Netflix’s Unbelievable tells the story of a horrifying crime and stunning miscarriage of justice. In 2008, 18-year-old Lynnwood, Washington woman Marie is attacked in her apartment by a man who ties her up and rapes her, taking photographs all the while. She reports the assault to police, who quickly abandon investigating her case and charge her with with making a false report to police. Two years later, in Colorado, detectives investigate a serial rapist with the exact same modus operandi—all without knowing that he may have struck before.

Related Stories

The case is true, and is based upon a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 joint investigation from ProPublica and the Marshall Project by reporters T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong. Their article, "An Unbelievable Story of Rape," tells the story of Marie (the middle name of the real victim) and Colorado detectives’ hunt for a serial predator. Despite the fact that trauma can sometimes cause victims to give differing accounts of their attacks, police honed in on inconsistencies in Marie’s story.

"When the police began doubting Marie, they turned on her,” Armstrong told National Public Radio last year. "The focus of the investigation became her credibility. And instead of interviewing Marie as a victim, they began interrogating her as a suspect."

The investigators confronted her, and under their pressure, Marie said that she made up her initial claim. Later, she was charged with making a false police report—a crime punishable by up to a year in jail. Marie accepted a plea deal that sentenced her to counseling, probation, and a $500 payment for court fees, but no jail time. Just weeks after she was charged, another Seattle woman reported being raped in her home by an assailant who tied her up and photographed her.

By 2011, Colorado Detectives Stacy Galbraith and Edna Hendershot, officers from separate departments in different towns, were working together to catch a serial rapist terrorizing women, completely unaware that Marie even existed.

And much like the detectives, who hunted the rapist separately before joining forces, Miller and Armstrong initially reported the story on their own before collaborating. Rather than write competing pieces, the two journalists teamed up.

"This is not the kind of story where you anticipate competition," Armstrong told Longform in 2016. "This was about a sexual assault that happened in 2008, and [Miller] and I are both working on this story seven years later. The odds of that happening are pretty long."

Beth Dubber/Netflix

Unbelievable stars Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever as Marie, alongside Toni Collette and Merritt Wever as detectives on the hunt for her rapist.

Armstrong and Miller reported the story in part by interviewing almost everyone involved—Marie, her one-time foster parents, the Colorado detectives who solved the case and one of the Washington cops who bungled it, and the rapist. In a follow-up article describing the process by which they reported the story, the journalists wrote that they filed records requests for thousands of pages of documents from police and prosecutors offices in Washington and Colorado:

The records obtained through these requests included investigative reports filed by detectives in Lynnwood and elsewhere; crime-scene photos and surveillance footage collected by the various law-enforcement agencies; the two case reviews of how the Lynnwood police handled the investigation of Marie’s rape report.

"Other reporting included pulling transcripts of television news coverage from when Marie was raped and later charged,” wrote Miller, "having court transcripts prepared from when O’Leary was sentenced in Colorado; reviewing grant documents for Project Ladder; and mining the criminal-justice literature for expert views on how rape investigations should be conducted.”

In a decision that was echoed in Netflix’s series, the reporters decided not to focus the story on the rapist, Marc O’Leary. "There’s a lot of detail about his background, his life and about what he did, and if you were writing a true-crime novel, you would put all that stuff in there," said Miller during the Longform interview. "But we jointly decided that this story wasn’t about [O’Leary], it was about the police and their investigation and Marie."

The reporters adapted the story for audio for an episode of This American Life and wrote a book about the case called, A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America. (A later edition has been retitled, Unbelievable: The Story of Two Detectives’ Relentless Search for the Truth.)

And the reporters who made her story national news are still in touch with Marie, who, in 2014, settled a lawsuit against the city of Lynnwood for $150,000.

"She didn't want to let this experience limit her in how she went about the rest of her life,” said Miller in his NPR interview. "These days she's a long haul truck driver. She drives an 18-wheeler across the country. She and I speak fairly often. And it seems like every time I talk to her she's in a different state. She is strong. And she is resilient."

"I don’t want to cower in the corner," Marie herself told ProPublica in early September. "I didn’t want it to ruin the rest of my life. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I wasn’t going to let him destroy me."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57xKernqqklravucSnq2ispmSuc4WPa21vbWFku6bAxaWgsWWlo6%2BmuMierZqanJp6rq3RopxmrKKqsm6%2F06ipsmc%3D