Case 350: Alice Sebold & Tony Broadwater

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
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Around 2 o'clock in the morning on Friday, May 8, 1981, a young woman emerged from the dark fields of Thorndon Park in Syracuse, New York and climbed a stone staircase to reach the sidewalk along Ostrom Avenue. The neighborhood was home to Syracuse University, where classes and final exams had wrapped up the day before. Even though it was late at night, people were still out celebrating the start of the summer holiday. As the woman made her way south along the street, everyone who saw her immediately noticed that something was wrong. She walked slowly, staring straight ahead, seemingly in a daze. Her cheek and lips were cut, her face swollen and her dark hair tangled and dirty. Her clothes were on inside out and appeared to be soaked with blood. When someone approached and asked if she was alright, she didn't respond. She just kept walking. Did you see her? Someone said. She's really fucked up.
The woman was clutching a purse and some books, and although she couldn't or wouldn't speak to anyone, she seemed to know where she needed to go. She crossed the street and turned west onto Waverly Avenue, then stopped in front of Marion Hall, a co-ed dormitory for freshmen on the university campus about three blocks from Thorndon Park. Two students sitting on the stoop got up quickly when they saw her and rushed to hold open the doors, helping her inside. In the lobby, she approached another student who was serving as an overnight security guard and finally broke her silence. I was raped in the park, she said. Will you call the police?
The young woman whose name was Alice Sebold was rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital. Her injuries were serious. She had been cut by broken glass, beaten, strangled and sexually assaulted with such violence that she'd suffered internal lacerations and required stitches to stop the bleeding. A rape kit was collected as evidence for police, which included semen and a single pubic hair left by the attacker. In 1981, DNA identification wasn't an option, but biological material was used as comparison evidence. Documented physical traces from a crime scene that could be compared against samples from a suspect to look for similarities. But without a suspect, there wasn't anything to compare this evidence to. Alice understood that it was up to her to help the police find the man responsible. From the hospital, she went directly to the police station. There, in spite of her exhaustion and the powerful injection of painkillers she'd been given by the doctor, she tried to help police create a composite sketch of the man who attacked her. It was a frustrating process, and ultimately she didn't think the picture looked like him at all. The police gave her an array of mug shots to look at too, but none looked like the man at the park.
It wasn't until after sunrise that Alice met the investigator who would be in charge of her case, Sergeant George Lorenz. She sat across from him in an interrogation room and recounted the events of the previous night, describing each harrowing moment in graphic detail. To Alice's surprise, it was much more than Lorenz wanted to know. Multiple times he cut her off, saying, That's inconsequential. Just the facts. Even without all the details, her story was horrific. She had been walking back to her dorm and took a shortcut through the park. A man grabbed her from behind and said he had a knife. She screamed and tried to fight him, but wasn't able to get away. He knocked her glasses off, shoved her to the ground and beat her head against the pavement. He threatened to kill her, ripped out fistfuls of hair and strangled her until she blacked out. Then he dragged her into a short tunnel beneath the park's historic amphitheatre, where he assaulted her viciously for over an hour, undisturbed by the people who passed by on the footpath from time to time. The assailant was a young black man who was short, slim and muscular. He was wearing dark clothes with his hair cut in a short afro.
During the attack, Alice pleaded with the man that she didn't understand some of the things he wanted her to do because she was a virgin. He hadn't believed her and her pain and confusion seemed to make him more angry. He was intensely violent and she thought she was going to die, but after raping her multiple times, he fell asleep instead. As soon as she tried to move away from him, he woke up. She was desperate to get out of the tunnel alive.