On A Crusade -- Whether You Call It A Mission Or A Grudge, This Prosecutor's Sex-Crime Unit Breaks New Ground

Rebecca Roe is seated in a King County courtroom, ignoring the man sitting close enough to touch her with his tattooed arm. She's never met him and doesn't want to. He is accused of being a child rapist.

She gets up and brushes past him, her linen suit crisp with purpose. She is a King County prosecutor and famous for her toughness, both in court and in the office where she heads a special unit that prosecutes only cases of abuse against women and children. In this trial, like so many others, Roe will show no mercy. She has charged this slumping, thin-haired man with 20 counts of child sexual assault. Twenty counts. In Roe's mind, these are 20 acts of evil punishable by as much fury as she can muster from the jurors seated before her.

The trial will be long and disgusting, but one thing is already certain: The lives of everyone in this case are permanently changed. Child abuse is the most crushing crime in the justice system today, and for that reason, it is also the most controversial. Roe knows that better than most.

As head of the Special Assault Unit (SAU) in the prosecutor's office, she must contend not only with the horrifying details of abuse cases, but with critics who say she has perpetrated a few horrors of her own. They claim that after 15 years on the job, she has become too zealous and aggressive, leading a "brigade" against innocent men whom she has railroaded into prison.

"I think she's the most powerful prosecutor in King County because she has her little fiefdom there, the SAU unit," says David Allen, a veteran criminal defense attorney. "The power they wield is incredible. Just by filing a charge she can get a conviction in a lot of cases because there's such a presumption of guilt when someone is alleged to have molested somebody. It's like McCarthyism. Being `soft' on child molesters is enough to ruin somebody."

That criticism has rumbled through the courthouse for years, but it got a powerful boost in March when the CBS show "60 Minutes" suggested Roe had wrongly put a Kirkland couple in prison for allegedly molesting their 3-year-old daughter.

"The unit, because of the aggressive nature of Ms. Roe, has come to be known as `The Women's Vengeance Brigade,' " Morley Safer reported. "Under Ms. Roes's leadership, the number of cases of abuse against women and children filed in the county has nearly doubled."

At that moment, before 32 million viewers nationwide, Roe became something more than a tough prosecutor in a controversial case. She became a zealous man-hating avenger of abused woman and children. She was even shown in court wearing a dark suit and man's tie.

But to interpret her aggressiveness as a "Women's Vengeance Brigade" was beyond the bounds of fair play or truthfulness, say Roe supporters and the outspoken prosecutor herself. "If you're a male prosecutor and you're strong and assertive, you're seeking justice," she says. "If you're a woman, and you're strong and assertive, you're seeking vengeance. There's a big difference there."

So big, it has engulfed her office on the fifth floor of the courthouse in downtown Seattle. For 15 years, this is where Roe has been on the cutting edge of criminal law. More than just about any other prosecutor in the United States, she has pushed prosecuting to its deepest boundaries in the darkest cases - date rape, domestic violence, child abuse, incest. Before 1979, such crimes rarely appeared in court. Today, they dominate headlines. To her admirers, Roe is a heroine whose work has transformed and made just the very society we live in. To her detractors, she is a villain with a powerful ax to grind.

ROE IS EATING pizza on the deck of her Seattle house, overlooking a park-like back yard and a cottage garden. It is a pastoral setting where the leader of the "Women's Vengeance Brigade" lives with two males: her husband, Tim Greenleaf, and their 8-year-old son, Brian. She does not, she laughs, prefer the intimate company of women to men - as her critics have long suggested.

It is a warm evening, and Roe is wearing a red T-shirt, jeans and moccasins. She is a short, athletic woman who once held Seattle's swim record in the 100-yard freestyle for girls 14 and under. Now, she is 40 and walks with a limp. She had knee surgery after a long career on the ski slopes and softball field, and impromptu scrimmages under the basketball hoop on her office door.

