Initially, the only reaction to the e-mail McFadyen received came from his teammate Erik Henkelman at practice the next morning. “I distinctly remember Erik Henkelman getting my joke,” McFadyen recalls. “I walked in, and he was like, ‘Dude, that e-mail was so funny.’” Afterward, “We’re walking towards East Campus, and there’s a cop car parked in front of 610,” McFadyen says, and the police were talking to some of his teammates. “Apparently, that stripper [Mangum] called the cops or something.” It would be another day or two before Coach Pressler told players that Mangum was claiming she had been raped.

At first, according to McFadyen, the players did not think it was a big deal to give DNA samples to the Durham police. “We were so convinced that nothing happened,” he recalls. “The cops were like, ‘You give it and nothing matches, it’ll be over.’ O.K., well, nothing is going to match. Take our DNA. Just take what you need.” He said the police took a mouth swab, some of his hair and fingernails. Since Mangum had told investigators that she had viciously scratched her attacker, the police were also looking for evidence of scratches on the players’ bodies. At the Durham police station, the 46 white lacrosse players on the Duke team stripped down to their boxers. “We all got basically naked and they took pictures of our bodies,” McFadyen says. “I mean, we’re lacrosse players. We’re young, 20-year-old guys. We’re covered in bruises. We’re scratched up. I remember Reade [Seligmann, a sophomore midfielder] had a—because we beat the shit out of him in practice—had a bruise down his arm. ‘Oh my god,’ they said, ‘take a picture of this,’ and they’re documenting his arm.”

On March 27—two weeks after the party—Durham police officers Mark Gottlieb and Benjamin Himan were in a training class when Police Corporal David Addison summoned Gottlieb to step outside to see a “disturbing message”: Ryan McFadyen’s e-mail. The officers agreed it “was written in a manner that indicated the possibility of two or more people may have conspired to kill someone,” according to Gottlieb, the lead police investigator on the lacrosse case. The e-mail—which found its way to investigators through CrimeStoppers, a community-oriented program coordinated by Addison—had been sent by one Ryan McFadyen, just before two A.M. in the early morning hours of March 14, some 90 minutes after the party at 610 North Buchanan had ended.

After the officers reviewed the e-mail, they went to see Nifong, the Durham County D.A., at the Durham courthouse. Nifong authorized Gottlieb and Himan to pursue a warrant to search McFadyen’s dorm room, even though Mangum had previously ruled out McFadyen as one of her attackers.

To the original five crimes—first-degree rape, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree sexual offense, common-law robbery, and “felonious strangulation”—that the officers believed were committed in the house on the night of March 13, they now added a sixth: conspiracy to commit murder. Durham Superior Court Judge Ronald Stephens granted Nifong and the officers the search warrant they were seeking, but he ordered it sealed indefinitely, meaning that it could not be made public until the court chose to do so.

Six police officers, accompanied by a member of the Duke University police force, began the search of McFadyen’s dorm room at 6:01 P.M. Gottlieb and Himan led the team. After knocking on the door to McFadyen’s room and announcing he was a police officer, Himan served the warrant on Brad Ross, a sophomore midfielder and McFadyen’s roommate. While in their reports Gottlieb and Himan described a calm scene, there was at least one other perspective. According to a court document filed by Robert Ekstrand, a Durham attorney and Duke graduate who represented many of the lacrosse players in the months to follow, “Gottlieb, in particular, was in a rage. The officers destroyed furniture, and needlessly threw clothes, papers, cords, and books everywhere.” Gottlieb left before the search concluded. But before he did, Gottlieb noted that “inside the room were a number of hand drawn penises on the wall with team member’s nicknames, jersey numbers, and questionable racial/ethnic things written on same.”