harrison went to the jail to talk to him.

“You have things to teach me,” she told him.

Eventually, she gathered the courage to ask about the woman on the bicycle. A perfect poker face hid her shock as he confessed: If the young mother would have stopped instead of riding away, he would have raped her.

He had something else to tell Harrison, too. Decades earlier, he had gotten away with raping a woman in the woods.

The man was charged with aggravated stalking for following the woman on the bicycle. It ended up being the first time Harrison ever testified in a felony trial. The man was convicted and sent to prison.

Like others around the country, the detective bureau Harrison joined was overwhelmed with sexual assault cases. She quickly realized justice came down to the luck of the draw. Cases only got solved if a well-trained investigator worked hard and asked the right questions. Otherwise, they went nowhere. That meant a lot of sex offenders were going free. She made it her mission to stop as many as she could.

By then, one of the most important tools a sex-crimes investigator could use was the rape kit – a box of evidence collected during a medical exam that often contains DNA. But Harrison specialized in child sexual abuse. In those cases, DNA usually wasn’t a factor. It often took months or years for young victims to come forward, so it was too late for a rape kit.

Even when she caught the occasional case with an adult victim, DNA rarely came into play. Usually, the victim and suspect knew each other. Sometimes, the police didn’t even take a report. When they did, proving a crime often came down to a question of credibility – a “he said, she said” case. If the suspect could argue convincingly that the sex was consensual, he could avoid being charged. And if he didn’t get charged, the state crime lab wouldn’t test the kit.

If someone was raped by a stranger, DNA could be the key to solving the case. But if the cops thought the victim was uncooperative or lying, those kits weren’t tested, either.

Such beliefs were almost universal among the law enforcement back then. Case by case, the untested kits piled up in evidence rooms and storage sheds across the country. Almost nobody thought it was a problem – until an assistant prosecutor walked into a Detroit warehouse in 2009.

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Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who had been raped as a law student, was outraged by her assistant’s discovery: More than 11,000 untested rape kits, which had languished in that warehouse for years.

Fueled by Worthy’s efforts, awareness grew, and similar caches of old kits were discovered nationwide. In 2015, a federal program known as the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative awarded the first in a series of grants to help state and local agencies address the backlog.

The idea was to dig all the kits out of storage, test them and send the results to a national DNA database known as CODIS, which would help identify suspected rapists.

The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office received an early grant. The Michigan State Police received another one to cover the rest of the state. Mary DuFour Morrow served as director of the statewide project. In early 2016, she sent a letter to police and sheriff’s departments asking them to compile detailed lists of their untested kits.

Once the lists were complete, Morrow planned to personally visit each police station and sheriff’s office to help ship out the kits for testing. Every single one.

In Ingham County, two deputies from the evidence room printed out Morrow’s spreadsheet on a piece of poster-sized paper and started making notes in the margins. Overwhelmed, they showed up at Harrison’s cubicle again and again to ask about her cases.

What is happening here? she finally asked them. Do you need some help?

They shared Morrow’s letter.

It seemed to Harrison that her colleagues were making their task harder than it needed to be. They didn’t have to go through the records. They just had to look at the rape kit boxes, to see if they’d ever been opened for testing.

But she didn’t understand why. Why test everything? If a case had already been resolved, it wouldn’t help. In he said, she said cases, DNA couldn’t tell you whether or not the sex was consensual, so what was the point?

Harrison got Morrow on the phone.

Let me tell you about what happened in Detroit, Morrow said.

A woman was at a bar for a birthday party, and when she stepped outside to make a phone call, she saw her ex-partner. He asked her to get in the car to talk about their son, and she did.

He pulled into an alley, where he started saying some vulgar things. She knew it was going bad and tried to get out, but he put his arm across her neck, put the seat back and raped her.

Her kit wasn’t tested. No need, right? The identity of the perpetrator was known.

Morrow went on to describe another case:

A 15-year-old girl was walking to school when a guy pulled up and offered her a ride. She got in; he drove the wrong direction and parked. Then he started touching her and talking about having sex. She told him she wasn’t there for that. He smacked her in the face and raped her.

That one is a no-brainer, right? Of course you would test that kit.

And a third:

A young girl and one of her friends were headed to do some shopping. A man offered them a ride, but they said no. A little while later, one of the girls came out of the store alone. The guy was still there and asked her once more to get into his car. When she wouldn’t, he grabbed her, drove to a deserted area, and raped her.

Again, of course you would test.

And that’s what happened, Morrow explained. When they put the DNA profiles into the CODIS database, no names came up. No one knew who was responsible for the crimes. But years later, the authorities went back and tested every single kit in their backlog – including the case of the woman assaulted by her ex.

