Chapter 4: A verdict with 'collateral damage' Click here to read previous installments

Nick Socias had been working for this moment for more than two years, determined to finally put away an alleged serial rapist named Keith Edward Hendricks. In December 2015, the assistant district attorney was pinning his hopes for success in the 176th Criminal District Court on Hendricks' latest victim, a fragile 24-year-old named Jenny who suffered from bipolar disorder and was a reluctant witness at best. She sat in a witness room on the 19th floor of the Harris County Courthouse downtown. Socias remembers speaking to her minutes before the proceedings began. She told him she just wanted to testify and leave. Socias didn't think it would be easy for Jenny, at least the fifth woman to identify Hendricks as the man who had allegedly raped her. Socias couldn't understand how the system had failed for nearly a decade to put Hendricks away. He hoped to get her on and off the stand as quickly as possible. But minutes before she was supposed to testify, Jenny urinated on herself, emotionally unprepared to confront Hendricks in open court. It wasn't the way Socias wanted to begin. He told the judge what had happened. Jenny was given fresh clothing to change into while attorneys made opening arguments to the jury.

Socias called her as the first witness. But by Socias' fourth question, which was to confirm her name, Jenny unraveled, barely able to speak. She paused after Socias asked if Hendricks had her taken to an abandoned house. "Telling you that — see, the problem was that I can read everybody's mind at the same exact time, like I function at a high velocity more than everybody else," she finally said, making little sense. District Court Judge Stacey Bond called for a break. Outside the presence of the jury, she asked Socias if he had a plan to proceed. He did not. Socias told the judge he'd spoken to Jenny only twice in the past week, the second time being the day before the trial. He did not know what was wrong with her. The judge noted Jenny appeared to be responding to internal stimuli. The judge told prosecutors to talk amongst themselves to determine how to proceed. But during the break, Jenny left the courtroom and said she did not want to be in Houston, Socias recalled. Socias and fellow prosecutors followed her, trying to reason with her. Socias said Jenny then went out into the street, asking random people for rides. He began to panic, worrying for Jenny's safety. He said he followed her behind the courthouse. Jenny stood between two police SUVs, then walked into traffic, Socias recalled. He said he watched a car barely miss hitting her. Subscribe The Houston Chronicle is dedicated to serving the public interest with fact-based journalism. That mission has never been more important. Show your support for our journalism at HoustonChronicle.com/subscribe Socias said he ran into the street himself, stopping traffic. He could not tell if Jenny was intentionally trying to hurt herself. Authorities were called and paramedics arrived to take Jenny to St. Joseph Medical Center, Socias said. Socias said he also began emailing colleagues at the DA's office, asking them what to do. He did not have experience with mental health cases and certainly not the set of unusual circumstances he faced with his witness. When proceedings resumed after lunch, Socias told the judge what had happened and explained that the DA's office thought Jenny was a danger to herself and had taken her to a hospital and into custody for mental health reasons. To ensure her presence when the trial resumed, Socias asked the judge to issue a material witness bond. The measure — which he said was suggested by colleagues and superiors— would guarantee that she was released back into the custody of the DA's office instead of the street.

The judge agreed to issue the witness bond and reset the case for Jan. 11. Concerned about Jenny's well-being, Socias visited her a few times while she was at St. Joseph. She seemed to be making progress, becoming more lucid and less combative. He understood that she would eventually be released from the hospital. On his last visit, Socias told Jenny he would not see her again for a couple of weeks because he would be undergoing his own medical procedure. Jenny was released from the hospital on Dec. 18. An investigator from the district attorney's office picked her up.

He would later email Socias telling him he took care of Jenny's transfer, without elaboration. Socias assumed, from his conversations with Jenny's doctors at St. Joseph, that she would be transferred to a county mental health facility. Instead, the DA's investigator, who was armed, arrested Jenny, handcuffed her and put her in the back of his car. Then he drove her to the Harris County Jail. Jenny's mother could not believe the phone call she received from her daughter telling her that she had been transferred from the hospital to the county jail. The youngest of her three daughters, Jenny had already been through so much. She had watched her daughter, once a smart student and talented athlete, struggle to manage bipolar disorder following her high school graduation. The highs and lows her daughter suffered were only compounded by the trauma of being raped. She had helped prosecutors persuade Jenny to testify because she thought it might bring emotional closure and put a dangerous man in prison. But no one ever said her daughter could be sent to jail while she awaited trial. She wrote Socias on Dec. 20 that Jenny had called her from the jail, asking why she had been transferred there instead of a psychiatric hospital. "This is really unacceptable for a rape victim to put her in jail," she wrote to him via email. The day before Christmas, Jenny's mother again wrote Socias, telling him her daughter was not doing well, not receiving proper medication for her mental illness or any support. She said she understood he wanted Jenny to testify, but it was not working this way. Jenny would not be a good witness if she was kept in jail. "Right now, she is like a caged animal set to explode," she wrote. Three days after Christmas, Jenny went to the jail's psychiatric unit. She had been in jail without her medications for more than a week. She tried to tell Jail staff she was a rape victim, a witness in a criminal trial, not the defendant. But they believed she was confused, questioning her orientation to reality. The jail's records indicated to them that she had been booked in as a suspect. Despite what she said, they insisted she was the one facing sexual assault charges. Her mother sent several more emails to Socias, pleading with him to transfer her out of the jail. Jenny told her she was not being housed in the mental health unit, but in the general population. She was worried about Jenny's safety and feared she could be hurt in jail. Her daughter was a rape victim, not a criminal.

