The Police Told Her To Report Her Rape, Then Arrested Her For Lying

Lara McLeod never wanted to report her rape. In those first few hours, the 19-year-old was barely able to put what had happened to her into words. Joaquin Rams, Lara’s older sister’s fiancé, had forced Lara to have sex with him, she said — just two weeks after Lara’s sister, Hera, had given birth to Joaquin’s baby.

Joaquin warned Lara not to tell anyone, she said, because it would ruin her family’s life. Lara feared that was true, but she broke down and told her parents the next day. They rushed out the door in a panic to pick up Hera and the baby. All Lara wanted to do after that was go back to sleep.

Instead, later that evening, she got a call from a police officer in Prince William County, Virginia, the suburb of Washington, D.C., where Joaquin and Hera lived. He wanted to know whether what Lara had told her parents was true. When Lara said it was, the officer told her that she needed to come to the station immediately for a formal interview.

After a cursory investigation of the claim they compelled her to file, the police abruptly concluded Lara was lying about being raped and arrested her. Hera was charged with obstructing justice for aiding Lara’s alleged deceit, and had to spend her savings on legal fees to get them dismissed. Lara’s charges were eventually expunged, but not before her reputation was destroyed. She says she still has severe panic attacks whenever she sees a police officer.

But the worst was yet to come.

In the ensuing battle for custody over Prince, Hera and Joaquin’s infant son, it emerged that not only had Joaquin lied about his name, employment history, and age — he was a decade older than he had claimed — but he had also once been a suspect in his ex-girlfriend’s shooting death and a person of interest in his mother’s death, too, although he was never successfully charged in either case. He had been accused of child abuse by his other son, although never convicted, and ran an amateur porn site.

But thanks to the charges against Hera and Lara, Joaquin was able to portray himself as a comparatively fit parent — and the victim of a smear job. The judge granted Joaquin unsupervised visits. Three months later, EMTs found Prince unconscious on the floor of Joaquin’s house. The 15-month-old died the next day. Months later, Joaquin was charged with capital murder.

Joaquin, who has been in jail without bail ever since, adamantly denies any wrongdoing in the deaths of his son, ex-girlfriend, and mother, and denies he raped Lara. His upcoming trial, in which the prosecutors are seeking the death penalty, has attracted plenty of media attention. But the mishandling of Lara’s rape allegations — the night that started it all — has never been reported until now, and authorities still refuse to explain why they were so quick to press charges against the sisters.

Internal documents and recordings of private meetings obtained by BuzzFeed News, none of which have previously been made public, show how grievously the police botched their investigation from start to finish, allowing their beliefs about sexual assault to influence the way they pursued the case.

In a private meeting with the McLeods, the chief of police admitted the department bungled aspects of the investigation, calling parts “improper,” “sloppy,” and “shortcutted,” saying he was “disappointed” that the detectives “didn’t pursue every possible means to either support the allegations or the conclusions that they were reaching or disprove them.” But he stressed that women do lie about rape, so it was important for officers not to be too credulous — and that it was only his “personal opinion” that police shouldn’t have pressed charges.

“It is not uncommon for people to make false, malicious, salacious allegations of sexual assault,” he said. "That does happen.”

Lara is stuck putting the pieces of her life back together. Now 23, she still has no clue why the police told her to report a crime, then arrested her for doing so. She only knows one thing for sure, she says: No one should ever report a rape to the police.

“The night I was raped, I said I wanted to be left alone,” Lara told BuzzFeed News in August. “People say rape is serious and you should report it, but look what happened to me: I reported my rape, and they told me it never happened.”

Before Hera met Joaquin in February 2010, the McLeods were a tight-knit, fortunate family. Both sisters attended private boarding schools and elite colleges. Lara, who is 11 years younger than Hera, studied opera and journalism in college before moving to the West Coast, where she works at a tech company. After Hera graduated, she worked for Teach for America and competed on the reality TV show The Amazing Race with her father before moving to Washington, D.C., where she’s worked the kind of high-powered consulting jobs that earn six figures and require a security clearance. Hera didn’t have much time for romance, so she tried online dating, where she met Joaquin.

