In Georgia, as in the majority of states, criminal cases did not allow for depositions except under extenuating circumstances. The first time that Leigh would speak to Tammy Karlsen would be during the victim’s cross-examination. At that moment, Tammy would represent the top piece of a very stable pyramid that Dante Carmichael would construct to support her testimony. The base would consist of a substantial cast of credible witnesses: police officers, medics, nurses, doctors, various experts, and the dog walker who had found Tammy handcuffed to the picnic table in the park. They would all give the jury a rock-solid reason to believe every word that came out of Tammy’s mouth.
Then Leigh would be expected to take a sledgehammer and knock the pyramid down.
BC&M spent a great deal of money finding out what motivated the average juror. They hired specialists and even brought in consultants on some of the higher-profile cases. Leigh had been privy to their work product. She knew that in rape trials, juror comments could run from insulting to demoralizing. If a victim was high or drunk at the time of the assault, then what did she think would happen? If she was angry or defiant on the stand, they didn’t like her attitude. If she cried too much or cried too little, they wondered if she was making it up. If the victim was overweight, then maybe she had been desperate and led the man on. If she was too beautiful, then maybe she was stuck-up and deserved what she had gotten.
Whether or not Tammy Karlsen would be able to thread the needle was unknowable. Everything Leigh knew about the victim had come from crime scene photos and statements. Tammy was thirty-one years old. She was a regional manager at a telecom company. She’d never been married, had no children, and lived in a condo she owned in Brookhaven, an area that abutted downtown Buckhead.
On February 2, 2020, she had been violently raped and left handcuffed to a picnic table inside an open pavilion located in a City of Atlanta public park.
Leigh stood up from her desk. She closed the blinds on the windows and door. She sat back down. She turned to a fresh page in her legal pad. She tapped open the recording from Tammy Karlsen’s official interview and pressed play.
The woman had been found nude so, in the video, she was wearing hospital scrubs. She sat in a police interview room that was clearly meant for children. The couches were low and colorful, with beanbag chairs and a play table filled with puzzles and toys. This was what passed for a non-threatening environment for a rape victim: stick her in a room for children to constantly remind her that not only had she been raped, she could also be pregnant.
Tammy was seated on a red couch with her hands clasped between her knees. Leigh knew from the notes that Tammy was still bleeding at the time of the interview. She had been given a pad at the hospital, but, eventually, a surgeon had been called in to repair the internal injuries from the Coke bottle.
The video captured the woman rocking back and forth, trying to soothe herself. A female police officer stood with her back to the wall on the opposite side of the room. Protocol required that the victim not be left alone. This wasn’t to make her feel safe. The officer was on suicide watch.
A few seconds passed before the door opened and a man walked in. He was tall and imposing, with gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard. Probably mid-fifties, with a Glock on the thick leather belt that reined in his big belly.
His appearance gave Leigh pause. Women tended to do these interviews because they made more empathetic witnesses on the stand. Leigh could still remember cross-examining a male detective who had confidently stated that he always knew a woman was lying about an assault if she didn’t want him in the room. He had never considered that a woman who had been raped by a man would not want to be alone with another man.
It was 2020. Why had they sent in this bear of a detective?
Leigh stopped the video. She clicked back through the incident reports to find the first detective on scene. Her memory was that the primary investigator was a woman. She checked the list, then the incident statements, to verify that Detective Barbara Klieg was the officer in charge. Leigh searched the other reports for a possible ID on the man in the video, then rolled her eyes because all she had to do was press play.
He said, “Ms. Karlsen, I’m Detective Sean Burke. I work with the Atlanta Police Department.”
Leigh wrote down the name and underlined it. The with made her think that he was a consultant, not an employee. She would need to know what cases Burke had worked on, how many successful prosecutions he’d been a part of, how many citations or warnings were in his file, how many lawsuits settled, how he behaved on the witness stand, what weak points had been opened up by other defense attorneys.