Across 20 years and 2 trials, an accusation of childhood rape

Matt Mencarini | Lansing State Journal

LANSING - Ryan Lewis sat on a bench outside the courthouse in downtown Mason and smoked cigarettes.

Marlboro Black Menthols, the first pack his father ever bought him.

He sat and he smoked and he waited.

Inside the courthouse, jurors were deciding whether they believed that his former dentist had raped him when he was a child.

It happened on a brown leather couch in Wendell Racette’s private office, Lewis had told the jury days before. Racette raped him while he was under the effects of nitrous oxide, he testified, forced him to perform oral sex and threatened to kill him and sexually assault his sisters if he told anybody.

The abuse started in 1996, when Lewis was 5, he said, and continued until he was 10.

It had taken Lewis more than a decade to come forward. It took the jury five hours to convict Racette on 15 counts of criminal sexual conduct.

It wasn't until each juror confirmed the verdict that the reality set in. Lewis put his face in his hands and cried.

That was Aug. 24, 2012, a Friday, less than a year after an earlier trial ended with a hung jury. Since that day, Lewis has wrestled with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s been intermittently homeless. He’s struggled to move on and start the rest of his life. He doesn’t want to be defined by what happened to him or by its aftermath.

"It’s getting easier because I feel like I’m strong enough to do it," he said. "I'm not saying it's easy. ... It's easy because I wake up every day and I try."

In September, the Michigan Court of Appeals granted Racette a third trial, in part, because it said the jury was given too much evidence of Racette’s other alleged abuses of former patients. Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III appealed the decision.

Weeks after the Court of Appeals ruling, Lewis, who is now 25, decided he was ready to tell his story publicly. He didn’t want to be an unnamed victim any longer.

“A victim has a voice, too,” he said.

Lewis is a former college football player. His presence can't be missed in a room. But he speaks gently, guarded at first, slowly opening up as he talks.

In a series of interviews with the Lansing State Journal, he talked about his life, about how the criminal justice system treats victims, about what it was like to testify against the man he said abused him.

"If one word helps somebody, that's what I meant to do," he said.

The state Supreme Court denied Dunnings’ appeal on Dec. 23.

Racette, now 69, will get a new trial or, if Dunnings decides not to press on with the case, he will go free.

Lewis might have to take the stand again and tell his story one more time.

'Allows you to take control'

One day in March 2005, during his freshman year at Everett High School, Lewis left class. He went north on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, to where it crosses the Grand River near the General Motors' Grand River Assembly plant. He sat for four hours and thought about jumping.

"I didn't want to be around anymore," he said. "I was just sad. A lot of my emotions, I couldn't explain to anybody. So I just really felt alone."

He didn't jump. He went home and talked to his parents, not about being raped, but about needing help.

He was admitted at Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services in Grand Rapids. The stay didn't resolve anything. After five days, he didn't want to be there anymore, so he said and did what he needed to get out.

He wouldn’t try to kill himself until years later, on a Sunday morning while his family was getting ready to go to church.

He swallowed "60 to 100 pills ... a bunch of different pills," he said. There was a note on the table and Lewis unresponsive in his bedroom. He woke up four hours later at the hospital.

Neither of his parents could comprehend Lewis' psychological troubles, according to court records. And there was other troubling behavior. Lewis' father was a law enforcement officer. In early 2010, Lewis took his service weapon without permission and shot about 28 rounds with his friends.

"I kind of reached a point in the relationship with my parents where it was hard for me to move forward in my life with this still a hindrance," Lewis said. "So I decided to tell them what had happened to me."

He told his mother first, sitting on the bed in his parents' bedroom. In shock, she called out to Lewis' father, who was in the kitchen making breakfast.

"It was hard for them to grasp, and it was hard for them to deal with, being parents and feeling like they're somewhat responsible," he said. "And so I tried to alleviate that and tried to explain to them that I don't blame them and that this is something that has happened to me and as a family we need to come to terms with it."

He still wasn't ready to go to the police. He wouldn't be for nearly a year.

Racette’s license was suspended in 2000 and revoked the next year for Medicaid fraud. That was the reason Lewis stopped being his patient. It was reinstated in 2009.

Near the end of 2010, Lewis found out Racette was working as a dentist again and could work with children.

"When I found out that he was working with kids again, it didn't sit well with me," Lewis said. He didn't want others to be victimized. "It was just something I couldn't live with knowing."

What came next is laid out in court records from a 2011 trial, which ended in a hung jury, and the 2012 trial that sent Racette to prison.