Her younger brother, Mark Roe, sits next to her. At 33, he is lean and muscular. He is also very funny. Together, he and Rebecca laugh almost as much as they talk, and it's probably a good thing. What they have to talk about is not so funny. Like his older sister, Mark is an attorney who prosecutes sex crimes, in the offices of the Snohomish County prosecutor. Whereas most families on a beautiful evening would discuss lawn care or politics, the Roes talk about perverts and pretrial motions.

The conversation turns to the continued controversy over DNA testing to help identify suspects and solve complicated crimes. "We have a case now with a 76-year-old Alzheimer's patient who was raped," says Rebecca, noting the woman's unreliable memory. "If we didn't have DNA, we'd be cooked."

"Yeah?" says Mark. "We've got the case with the mom and the son who forcibly raped her - the 911 tape was pretty explicit. But now she won't cooperate. DNA is important in that one."

The discussion volleys between gruesome details as another well-known family member looks on. It's Ellen Roe, their mother and the opinionated president of the Seattle School Board. For 17 years, Ellen Roe has generated her own share of headlines. She was the only member in 1977 to vote against the district's mandatory busing plan and, last December, was again alone in opposing the distribution of condoms in city high schools.

Rebecca and Mark don't generally share their mother's conservative viewpoints, but shrug, as if to say, "That's Mom." Bluntness runs in the family like a stubborn strain of freckles.

"This past Christmas was kind of amusing because we had all spent a lot of time in the press, and who had stuck their foot farther down their throat was a topic of conversation," Mark says. "I may have won, but it was just beginner's luck."

Mark has been prosecuting abuse crimes for two years. He didn't plan it that way. Although he became a prosecutor because his sister's war stories intrigued him, "I fought kicking and screaming not to do the sexual-assault stuff. I'd seen so many people come to the unit and burn out, hate it, change their outlook - happy people turned into crushed people. I didn't want that to happen to me."

Now, two years later, he won't leave the unit. He has maintained his perspective and gallows humor, although he is vulnerable to the strains. Last month, he and his wife, Jill Barringer, had their first child. On a list outside his office door, Mark had solicited names for the baby, but rejected the most popular choices - Heather, Brittany and Crystal. "We have a lot of victims with those names," he says. "It would be tough to name her after them." Instead, he settled on Margaret Frances, a name from another era.

THE ROES WERE raised in the white-picket era, a nice Catholic family with six kids who rarely got into trouble. Ozzie and Harriet couldn't have been prouder. Rebecca was the most rebellious, but her most irreverent act was getting smashed on sloe gin, only to encounter her parents at a dance at Nathan Hale High School. They were the chaperones.

She was grounded, limiting her activities to swimming. Through high school and again in college at the University of Washington, the pool would be her second home. When she wasn't swimming, she was coaching or instructing, involving herself in the lives of young people. That, as much as anything else, would shape her career after she graduated from law school at the University of Puget Sound.

She joined the prosecutor's office in 1977 and was drawn to cases with children. She worked first in juvenile court and then moved downtown, where Norm Maleng was the newly elected prosecutor who shared her concern for kids. Within a year, he had created the Special Assault Unit - a division solely for prosecuting crimes against children.

"There was a dark side of society that for a long time we kept hidden from view," recalls Maleng, who is still prosecutor and a candidate for state attorney general. "We decided to bring it out in the open."

"It" was a sleeping giant. Until that time, child abuse was rarely acknowledged. There were no actresses, such as Roseanne Arnold, exposing it on national talk shows; no made-for-TV movies with incest driving the plot. Child abuse was a taboo subject. Sex crimes against women were, too. In Yakima County, for example, rape victims were even required to take polygraph tests before their complaints would be seriously pursued.

Into that climate stepped the SAU. Maleng knew it was a sensitive social experiment, but he also believed there was a pressing need. He selected three people for the job, including Roe. She was immediately thrown into the fire. One of her first cases involved the youngest victim the office had ever dealt with - a 3-year-old girl who was barely able to hold up that many fingers when asked her age. But the girl was able to identify the 16-year-old baby-sitter who had raped her. Roe sent him before a jury and won a conviction.

