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DIANA MAZZELLA: Hi there, listeners. We've got an incredible episode of the Sparked podcast for you today but it's going to be a little different than our normal setup. We're going to turn this episode over to West Virginia University Magazine writer Jake Stump who covered this story for the print issue. We also want to let you know up front that this episode deals with some difficult subject matter, including sexual assault of a minor. So if you're listening with children, you might want to catch this one later.
Now for the story.
KATIE HAUGHT: He left me there in the grass and the snow. I ran back to my house fully naked. And then I went to the bathroom to try to clean myself up. A lot of kids don't know about any of that stuff yet. It's kind of just, yeah, I'm in pain but you don't know the significance of that. If a stranger comes and breaks your arm, it's different than when a stranger comes and sexually assaults you. It just is. And I don't think that awareness is there at that age. It's such a more invasive thing than just physical pain.
JAKE STUMP: Do you remember being 5 years old? When we think of our childhood memories, we think about digging up worms, trips with dad to the ice cream shop, or maybe it's the smell of grandma's house on Christmas Eve. As adults, we sometimes reflect on those memories, securely tucked away, for comfort and reassurance. But for Katie Haught, reflection is tougher. You just heard her describe the moments after she was raped and abandoned in a church parking lot. When she thinks back to being 5 years old, she doesn't think about what we think.
It was a cold February night in 1996. Katie's parents invited some friends over to their house in Hurricane, West Virginia to play the science fiction game "Cosmic Encounter." The parents were geeks before being a geek was cool. They were into "Dungeons and Dragons" and were active in the Society for Creative Anachronism. That's a group that does medieval reenactments. So, as the adults played board games, Katie and her 7-year-old brother watched TV in the rec room. Game night came to an end around midnight. All the guests left and mom and dad got ready for bed. Meanwhile Katie and her brother fell asleep in the rec room.
Sometime before the break of dawn, she woke up. That's when the real nightmare began. A man came in and snatched Katie from her slumber, carried her across the street to the church parking lot. That's where he savagely assaulted her. After the rape, the assailant took Katie's clothes and fled. The attack was so vicious, she had to undergo surgery to repair muscle and tissue and was hospitalized for two weeks. The precise details, such as what the man did to her and what he looked like, have escaped Katie's memory.
HAUGHT: I don’t remember much from that night. Um, I. There's always little things. Like the color of the sky that night. That's what, I guess I was being carried and I was looking up. That's what stuck in my head. I remember where it was. There was the church across the street. There was a line of pine trees and it was kinda around that behind them. But I don't remember much about the night very much. Um. I kind of very successfully repressed everything in the most unhealthy way as possible (laughs).
STUMP: Katie is now 26. As an adult, she laughs and jokes at herself for forgetting such a traumatic experience. She's an outgoing, unabashed redhead, bubbly at times. Definitely not standoffish. We met up in a quaint downtown diner called the Skiff in Ravenswood, West Virginia. It was one of those rainy summer nights when the silence is broken either by conversation or the sound of cars whizzing by on the wet pavement outside. Katie had just gotten off her shift at a Taco Bell. She also runs a photography business on the side. Being a working, single mom isn't the easiest gig in the world. You'd think she has too little time to dwell on the past. And she'd prefer it that way. But here we were, the only people in the diner, and she was affording me her time to discuss such a personal, horrific story. For more than 20 years, she's carried this albatross around her neck, and it continues to peck away at her very being. Who was the monster that did this to little, 5-year-old Katie?
HAUGHT: I remember I woke up, I saw the sky, I was really cold and I was like, 'Daddy what are we doing?' I didn't look at his face. I didn't even look at his face. I just assumed it was my father.
STUMP: Meet Joe Lavigne, Katie's father.
JOE LAVIGNE: I woke up and found Katie in the bathroom trying to clean herself off with cold water from the sink. And I asked her, 'You know, what happened?' She said she hurt herself pooping. That's what she told me. So I got Jamie up to come deal with her and I went to go clean up where she had been sleeping. And uh. Cross room to have washcloth and there's a little bit of debris on the floor where she was sleeping and I got that in the washcloth and tossed in the washroom. I turned around to come back and I noticed our front door was open in the living room. It's February. This is not normal. OK so I went back in where Jamie was just getting her into the bathtub and I asked her, 'The front door's open. What's going on?' She looked at me and she said, 'My daddy took me outside and hurt me.' And she told that to me without being in fear of me.
STUMP: Lavigne called 911 and told the dispatcher exactly what Katie said – that she told him that 'daddy' hurt her. And that may have sealed his fate right then and there. The question of who assaulted Katie wasn't really a question at all. From the beginning of the investigation, all eyes were set on one man and one man only. Daddy.
