Expert deposed in JCPD federal lawsuit says sex assault investigation problems rose to top brass
GREENEVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) — A former Johnson City police supervisor named in two federal lawsuits against the city allegedly disparaged some women who filed sexual assault complaints, according to deposition testimony from the consultant who audited the Johnson City Police Department’s handling of sexual assault cases.
Under questioning from an attorney for former federal prosecutor Kat Dahl, who is suing Johnson City for wrongful termination, consultant Eric Daigle reviewed elements of findings in his audit of 2018-2022 cases. He also provided opinions about the role department leadership played — and the role it should have played — in carrying out sexual assault investigations.
“(In) speaking with different investigators… there was some directions that command staff in the investigations (division), and maybe in other areas of the department, would make allegations or assumptions based on the position or the situation that the female was in at the time of the alleged assault, and therefore was lying as a result of it,” Daigle said in answer to one question.
“And obviously, that is — that is biased, and it’s biased to the victims, and it needs to be — it has no place in sexual assault investigations.”
“Whatever the failures that we identified or the concerns that we identified, my biggest question is going to be where was the supervisor or where was the command staff to make sure this got done.”
Eric Daigle in December 28, 2023 deposition testimony
Dahl’s lawsuit, and a second one on behalf of alleged sexual assault victims, claim the so-called Daigle Report buttresses their allegations that the Johnson City Police Department (JCPD) failed in its obligation to protect women and adequately investigate sexual assault reports.
Johnson City — which rejects all claims in both lawsuits — commissioned the Daigle audit shortly after former federal prosecutor Dahl sued in June 2022, a year after JCPD fired her. Dahl claims that she was retaliated against for pressing JCPD leadership to thoroughly investigate Sean Williams for what she suspected were serial rapes and potential child sex abuse.
Dahl went to supervisors with concerns about Williams shortly after they brought her in to investigate potential federal ammunition charges against him. She recorded one of those conversations — with Chief Karl Turner and Captain Kevin Peters — on Dec. 8, 2020. She implored them to follow up on red flags she noticed in the ammunition investigation, which began after a woman named Mikayla Evans fell from Williams’ fifth-story window on Sept. 19, 2020.
Peters, who oversaw the Criminal Investigations Division, came up specifically in the deposition. Asked if the investigator who mentioned command staff making allegations or assumptions based on a woman’s life circumstances identified any supervisors by name, Daigle said this:
“My recollection was that in the investigative application that she would hear the commander, Kevin Peters, make comments about the females who were victims and the situations that they were faced in. I don’t have her notes specifically in front of me, but that’s what led to us asking, you know, additional questions and follow-up.”
Those notes, Daigle acknowledged, are part of his file. In addition to publishing excerpts of the Daigle deposition Tuesday, the court published Dahl’s “motion to compel” documents from Daigle’s file. Her attorneys are seeking Daigle’s “work product” in the form of his notes and the matrix he used to determine what important benchmarks each of the 325 sexual assault cases did or didn’t meet.
After Dahl’s Dec. 8, 2020 recorded meeting, JCPD leaders did not generate a search warrant for Williams’ computers, which Dahl strongly suggested. But two years later, the former downtown resident was arrested in North Carolina and police there searched his electronic devices seeking drug trafficking-related evidence. That May 2023 search allegedly yielded video and photo evidence of Williams raping or sexually assaulting more than 50 different women and at least three children in Johnson City.
Computer files show 52 Sean Williams alleged rapes
Williams now faces multiple state counts of child rape and federal counts of producing child pornography. He has not yet been charged in any of the alleged assaults against women, who appeared to be drugged, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in June 2023.
Daigle began his work in August 2022. The city published his report online in July 2023, a month after nine alleged Sean Williams victims sued the city and several current and former JCPD officers. That suit claims JCPD knew Williams was committing sexual assaults and “let him get away with it.”
Daigle’s report was damning on a number of levels, though he did say in his deposition “not all of the cases were failures” and “there was good work done by men and women at Johnson City Police Department.”