That’s when they realized: All three rapes were committed by the same man.

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Just over a year after that phone call, Ingham County started getting its own matches back from the federal database. Harrison was already swamped. She was working 50 cases, and new rape reports were coming in every day. There was no way she – or anyone – could get to the cold cases any time soon.

The Michigan State Police got another federal grant in 2018. Together with the state attorney general, the department funded a full-time team to work on Ingham County’s backlogged rape cases. It started out with one prosecutor, one victim advocate and one detective: Harrison.

She moved into a fourth-floor office adjoining the courthouse, with the prosecutors.

Then she started collecting the reports from the cold cases and building a spreadsheet.

The following year, the task force expanded to include neighboring Jackson County, and Detective Joseph Merritt came on board as Harrison’s partner. They intended to investigate every report eventually. But with 190 cases between them, they had to come up with a triage system.

Cases nearing the end of the statute of limitations came first.

Suspects who appeared to pose the greatest risk to the public came next. Did he use a weapon? Had he been convicted of other sexual assaults? Was the crime particularly violent?

If the DNA from the rape kit matched a suspect by name, or if the people involved were easy to find, those investigations also rose to the top of the list.

So many of the cases, Harrison found, had the classic problem: The victim and suspect knew each other. A domestic violence victim who said her ex forced himself on her; a young woman who got drunk at a party and said she was assaulted; a teenage girl who met a guy at the bus station, went to his house for his birthday, then accused him of rape.

He said, she said.

Most of those got shuffled to the end of the line. There was no way around it.

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By June 2021, the task force had yet to secure a single conviction.

Harrison was cleaning up her inbox when an email from the state crime lab caught her eye. Every time a sample from a case yielded a match in CODIS, the DNA database, the lab sent out a notification. But most of the time, Harrison learned about them from the local detective or the records division. This time, the lab had also emailed her directly.

Harrison pulled up her spreadsheet and found the case.

The victim was a 17-year-old girl who had identified her attacker. The man had claimed consent. He said, she said.

But now, that man’s DNA had been linked to a rape report from Georgia – eight years later and 800 miles away.

His name was Marshawn Curtis.

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Harrison pulled the original police report, which was dated March 26, 2012.

Joslyn Phillips had turned 17 two weeks before she filed the report. Life up to that point hadn’t been easy. Her parents split, and her mother had a drug problem. Phillips had moved in with her father in third grade. By the time she was a sophomore at Lansing Eastern High School, both her parents had moved out of state. She bounced from house to house, staying with her grandmothers, with a friend’s mom who had no electricity or running water, and at a group home. Finally, a friend’s dad agreed to serve as her legal guardian.

School was the only constant. Her grade point average was 4.25 – higher than the top of the 4.0 scale because she had done well in advanced-level courses. Her dream was to attend medical school and become a surgeon.

Phillips also loved art and often dyed her hair different colors. She didn’t have a car.

In January 2012, her guardian’s parole was revoked, and she needed yet another place to stay. A friend of her brother’s offered a room, but he lived across town – nowhere near the school bus route.

So every morning, Phillips grabbed her purple bookbag and hopped on the public bus. She had to change buses at the downtown hub. In the smoking area there, she met Marshawn Curtis.

He told her he liked her hair. After that, they would chat whenever they saw each other. Over time, she grew to consider him a friend.

Today’s my birthday, he told her on March 24, 2012. You should come to my party tonight.

He was turning 19.

Phillips told him she had some things to do, but when he texted her later with the address, her other plans had wrapped up. She got on the bus and headed for his house.

When she arrived, there was no party.

Curtis ushered her inside, where his brother and sister-in-law were smoking weed and drinking. She joined in, downing three or four shots of Crown Royal and taking a few tokes. Rap music blared.

Phillips lost track of time. She eventually realized she’d missed the last bus and had no way to get home. It was way too far to walk in the dark. The guy she was crashing with had to work in the morning. He’d be pissed if she woke him up to ask for a ride.

You could stay here, Curtis offered.

It seemed like her best option, so she grabbed her stuff and followed Curtis to his bedroom. There, they continued talking and listening to music.

He tried to kiss her, but she turned her head.

Then he put his hand on her breast. When she told him to stop, he grabbed at her crotch.

I don’t want to have sex with you, she said, pulling away. But we can still be friends.

He backed off, and for a second, she thought everything would be OK. Then she realized he was taking off his pants.

I knew when I seen you, your p---- was mine, he said as he held her down. I’m gonna get you pregnant so no other n----- can get you.

It felt as if he was on top of her forever. She tried to push him off, but it only seemed to make him more excited. Finally, he abruptly rolled off her, vomiting over the side of the bed. She grabbed her pants and shoved them into the purple bag, along with her jacket and shoes. Then she ran for the door. It had a lot of locks, and she had somehow forgotten how to open them. Before she could make it off the front porch, he caught her.