The judge who presided over Hera and Joaquin’s custody battle was struck by the differences between the two. “What attracted the two of you together on the internet, god knows,” he said. Hera’s family was equally baffled. Joaquin was a goateed musician who didn’t have a steady job or any discernible talent. But he won Hera over by talking about how much he loved his 10-year-old son, whom he had raised as a single dad ever since what he claimed was the child's mother’s tragic accident. He spoke confidently about his aspiring music career and often said he was on the phone with R&B stars or meeting with business partners. He had a recording studio in his four-bedroom house, drove a Mercedes-Benz SUV, and bought expensive electronics.

Hera is the first to admit she didn’t try too hard to poke through the holes in his story. She was 29, and Joaquin, who told her he was 26, was her first serious boyfriend after years of travel and adventure. He “spoke with such conviction,” she said, “that it seemed impossible that the things he told me weren’t true.”

The fantasy began to unravel a few months after they started dating, when Hera became pregnant. Hera knew it was risky to have a baby with a man she barely knew, but she had a steady salary and had always wanted kids. That rationale, combined with her Catholic upbringing, convinced her to go for it, she said.

Lara McLeod and Prince.

Courtesy of Laura McLeod

Suddenly, Joaquin had no money and expected Hera to pay for everything, she said. He stopped eating and showering and made comments about how he should kill himself so Hera could collect life insurance. In December 2010, Joaquin was charged with domestic abuse on a juvenile after his son told a school counselor that Joaquin had punched and kicked him, according to a visitation evaluation report. Joaquin told Hera that his son was overreacting to a spanking. Hera, determined to keep her newly formed family together, convinced herself that Joaquin, who was never convicted of the charges, was telling the truth and experiencing depression. She started attending counseling sessions with him.

“I felt trapped,” she said, “but I wanted my son to have a father.”

Lara and Hera had always been close, but the two grew apart when Hera started dating Joaquin and Lara went off to college. That’s why Lara agreed to go to a Lil Wayne concert with Joaquin on July 16, 2011, two weeks after the baby was born. Lara didn’t like Lil Wayne any more than she liked Joaquin. But he was family now.

It was the summer after Lara’s freshman year, and she was living at home at her parents' house in Gaithersburg, Maryland, about 40 miles away from Joaquin's place in Manassas, Virginia. The night of the concert, Hera and the baby spent the night at the McLeods' in case Joaquin and Lara stayed out late — he had told Lara he would take her backstage and to an afterparty. On the way to the show, Joaquin asked Lara if she was willing to do whatever it took to succeed in the music industry. She wasn’t sure what he meant, she told the police.

Later on, Lara said, instead of taking her backstage, Joaquin brought her back home to explain: She could either have sex with him, right then and there, or he would take her to a party where she would be gang-raped by a group of men.

Lara later told the police that she tearfully argued with Joaquin into the early morning. When she protested that her sister had just given birth to Joaquin’s baby, he claimed he and Hera had agreed that Joaquin could sleep with Lara that night, the police report states. Lara even tried saying she had her period — that always discouraged pushy guys at college — but Joaquin was relentless. Earlier in the night, he had shown Lara the gun he had on him, she told police. Later, he put her phone in the trunk, and she didn't know anyone in the area to ask for help, she said. As the night went on, Lara began to realize there was no escape. Joaquin led her into the basement.

The rape itself was an “out-of-body experience,” Lara said. Either her sister had put her in a position to be raped by Joaquin, Lara thought, or she had just destroyed Hera’s new family. Afterwards, Joaquin dropped her off at a subway station, gave her a hug, and told her not to fight him so hard next time, she says.

When Lara told her parents what had happened the next day, Hera knew immediately that her sister was telling the truth.

“I wanted so badly to believe that he was who he said he was,” Hera said. “But then it was like someone finally threw a big bucket of water on me and I woke up screaming. I realized I didn’t know this person at all. I just saw a monster.”

Hera McLeod (left) and Lara McLeod photographed in Seattle on September 8th, 2015.

Jovelle Tamayo for BuzzFeed News