Oklahoma City Police Detective Kim Davis groans as she wakes to her cellphone ringing.
After more than 27 years as a cop, she’s grown used to such middle-of-the-night summonses. But tonight, filling in for her partner, she’d hoped to avoid catching any calls.
She grabs her phone off the bedside table and slips into the kitchen trying not to wake her husband, Cecil, a fellow officer, who’d just gotten home from his shift about an hour before.
A lieutenant tells Davis a woman is claiming that she’s been sexually assaulted by a police officer.
Davis, 49, scribbles a few details on a notepad she keeps on the kitchen counter just for calls like this. She tells the lieutenant she’ll meet the victim at Southwest Medical Center where the woman can be examined.
Davis takes a quick shower to wake up then dresses in typical summer work attire — jeans, tennis shoes and a tan polo shirt with an Oklahoma City Police Sex Crimes unit logo.
She takes a quick look in the mirror and is thankful once again for her short hairstyle that only needs a quick brush to look presentable. She notices the gray is peeking through the brown and makes a mental note that she needs to get it colored again soon. She throws on a blue windbreaker, slips the lanyard holding her police badge around her neck and clips the holster carrying her 9 mm Smith and Wesson to her belt.
Before she heads out the door, she wakes Cecil with a hand on his shoulder to let him know she’s leaving, a routine they’ve developed during their 17-year marriage. As a member of the department’s tactical team, he’s had plenty of his own late-night call outs.
He mumbles an OK, tells her to be careful and that he loves her.
From experience, Davis knows this will probably come to nothing. Almost once a month it seems the department gets a complaint like this against an officer, almost always involving a person upset over getting arrested.
Davis knows that most of the allegations prove false. Almost always, it’s an angry suspect looking to get out of jail or get back at what they perceive as an overly aggressive cop.
Of the dozen or so cases she’d investigated over the years, none had resulted in charges being filed.
She knows the truth typically works itself out pretty quickly, usually as soon as she interviews the alleged victim. Typically, liars can’t keep their story straight.
Davis arrives at the hospital about 5 a.m. There, she’s met by another lieutenant who tells Davis that the victim is a 57-year-old black woman who claims she was stopped by a police officer about three hours earlier on NE 50 Street near Lincoln Boulevard in northeast Oklahoma City.
Little older than normal, Davis thinks.
What was she arrested for? Davis asks.
She wasn’t, the lieutenant responds.
Did she get a ticket or anything? Davis asks.
Nope, comes the reply.
She wasn’t getting out of a ticket. She wasn’t getting out of an arrest. No obvious motive.
Strange, Davis thinks.
Down a hallway, Davis knocks before entering a small examination room reserved for sexual assault victims.
The woman is alone, sitting up in a hospital bed quietly crying. She’s wearing jeans, a white, collarless blouse and tennis shoes. The woman wipes her eyes and straightens up.
To Davis, she looks like somebody’s grandmother.
Davis introduces herself, tells the woman she’s a sex crimes detective, that she’ll be investigating her claims and that she wants to hear her story.
Between sobs, the woman, Jannie Ligons, recounts her night.
She tells Davis how she’d been playing cards and dominoes at a friend’s house and was on her way home when she saw a police car pull up next to her red Pontiac Grand Am then fall back and pull in behind her. When the officer flashed his emergency lights, Ligons said she quickly pulled over. Ligons tells Davis she’d smoked a little marijuana earlier that night but hadn’t been drinking.
Ligons details how the officer told her she’d been swerving and ordered her out of her car. She said he’d asked her to walk back to his car, told her she looked like she’d been drinking and asked whether she had any alcohol in the car. He told her he’d take her to jail if she lied. She told him she didn’t.
He patted her down, ordered her to sit in his backseat and searched her car, she tells Davis.
Ligons tells Davis the assault began a few minutes later when the officer returned to his patrol car. First, Ligons says, he ordered her to lift her shirt and bra then shined a flashlight on her exposed breasts. Next, he ordered her to lower her jeans. At first, she says, she thought he was kidding. Then, fear set in.
Through tears, Ligons tells Davis she begged the officer, saying, “You’re not supposed to do this.”
Eventually, he forced her to perform oral sex, she says, at one point telling her to hurry up, that he’d just gotten off work and was tired.
She tells Davis how she spent much of the assault staring at the officer’s holstered sidearm and avoiding looking at his name badge. She says she feared for her life. No way she thought an officer would be that bold and let his victim live to talk, she tells Davis. She’d even asked the officer at one point if he was going to kill her, Ligons says.
She describes her attacker as white, between 35 and 45 years old, 5-foot-7 to 5-foot-9 inches tall, with a thick build and blond hair.
