PART TWO
Forces of habit
The story of Amber Wyatt’s assault begins in some sense a decade earlier, with another assault — and another failure of irresponsible adults and their children to face consequences. In 1996, another 16-year-old Arlington girl was allegedly sexually assaulted at another high school party, and another opportunity to prosecute those responsible was ignored. And, with that, another moment of clarity that could have turned toward reform instead degenerated into a rally for the guilty.
On Sept. 13, 1996, a 16-year-old junior at Arlington High School was allegedly sexually assaulted at a party while she was drunk. According to contemporaneous news reports, she alleged that dozens of her peers stood by as others assaulted her with a condom-topped broomstick, exposed their genitals and urinated on her. The girl was hospitalized, but no sexual assault charges were filed against her assailants. The town helped see to that.
Police interviewed some 35 students after the incident; none supported the girl’s allegations. Coupled with the victim’s broken memory, this meant police were never able to bring any perpetrator to justice for the sexual assault. Instead, police issued simple assault and disorderly conduct citations to a smattering of teens who had been at the party, a light reprimand given the circumstances. Nonetheless, some parents resented even those meager reprisals.
The parents’ objections might have remained at the muted level of privileged suburbanites grousing over traffic tickets had it not been for Lynn Hale, then superintendent of the Arlington Independent School District, who took it upon herself to try to prevent another such episode.
Less than two weeks after the girl’s report, Hale told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News that she wasn’t convinced the district was “implementing the appropriate consequences . . . for students who drink.” And she followed through, instituting a district-wide policy under which any student caught at a location where alcohol or drugs were being used would be banned from extracurricular activities for the entire school year, regardless of whether police cited them for use.
Parents revolted. Seven families of students affected by the policy filed suit, and in January 1997, a local judge invited them to debate the policy with members of the school board. After meeting with the students and their parents and considering the arguments of the school board and its attorney, the judge, saying he was speaking “as a parent,” thanked Hale for her attempt to do something — anything — about the problem. And then the judge effectively overturned Hale’s policy, reinstating some 20 students to their extracurricular activities.
Hale didn’t remain in her post much longer to see what would become of the phenomenon she had observed and tried to halt. By the summer of 1998, she had already been replaced as superintendent by Mac Bernd, who eased the anti-drinking policy to include a penalty of just six weeks for first-time offenders. “I have a somewhat jaundiced view of how much control we do have over teenagers,” Bernd, several years retired, told me in 2015 in an Arlington restaurant lined with framed drawings of Texas college and high school mascots. He wanted to preserve, Bernd said, “an opportunity for redemption.”
It’s impossible to know whether Hale’s tougher policy would have given pause to anyone present at the 2006 party that Wyatt attended. For a deterrent to be effective, consequences must seem real. And it’s easy to see how, with Hale’s rule a vanquished memory and the case that sparked it an item of urban legend, a pair of Arlington teenagers with ample opportunity and bad intentions might have reasonably concluded no harm would come to them should they wantonly violate rules, policies or people. They would have been exactly right.
And so it came to pass that August evening that Martin senior Arthur Aven stood in a suburban driveway facing a decision too momentous for his years: Believe the girl who had pulled him aside to tell him that she had just been sexually assaulted — or believe one of her alleged assailants, who was among his closest friends.
About 45 minutes earlier, by Aven’s recollection, homeowner Cindy Marks had asked him to take Wyatt home. (Marks would later explain to police that unnamed kids had asked her to make Wyatt leave, because Wyatt was being, in her words, “obnoxious.”) But Aven didn’t have his car; he had planned to spend the night with the soccer player and was counting on him for a ride. And so the soccer player had volunteered to take Wyatt home, along with the football player, then circle back and pick up Aven.
Perhaps Aven was relieved. He told police that Wyatt had been hanging on him all night, flirting with him in the pool, loudly declaring to no one in particular that she was “gonna f--- this guy tonight.” But he wasn’t interested; he just wanted to enjoy the party. With the two boys and Wyatt on their way home, it had seemed as if the night was winding down.
But then the soccer player returned to the Marks residence with Wyatt — and she immediately took Aven aside, sobbing hysterically, brandishing a bleeding wound on her arm and telling him that she had just been raped.
“It was hard for me to really believe anything at the time,” Aven told me, sitting in a Fort Worth Starbucks this April. His short-cropped blond hair swept up from his forehead in a stubborn cowlick, just as it had in his varsity basketball yearbook photo back in 2006. In school, he had been well liked and quietly bright. He had been close with the soccer player at the time, and they remained friendly enough years later that the soccer player was part of Aven’s wedding party. But Aven still seemed deeply troubled, both in 2006 and when I spoke to him, by what had happened that night.
