The Lie That “Just Happens”

In his small, shared cell at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, Dawit Bekele went into a panic. His heart began to race. Finally a guard took him to a nurse.

Craig LaRotonda/Revelation Studios

Courtesy of the King County Sheriff's Office

The kidnapper who does not exist.

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More About

• Dawit Bekele
• Katherine Clifton
• Robert Flennaugh
• Sexual Offenses
• Crime

As he underwent an exam, Bekele tried desperately to convince the nurse he had done nothing wrong, that he was an innocent man. The nurse tried to comfort him, saying that just because he had committed a terrible crime—namely, raped one of his students at a local community college—didn't mean he was a bad person.

"The first three or four days were complete hell," recalls Bekele (not his real name), who spent nine days behind bars and agreed to describe his experience to Seattle Weekly if we did not identify him. "Especially at night. It felt like the demons are coming to make you go crazy."

It was the summer of 2007, and Bekele, a popular psychology professor and licensed therapist, had been teaching a course on organizational behavior. One day he received a call from his union representative informing him that he was no longer allowed on campus and that a replacement instructor had been assigned to his class. When he asked for details, the rep said something about an investigation and disciplinary action. "He was very vague," says Bekele, whose accent bears a trace of his upbringing in Ethiopia, where he lived until age 18.

Though he didn't know exactly what was going on, Bekele understood his employment contract well enough to know that whatever it was, it must be a big deal for him to be removed from the classroom. He and his wife took a walk to talk about what might come next. He prayed with the priest at his Eastern Orthodox church. "Even if they come to kill you, don't lose your faith," Bekele remembers the priest saying. It wasn't all that helpful at that moment.

On July 12, after Bekele packed his 5-year-old daughter off to school, two King County Sheriff's deputies showed up at his door. They had been contacted by one of his students, Katherine Clifton. She told them Bekele had been stalking her, showing up frequently at her job, and had even struck her in a fit of rage. She showed investigators e-mails from Bekele expressing romantic interest in her, advances she claimed to have rebuffed. And she told them that on July 5, he had broken into her apartment, wrapped a strip of fabric around her neck, and raped her.

The deputies told Bekele the accusations against him, handcuffed him, and put him in the back of a squad car. Then they searched his house.

When they returned to the car, one of the detectives showed him printouts of the e-mails Clifton had supplied. "He said, 'This is your chance to come clean,'" Bekele remembers. "I said, 'That's not me.'"

They drove him to the Maleng Regional Justice Center, where he was booked. "Next thing I knew I was stripped and put on the orange suit," he says.

Fortunately for Bekele, even as prosecutors imprisoned him and filed charges against him, they continued to investigate the evidence. They determined that both sides of the e-mail exchange had been sent from Clifton's own computer. That's when her allegations began to fall apart. Bekele's friends provided an alibi, saying he'd been at a dinner party with them on the night of the alleged rape. Eventually, Clifton confessed to inventing the whole story.

"To this day, we have no clue why she made this up," says Bekele's attorney, Robert Flennaugh. While the charges were pending, Flennaugh had tried, as defense lawyers do, to come up with some reason why Clifton might have dreamt up a false claim—some motivation, a grudge. In rape cases especially, when it's one person's word against another's, jurors need to see some reason for the victim to lie, especially considering how painful it is to come forward with such a charge.

Clifton had once contested a grade from Bekele, thinking she deserved a 4.0 after receiving a 3.9. And she'd sent him one e-mail that seemed possibly inappropriate. But that was it, Flennaugh says. They'd had no other contact outside the classroom.

Flennaugh would have had a tough time raising doubts in jurors' minds about the accuser's motives, a fact that still makes him shudder. Had she not gone so far as to create the bogus e-mails, his client would likely be facing a possible prison term, Flennaugh says. "If she hadn't lied too much, where would we be? We'd be in trial."

The phenomenon of completely unmotivated lying—or, at least, lying with no readily understandable motive—is a rare one in the criminal justice realm. Most of the time people lie for clear and obvious reasons—to exonerate themselves or cover up some other misdeed. But as Flennaugh says, "Sometimes cases happen and it has nothing to do with motivation at all."

Seattle-based forensic psychologist David Dixon, who evaluates defendants during criminal trials—including people accused of filing false police reports—prior to their sentencing, says the few cases of this sort that he has come across suggest an underlying mental disorder that goes much deeper than telling a lie. And in his experience, most of those cases are set in motion by women. "I'm not exactly sure why," he says.