The case shattered old barriers. At that time, the law in Washington presumed that children under 10 years of age were not competent to testify in court. But Roe convinced the judge that the girl was aware and able to determine between proper, improper and brutal contact with adults. It was an early glimpse of a courtroom style that would make her one of the most respected and feared prosecutors in King County.

"I don't think any prosecutor, male or female, is better at summation than Becky Roe," says criminal defense attorney Michael Frost. "Nobody can sum up a case more logically, concisely and persuasively than she can. She's my least favorite prosecutor to have to face, and that is intended as a back-handed compliment."

And then, when it's over, it's over.

"She's got a good sense of humor," adds Frost. "I have had it out with her on occasions, but she doesn't hold a grudge. She is not passive aggressive at all."

That straight-up style, coupled with humor, served Roe beyond the courtroom. As her success grew, so did her reputation. Other prosecutors from around the nation and state started calling her for advice. One of them was Jeffrey Sullivan, the longtime prosecutor in Yakima County. He found her both helpful and persuasive. Finally, he stopped asking rape victims to take the polygraph test.

Using the polygraph "was the biggest mistake I ever made," Sullivan says. "And Becky was a great influence on that."

Indeed, SAU was changing society itself. Police, for example, could no longer turn away from the bruised face of a woman just because she was reluctant to report the man who had beat her: They were working with a prosecutor's office that would press the case if they could nail the evidence.

Often they did. Sometimes they didn't. In the early days of SAU, victories were sometimes mixed with tragic mistakes, including the 1981 prosecution of Steve Titus, a man wrongly convicted of raping a teenage girl. The SAU would have sent him to prison if The Seattle Times hadn't uncovered evidence pointing to a different assailant, who eventually confessed to the crime.

Roe was not involved with that case, but she agreed with the office philosophy behind it: take risks. Each week, it seemed, the SAU was tackling new and more horrifying abuses. Jeanette Dalton, a former SAU deputy, recalls a case with a Downs Syndrome teenager who was molested by her uncle: "We thought the chances were against us, big time. The victim was very close to being declared incompetent to testify, and we needed a psychologist to come in and interpret what she was saying because she was so hard to understand. We won that case."

Such victories had a price, though. "The workload was very, very heavy," recalls Dalton, who is now in private practice in Poulsbo. "It's the heaviest, most intense section in the prosecuting office, and that includes homicide. Men would drink, women cry. Part of the problem with the job was the job itself. There were many days when I'd go home at midnight, or sit in my office and cry, just cry, or listen as a victim screamed because the criminal justice system couldn't make them whole again."

IN THE MARBLE hallway outside a King County courtroom, Roe sidles up to attorney Michael Frost, who has just won a trial against her office. Frost braces. He knows that she knows he probably shouldn't have won. The guy was no angel. Roe looks up at him, says something obscene and then starts laughing. Frost responds with delighted relief. "Oh, Becky," he says. "I love it when you talk dirty to me."

Hallway humor in sex-crime court. It's as common as flashers in Freeway Park. It's also essential. The work would be crushing without it. Like Dalton, Roe had spent many late nights in the office, buried in documents and crumpled coffee cups. She usually rebounded, but something inside her gave way when a particularly dreadful case landed amid the clutter on her desk in 1985.

It was a double murder that would become known as the Windermere case because of the swank neighborhood where it occurred. There was nothing sophisticated about the crime, however. A woman, Colleen Gill, and her 16-year-old daughter, Kathryn, had been killed and mutilated by a drifter named Brett Allen Kendrick.

For three weeks, Roe and deputy prosecutor William Downing walked jurors through evidence from one of Seattle's most grisly murders. For three weeks, the images intensified.