Aven wrote in the statement he provided to police that, as soon as Wyatt told him she had been raped, he “asked Mrs. Marks and a girl named Carlye Bowers to come over to where me and Amber were standing. Amber repeated exactly what she told me to Mrs. Marks and Carlye.” Marks, 49 at the time, did not call the police. Instead, she suggested that Wyatt go to an upstairs room in her house, where she lay down. Bowers declined to comment for this article.
Wyatt was disoriented and confused, Aven recalled in his statement. She even misidentified one of the two boys she said assaulted her — the football player — instead naming a third boy who had been at the party as one of the perpetrators. But according to Marks, the football player had come back with the soccer player and Wyatt, and then left in his own truck. And those were the two boys Wyatt would tell the police had raped her: the ones who had been with her in the truck.
In his statement, Aven recalled standing in a nearby hallway with Bowers, Marks and his friend, discussing what had happened. The friend seemed surprised by Wyatt’s accusation, Aven said, and offered a competing version of events: On the way to Wyatt’s house, she said that she needed to urinate. Rather than stopping at a local fast-food joint or gas station, the boys figured it would be best to pull over behind a friend’s storage shed and let Wyatt pee on the ground. She fell down as she got out of the truck, Aven recalled his friend saying, which was how she had come by the bloody abrasion on her arm.
Somewhere near the close of this narration, Wyatt appeared in the door of the guest room, “too afraid to be alone,” Aven wrote. She asked whether Aven would stay with her until she fell asleep, and he agreed. Aven went into Marks’s guest room with Wyatt, helped her into bed and did his best to comfort her. He pulled out a trundle bed alongside her and lay down facing her. Wyatt recalled in her interview with police that Marks appeared at some point and gave her boxers and a T-shirt to sleep in, which she changed into. With Aven at her side, Wyatt eventually fell asleep.
The next day, Aven woke up alone. Wyatt was gone, the party was long over, and the nightmarish evening had given way to an ordinary summer morning in suburbia. And the boy who had been trusted with the markedly adult task of comforting a terrified, injured girl now called his father to come pick him up from the Marks home.
When police arrived there a day and a half later, after Wyatt filed a complaint, they found Cindy Marks polite and respectful while they gathered the bedding Wyatt had slept on and searched for any additional clothes she may have left behind. But when Marks made her sworn statement several weeks later — after canceling her initial appointment with police — the story she supplied differed vastly from the version of events Aven and Wyatt had related.
“At approx 11:30 pm I was shutting down the party,” she wrote. “The kids told me Amber was being obnoxious and to get her to leave. I asked [the soccer player] to take her home. He agreed and left. At approx 20-60 minutes [the soccer player] arrived back at the house.”
On the same October day that Marks wrote her statement, a detective interviewed her on camera for an hour and 45 minutes. In the video, Marks chewed gum while crisply answering questions. “No one seemed out of control to me except for Amber,” she said, “and she seemed kinda, I don’t know what it was, drugged up or something.”
Marks’s answers appear curated to emphasize her lack of culpability in the underage drinking that had transpired in her backyard. She claimed she didn’t believe Wyatt to be under the influence of alcohol. “I didn’t feel like she was drunk because I didn’t know they were drinking,” she said. “I figured she was on drugs, because I’ve also heard that her stomach has been pumped for drugs.” (Wyatt says that her stomach had never been pumped after drug use as a teen.) Yet Aven and Wyatt each admitted to having been drinking at the Marks party, and the school’s investigation would later conclude there had certainly been alcohol consumption in Marks’s backyard that night.
Even more striking, Marks also denied ever hearing anything about a rape that night, from Wyatt, Aven or anyone else. “You know, I just felt like she needed to go to sleep,” was her final analysis of Wyatt’s condition in her interview with police. Reached by phone in the summer of 2015, Marks declined to comment for this article. She also has not responded to many other recent attempts I’ve made, including over this summer, to get her side of the story.
In her video interview, Marks mocked how Wyatt had spoken that night, heavy and slow. The main fact about Wyatt circulating among the cheerleading moms, Marks said, “was that she does quad bars,” a street name for the prescription drug Xanax. She claimed that Amber had stolen her daughter’s sunglasses a year or more ago, though another student had returned them. She told the detective the alleged rapists were “good boys,” emphasized Wyatt’s “horrible reputation” for drug and alcohol use, and said she found it “odd” that Wyatt’s mother never called to ask what had happened, as if that had been the greatest abdication of responsibility to take place during that long night.