Map of locations Keith Edward Hendricks, a convicted rapist, has been accused of attacking homeless women in a small pocket of Houston's Midtown neighborhood since 2006. The following are locations and dates of reported rapes connected to Hendricks.

Socias said he did not know that Jenny had been taken to the jail until he received an email from her mother on Dec. 20. He was surprised that's where she ended up. He knew that transferring Jenny to the jail — the county's largest de facto mental health provider — was an option, but he thought it would be considered only as a last resort. He began sending emails to jail officials the day after Christmas, explaining Jenny was a mentally ill rape victim. She needed to be placed in the mental health unit, and she needed to receive her medications. Socias said he sent e-mails to at least four different jail officials. Socias said he also offered to lower the $15,000 material witness bond placed on Jenny so that her mother could take custody of her. Socias said he explained to Jenny's mother via email that he would like for Jenny to be with her. But she would be financially liable if her daughter did not show up for court, failed to take her medication or violated any of the terms of her bond, he told her in an email. In Texas, there is no law that authorizes bond forfeiture if someone fails to take medication, only for not showing up to court. But Jenny's mother did not know that. She found Socias' email intimidating and did not think she could realistically bring her daughter home. Socias said he was only trying to express how serious a responsibility it would be to care for Jenny until trial. Socias was frustrated by the system, too. There did not seem to be any semblance of continuity, protocols or dialogue among agencies in dealing with a mentally ill crime victim. He did not understand how the first option to house a rape victim was the jail. Socias visited Jenny three times while she was jailed. He said he offered to have her moved out of the general population, but she liked the inmate tank she was in and did not want to be alone. On Jan. 8, 2016, the Friday before the trial was set to resume, Jenny suffered what her attorneys would later describe as "an acute psychiatric episode" in her cell, loudly pleading with God to come to her rescue. When a guard failed to offer her medical care, according to her attorneys, Jenny experienced a panic attack that escalated into a physical confrontation with a guard, whom Jenny allegedly struck. The guard returned the punch with a closed fist. At least one guard slammed Jenny to the floor and painfully twisted her arms behind her back to handcuff her as she wept. After the incident, Jenny was charged with assault of a public servant.

Jenny was angry and still visibly upset when Socias met with her on Monday morning for trial, he recalled. She had spent 27 days in the county jail. But when he called her to the witness stand, she was collected and coherent during her testimony, despite the altercation over the weekend. Even during rigorous cross-examination by Hendricks' court-appointed defense attorney, Danny Easterling, about her mental health history, she calmly responded that she had suffered from bipolar disorder for several years. She said she felt "more clear" than she had when she testified in December. Easterling asked Jenny about how she initially identified Hendricks to police — she'd said she thought his name was "Kevin Slim." He grilled her about the discrepancy. Jenny remained calm. "His name was Keith. I didn't know that his name wasn't Keith or Kevin," she told him. At times, Jenny answered Easterling with snappy, clever retorts. He asked her about why she walked into the abandoned house with Hendricks. She responded that she had been naïve. Easterling kept questioning her: But what was her mental state that day? Had she suffered from delusions, racing thoughts? "Naivete is technically a mental state," she responded. Jenny told jurors about her upbringing in the Houston suburbs and her time at a community college, before her mental illness became apparent. She told jurors about her time on the streets.She explained she ended up homeless after problems with her family. It had been a brief experience but one she would not wish on anyone. The day she met Hendricks, she'd been staying nights at a homeless shelter near the Fiesta Mart and Sears in Midtown. Socias asked Jenny whether she saw her assailant in the courtroom that day. She said yes, the man sitting in front of her, wearing a yellow tie. Socias asked her about the afternoon of her assault. It had taken place at an abandoned, blue house about a half mile from the bus stop in front of the Fiesta where she met him. When they went inside, Hendricks shut the door, she said. He told her to take off her clothes, get on all fours. She did not feel she had a choice. She thought he might kill her. "I was just — wanted to cry," she testified. Hendricks proceeded to rape her, vaginally and anally. Jenny told jurors she did not want to have sex with him and tried to fight back. "He just choked me and tried to strangle me, after I tried fighting," she told jurors. Jenny remembered coming in and out of consciousness once the choking started. At one point, he began punching Jenny in the face. Socias asked her how it all ended. "... He just let me go, like, I don't know what happened; I woke up, and he told me to put my clothes on, and then he opened the door, and I ran, I just ran," she said.

