The caseworker and a local police detective met with Sandusky. Sandusky told them he had hugged the boy but that there “wasn’t anything sexual about it.” He admitted to showering with other boys in the past. He said, “Honest to God, nothing happened.” And remember, the boy himself also said nothing happened. So what do you do? You default to truth.
Aaron Fisher’s story was just as ambiguous.5 What Fisher remembered, during all those conversations with his therapist and sessions with the grand jury, kept changing. Once he said the oral sex stopped in November 2007; another time he said it started in the summer of 2007 and continued until September 2008; another time he said it started in 2008 and continued into 2009. He said that he had performed oral sex on Sandusky many times. A week later he said he had done it only once, and then five months later he denied ever having done it at all. Fisher testified about Sandusky before a grand jury twice in 2009, but it seems the grand jury didn’t find him credible. They declined to indict Sandusky.
The police began systematically interviewing other boys who had been in the Second Mile program, looking for victims. They came up empty. This went on for two years. The prosecutor leading the case was ready to throw in the towel. You have a grown man who likes to horse around with young boys. Some people had doubts about Sandusky. But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.
Then, out of the blue, in November 2010, the prosecutor’s office received an anonymous email: “I am contacting you regarding the Jerry Sandusky investigation,” the email read. “If you have not yet done so, you need to contact and interview Penn State football assistant coach Mike McQueary. He may have witnessed something involving Jerry Sandusky and a child.”
No more troubled teenagers with uncertain memories. With Michael McQueary, the prosecution finally had the means to make its case against Sandusky and the leadership of the university. A man sees a rape, tells his boss, and nothing happens—for eleven years. If you read about the Sandusky case at the time, that is the version you probably heard, stripped of all ambiguity and doubt.
“You know, there’s a saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely,” the prosecutor, Laura Ditka, said in her closing argument at Spanier’s trial. “And I would suggest to you that Graham Spanier was corrupted by his own power and blinded by his own media attention and reputation; and he’s a leader that failed to lead.” At Penn State, the final conclusion was that blame for Sandusky’s crimes went all the way to the top. Spanier made a choice, Ditka said: “We’ll just keep it a secret,” she imagined him saying to Curley and Schultz. “We won’t report it. We won’t tell any authorities.”
If only things were that simple.
3.
Michael McQueary is six foot five. When he started as quarterback for Penn State, his weight was listed as 225 pounds. At the time of the shower incident, he was twenty-seven years old, in the physical prime of his life. Sandusky was thirty years older, with a laundry list of medical ailments.
First question: If McQueary was absolutely sure he witnessed a rape, why didn’t he jump in and stop it?
In Part Three of Talking to Strangers, I’m going to tell the story of an infamous sexual-assault case at Stanford University. It was discovered when two graduate students were cycling at midnight through the campus and saw a young man and woman lying on the ground. The man was on top, making thrusting movements. The woman was still. The two students approached the couple. The man ran. The students gave chase. There were enough suspicious facts about that situation to trigger the grad students out of the default assumption that the encounter on the ground was innocent.
McQueary faced a situation that was—in theory, at least—a good deal more suspicious. It was not two adults. It was a man and a boy, both naked. But McQueary didn’t step in. He backed away, ran upstairs, and called his father. His father told him to come home. Then his father asked a family friend, a medical doctor by the name of Jonathan Dranov, to come over and hear Michael’s story.
This is Dranov, under oath, describing what McQueary told him:
He said that he heard sounds, sexual sounds. And I asked him what he meant. And he just said, “Well, you know, sounds, sexual sounds.” Well, I didn’t know exactly what he was talking [about]. He didn’t become any more graphic or detail[ed than] that, but as I pressed him, it was obvious that he didn’t have anything more he was going to say about it at the time. I asked him what he saw. He said he didn’t see anything, but again he was shaken and nervous.
Dranov is a physician. He has a duty to report any child abuse he becomes aware of. Second question: So why doesn’t Dranov go to the authorities when he hears McQueary’s story? He was asked about this during the trial.
Defense: Now, you specifically pressed him that night and you wanted to know what specifically he had seen, but my understanding is he did not tell you what he had seen. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
D: All right. He told—but you left that meeting with the impression that he heard sexual sounds. Correct?
Dranov: What he interpreted as sexual sounds.
What he interpreted as sexual sounds.
D: And your—your plan that you presented to him or proposed to him was that he should tell his boss, Joe Paterno. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
D: You did not tell him to report to Children and Youth Services. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
Q: You did not tell him that he should report to the police. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
D: You did not tell him that he should report to campus security. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct…
D: You did not think it was appropriate for you to report it based on hearsay. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
D: And indeed, the reason that you did not tell Mike McQueary to report to Children and Youth Services or the police is because you did not think that what Mike McQueary reported to you was inappropriate enough for that sort of report. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
Dranov listens to McQueary’s story, in person, on the night it happened, and he isn’t convinced.
Things get even more complicated. McQueary originally said he saw Sandusky in the showers on Friday, March 1, 2002. It was spring break. He remembered the campus being deserted, and said that he went to see Paterno the following day—Saturday, March 2. But when investigators went back through university emails, they discovered that McQueary was confused. The date of his meeting with Paterno was actually a year earlier—Saturday, February 10, 2001—which would suggest the shower incident happened the evening before: Friday, February 9.
But this doesn’t make sense. McQueary remembers the campus as being deserted the night he saw Sandusky in the showers. But on that Friday evening in February, the Penn State campus was anything but deserted. Penn State’s hockey team was playing West Virginia at the Greenberg Pavilion next door, in a game that started at 9:15 p.m. There would have been crowds of people on the sidewalk, filing into the arena. And a five-minute walk away, at the Bryce Jordan Center, the popular Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies was playing. On that particular evening, that corner of the Penn State campus was a madhouse.