Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
Officers took Becky to Shands Hospital and she was examined by Dr. David Minton. A rape kit was administered to Becky by R.N. Sharon Coullis, which was then turned over to investigator Nick Vellis. Finally, rape victim advocate Loretta Golden met privately with Becky.
LaWanda Highsmith, a close friend of Becky’s, showed up at the emergency room and informed investigators that she was also acquainted with McCoy. In her statement to police, Highsmith said, “She was present on one occasion when Tony McCoy and his ex-wife were involved in a domestic dispute.” According to the police report, “During the dispute Ms. Highsmith observed McCoy hit [his ex-wife] twice, as hard as he could.” Highsmith claimed that since McCoy’s divorce from his wife, his violent outbursts had become progressively worse.
Following the long ordeal at the hospital, Becky was released into the care of Highsmith, who took her home. Back at McCoy’s apartment, campus police arrested McCoy and seized evidence from inside. They discovered a brown-handled steak knife matching the description given by Becky. It was lying in a pan of dirty dishwater. Officers also found a pillow on McCoy’s bed with slash marks on it. “It appeared to have fresh stab type cuts in it,” the report notes.
When asked by investigators how Becky sustained cuts on her chest, “McCoy said that as breakfast was cooking he and Becky played with knives pretending to slash and stab at each other. He said she may have been cut accidentally, but doesn’t remember her being wounded,” according to the report.
When asked how the slash marks ended up on the pillow found on his bed, “McCoy said it was an old pillow given to him by his mother. He said the ‘cuts’ were old tears,” according to the report.
When asked why Becky would run from the apartment nude in broad daylight, “He said he could not explain why she ran out.” According to the police report, “McCoy thought she might have become angry over her jealousy regarding another female he dated, whom he identified [as McCoy’s ex-wife].”
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cCoy was booked and jailed on November 21, 1989. As a result of the serious nature of the charges against him, McCoy was suspended from the football team and expelled from the university. However, on March 19, 1990, all the charges against McCoy were suddenly dropped. Becky, after some time had passed, decided to no longer cooperate with prosecutors. “It’s not uncommon for victims to not want to go forward in domestic cases,” said Officer Nick Vellis, who recovered the knife allegedly used by McCoy on Becky. “But in my career with the University of Florida Police Department, I’ve never seen another case where a knife was used.”
State Attorney John Carlin, since retired, was in charge of the McCoy prosecution and was particularly distraught over Becky’s decision. “We felt we had a very strong case against Mr. McCoy,” Carlin said in an interview for this book. “I was upset when the case was not able to go forward. At the time, I thought we had a strong case. But without the victim, there was no way to go forward.”
According to McCoy’s criminal lawyer, Huntley Johnson, he knew before the prosecutors found out that Becky wasn’t going to go forward. “I spoke to her in my office and she told me that she was going to recant,” Huntley said in an interview for this book. “I said, ‘Fine. Let’s set up a deposition.’”
When Johnson deposed her under oath, Carlin was present. By the end of the questioning, Johnson knew McCoy was in the clear. “She was going to make a terrible witness,” Johnson said candidly in an interview with the authors. “She went in the tank. She was not going to testify [at trial]. Without her, the case was mighty, mighty tough to prove.”
Yet there was circumstantial evidence. A police officer witnessed and documented knife wounds on Becky’s chest; a wooden-handled knife, matching the one described by Becky, was seized from McCoy’s apartment; a pillow with slash marks on it was recovered by police from McCoy’s bed; and Becky was seen by multiple witnesses running down the street naked in broad daylight. Carlin insisted, however, that without Becky’s willingness to testify against McCoy, the prospects of prevailing at trial were suspect at best. “By law, we could have subpoenaed the victim to appear,” Carlin explained. “But it is a very, very rare occasion when you subpoena a victim to testify when they are reluctant to do so. It is a hairy situation to call someone to the stand when you’re not sure what they’re going to say. They could blow the case right out of the water.”