"All the evil reflected in the crime is exactly what we had to focus on to prosecute," recalls Downing, now a King County Superior Court judge. "And we had all these 8-by-10 glossies and we couldn't look away, as prosecutors."

To make matters worse, the Gills were a tight-knit North Seattle family, and in them Rebecca Roe recognized her own childhood.

"The kids in that case could have been us - your basic North End family. I identified so strongly with them, and what happened was so horrible. I had a tremendous amount of difficulty dealing with it. I woke up thinking about that case every night for a year. I went into my own trauma counseling after it was over. It was the first time I felt I wasn't capable of handling it on my own."

She stayed in counseling for three or four months, much shorter than most people would have needed to get centered again. But she wasn't completely healed. Death obsessed her. Questions haunted her. What happens when you die? What becomes of the soul? Is there anything in death to appease the horrors of life?

"I'm very unresolved on what happens," she says. "You know, I grew up Catholic and with the notion of heaven and hell, but I'm certainly not committed to that theory. So I don't know what I believe.

"But for a period there, it became so important to me to try to answer those questions, as if you can go out and look them up in a book: `What Happens When You Die.' I thought it would somehow allow me to look at what happened in that (Windermere) case and others, to somehow make it easier."

JOHN AUSTIN IS joking around in Roe's office - hardly the demeanor you'd expect from an attorney who, only 10 minutes before, had been sitting opposite her in a courtroom, defending a man she has charged with child rape. But here they are, palling around. There's laughter. Some kidding. More jokes and then silence. They've finally noticed a reporter and photographer watching them from the hallway.

"Damn!" bellows Austin. "They're going to think we're in collusion!" He swirls on his huge frame, lunging toward Roe's desk in mock fury. "I hate you!" he thunders, while she rears back with a loud belly laugh. These two have known each other a very long time, bonded by the same humor that helped her get past the Windermere case and so many others.

She respects Austin, even though he's defending someone she considers a "sleaze" - and even though he's the one who began all this nasty business about the "Women's Vengeance Brigade."

"This is the yahoo who started that whole thing," she says, pointing a finger at him. "You're the one who said it first. Remember?"

Austin puffs out his chest defiantly. "You don't want to report every accusation from the prosecutor's office," he says. "They do lose cases."

Roe laughs but goads him on. He slips into the hallway, protesting. "The prosecutor sometimes gives me more credit than I deserve," he says loudly. "But I will say this: I absolutely believe Anita Hill was correct! Those senators; what a bunch of maggots!"

Roe is howling. It is their way of joking about something that has turned out to be not so funny. Although Austin coined the "brigade" term years ago when he worked in the SAU with Roe, it recently resurfaced with, well, a vengeance.

On March 15, "60 Minutes" aired its story about Roe and the Kirkland couple her office had prosecuted for allegedly molesting their daughter. There was Roe on TV, dressed in a dark suit and man's tie, looking every bit the leader of a "Women's Vengeance Brigade," as Morley Safer reported. There was Roe, accused of motives no prosecutor can ever afford: that of bias and unfair zeal.

In the months since that report, the courts have backed the prosecution by denying a new hearing on the case. That pleases Roe, but it doesn't ease the sting she still feels after the "60 Minutes" segment.

"It was designed to create the impression that SAU is a group of crazed, man-hating women out to get retribution against innocent men," she says. "I find that incredibly offensive, and underlying that, it suggests that women are still second-class citizens. If a guy gets hit over the head on the street and reports it, he's looking for justice. If a woman gets raped or assaulted and reports it, then she's looking for vengeance."

That societal bias persists, she says, pointing to several highly publicized events. Most recently, there was the William Kennedy Smith date-rape trial. Roe says the woman accuser was presented as loose, unprincipled and unstable: "The initial media reporting on that victim was just appalling. Going back into every detail of her life. That was just plain garbage."

Before that came Anita Hill's testimony to a U.S. Senate committee. When Hill said she had been sexually harassed by Judge Clarence Thomas, Roe says the committee unfairly assailed Hill's character.

