Over the next few days Tittsworth told Griffith her terrible secret. Eight years before, when she was 17 years old, she lived in tiny Mt. Vernon, Texas, a region dominated by coal mines and chicken-processing plants. Henson, a newly hired police officer there, had pulled her car over and brought her back to the local station house. There, in a room lit only by a Coke machine, she says he repeatedly raped her. Griffith was stunned. “I’ve been around cops my whole adult life,” drawled Griffith, a bantam of a man who’d made a career in law enforcement. “I never heard of anything like this.” Griffith then did the only thing he knew how to do. He set out to investigate the alleged sexual assault of the woman who would soon be his wife. Over the next 18 months seven women–including Tittsworth, her best friend, a robbery victim and a policewoman–would accuse Henson of sexual impropriety and assaults spanning nearly a decade. Henson initially denied the allegations, but as the number of accusers grew he changed his story, saying that in each case where sex was involved it was consensual. Henson was never charged with a crime, and through his lawyer, Robert Bass, he declined to be interviewed by NEWSWEEK. Bass describes Henson as a “sexual opportunist, rather than a rapist,” a man who merely accepted sex when it was offered and found, through his work as a police officer, that sex was offered quite a bit. But Griffith became convinced that Henson used the power and authority of his badge to prey upon women he was sworn to protect.
In the colorful history of policing, bad cops–though a tiny percentage of all officers–are a fact of life. Even in well-run departments, pockets of rogue officers have been responsible for corruption, drug dealing and brutality. Recently a spate of cases has surfaced around the country, in Sparks, Nev.; Wallkill, N.Y.; Washington, D.C., and Suffolk and Nassau Counties in New York, focusing attention on another way cops go bad: they sexually harass or even sexually assault women. Although crimes of this sort are not new and no statistics are kept nationwide, victims have begun breaking the silence. And no wonder. In the past decade debates in the workplace and on college campuses have given sexual harassment and date rape a place in our national dialogue. At the same time high-profile cases of police misconduct–from Rodney King to Abner Louima–have offered stark reminders of how police officers can cross the line. Ironically, big-city police departments like the ones in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are best equipped to handle charges of sexual misconduct. Their internal-affairs departments were created to weed out bad cops and bring them to justice. But three quarters of the country’s 640,000 police officers work in small and midsize departments. These suburban and rural forces rarely have the expertise or the resources to police the police. “Often police departments just want to sweep these kinds of cases under the rug,” says Penny Harrington, a former police chief from Portland, Ore. “These complaints are handled poorly and investigated badly, if at all.”
Tom Griffith thought he was well qualified to bring a bad cop to justice. The son of a Baptist preacher, he was raised with a rigid sense of right and wrong. He liked and respected members of the insular group–the good ole boy network, as he calls it–that runs law enforcement in east Texas. But he’d also seen the lengths they would go to to protect one another. “I knew that this might get bad,” said Griffith, “I just didn’t know how bad.” A few days after his wedding, he set out to gather the facts.
Tittsworth’s account never wavered. She described how in July 1991 Henson, then 34 and built like a refrigerator, ordered Tittsworth, who stands 4 feet 10 and weighs about 80 pounds, to follow him in her car. Nervous and perplexed, she did as she was told. She knew him slightly. A few weeks before she’d asked him to look in on her best friend, who had had too much to drink. But when they got to the tiny Mt. Vernon station house, Henson, 6 feet 2 and 250 pounds, brought her into an interrogation room, snapped off the light, pulled down her pants, pushed her face down on the table and attempted to penetrate her. “I was screaming ‘No! No! Stop it!’ " recalls Tittsworth, her thin voice quavering. Afterward, she says, Henson looked at her hard and put his hand on his gun belt. “You know what will happen if this gets out.” She thought he meant to shoot her. Twenty-four hours later, without a word to even her best friend, Shonda Allen, Tittsworth moved 250 miles away to Oklahoma City. Two years of crippling depression followed. “At 17, I didn’t know there was anywhere I could go to report it,” she says mournfully. “In my eyes, Henson was the law.”