LAVIGNE: There's probably 15 different police officers from different organizations there all day long and all day long we're begging them to take fingerprints off the front door and they refused. They took me to the police station and they questioned me over and over and over again all day long. And it was from just after 7 a.m. in the morning til just before midnight that night before I finally said, 'Look. If you're not going to arrest me, I'm going to go home because you left me in a room here with this book that says what my rights are and says if you don't arrest me, I can go home.' So they pushed me back into the room and locked the door. So about midnight or so they actually arrested me and took me to jail.
STUMP: Katie's mother and Lavigne's wife, Jamie Loughner, has staunchly defended Lavigne from the get go. She said he'd been asleep next to her throughout the night. Still, Lavigne cooperated fully with the investigation. He gave police permission to search his home. He turned over his clothes. He gave blood samples. Hair samples. Investigators reported no scratches, bruises, blood or semen on Lavigne's body after examining him. They collected several items from the house, including five towels, four washcloths, and a pair of green pants. The court later discovered that the handling of that evidence was botched. Two of the towels and two of the washcloths were never seen again. The other two washcloths were not properly packaged for delivery; therefore, those could not be tested.
As for the green pants? Katie had described her assailant as wearing green jean pants. Police did recover a pair of green pants from Lavigne's home. But these were green, standard issue Army pants from when Lavigne served in the 82nd Airborne Division. They were size 34 and no longer fit Lavigne, who was a size 38. There was no DNA evidence on the pants, either, linking him to the rape. Then there was the crime scene itself. The church parking lot, where the assault occurred, was not cordoned off by police. A few short hours after the attack, worshippers convened, perhaps unaware of the crime, for weekly Sunday morning services. Any potential evidence could have easily been tainted or destroyed.
LAVIGNE: It was all about putting the blinders on. We're convicting this guy right here and we're going to do everything we can to keep that conviction. Because they don't need actual evidence to convict you anymore. They just need words.
STUMP: Words. Words branded Lavigne the monster. But even the words weren't entirely etched in stone. Katie did say, initially, that "daddy" took her outside and hurt her. But subsequent interviews paint a murkier picture. At times, Katie said that the assailant "looked like daddy." And when Katie sat down with a sketch artist to describe her attacker, she said he had longer black hair, "black peachy skin" and "black hair on his chin." That did not match Lavigne's appearance at the time. When asked in court to identify her attacker, Katie either remained silent or said she couldn't remember. She also said her father was inside the house when she returned home while her assailant ran in the opposite direction following the attack. The prosecution framed its closing argument on whether one believed or doubted Katie's original statement, and argued that the child was confused because she was influenced by others, particularly the mother, into changing her story. Much like the details of her assault, Katie cannot clearly remember what she said to investigators.
HAUGHT: If I did say that t was him I don't remember that. I believe as a logical person with cognitive thinking that I was in a traumatic state and I might have said something and also I was very young and when you're that young, you, you know, maybe all men are daddies and all women are mommies. That's kind of how that works. Most kids kind of think that way. That's what I always thought to myself. Maybe that's what I meant. I saw an account that I said 'a daddy' did it and not my daddy.
STUMP: In November 1996, Joe Lavigne was found guilty of first-degree sexual assault, child abuse resulting in serious injury and incest. He was sentenced to up to 60 years in prison.
LAVIGNE: My speech to the judge who sentenced me was, 'I'd rather spend the rest of my life in prison before I admit to a crime I didn't do.'
STUMP: A year later, the state took custody of Katie and her two brothers. Their mother left West Virginia and Lavigne's sister, Lori, stepped in to raise the children. Katie just wanted daddy to come home.
HAUGHT: I don't know if I ever believed it was my dad. I don't know if in that time afterwards, maybe I did. I know that I told him that. I know that some of the emergency workers said that I did. But I don't remember saying that. But that's just part of the traumatic experience that I've very successfully blocked out. The – I remember when we were living in Maryland with my mom months after – it wasn't very long at all – she didn't always live there with us. She'd come and visit. I would look out the window at night and do the 'wish on a star.' Star light star bright first star I see tonight. And I wished that my daddy would come back. I remember that. I don’t remember ever thinking it was him. I remember wishing he'd come back. It's hard to believe I ever thought it was him.
STUMP: Over the next 15 years, Katie continued to wonder, 'When was daddy coming home?' She got an answer in 2011. That's when Putnam County Circuit Judge O.C. "Hobby" Spaulding issued a 74-page ruling overturning Lavigne's conviction. Spaulding cited deficiencies in the police investigation, inconsistent hearsay statements and insufficient evidence. Lavigne was released on bond pending a new trial. He was a free man. Or so it seemed.