On Dec. 10, 2010, Lewis met with Lansing police Det. Elizabeth Reust, who specialized in cases involving the alleged sexual assault of children. For the next 30 minutes, he told her what he could about the nightmares and memories of the abuse, according to court records.

Lewis seemed terrified, Reust later testified.

Reust is no longer a Lansing police detective. She declined to be interviewed for this story, citing the possibility of a third trial that could include her as a witness.

Police executed a search warrant of Racette's former office on East Saginaw Street, where they found condoms and pornography and the files for Lewis and his two sisters among others.

The couch Lewis said he was raped on a decade earlier was gone.

As Reust walked through the office, it appeared as if "somebody had worked there yesterday and left to go home like they were coming back the next day," she testified during the second trial. The dental instruments were still out on trays.

The practice had been closed for 10 years. Racette had been working out of an office in Mt. Pleasant. When police returned after the first trial to execute a second search warrant, the patient files for Lewis and his sisters were gone.

Weeks before the arrest, Reust called the practice in Mt. Pleasant and left a message for Racette. He called back the same day.

She told him who she was and that she was investigating a complaint that he had touched a child inappropriately.

She told him it allegedly happened 10 years ago, but didn't say it involved a former patient. He told her he wasn’t practicing dentistry at that time, and she clarified that the incidents were alleged to have happened between 1995 and 2000.

He then twice told her the statute of limitations was up on those incidents. He denied knowing Lewis. He never denied the allegations, Reust testified.

Racette was arraigned on Jan. 24, 2011. It was the day after Lewis' 21st birthday.

The investigations before and after the arrest were "strenuous," Lewis said in December, with many interviews and discussions about what happened to him and when.

For many victims, sexual assault investigations can be far worse, experts say, shifting the blame for assaults, making them victims all over again.

But for Lewis, it allowed him to take control over something he had been hiding.

"A lot of people live their entire lives with secrets," he said. "And that, it affects you. And the more you try to deny, the more you try to move past and say 'I’m strong and I can defeat it,' (the more) it will continue to affect you. And until you come to terms with that, it will be a negative impact on your life."

'Justice is not being afraid'

The first time Shari Murgittroyd met Lewis, he just showed up to her office at Michigan State University's Counseling Center.

"He needed everything," she said.

It was after Racette's conviction. Lewis was coming off a nearly 18-month stretch filled with police investigations and trials. He was homeless, going from couch to couch. He was trying to get on Medicaid and food assistance. He needed counseling.

Murgittroyd said she could tell right away that Lewis had post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and insomnia.

"He would have intrusive memories, flashbacks of the events," she said. Lewis gave Murgittroyd permission to speak with the State Journal about his treatment.

That first meeting lasted an hour. She gave him bus tokens, talked about in-depth counseling options and went over breathing exercises for when flashbacks crept up.

"Sometimes we wouldn't talk for a couple weeks and he would just walk in," Murgittroyd said.

She helped connect him with groups that could pay for a cell phone or medication, or connect him with therapists. And she's continued to help him.

In one sense, Lewis was fortunate, she said.

“You don’t see that very often, where perpetrators actually get held accountable and go to prison,” she said.

In 2014, only a third of rapes or sexual assaults were actually reported to police, according to a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice.

One reason is the "incredibly traumatic" process sexual assault survivors encounter in the criminal justice system, said Rebecca Campbell, a psychology professor at Michigan State University who specializes in sexual assault and how the legal and medical systems respond to the needs of rape victims.

The word many victims use to describe the criminal justice system is “toxic,” she said. Police and prosecutors often don’t believe them. Victims face demeaning and intense cross-examination as witnesses.

But studies have shown the rate of false reporting is low. A 2009 study by the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women put it at 2 to 8 percent.

Keeping rape or sexual assault a secret has a "tremendous emotional physical toll on the brain and the body" that can lead to depression, anxiety and PTSD, Campbell said.

Lewis knows this.

"You kind of walk around with a weight on your life when you don't come forward with these things," he said. "And if you're not careful, it will bring you down."

He has triggers. Blue walls in a doctor's office. Latex gloves. Once a smell while riding the bus sent his mind back to trauma.

Counseling and support and therapy have helped. So did the birth of his daughter, Ramaya, who turned 4 in November.

And so did coming forward, even if it meant facing Racette again and testifying in open court

"Justice is not being afraid," Lewis said. "For my entire life, as far as I can remember, I was afraid, terrified, angry, resentful. And coming forward sets you free."

'I could look at tomorrow'

The second trial started on a Monday.

During her opening statements, Ingham County Assistant Prosecutor Debra Rousseau described Racette as "a master manipulator" who enjoyed inflicting pain on children.