Sexual assaults are tricky cases to investigate. In many instances, allegations boil down to he said, she said. But this time other alleged victims were not hard to find. When Tittsworth moved back to town two years later, in 1993, Allen arranged to meet her at a local steakhouse. Swearing her best friend to secrecy, Tittsworth told her about Henson’s alleged attack. The usually stoic Allen broke down. “Me too,” she said, choking. A few weeks before their high-school graduation, Allen said, Henson pulled her over during a traffic stop, grabbed her head and allegedly demanded oral sex. But there was more. On graduation night, when Tittsworth had trustingly asked Henson to check in on Allen, Allen said she woke to find Henson had entered the unlocked door, had pushed her up against a wall and was penetrating her. “I opened my eyes because I heard the police radio,” recalls Allen. Afterward, she says, he asked her, “Who do you think folks will believe if you tell? You or me?”
After listening carefully to Tittsworth’s and Allen’s accounts, Griffith did a strange thing for a man just back from his honeymoon: he asked his wife and her best friend to write out formal statements and sign them. Then he asked the two women to take polygraph tests. Tittsworth, already high-strung, became hysterical under questioning and could not continue. Allen, the steadier of the two, passed with flying colors.
Griffith began making cautious inquiries into Henson’s past. He phoned a friend in nearby Greenville, where Henson had gone to work after he left Mt. Vernon. Griffith learned that Henson had been dismissed from the department there because of two accusations alleging sexual misconduct: one, that he pulled over a police-radio dispatcher and propositioned her; the other, that he drove a drunken officer and his wife home after a party, put the officer to bed and then masturbated in front of the wife. (In a later deposition, Henson denied both allegations.) “I became thoroughly convinced,” said Griffith, “that Henson was a pattern serial sex offender.”
With written statements from the dispatcher, Allen and his wife, Griffith tried to figure out what to do. Henson was a popular deputy who was well liked by his fellow officers. Griffith feared breaking the unwritten code that cops protect their own. Worse, the alleged crimes were too old to prosecute. In small-town Texas, where memories are long and judgments are harsh, Griffith didn’t want to expose the women to unwanted publicity for a case that would go nowhere. But he was convinced that Henson should not be a cop. It was the schoolchildren, he said, that made up his mind. “I’ve always told kids, if you have a problem, you can always trust a policeman,” says Griffith. “I couldn’t live with the thought that I had driven defenseless young girls to someone like Henson. It just stuck in my mind like a briar.”
While Griffith fretted, Henson left Camp County and took a job as captain in the Titus County sheriff’s office. Griffith finally sought a meeting with Henson’s boss there, Sheriff Arvel Shepard. Griffith presented him with an official-looking “investigation file” he’d put together. Take Henson’s badge, Griffith urged. Shepard suspended Henson with pay and contacted the elite Texas Rangers to look into the claims. As Griffith had feared, the allegations were too old to prosecute, and the Rangers quietly closed the case. Still troubled, Shepard says he told Henson he planned to launch his own internal-affairs investigation into the allegations. Henson, Shepard says, resigned on the spot. But any misgivings Shepard might have had were apparently short-lived. A week later Henson was rehired by Sheriff Alan McCandless in Camp County. “So it’s gone,” Henson boasted to a local reporter, referring to the allegations against him. McCandless told the reporter he was glad to have Henson back. “He’s an excellent employee.” And Shepard backed him up. Henson hadn’t been forced to resign, Shepard told the paper; “it’s just over.”