Forces of habit
The story of Amber Wyatt’s assault begins in some sense a decade earlier, with another assault — and another failure of irresponsible adults and their children to face consequences. In 1996, another 16-year-old Arlington girl was allegedly sexually assaulted at another high school party, and another opportunity to prosecute those responsible was ignored. And, with that, another moment of clarity that could have turned toward reform instead degenerated into a rally for the guilty.
On Sept. 13, 1996, a 16-year-old junior at Arlington High School was allegedly sexually assaulted at a party while she was drunk. According to contemporaneous news reports, she alleged that dozens of her peers stood by as others assaulted her with a condom-topped broomstick, exposed their genitals and urinated on her. The girl was hospitalized, but no sexual assault charges were filed against her assailants. The town helped see to that.
Police interviewed some 35 students after the incident; none supported the girl’s allegations. Coupled with the victim’s broken memory, this meant police were never able to bring any perpetrator to justice for the sexual assault. Instead, police issued simple assault and disorderly conduct citations to a smattering of teens who had been at the party, a light reprimand given the circumstances. Nonetheless, some parents resented even those meager reprisals.
The parents’ objections might have remained at the muted level of privileged suburbanites grousing over traffic tickets had it not been for Lynn Hale, then superintendent of the Arlington Independent School District, who took it upon herself to try to prevent another such episode.
Less than two weeks after the girl’s report, Hale told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News that she wasn’t convinced the district was “implementing the appropriate consequences . . . for students who drink.” And she followed through, instituting a district-wide policy under which any student caught at a location where alcohol or drugs were being used would be banned from extracurricular activities for the entire school year, regardless of whether police cited them for use.
Parents revolted. Seven families of students affected by the policy filed suit, and in January 1997, a local judge invited them to debate the policy with members of the school board. After meeting with the students and their parents and considering the arguments of the school board and its attorney, the judge, saying he was speaking “as a parent,” thanked Hale for her attempt to do something — anything — about the problem. And then the judge effectively overturned Hale’s policy, reinstating some 20 students to their extracurricular activities.
Hale didn’t remain in her post much longer to see what would become of the phenomenon she had observed and tried to halt. By the summer of 1998, she had already been replaced as superintendent by Mac Bernd, who eased the anti-drinking policy to include a penalty of just six weeks for first-time offenders. “I have a somewhat jaundiced view of how much control we do have over teenagers,” Bernd, several years retired, told me in 2015 in an Arlington restaurant lined with framed drawings of Texas college and high school mascots. He wanted to preserve, Bernd said, “an opportunity for redemption.”
It’s impossible to know whether Hale’s tougher policy would have given pause to anyone present at the 2006 party that Wyatt attended. For a deterrent to be effective, consequences must seem real. And it’s easy to see how, with Hale’s rule a vanquished memory and the case that sparked it an item of urban legend, a pair of Arlington teenagers with ample opportunity and bad intentions might have reasonably concluded no harm would come to them should they wantonly violate rules, policies or people. They would have been exactly right.
And so it came to pass that August evening that Martin senior Arthur Aven stood in a suburban driveway facing a decision too momentous for his years: Believe the girl who had pulled him aside to tell him that she had just been sexually assaulted — or believe one of her alleged assailants, who was among his closest friends.
About 45 minutes earlier, by Aven’s recollection, homeowner Cindy Marks had asked him to take Wyatt home. (Marks would later explain to police that unnamed kids had asked her to make Wyatt leave, because Wyatt was being, in her words, “obnoxious.”) But Aven didn’t have his car; he had planned to spend the night with the soccer player and was counting on him for a ride. And so the soccer player had volunteered to take Wyatt home, along with the football player, then circle back and pick up Aven.
Perhaps Aven was relieved. He told police that Wyatt had been hanging on him all night, flirting with him in the pool, loudly declaring to no one in particular that she was “gonna f--- this guy tonight.” But he wasn’t interested; he just wanted to enjoy the party. With the two boys and Wyatt on their way home, it had seemed as if the night was winding down.
But then the soccer player returned to the Marks residence with Wyatt — and she immediately took Aven aside, sobbing hysterically, brandishing a bleeding wound on her arm and telling him that she had just been raped.
“It was hard for me to really believe anything at the time,” Aven told me, sitting in a Fort Worth Starbucks this April. His short-cropped blond hair swept up from his forehead in a stubborn cowlick, just as it had in his varsity basketball yearbook photo back in 2006. In school, he had been well liked and quietly bright. He had been close with the soccer player at the time, and they remained friendly enough years later that the soccer player was part of Aven’s wedding party. But Aven still seemed deeply troubled, both in 2006 and when I spoke to him, by what had happened that night.