Lewis, she said, had gone “from being a troubled adolescent to a man carrying a burden to a man strong enough to finally tell the world what happened.”

Lewis' testimony took hours. He remembers all the eyes on him, the feeling of judgment, the courtroom’s detailed woodwork, the jury to his left, the judge to his right and his family sitting in the gallery where he could look to them for comfort.

He needed to keep his emotions in check, unsure how the jury might read them. He wanted to flee the courtroom. He wanted to lunge at Racette, seated about 30 feet away.

"If you could be in combat with someone, visually…" he said, describing the few instances in which the two made eye contact. “Both of you want to tear at each other.”

“This was my moment to get justice. This was me in power with him in the room."

The second jury was given the case on a Friday. Five hours later, it came back with its verdicts.

"When they all go through the line and say 'guilty,' that's when I broke down,” Lewis said.

Racette was sentenced the next month. His earliest release date would have been in 2027.

"I felt like I could look at tomorrow," Lewis said. "Everything was just a new day."

But according to the appeals court, Racette wasn’t given a fair trial.

"The jury was helped by inadmissible evidence," said Lawrence Emery, Racette's attorney for the appeal. “You have a man who is sitting in prison because of it.”

'I'm happy'

On her final day of work in the late 1970s, one of Racette's former receptionists went to the Lansing Police Department to report his abuse of patients. She worked for him for two years and left because she didn't want to be around his abuse any longer.

Her report was ignored, prosecutors said in their appeal to the Supreme Court.

She testified during the second trial that Racette inflicted unnecessary pain on children, leaving welts and red marks. She told the jury she saw children crying and shaking from the pain.

She was among the "parade of witnesses" Ingham County prosecutors presented the jury, their testimony painting Racette "as a wicked man who has a propensity to abuse children," the Court of Appeals said in its order granting a third trial.

In criminal cases, a defendant’s previous actions can’t be brought up if their only purpose is to provide evidence of the accused’s character or to argue that a crime would have fit with that character. To be admissible, they must do more, and judges have to consider whether admitting that sort of testimony will prejudice a jury.

In Racette’s case, the Court of Appeals ruled that the many former staffers and patients testifying against him might have.

The defense strategy at trial was that Racette saw far too many patients each day — between 40 and 60 — to have time to rape or abuse Lewis without others knowing. Racette's attorneys also called former staffers and parents of patients who testified they never saw Racette abuse patients and that parents were allowed in the treating room.

They presented expert testimony that dental schools used to teach techniques for gaining compliance, such as grabbing patients by the shoulder, putting hands over their mouth or "stern voice control."

Complicating matters now is a civil suit Lewis filed against Racette before the second trial. During depositions and discovery, "medical, dental, psychological, academic and other factual information" was found that Racette's attorneys said cast "serious doubt" on whether the abuse happened.

Emery said much of that evidence was excluded from the second criminal trial.

New information from the civil suit has given prosecutors pause as they decide whether to pursue a third.

Dunnings declined to be interviewed for this story.

"Why would a kid make up of all this?” Emery said. “He has a fertile imagination.”

Which is not the assessment of his counselor. Murgittroyd calls Lewis a hero for coming forward, even if he doesn’t necessarily think of himself that way.

"I think on some level he understands that he’s helping others," she said, "and he stopped a predator from continuing and harming other children or harming other adults even.”

Lewis understands that healing and justice is a process he doesn't always control.

"I'm happy for the first time in my life," he said. "I am truly happy. And the one thing I wake up every day with now is trying to spread that, because I've been somewhere where I wasn't happy.

"And I know there are other people still living in that. And I want to be able to get them get out of that."

Months before the fate of a third trial was set, Lewis was already preparing himself for the possibility.

"If anything, the upcoming possibility of a third trial is just reinvigorating," he said. "To me, it's just, how many times do I have to prove myself? And I’m not afraid to."

Contact Matt Mencarini at (517) 267-1347 or mmencarini@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter@MattMencarini.

Resources for sexual assault victims.

National

Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network

24-Hour Crisis Line: 1-800-656-HOPE (4673)

www.rainn.org

Ingham County

End Violent Encounters (EVE Inc.)

24-Hour Crisis Line: 517-372-5572

www.eveinc.org

Firecracker Foundation

Office Line: 517-242-5467

www.thefirecrackerfoundation.org

MSU Sexual Assault Program

24-Hour Crisis Line: 517-372-6666

www.endrape.msu.edu

Clinton County

Safe Center

24-Hour Crisis Line: 877-952-7283

http://www.thesafecenter.org

Eaton County

SIREN Eaton Shelter

24-Hour Crisis Line: 517-543-4915

www.sireneatonshelter.org