VALENA BEETY: I first learned about Joe’s case from his public defender Greg Ayers who was at the Kanawha County Public Defender's Office and Greg had represented Joe for years fighting for Joe to get his conviction reversed. And he had succeeded. And then, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals reinstated Joe's conviction. So Joe was going back to prison.
STUMP: That's Valena Beatty, law professor at WVU and director of the West Virginia Innocence Project. She took up Lavigne's case after the Supreme Court sent him back to prison. The West Virginia Innocence Project, housed within the Clinical Law Program at the WVU College of Law, is part of the wider, national Innocence Network. The original Innocence Project in New York was founded in 1992 with the goal of exonerating wrongly convicted inmates through DNA testing. Nationally, the Innocence Project has helped exonerate more than 350 people due to DNA evidence. Sounds like it could help Joe's case, considering, you know, he was convicted without any DNA evidence at all.
BEETY: Enough time had passed and the science had developed enough that there's so much physical evidence in Joe's case that we were like if we can get one more shot with the most advanced technology to look at this let's see if we can get something.
MAZZELLA: We'll be back after the break.
(BREAK)
STUMP: They got something, alright. In 2017 newly tested DNA samples from the rape kit identified a male profile - one that was not Lavigne. Lavigne was not the monster. But it’s not official, yet anyway. The Innocence Project is still building its case before these findings are presented in the legal arena. Additional testing is also ongoing. So, how did we even get here? How can this happen in the first place? Heading into this story, I kept an open mind to every possibility. I read the countless newspaper articles. I read the legal documents. The rabbit hole/cesspool that is the World Wide Web led me to old message boards and forums where people squabbled over the case. One person wrote, "The jury found this monster guilty beyond a reasonable doubt...not just one judge, not just one person, not uniformed people writing their opinions on TOPIX. 12 JURORS." Another, believing in Lavigne's innocence, sarcastically wrote, "Stratego master Joe had it all planned out like a real pro, eh?? Great deductive skills, whizbang!!" Beyond every opinion, the fact remains that Joe Lavigne was convicted of a crime of which zero physical or forensic evidence was ever presented in court.
BEETY: Sadly we know from both DNA exonerations and non-DNA exonerations that people are wrongfully convicted in America. There are multiple causes of wrongful conviction - a mistaken eyewitness identification where the eyewitness mistakenly says and identifies that the innocent person committed the crime when they didn't. Another is false confessions, coerced confessions. Another is, simply someone who takes a guilty plea to something they didn't do because they know they're facing a very long sentence and they see that as the only option. That's usually along with having a defense attorney who's not representing you well.
STUMP: In Lavigne's case, maybe it was because he didn't fit in with the status quo. Maybe he was an oddball. I mean, he was into Dungeons and Dragons, role playing games and renaissance reenactments. You can't trust a guy in a goofy helmet waving a pool noodle as a sword, can you?
BEETY: All of his character witnesses were like him, members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is like a Renaissance Fair group where people dress up like the Middle Ages and joust and act. And that was portrayed as a cult, as a violent cult.
That he was someone who not only he had this kind of behavior and tendency because he was part of this group but so did all of the people who got on the stand to vouch for him. You can't trust anything that they say because they're also part of this crazy cultish group the Society for Creative Anachronism.
STUMP: At least one day of testimony focused on Lavigne's interest in the Middle Ages and strategy games. The prosecution used it to show jurors that Joe knew how to plan. At one point in the trial, the prosecuting attorney asked if the Society of Creative Anachronism had "secret rules." The amount of attention given to Lavigne's hobbies was a bit far-reaching, Beety believes. She, herself, knows what it's like to be a prosecutor. She was one in Washington, D.C. before arriving at WVU. Making the right conviction is the goal. Not just making a conviction.
BEETY: Part of what our project does is it fights to free people who should never have been in prison in the first place, to allow them their lives back after being wrongfully convicted. But part of our work is also to prevent wrongful convictions in the first place, to fight for policy changes, to meet with public defenders and prosecutors and police, to do trainings for judges, to raise awareness of these causes of wrongful convictions so that we can decrease frontal convictions. We can prevent them. We can stop them from happening the best we can. So education is a big part of that. I think that's one reason WVU as part of their mission for the state. The education that the Innocence Project provides about how to make our system stronger and better and more reliable is really important and as part of our service to the state.
