Alice Sebold steps out of her $6M home after black man accused of raping her exonerated

Sebold’s attack itself is not in question.

She told police at the time about the rape, and an examination was performed. 

Then, five months after it, when they’d failed to locate him, she saw a man in the street who she was convinced was her attacker. 

Broadwater was in the area at the time of the run-in with the alleged rapist, so he was brought into the investigation. 

At a lineup shortly afterwards, she was asked to identify the rapist but she picked the man standing next to Broadwater. 

Cops told her afterwards that she had ‘failed to identify the suspect’ because she didn’t pick Broadwater, the man they were sure she’d walked past in the street. 

The police extracted one of his pubic hairs to run a DNA analysis on him and they used that hair analysis to convict him – using technology that is now discredited. 

In court, she identified him as her attacker and in her book, she explained the discrepancy as a mistake because he was ‘identical’ to the man she did pick.  

In Lucky, Sebold describes the lineup and how she was convinced that it was the man standing in position five who had raped her because he ‘looked at’ her, though she was standing behind a glass panel and they could not see her.

‘Five black men in almost identical light blue shirts and dark blue pants walked in and assumed their places. “It’s not one, two, or three,” I said,’ she wrote in her memoir. 

Broadwater was standing in position four. 

‘I stood in front of number four. He was not looking at me. While he looked toward the floor I saw his shoulders. Wide like my rapist’s, and powerful. 

‘The shape of his head and neck – just like my rapist’s. His build, his nose, his lips. I hugged my arms across my chest and stared.

‘I moved on to number five. His build was right, his height. And he was looking at me, looking right at me, as if he knew I was there. Knew who I was. The expression in his eyes told me that if we were alone, if there were no wall between us, he would call me by name and then kill me…. I approached the clipboard… I placed my X in the number five box. I had marked the wrong one,’ she wrote.  

After the lineup, she was told by a Sergeant Lorenz, that she picked out the wrong person.

‘Alice, it’s my duty to inform you that you failed to pick out the suspect,’ she quoted him saying. 

‘He did not tell me which one was the suspect. He couldn’t. But I knew. I stated for the record that in my opinion, the men in positions four and five were almost identical.’ 

She then described how the then Assistant District Attorney Gail Uebelhoer came into the room and said: ‘Well, we got the hair out of the bastard,’ referring to Broadwater. 

In Lucky, Sebold wrote that she believed she had made a mistake in the police lineup. She went on to identify him in court and he was jailed.  

Sebold wrote in Lucky of being raped as a first-year student at Syracuse in May 1981. 

‘This is what I remember. My lips were cut. I bit down on them when he grabbed me from behind and covered my mouth. He said these words: “I’ll kill you if you scream.” I remained motionless. “Do you understand? If you scream you’re dead.” 

‘I nodded my head. My arms were pinned to my sides by his right arm wrapped around me and my mouth was covered with his left.’

She goes on to describe the rape in graphic detail, how she had to talk to the rapist to encourage him, telling him he was a ‘good man’ and how she wished it to be over. 

She wrote how he then apologized in tears once the attack was over, and told her she was a ‘good girl’. 

Sebold describes running back to her dorm, confiding in her friends that she was just ‘beaten and raped’ in the park. 

‘My face smashed in, cuts across my nose and lip, a tear along my cheek. My hair was matted with leaves. My clothes were inside out and bloodied. My eyes were glazed,’ she said. 

Months later, she said she spotted a black man in the street and thought it was him.  

‘He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street,’ wrote Sebold. ‘”Hey, girl,” he said. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”‘

She said she didn’t respond: ‘I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel.’  

Alice Sebold was writing her hugely successful novel The Lovely Bones, about the rape and murder of a teenage girl, in the late 1990s when she found herself having to abandon that project so she could complete her own memoir about how she was raped as student.

She said years later that she wanted the dead narrator of her novel, Susie Salmon, to ‘tell her own story,’ while her memoir, Lucky, would be the ‘real deal’ about rape.

That memoir was published in 1999 three years before her novel and received great critical acclaim.

But it would be The Lovely Bones (2002) that would launch her into literary stardom after it became an instant classic.

The novel starts with the arresting line: ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.’

The book is told in the voice of Susie, a dead girl speaking from heaven after she has been raped and murdered.

Susie tells the harrowing tale of her vicious abduction and murder in a cornfield near her home and observes the events which follow.

How her dismembered elbow is discovered in the field in a patch of blood, but her body is nowhere to be found.

This allows her parents to harbor a vain hope that she will be found alive.

The portrayal of her family suffering the immense grief of losing their child was what made the novel a hit with critics.

The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani described it as ‘a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed.’

But others found Susie’s ability to flit between heaven and Earth an unconvincing plot device.

The ghost of the girl is glimpsed by family members as they walk around corners in their house. 

And she even enters the body of a school friend who is making love to her own former sweetheart.

The novel was immensely popular, particularly with teenage girls and women.

English author Joan Smith attacked the novel’s ‘apple-pie sentimentality’, saying it was sickly sweet.

Literary critic Philip Hensher described the book as ‘a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment.’

The novel went on to win the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003 and was made into a movie by fantasy-loving director Peter Jackson starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci.

The Lovely Bones has influenced an entire sub-genre of Young Adult (YA) fiction known derisively as ‘sick lit’, which has enduring popularity to this day.

Commonly it is fiction which revolves around the afterlife where protagonists are killed early on in the narrative, finding themselves in a strange ghost world.

The hugely successful Twilight Saga, a series of fantasy romance novels by Stephenie Meyer, were influenced by Sebold’s work.