Aven wrote in the statement he provided to police that, as soon as Wyatt told him she had been raped, he “asked Mrs. Marks and a girl named Carlye Bowers to come over to where me and Amber were standing. Amber repeated exactly what she told me to Mrs. Marks and Carlye.” Marks, 49 at the time, did not call the police. Instead, she suggested that Wyatt go to an upstairs room in her house, where she lay down. Bowers declined to comment for this article.
Wyatt was disoriented and confused, Aven recalled in his statement. She even misidentified one of the two boys she said assaulted her — the football player — instead naming a third boy who had been at the party as one of the perpetrators. But according to Marks, the football player had come back with the soccer player and Wyatt, and then left in his own truck. And those were the two boys Wyatt would tell the police had raped her: the ones who had been with her in the truck.
In his statement, Aven recalled standing in a nearby hallway with Bowers, Marks and his friend, discussing what had happened. The friend seemed surprised by Wyatt’s accusation, Aven said, and offered a competing version of events: On the way to Wyatt’s house, she said that she needed to urinate. Rather than stopping at a local fast-food joint or gas station, the boys figured it would be best to pull over behind a friend’s storage shed and let Wyatt pee on the ground. She fell down as she got out of the truck, Aven recalled his friend saying, which was how she had come by the bloody abrasion on her arm.
Somewhere near the close of this narration, Wyatt appeared in the door of the guest room, “too afraid to be alone,” Aven wrote. She asked whether Aven would stay with her until she fell asleep, and he agreed. Aven went into Marks’s guest room with Wyatt, helped her into bed and did his best to comfort her. He pulled out a trundle bed alongside her and lay down facing her. Wyatt recalled in her interview with police that Marks appeared at some point and gave her boxers and a T-shirt to sleep in, which she changed into. With Aven at her side, Wyatt eventually fell asleep.
The next day, Aven woke up alone. Wyatt was gone, the party was long over, and the nightmarish evening had given way to an ordinary summer morning in suburbia. And the boy who had been trusted with the markedly adult task of comforting a terrified, injured girl now called his father to come pick him up from the Marks home.
When police arrived there a day and a half later, after Wyatt filed a complaint, they found Cindy Marks polite and respectful while they gathered the bedding Wyatt had slept on and searched for any additional clothes she may have left behind. But when Marks made her sworn statement several weeks later — after canceling her initial appointment with police — the story she supplied differed vastly from the version of events Aven and Wyatt had related.
“At approx 11:30 pm I was shutting down the party,” she wrote. “The kids told me Amber was being obnoxious and to get her to leave. I asked [the soccer player] to take her home. He agreed and left. At approx 20-60 minutes [the soccer player] arrived back at the house.”
On the same October day that Marks wrote her statement, a detective interviewed her on camera for an hour and 45 minutes. In the video, Marks chewed gum while crisply answering questions. “No one seemed out of control to me except for Amber,” she said, “and she seemed kinda, I don’t know what it was, drugged up or something.”
Marks’s answers appear curated to emphasize her lack of culpability in the underage drinking that had transpired in her backyard. She claimed she didn’t believe Wyatt to be under the influence of alcohol. “I didn’t feel like she was drunk because I didn’t know they were drinking,” she said. “I figured she was on drugs, because I’ve also heard that her stomach has been pumped for drugs.” (Wyatt says that her stomach had never been pumped after drug use as a teen.) Yet Aven and Wyatt each admitted to having been drinking at the Marks party, and the school’s investigation would later conclude there had certainly been alcohol consumption in Marks’s backyard that night.
Even more striking, Marks also denied ever hearing anything about a rape that night, from Wyatt, Aven or anyone else. “You know, I just felt like she needed to go to sleep,” was her final analysis of Wyatt’s condition in her interview with police. Reached by phone in the summer of 2015, Marks declined to comment for this article. She also has not responded to many other recent attempts I’ve made, including over this summer, to get her side of the story.
In her video interview, Marks mocked how Wyatt had spoken that night, heavy and slow. The main fact about Wyatt circulating among the cheerleading moms, Marks said, “was that she does quad bars,” a street name for the prescription drug Xanax. She claimed that Amber had stolen her daughter’s sunglasses a year or more ago, though another student had returned them. She told the detective the alleged rapists were “good boys,” emphasized Wyatt’s “horrible reputation” for drug and alcohol use, and said she found it “odd” that Wyatt’s mother never called to ask what had happened, as if that had been the greatest abdication of responsibility to take place during that long night.
