Missoula

Missoula by Jon Krakauer

Book: Missoula by Jon Krakauer Read Free Book Online
Authors: Jon Krakauer
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Kaitlynn Kelly noticed that her jeans and belt were missing. “I was really confused why he took my pants,” she said. “I can’t get over that.” She went for a drive with her roommate, Nancy Jones, * 4 to try to clear her head. “I didn’t understand what had been done to me,” Kelly reflected. “I kept asking Nancy, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘You were raped.’ ”
    Even after Nancy put it that plainly, Kelly said, “It took me a couple of days to comprehend it. On Monday, Nancy convinced me to go into Curry Health Center to get a rape kit done.” At Curry a physician documented severe vaginal and rectal pain, vaginal bleeding, and abrasions to her inner thighs and vaginal vault. But Kelly didn’t want to report the rape to the police.
    On Tuesday, Kaitlynn Kelly ran into Kerry Barrett and told her what had transpired. At that point, Barrett said, “Kaitlynn didn’t know who Calvin was, didn’t know his last name, didn’t know where he lived. And she was scared for her life, because it had happened in her room, and she didn’t know if he was going to come back.” Although Barrett urged Kelly to report the assault, Kelly resisted. “She worried she might get in trouble,” Barrett said, “because she’d been drinking and she was underage, only twenty at the time. And she didn’t think the cops would believe her story.”
    Kerry Barrett, concerned that the man who raped her friend would never be held accountable, decided to take matters into her own hands. There was a security camera trained on the door Kaitlynn Kelly and Calvin Smith had used to enter Turner Hall. “So I called up campus security and asked them how long they kept the tapes from their cameras,” Barrett said. “At which point they kind of roped me into telling them why I wanted to know.” When Barrett disclosed what had happened to Kelly, a campus safety officer drove over to Barrett’s apartment and brought her in to review the security footage.
    It didn’t take long for Barrett to identify Kelly on the video, entering Turner Hall with a large young man at 3:27 a.m. “We saw the guywho raped her enter the dorm with his arm around her,” Barrett said. “She looked very, very drunk. And then about half an hour later we saw the rapist go out the door with her pants in his hand.” Apparently, he took them as a trophy of his conquest.
    Barrett hadn’t told Kelly that she’d gone to the campus police. She made it clear to the safety officer who’d shown her the video that Kelly didn’t want to report the rape, and she begged him not to contact Kelly. He agreed, promising that he would save the footage so it would be available if Kelly changed her mind.
    A day later, Barrett confessed to Kelly what she’d done, explained that the video of the rapist was being preserved, and related that the campus police had assured her that Kelly wouldn’t get in trouble. After some deliberation, Kelly reconsidered and decided to report the assault to the campus police. Because the alleged crime was a felony, the UM police immediately turned the case over to the Missoula Police Department, which dispatched Officer Randy Krastel to Kelly’s dorm room to take a statement and collect whatever evidence still existed.
    By now, five days had passed since Kaitlynn Kelly had allegedly been raped. “I’d thrown away my blood-soaked sheets because I was disgusted and I didn’t know what to do,” she told me. “But I gave the cops my bloody shorts, my bloody underwear, my bloody T-shirt. They also took my two-inch-thick memory-foam mattress that was soaked all the way through with blood.” Officer Krastel interviewed Kelly, Kerry Barrett, and Kelly’s roommate and took photographs of the crime scene.
    The accused rapist, Calvin Smith, had graduated from a small-town high school the previous June, where he’d distinguished himself as an athlete. Individuals who knew Smith have described him as “kind,” “easygoing,” and

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