As Phillips fought to get away, Curtis clenched her arm with one hand, masturbating with the other. He wasn’t much bigger than she was, but his grip was iron. She eventually broke free and fell to the ground. Struggling to her feet, she ran, half naked, for blocks. She fled past a sea of houses, one after another, with no idea where she was or where she was trying to go. She stopped only when she ran out of breath.

She pulled on her pants and dug through her bag for her phone.

When her roommate answered, she asked if he would pick her up.

There is no reason for you to be out so late, he lectured when he got there. You need to stop making these irresponsible decisions.

She stared out the window, silent.

When they got home, Phillips tore off her clothes, took a scalding shower and lay freezing on the bedroom floor in front of a space heater. She stayed there, staring at its red power light, for more than a day, but couldn’t get warm.

When she finally willed herself to get up and go to school, she got as far as the bus station. Then she got a text from Curtis: “Why you actn like I did something oh so horrable to you? I mean was it really that deep.”

Phillips froze. She thought about calling the police, but worried that if she did, she would get in trouble for drinking and smoking pot. She couldn’t call her roommate again; he was already annoyed with her. She did know someone else with a car – a woman named Tiffany Horner. Phillips used to babysit Horner’s five kids and considered her more of a big sister than a friend.

Phillips stuttered through hysterical sobs to tell Horner she’d been raped.

I’m on my way, Horner replied.

Horner insisted on taking Phillips to the hospital for a rape kit exam. You won’t get in trouble, Horner assured her.

For close to three hours, she lay on an examination table as a nurse performed a pelvic exam, took photographs and collected evidence from her mouth, breasts, vagina, anus, skin, hair and fingernails.

When it was over, an officer asked Phillips if she wanted to press charges. She said yes.

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After the rape, Phillips’ mother came back to town for a while, then her guardian got out of jail and she moved back in with him. Even though the school bus stopped right around the corner from his house, she had a hard time getting out of bed to go to class.

After months without any updates from the police, she decided her rape kit must not contain any DNA and blamed herself for destroying it by taking a shower.

No one told her she was wrong.

The detective assigned to the case, Catherine Farrell, had written Curtis a letter asking him to meet with her. After he explained the whole thing – Phillips was making it up, the sex was consensual – Farrell swabbed his cheek for DNA. But she never sent it or the rape kit for testing. The prosecutor, in turn, wrote off the case as a he said, she said and decided not to charge him.

No one told Phillips that, either.

One afternoon, she tied a rope around the back porch railing and slipped her neck through.

Her guardian got there in time to save her, and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Over the next several years, she survived several more suicide attempts and started using heroin. She spent a Michigan winter living in a tent and scavenged for food in dumpsters. There were people in her life who would have helped, but she didn’t ask.

Three years after Phillips reported being raped, the Michigan State Police got its first federal grant to address the state’s backlog of untested rape kits. The program had lofty goals, starting with testing those old kits.

So the Lansing Police did. In 2016, they sent Phillips’ kit and the swab from Curtis’ cheek to the lab.

But testing the old kits wasn’t enough. The idea was to investigate the forgotten cases and bring victims justice.

In October 2016, the lab notified the state police of the match between the evidence in Phillips' kit and Curtis' DNA profile. More than a year later, a Lansing Police officer called Phillips about it and asked if she wanted to press charges.

Again, Phillips said yes.

The prosecutor wanted police to gather more evidence and bring her a stronger case. Again, no one told Phillips.

A year later, she tried to follow up again. A detective told her to call the prosecutor’s office. When she did, no one knew who she was or what she was talking about.

By then, Phillips was raising a daughter alone after her ex-boyfriend’s fatal overdose. So she did the only thing she could: Try to forget.

Everyone else seemed to forget, too. But Curtis’ DNA profile didn’t disappear. It sat in the federal database for years.

Then, a lab worker in Georgia entered a new DNA sample into the system. A computer algorithm tied them together. The cases were a match.

Soon, Detective Annie Harrison got an email, opened it up, and saw Marshawn Curtis’ name.

With that, Curtis no longer looked like just another “he” in the pile of he said, she said cases.

He looked like a sexual predator.

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UNTESTED, Chapter 1 | Next: Chapter 2, The Chase. | Chapter 3, The Trial. | About this story. | 8 lessons learned.

Gina Barton is an investigative reporter at USA TODAY. She can be reached at (262) 757-8640 or gbarton@gannett.com. Follow her on X @writerbarton.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Michigan cold case gets spark from DNA evidence hundreds of miles away