STUMP: Since 2012, a handful of rotating third-year law students have worked alongside Beety on Lavigne's case and other wrongful conviction cases throughout the state. The West Virginia Innocence Project, the first of its kind in the state, continues the work of the attorneys who've represented the six individuals who have, so far, been exonerated in West Virginia. Lavigne is closer to being added to that list. In the fall of 2017, he was granted parole – allowing him to leave prison for a second time. He jokes that leaving prison has turned into somewhat of a tradition. Here is what it sounded like outside Huttonsville Correctional Center on November 15, 2017, when a crowd of his supporters – his family and people who've worked on his case, from Valena to her students – greeted him upon his departure.
CROWD: Yay! (Applause)
Voice: Selfies!
LORI HAUGHT: You know we're huggers. We can hug.
LAVIGNE: I spent years going, 'Don't touch me.' But it's different.
STUMP: That was the week before Thanksgiving. The last time Lavigne had seen the outside of the prison was five years earlier, days after Thanksgiving. There was much to be thankful for. And food to be consumed.
LAVIGNE: I was up til like 2 o clock this morning thinking about food. (laughter) We have a slow cooker. Ok, I'll do this, I got big plans for slow cookers.
BEETY: Ok, Joe Lavigne, you have just left the prison! How are you feeling?
LAVIGNE: I am feeling fantastic. This is my picture from being in and it doesn't show me with a smile. You won't see hardly any pictures of me in the prison with a smile. Now I can't help but smile.
BEETY: We're so happy you're out. Thank you Joe.
STUMP: One person missing from Joe's welcoming committee that day was Katie. Though she came to Huttsonville two months earlier to deliver an impassioned speech to the parole board about her father. Here's a line from that speech: "An evil man took my innocence that morning and broke my body. But it was the justice system that failed us, that took my daddy and broke my heart."
She did have a brief phone conversation with her dad upon him leaving prison.
VOICE: Say hi to Katie.
LAVIGNE: Hi Katie! Hey I hope I'll be able to see you soon. OK. You'll probably meet us there because I have to stop at the parole office on the way. Good to go. Bye-bye.
STUMP: Daddy did not get to see his little girl. Here's Lavigne's sister, Lori, explaining why they haven't reunited.
LORI HAUGHT: The parole officer informed us very sternly no contact whatsoever with Katie, which was the first we had heard about this, so here we go another shock. So we had to contact her. And she was not happy. She hung up on us and didn't talk to us til Thanksgiving. She's victimized again you know but that was kind of a real kind of deflator just from point one.
STUMP: A standard condition of parole for sex offenders is that they cannot have contact with their victims, even if the victim consents. Beety and her students are hoping to lift that restriction for Lavigne.
BEETY: This conviction will follow him for the rest of his life even when he's released. He'll have to be on the sex offender registry that will limit where he can live, who he can interact with. Ostensibly he is not supposed to have any contact with the victim which is his daughter if he's on the sex offender registry. Even though she's repeatedly said it wasn't him. Doesn't matter. According to the sex offender registry and his parole requirements, he's going to have to not have contact with her so he could be in violation of parole and then sent right back in.
STUMP: As you heard Katie earlier, she feels betrayed by a system. Robbed of a father and a happy, healthy childhood. While Lavigne is no longer behind bars, Katie can't help but still feel imprisoned herself. Daddy's not really home yet. And even the new DNA evidence instills little hope in her.
KATIE HAUGHT: Logically, I think that no one can deny he's telling the truth now. But with the history that we have, and the incompetence, and probably more so, political things. After all that, it's very difficult after being crushed by the system so many times to actually be excited about it. The disappointment when it doesn't turn out – when you get excited about it and you really believe it's going to happen. The disappointment when it doesn't is way worse. The fact that they gave him back to us and they took him away again. It was way worse than the first time. Especially my brothers, probably more so. My older brother was older when it happened so he really clung to them and the idea of it and mom and dad and our family. My younger brother was so young he never met my dad, and when my dad got out and my younger brother got to meet his dad for the first time, and they took him away. That was just so much worse.
MAZZELLA: Beety and the Innocence Project continue to work on clearing Joe's name. They hope to soon introduce the new DNA findings and file a coram nobis, a legal order in which a court could correct its original judgement upon discovery of an error or new evidence. Thank you for listening to Sparked, a podcast of West Virginia University Magazine. This episode was recorded and produced by Jake Stump, Raymond Thompson Jr. and me, Diana Mazzella. Many thanks to Joe Lavigne, Katie Haught, Lori Haught, the West Virginia Division of Corrections, and Valena Beety at the West Virginia Innocence Project for their help in reporting this story. You can find out more about the project and how to support it at their website: go.wvu.edu/innocence.
Let us know what you thought of this episode and don't forget to subscribe to future episodes wherever you get your podcasts or at our website, wvumag.wvu.edu/sparked. Sparked is a production of West Virginia University, located in Morgantown, West Virginia.