Jenny knocked on doors nearby until she flagged down a motorist who would help her. In all, she spent the first full day of the trial on the witness stand, maintaining her composure throughout. Pedro Moreno, then more than two years into his retirement from HPD as a sex-crimes investigator, testified the following day. He told the jury that as soon as he was assigned to work on Jenny's case, he did what he always did and set off to find the victim. It was part of his job to figure out the facts and get a feel for the victim's story. Socias asked if Jenny gave him a name of the suspect when he met her. Did she say the names, Slim, Chicago Slim and Kevin? She did, Moreno answered. Who did Moreno determine that person was? Socias asked. Keith Hendricks, Moreno replied. He was the man wearing the black suit and the gray tie in court. Socias asked if she'd identified her attacker from a photo lineup. She had, Moreno said. She picked the person in the third frame of the six-picture spread, Hendricks. She circled the photo and dated it. He testified that she'd also given a sworn statement to the facts of the case.

Hendricks' attorney peppered Moreno with questions about the technicalities of his report, whether he'd properly documented Jenny's identification of Hendricks and if he had taken down her statement in her own words. Socias, on redirect, asked Moreno: Are the homeless more likely to be victims of crime? Yes, Moreno testified. "They're a lot more susceptible to being sexually assaulted, robbed, beaten." Moreno hoped this could be the case that finally sent Hendricks to prison — the last time he'd be called to testify against him. To rebut a defense theory that this was an incident involving consensual sex, Socias asked Judge Bond to allow him to bring in evidence from three of Hendricks' other alleged rapes: the September 2006 attack on a woman named Jean near a construction site, the October 2006 rape of a woman named Dawn, now deceased, and Kristy Anderson's 2010 aggravated sexual assault on Blodgett. A jury is generally asked to evaluate a defendant's guilt or innocence based only on the evidence of the crime for which he or she is standing trial. The burden of proof prosecutors must show to introduce other alleged offenses is high. But by the time of Jenny's trial, Texas law had changed and made it easier for prosecutors to bring additional offenses into sexual assault cases. Though the decision still fell to the judge, the new law put the onus on the defense to prove why the extraneous cases should not be allowed into trial. During Hendricks' 2009 rape trial, before the evidentiary shift, a judge refused to allow in two other rapes, what the prosecutor believed was a critical factor in Hendricks' acquittal. This time, Easterling objected, arguing in part that the prosecution should not be allowed to bring in such evidence because none of the victims were in court to testify. Bond overruled the defense's objections. Though she acknowledged the court was in "uncharted waters" by letting in the extraneous offenses without live testimony from victims, she would allow it. Over the next four days, the jury also heard testimony from DNA experts and hospital officials. An analysis of the rape kit in Jean's September 2006 sexual assault, untested for seven years, showed that there was only a 1-in-13-quintillion chance that the DNA had come from someone other than Hendricks. An analysis in Dawn's October 2006 rape produced the same 1-in-13-quintillion likelihood. In Kristy Anderson's April 2010 assault, results showed a 1-in-1.3-million chance the DNA sperm sample collected from her face belonged to someone besides Hendricks. When it came time for closing arguments on the fourth day of the trial, Easterling focused on the criminal backgrounds of the three other victims, telling the jury that their claims were not believable because they were mentally ill and, in two cases, drug addicts. Socias stressed to the jury that Hendricks picked his victims for the very reasons the defense had outlined. "What we see as people needing the most protection, the most very vulnerable, homeless women living on the streets, he sees as an easy target," Socias told jurors. "Perfect target for him because he thinks, 'Who's going to believe these girls? Who's going to care?'" The jury left to deliberate. It wouldn't take long before jurors made their decision: guilty. "What we see as people needing the most protection...he sees as an easy target." After the verdict, her mother had been calling prosecutors, reminding them that her daughter was a rape victim, and she should not be held in jail. But they would not help her. She finally reached Inspector General Nick Lykos in the County Attorney’s Office. Listening to her plea, Lykos was incredulous. He immediately made inquiries and verified the facts. Within 10 hours of the verdict, authorities dismissed the criminal assault charges against Jenny, and she was released from custody. Harris County had finally managed to convict Hendricks, more than a decade after he'd come to Houston and been accused of several violent rapes. His alleged crimes spanned two Houston police chiefs and five Harris County district attorneys. In July, Jenny filed a federal lawsuit against prosecutors and Harris County, claiming that her constitutional rights had been violated during an unlawful incarceration. "As a rape victim," Jenny's lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, "Plaintiff experienced the trauma of rape not just as a sexual violation, but more significantly as an overwhelming and terrifying sense of powerlessness, helplessness, hopelessness, lack of control, and an overall deprivation of her personal integrity." Her attorneys asserted that the court order used in the case was illegally obtained and wrote that her jailing amounted to being "re-raped." The lawsuit provoked outrage from women's rights activists and rape victims' counselors across America, who couldn't believe that authorities had jailed Jenny and then failed to protect her in custody.

Then-District Attorney Devon Anderson aggressively defended the tactic at first, saying in a video statement that it had come in an "extraordinarily difficult and unusual situation" that left prosecutors "no apparent alternatives that would ensure both the victim's safety and her appearance in trial." Her tone softened in a later interview in which she expressed concern for Jenny. "I became a prosecutor because of rape victims and sexual assault, so this one has been very difficult for me," she said. "I don't want people to think that this is what we do to victims. It's just not. This is an extraordinary set of circumstances, a perfect storm."