Johnson, himself a former state prosecutor, agreed with Carlin’s decision to drop the case, offering the following personal experience as an illustration of why: “As a young prosecutor, I had a woman who had thirty scars on her back where this guy hit her thirty times with a coat hanger. She was a reluctant witness. I subpoenaed her and made her go to trial. She got on the stand, cried, and said it was an accident. The jury convicted the guy of the least charge they could and the judge gave him three months’ jail time. The point is that with a reluctant victim you don’t have a hell of a lot.”
Despite dropping the case against McCoy, did Carlin believe the allegations laid out in the graphic report? “As a prosecutor, anytime you have a case that you file charges on, you have got to file the charges in the belief that you have probable cause to believe the individual did the crime and that you can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,” Carlin said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t file those charges. This case was dropped not because of any new evidence. We dropped the case because the victim did not wish to testify. The allegations that were made were particularly brutal. Whatever happened that day, the woman was scared enough to run out of the apartment naked.”
And Johnson’s beliefs about the acts attributed to his client? “I remember the report as being brutal,” said Johnson, stating that he never had to answer the question as to whether the report was accurate because the trial never took place. “But I was coming from the other end of the spectrum, which was to represent Mr. McCoy’s interests the best I could. I didn’t question the state’s decision to drop the case. I just went on to the next case. I was just glad that one was over with. I wasn’t worried about why they did it. I hate to sound cold about it, but I’m there to defend Tony McCoy.”
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cCoy, now married and an ordained minister who preaches regularly in the Indianapolis area, was reinstated to the University of Florida following the state’s decision to drop the charges against him. After censuring him for committing “disorderly conduct” in connection with the incident, a school judicial panel accepted McCoy’s application for reinstatement. He played his senior season and went on to be drafted by Indianapolis, where he says he is actively involved in working with abused women. McCoy said that his We As One ministry in Indianapolis buys and refurbishes drug houses in the inner city and then uses them to provide housing to abused women.
“I have no regrets,” McCoy told the authors. “When you’re young, you make mistakes. You do stuff foolishly. You learn from it. And you go on. I feel like God has been blessing me ever since. That was a point in my life where, truthfully speaking, I thought that I was someone who deserved special things and special treatment. What kid doesn’t coming out of an enviroment like I did and into the college atmosphere and becoming an All-American? You begin to think that your odor doesn’t stink.
“That incident was a good wake-up for me. I never ever admitted to rape. And I never will admit to rape. I never admitted to any of those things that happened in that whole scenario of acts.
“A lot of kids don’t get a second chance,” McCoy mused. “I got a second chance. I’m thankful for it. I often look back and just thank God for where he brought me from.”
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ack in 1991 when Gretchen Daniels reported to police that she had been assaulted by McCoy and Mickell, she referred to McCoy’s alleged sexual assault on Becky in her decision not to press charges. Shortly after officers took Carmen Nichols’s 1995 telephoned-in report, they discovered that she too had filed a more timely complaint against McCoy and Mickell back in 1991. After going to the campus infirmary for medical treatment and reporting the matter to her residence hall advisor, Nichols filed a formal police complaint with campus police officer Angel Allen in the summer of 1991. But at that time, Nichols told Allen that she did not want to press charges. Investigator Allen complied with Nichols’s wishes, labeled her 1991 report “confidential,” and filed it away.
On December 21, 1995, two months after recontacting the Florida campus police and asking that charges be pressed, Nichols was notified that Assistant State Attorney Jeanne Singer would not be indicting McCoy, Mickell, and the others. It was not, however, because their cases weren’t worthy of prosecuting. The statute of limitations had expired, barring prosecutors from seeking an indictment. The final page of the lengthy case file on McCoy and Mickell reads, “This case is closed, no criminal charges will be filed.”
No one will ever know the truth.
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cCoy, years removed from his days at the University of Florida, is about to hang up the telephone at the conclusion of his long interview with the authors. Then he pauses. “Let me just share this,” he said pointedly. “That was a part of my life when I was a young man who was just not very mature at the time. This whole incident caused me a lot of pain. It’s a part of my life that’s over and I’m done with. I was exonerated of the whole thing. I feel I’ve forgiven myself and I’ve forgiven Becky. And I asked her to forgive me, not for the things I was accused of, but for the disorderly conduct—for not treating her as a woman should be treated. I’m over it. I know God has forgiven me and I’m moving on with my life.”
