Twenty-seven years ago, the Virginia woman sat in a courtroom, swore to tell the truth and told a jury that a stranger named Thomas Haynesworth raped her.
She was so sure. The sight of him made her tremble.
She helped send him to prison.
But she was wrong.
“For so long, his face and his name were where I directed my anger,” the Henrico County woman said in a recent interview. “That’s gone now. He’s not the name. He’s not the face.
“Now when I hear his name, I feel guilt. Obsessive guilt.”
DNA evidence has proven that Haynesworth, who was an 18-year-old high school dropout when he was arrested, did not rape the woman.
Haynesworth, now 46, was released from prison Monday on parole and is fighting to clear his name. DNA exonerated him in a second rape as well. But he was convicted of two other attacks for which there is no genetic evidence to test.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) and two prosecutors, who have become convinced that Haynesworth was wrongly convicted in all of the attacks, are supporting his petition to the Virginia Court of Appeals for a writ of actual innocence.
So is the Henrico rape victim.
“It’s been 27 years,” she said. “I wish that somehow all that time could be given back to him. But it’s impossible.”
The Henrico woman, now 47, got married since the 1984 attack at the Richmond day care where she worked. She raised two children and has a successful career. The Washington Post generally does not name sexual assault victims without their consent.
Advances in genetic testing have led to the exonerations of 267 people across the United States who were convicted of crimes they did not commit. In more than three-quarters of those cases, a victim or witness identified the wrong person, according to the Innocence Project.
For men exonerated in rape cases, there is the indescribable loss of years — even decades — of life. For the women who identified them, there is a different pain. They are faced not only with the trauma of having been raped, but also the confusion and anguish of knowing they helped send an innocent man to prison.
“While trying to do the right thing, we got it wrong,” said Jennifer Thompson, who was raped in 1984 in North Carolina and wrongly identified a man named Ronald Cotton. “I felt I had become the offender and Ronald was the victim. I had failed everybody.”
Thompson, who co-wrote a book about her experience, said people lashed out at her in cyberspace, saying she should slit her wrists and slit her throat. Some called her racist. She has befriended the Henrico woman and four others who were attacked and made the same mistake.
“There is no support group for rape victims who wrongly identify people,” Thompson said.
A search for red flags
On the day that two detectives showed up at the Henrico woman’s house in March 2009, she felt a rush of fear. Haynesworth, she thought, must have made parole.
But the officers started talking about DNA and evidence. She began to understand what they were saying: DNA had cleared Haynesworth and implicated a convicted rapist named Leon Davis.
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