Among other things, Daigle’s work found that too often, suspects weren’t interviewed, interaction with alleged victims discouraged full cooperation, investigative work was shoddy and incomplete— and that gender bias appeared to undermine the effectiveness of police work in numerous cases.
“Statements by JCPD investigators and Department leadership to women reporting sexual assault frequently reflect assumptions that women reporting non-stranger sexual assault are lying, and that such assaults are less severe and traumatic to victims than other serious crimes,” the report states. The assumptions, it adds, “interfere with the objective investigation process.”
Lawyers for the city have sought to keep the Daigle report’s contents( and Daigle’s background “work product” such as notes and a spreadsheet of cases he reviewed) out of the federal civil suits. Those efforts so far have been largely unsuccessful.
Johnson City seeks to exclude sexual assault report in Dahl trial
Daigle also reported findings that “investigators improperly rely on a woman’s sexual history in evaluating the veracity of the sexual assault report.”
Several of Williams’ alleged victims had their complaints included in Daigle’s audit, which found that the bias tended to be most severe when complainants had life issues such as drug use or knew their alleged assailants. This was the case in the majority of claims against Williams mentioned in the so-called “Jane Does” lawsuit.
“Our review revealed instances where JCPD officers likely would have obtained statements and facts to support a prosecution if they had used the investigative tactics known to be effective and essential in sexual assault investigations, especially investigations of non-stranger sexual assault,” the Daigle report stated. It added that these “deficiencies compromise the investigative process and unnecessarily place victims at an increased risk of harm.”
In his deposition, Daigle said biases came out as his staff dug “deeper into the reports.” Sometimes victims had previously dated an alleged assailant and the JCPD would eventually report that the victim didn’t want to continue the investigation, case closed, Daigle said.
“And we’re like, well, wait a minute. That’s not supposed to be the way that works. Or the victim has a long history as a prostitute or has a long history of drug addiction, you know. And just because they have these things in their history, you know, doesn’t automatically disqualify them from being a victim and the investigator needs to do more work to ensure that the disqualification, you know, the evidence is clarified.”
Daigle also called out supervisors and JCPD leadership for their role in these failures, which his report said likely led to some prosecutable cases never yielding charges. Dahl’s attorney, Hugh Eastwood, revisited some of those particular criticisms when he deposed Daigle on Dec. 28, 2023.
Asking about a recommendation that supervisors, officers and investigators must be held accountable for properly documenting and maintaining case files, Eastwood asked Daigle “what do you mean by that?”
Johnson City, Turner file to dismiss Kat Dahl lawsuit
Daigle said because new officers don’t yet have adequate experience, supervisors are there to provide “checks and balances” to ensure good policing.
“And so on all the things we talked about to this point, you know, not doing search warrants, not securing scenes, not taking statements, whatever the failures that we identified or the concerns that we identified, my biggest question is going to be where was the supervisor or where was the command staff to make sure this got done,” Daigle said.
“And why … do we need an outside assessment to find things that we should be finding ourselves all along — along the process?”
At another point, Daigle said he believes “the reason why we have supervisors is to make sure the officers do their job the way that they’re supposed to do it. If the supervisors fail to address it, that only magnifies the failures.”
In its motion to compel the city to produce Daigle’s work product, Dahl’s lawyers argue that the city hasn’t put forth any good reasons as it attempts to withhold the additional materials. They say Dahl “has a good faith, reasonable belief that this information will help defeat Defendants’ motions for summary judgment, because it will prove the truth of her allegations, and tend to disprove the Defendants’ proffered and pretextual reasons for firing Dahl.”
They write that Dahl wouldn’t be able to replicate Daigle’s findings, but that his “targeted findings as to a custom of gender bias and discrimination undermining Johnson City’s sex crime investigations gets to the heart of Dahl’s whistleblowing.”
The city’s motion for summary judgment is essentially an effort to have the lawsuit dismissed. Currently, a trial is slated to begin May 21 in Knoxville.
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