The battlelines were now clearly drawn. Seething, the women filed a federal lawsuit, and Tom Griffith penned a letter to the local paper, laying out the accusations and offering Henson $5,000 to take a polygraph test. The scandal became the talk of the community as people took sides for and against. Hoping to clear the air, McCandless arranged for Henson to quietly take a polygraph test. During the exam, when Henson denied he’d had forcible sex with Tittsworth or Allen, the test showed he was lying. At the polygraphist’s suggestion, Henson stopped the test and confessed to McCandless that he’d had consensual sex with Tittsworth and Allen. “I wasn’t happy,” said McCandless. “But that doesn’t make Henson a rapist.”
Meanwhile, Griffith began to get signals that he’d made some powerful enemies. The security business he ran on the side, which relied on state and local contracts, hit hard times. One afternoon he found the dead body of his Rottweiler in the front yard; another time his security office was vandalized. But shortly after Griffith’s letter was published, two other women contacted him, saying they, too, had been assaulted by Henson. A gas-station clerk named Billie Ann Diggs claimed Henson came by her apartment in uniform and intimidated her into performing oral sex, and a nurse named Delilah Morse said Henson was investigating a break-in at her home when he showed up out of uniform, masturbated on her couch and then raped her. Both women took, and passed, polygraph tests.
With the list of Henson’s accusers growing, Sheriff McCandless demanded Henson’s resignation, and the local district attorney, Chuck Bailey, reluctantly stepped in. It would be a tough case to prosecute. Griffith had muddied the waters terribly–he was a small-town cop unofficially investigating a superior officer. And “it didn’t help that Griffith was investigating allegations made by his own wife,” says Bailey. But what Bailey did convinced the women that they’d never get justice: in January 2000 he asked another Texas Ranger, Steven Boyd, a social acquaintance of Henson and his wife’s, to begin an official inquiry. Boyd’s investigation was cursory. When the women asked him to allow their lawyer, Mark Perlmutter, to wait outside the room while they were interviewed, Boyd became irked and refused to meet with them at all. He did interview a junior police officer, Sue Presley, who had worked with Henson. Afraid for her job, she said, she politely told Boyd she knew of no wrongdoing on Henson’s part; then she contacted Perlmutter and told him Henson had assaulted her as well.
On a cold February afternoon the prosecutor and the women clashed in front of 12 grand jurors. Although Bailey refused to comment later on the proceeding, a transcript reflects suspicion and distrust on both sides. Terri Griffith, Allen and the two women from Greenville, whose accounts might have suggested a pattern of misconduct, were never asked to testify. Diggs’s testimony was uneven. When Presley took the stand, Bailey questioned her harshly. “That’s exactly why women never come forth and report anything,” Presley snapped, “because of what you’re putting me through.” When Henson took the stand, he acknowledged having sex with Diggs, Morse and Presley, but said he had quit drinking and had asked God’s forgiveness. In the end, the jury voted not to charge Henson with a crime. The women were devastated.
Their spirits flagging, Griffith and the other women pressed a civil suit against Henson. Their lawyer, Perlmutter, claimed that Henson had violated his clients’ civil rights. Henson’s lawyer said their case would never stand up in court. “Let’s face it, cops have groupies, women who just like to have sex with men in authority,” said Bass recently. But the showdown Henson’s lawyers claimed they wanted never took place. In January, months before the case could come to trial, Henson’s side agreed to pay the women $350,000. Before they would agree to settle, though, the women insisted that Henson’s grand-jury testimony be made public in hopes that he will never wear a badge again. They also set aside $10,000 to pay for Henson’s psychiatric care, should he decide to seek it. After it was signed, the five women wept. But Tom Griffith was stony-faced. “I was overwhelmingly disappointed in the system I had dedicated my life and heart to,” he said. “Aside from me, no one really tried to get this cop off the street.”
Henson is now working as a landscaper, says Bass. He’s still licensed to work as a peace officer, though, and nothing about the settlement, Bass points out, would prevent him from becoming a cop in Texas again. “Henson told me that he’s giving up law enforcement. He said he’s through,” says Bass. “We’ll see about that.”