The Benefit of the Doubt
Even if Nichols and Daniels had decided to press charges back in 1991, they would have confronted this sobering reality: the players would have probably been acquitted, if charged at all. Unless the accuser has sustained serious physical injuries, juries usually give the benefit of the doubt to the athlete.
Take the case of Freddie Bradley, who was drafted by the San Diego Chargers in 1996.
Before the Chargers drafted Bradley out of California’s little-known Sonoma State College in 1996, he was a running back for the University of Arkansas. He ended up at Sonoma only after Arkansas stripped him of his football scholarship in 1992. Why would Arkansas get rid of a guy who had the goods to run in the NFL? Bradley was indicted for raping a thirteen-year-old girl in the student-athlete dorm on the Fayetteville campus.
On the morning of April 22, 1992, Bradley and teammate Derrick Martin picked up two girls, ages thirteen and fourteen, at the Woodland Junior High School and brought them back to their dormitory. The girls, who went willingly to the players’ room, later testified that Bradley and Martin put on condoms and had sexual intercourse with them. Under Arkansas’s statutory rape law, it is illegal to have sex with a child under the age of fourteen. Since the thirteen-year-old was by law too young to give consent, Bradley was, by definition, guilty of statutory rape if he merely had sex with the girl, consensual or otherwise.
The thirteen-year-old, who had turned fourteen by the time the trial took place, took the stand and testified that she did have sex with Bradley. Police recovered condoms from Bradley’s room. Yet, Bradley testified that he did not have sex with his accuser. On January 26, 1993, a Washington County jury acquitted both players.
University of Arkansas Chief of Police Larry Slamons, sensing from the start that this was going to be a high-profile case in the community, personally took charge of the investigation and concluded that sex definitely took place between Bradley and the child. “That didn’t make any difference to the jury, who said, ‘They’re doing it voluntarily,’” Chief Slamons said in an exclusive interview. “The jury ignored that particular part of the law.”
Assistant District Attorney Terry Jones, who prosecuted Bradley and Martin, explained why the jury let the players off. “Bradley and Martin were two very handsome, clean-cut, soft-spoken, nice kids except for what they were doing,” Jones explained. “There’s one theory about those kind of cases: that the women [on juries] tend to blame the victims a lot. The trouble is that these guys [athletes] are smarter than the average bear. They’re good-looking kids. They come to court and they’re cleaned up and they look good and make great defendants.
“It is very difficult when you have willing females, who go out of their way to make dates with or arrange liaisons with athletes to go up in their bedrooms, to not have the blame placed on the girls for a considerable amount of what happens to them. They’re not regarded as innocents anymore. And it’s very tough to convince a jury that they either were not victimizing the athletes or that they were not willing participants in the sexual activity that ensues.”
If thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds can be seen as more blameworthy than adult athletes in a statutory rape case, the odds of getting a jury to convict only get worse when the accuser is an adult. “My frustration with these cases is that I’d like to get a good one, one of these days,” mused Jones, who has prosecuted other University of Arkansas athletes for sex crimes. “I’d like to have one with substantial evidence and credible witnesses.”
After playing two seasons with the San Diego Chargers, Bradley was released by the team after a career-threatening knee injury. He underwent successful surgery and, according to his agent, Timothy Shanahan, Bradley was hoping to sign on with a team before the start of the 1998 season. Bradley declined to be interviewed for this book.
Rapists Never Retire
“I had a teammate whose motto was ‘If she ain’t freakin’, we ain’t speakin,’ which meant: I don’t even want to talk to you if you’re not talking about going back to the hotel,” former NFL quarterback Don McPherson said in an exclusive interview.
After quarterbacking for both the Philadelphia Eagles and the Houston Oilers in the late 1980s, McPherson was hired by the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston. There he directed Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), a program that uses male athletes to train college-and high-school-age young men in how to reduce abusive treatment of women.