"Strong women are under attack," she says, citing a backlash that affects even the way she handles some cases in King County. As a woman, she must sometimes modify her style when compared with that of a man handling the same kind of case. She uses her brother for an example.

"With a case of date rape, Mark would be in a much more advantageous position in front of a jury simply because he's a man," she says. "But some jurors would look at a woman prosecutor as vouching for the credibility of another woman."

Mark agrees. "Jurors have come out of some cases here and said they felt the women prosecutor had a secret agenda, as if inferring she was abused as a child and now hates all men," he says. "That's the kind of crap that a guy doesn't have to deal with."

And that's the kind of bias that makes his sister bristle when asked the inevitable question about her own background: Was she ever abused? The answer is a blunt "No." Roe is displeased with the query, knowing that it has never been asked of her brother.

NOR HAS IT BEEN asked of the men in the "Women's Vengeance Brigade" at SAU. Of 14 members, half are men. They include Rod Scarr, a boyish-looking prosecutor who is about to undertake one of the unit's most important and controversial tasks, questioning a child about alleged sexual abuse. He steps into a play area filled with old toys. This is where the few words of a child can send a grown man to prison.

Scarr drops to his knees, facing the blue eyes of a 3-year-old girl. Her blond hair springs from the top of her head in a ponytail. Her nails are dotted with pink polish.

He smiles and begins. "Can you find a red crayon for me?" he asks, and she shyly selects a bright red one. "Good. Now, which one is green?" She points to a green one, and Scarr nods. If he can show that she knows red from green, it's a step toward showing she knows right from wrong. Scarr zeroes in, asking about her family. "Can you draw pictures of your mommy and daddy?" She nods yes. "Did you tell somebody that you got an owie?" She nods yes again. "Can you put your finger where you got an owie?" She nods, but doesn't point, moving away from the table. "Can you find another green crayon?" he asks, drawing her back. She nods and points to a green one. "Are all the crayons green?" Another nod yes and the case starts to fold. She is distracted, trying to please him, nodding yes to almost all of his questions.

Scarr stands and leaves. Although the girl allegedly told her mother that her father hurt her in bed, she won't repeat that to Scarr. The case will probably vanish, and that wouldn't be uncommon.

The SAU doesn't file charges on about half of the complaints brought to it. Of those it does file, Roe says about 80 percent of the accused plead guilty. The remaining 20 percent go to trial, for a conviction rate of just 65 percent - far below that of the rest of the prosecutor's office. Child-abuse cases are difficult to prosecute. They often boil down to a child's word against an adult's, and children can be terrible witnesses who don't recall times and events. Too, they can be pawns in vicious custody battles.

Roe says she is sensitive to that. "Kids who talk about touching are extremely susceptible of being misinterpreted by adults who are ready to believe the worst," she says. "I put the kibosh on a lot of filings proposed to me, particularly with young kids in the custody-battle area."

To which a well-known defense attorney responds with disbelief. "Becky tells you she doesn't do these cases? That is ridiculous," says John Henry Browne. He cites a client who he says was "incredibly destroyed by what happened to him."

The episode began in 1988, when the man and his wife divorced. Court records show it was a bitter separation, made more so by a custody battle over their 3 1/2-year-old daughter. The father had visitation rights, during which he bathed the girl and treated her vaginal area with Vaseline for a persistent rash. Afterward, the girl complained that her father "tickled" her "bug," meaning her vagina.

The child was taken to a private sexual-assault counselor, who said she was certain the child had been abused. Rape charges were brought against the man, who then hired Browne. But the case began to unravel when Browne discovered that the counselor had made similar, but unsubstantiated, allegations of abuse against her own ex-husband.

Browne asked Roe for an independent examination of the child, but she refused. During pretrial hearings, Browne repeated his request to the judge, who granted the review. When questioned again, the girl contradicted herself so much that the case fell apart and was finally dismissed.

"If Becky hadn't resisted the interview with an independent expert that we asked for, it wouldn't have gone to trial," says Browne. "(My client) didn't see his daughter for 16 months; he paid up to $35,000; and he lost one job because of the incident."

Roe responds with an exasperated sigh: "Go talk to the mom in that case. She is furious with us that we took it away from a jury. There's the other side of the story."

That doesn't satisfy Browne. "I think it's time for Becky to do something else," he says. "I think 15 years ago when she began this brigade, the overzealousness was very appropriate to focus attention on abuse. But over the last five years, I think the usefulness of that has weaned. I think overzealous positions have been taken consistently and with wrong results."

That sentiment is shared by other defense attorneys who say they've seen too many men wrongly accused of unmentionable crimes with daughters or nieces or strangers or wives.

"Aggressive doesn't even come close to describing her (Roe's) style," says David Allen, who likens Roe's tactics to McCarthyism, and is the lawyer who defended the Kirkland couple featured in "60 Minutes."

"She's more like a street fighter. Take no prisoners. Don't give an inch. No, that's too mild. She's rough. I hate to talk in bumper stickers, but I think she's very aggressive and very unyielding."

ROE SCOFFS at such talk, saying it's to be expected from attorneys who make their living representing the people she's prosecuting. And even in that group, she has admirers. Jeff Robinson is one of them.

Robinson and attorney Michael Iaria represented Tyrone Briggs against charges that he had attacked five women in late 1986 near Harborview Medical Center. It was Briggs' third trial, after two others ended in mistrial and juror misconduct. Briggs had been in jail three years, and a growing number of people felt he was there unjustly. Into this arena walked Roe. It could have been an explosive trial, but Robinson says Roe didn't exploit the situation.

"She and Mark Larson, a senior deputy prosecutor, tried the case with respect, in an honest fashion," Robinson says. "They were up front with us about what they were doing. What could have been a very, very ugly experience was handled in a very professional manner."

Roe lost. Robinson won. There are no hard feelings. In fact, Robinson bristles at Roe's label as leader of the "vengeance brigade."

"When women in authority do things that people don't like, that's what you get," Robinson says.

That characterization bothers others, including Roe's boss. In his campaign for attorney general, Norm Maleng has not distanced himself from the SAU. Instead, he praises it as one of his greatest achievements and calls Roe "one of the small handful of absolute best prosecutors we've had in the office. She is absolutely a superb lawyer. She is very tough-minded, but she is a very loving and caring person, which is not an aspect of an insensitive person."

For her part, Roe bluntly rules out a run for Maleng's job should he become attorney general. "There's not a snowball's chance in hell," she says. Nor is she going to modify her style to appease her critics.

"Here's what I'm not," she says. "I believe it would be wrong to adopt an attitude to not file a case unless you knew you would win. For this office, the filing standard is: Will a reasonable unbiased juror, when presented with the evidence, be justified in convicting? A jury should make the decision. I shouldn't."

With that, she heads back into the courtroom. It's time to call more witnesses against the man she has charged with 20 counts of child abuse. Seems he is not only accused of molesting his own two daughters, but the young members of a Girl Scout troop whom he supervised for more than a year.

Roe seats herself at a table near him, not looking his way, focusing instead on the piles of paper before her. It's the evidence the SAU has collected over two years, the evidence she feels will justify a jury's conviction. As is so often the case, she is right.

After weeks of testimony from young girls with hard memories, the jury issues its verdict. Guilty, on all 20 counts. They will put him in prison for these things: raping his own daughter, raping his nephew, molesting another daughter, molesting her friends, and putting his finger inside a 7-year old girl whom he dressed in red lingerie.

If you want to call that vengeance, fine. Rebecca Roe calls it justice.

LINDA KEENE IS A PACIFIC STAFF WRITER. HARLEY SOLTES IS PACIFIC'S STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER.