There is one indisputable fact about the events of the night of May 8, 1981: Alice Sebold, who had just finished her freshman year at Syracuse University earlier that day, was brutally raped as she walked home through a park.
Anthony Broadwater was arrested several months later and convicted of the attack. He spent 16 years in prison, repeatedly being denied parole because he refused to admit his guilt. Upon his release in 1998, he was required to register as a sex offender.
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Sebold continued to write and speak about the attack, culminating in the publication of “Lucky,” a memoir about the rape. The book would become a bestseller after the success of Sebold’s first novel, “The Lovely Bones.”
But 40 years after the assault, a court overturned Broadwater’s conviction after the Syracuse district attorney joined a motion to exonerate him and said in court that Broadwater should never have been prosecuted. As the exoneration made headlines around the world, we wondered how many other victims in Syracuse had been left behind and what else police might have missed.
What we found: No part of the Syracuse system at the time was reliable. The police ruled out rape. Prosecutors botched their confessions or were defeated at trial. The judges overlooked the irregularities. And Syracuse University seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than in solving it.
Here are some of the key findings from our years-long investigation into what went wrong after that night in May 1981. You can read the full story of how ProPublica reporter Joaquin Sapien reinvestigated the notorious case — and the rapes that surrounded it — decades after the fact. here.
As rape cases pile up in Syracuse, police fail to investigate
At the time of Sebold’s rape, in the spring of 1981, Syracuse was facing a wave of sexual assaults. It was the third such attack in the city’s Thornden Park in about seven months. A fourth occurred a block away. Much like the police report on Sebold’s assault, these cases were also quickly placed on the inactive docket.
Beyond the park, Syracuse women were being sexually assaulted in their dorms and homes. A nursing student was later attacked in the same place as Sebold, the same day her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators, many of whom carried knives, were often eerily similar; several were roughly the same height, weight, and race.
And yet, there were no apparent signs of urgency from law enforcement.
Syracuse University Canceled Media Coverage of Rape and Other Crimes
In addition to Syracuse police appearing to deprioritize rape cases in the early 1980s — a time when few survivors reported their assaults — documents and testimony indicate that the city’s namesake university actively suppressed media coverage of the attacks.
If a police report was labeled “NO PRESS,” a former detective in the Sebold case explained in a 2025 deposition, that meant the university “put its foot down and said there was no press for any type of rape, robbery or burglary in the Syracuse University area.” He testified that it was not unusual to see that designation on police reports at the time.
A Syracuse University spokesperson said in an email that “we are unable to speak to the actions or decisions of previous administrations” but that the university now has “comprehensive policies, a strong commitment to preventing sexual and relationship violence, and strong support structures to help every survivor who comes forward.”
Police and prosecutors botched the lineup and rushed the case to arraignment
It was neither police work nor media coverage that led authorities to Broadwater. His arrest came only after Sebold saw him on the street months after the attack and believed he was her rapist. Police arrested the 20-year-old and he agreed to wait in line.
But during the lineup, Sebold did not identify Broadwater as his attacker. Instead, she chose a man standing to her left.
Police had no other evidence linking Broadwater to the assault aside from a pubic hair sample he offered for comparison with the one found on Sebold, which, in a world before DNA testing, could essentially tell investigators that Broadwater and the rapist were black.
The current prosecutor says the case should have ended there and then. “The matter is over,” he told ProPublica. “Stop.”
But rather than release Broadwater and continue gathering evidence, an assistant prosecutor, Gail Uebelhoer, asked Sebold to write an affidavit at the scene, explaining what had happened. Sebold wrote in the affidavit that she chose the man at number 5 because he was looking at her.
In “Lucky,” her best-selling memoir about rape, Sebold said Uebelhoer tried to allay concerns about picking the wrong man by claiming that the man she chose and Broadwater were “doubles” of each other and implied that the two men had coordinated their appearance in the lineup to confuse Sebold. Both men categorically denied ever appearing together in any other lineup.
Hours after the lineup, Uebelhoer presented the case against Broadwater to a grand jury. In a 2025 deposition, she said she did not remember many key details of the Sebold case, but claimed she did her job in presenting it to a grand jury without hiding its flaws.
Broadwater’s decision to forgo a jury trial backfired
When his case moved forward, Broadwater and his attorney hoped he would be better off by opting for a bench trial, in which a judge, not a jury, would decide his fate.
But the judge seemed to have a soft spot for Sebold. In her memoir, she recalls how the judge spoke to her privately during a break in the proceedings, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. If a juror had asked a witness such questions, the witness likely would have been excluded from the jury and a mistrial could have been declared.
The judge also allowed Uebelhoer – then visibly pregnant and no longer involved in the case – to testify for the prosecution, where she appeared to imply that Broadwater was responsible for Sebold’s botched identification during the lineup.
Immediately after the prosecutor finished his closing argument, the judge found Broadwater guilty without leaving the bench to deliberate.
The rapes continued after Broadwater’s conviction and the emergence of a possible suspect
Broadwater’s conviction did not end the wave of sexual assaults in Syracuse. Just four months after the trial, a high school student named Thomas Weakfall admitted to raping five women, four of them within a mile of Thornden Park. He told police his madness began in late 1981.
Although there is no evidence that Weakfall attacked Sebold, he matched key elements of the description she gave of her rapist: Black, 16 to 18 years old, approximately 5’7″ and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9″ and 140 pounds, according to police reports. Broadwater was 20 years old, 5’6″ tall and weighed approximately 175 pounds.
But the rape trial against Weakfall collapsed because his confession was ruled inadmissible. The officers had taken his statement without a defense attorney present, unaware that Weakfall was already represented by an attorney for an unrelated burglary charge. He ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary, received five years of probation and was released.
Weakfall confesses again, but not to Sebold’s rape
Records show police arrested Weakfall for an attempted rape of a woman in his car in October 1983. He was released for four months, before pleading guilty to a lesser charge of attempted sexual misconduct. He was sentenced to one year.
During those same four months, Sebold’s roommate was raped in their apartment. She was one of five women attacked in the same group of blocks over a five-month period, according to contemporary media reports. Police suspected that only one man committed the crimes.
Although police reports of these assaults suggest an older and larger assailant, the elements of the crimes are burglarized homes; women raped at knifepoint and beaten; some bound and gagged – matched Weakfall’s methods.
Sebold’s roommate also told police that after the assault, she tried to get her attacker to leave by yelling that her roommate was coming home. He replied: “I know her, we had a history, we had an agreement in the past. »
In 1985, after being spotted using a stolen bank card, Weakfall confessed to other rapes, saying he had assaulted at least three women in the preceding months. This time his confession stood and he ultimately served 12 years of an 18-year sentence.
Although Weakfall admitted to committing rapes committed inside, he denied assaulting anyone outside. In interviews with ProPublica, he admitted to “raping” women, but also said he did not commit all of the assaults he confessed to.
Producers trying to make a movie about ‘Lucky’ triggered the collapse of Broadwater’s belief
In 2013, a film producer commissioned to write a screenplay based on “Lucky” contacted Paul Clapper, a retired detective who had played a tangential but important role in the Sebold case. According to the producer, he responded by pointing out that there were a number of questions in this case: Was the right person arrested? Was Sebold a good witness? If DNA testing had been available, would the result have been even? However, the producer stated that Clapper never developed this list and ultimately this attempt to film “Lucky” was abandoned.
Years later, a second producer attempted to make a film from Sebold’s memoir. His concerns about the story were such that he hired a private investigator to dig deeper. The investigator, Dan Myers, met with Clapper and came away with the impression that Clapper believed Broadwater was innocent of the crime and that Weakfall was guilty. Myers took his concerns to two Syracuse attorneys, who filed a motion to overturn Broadwater’s conviction in 2021. More than 40 years after the rape and after more than two decades of life as a registered sex offender, Broadwater was exonerated.
The consequences: “I will never write anything good enough”
Five years after the court overturned Broadwater’s conviction, Sebold has no doubt about his innocence and told ProPublica that she now questions her decision to report her rape to the police: “None of this would have happened.” »
Despite his exoneration, Broadwater said the stigma of a convicted rapist is still difficult to shake, even with his criminal record cleared and a multimillion-dollar settlement from New York state. “I am still embarrassed that I was convicted and sent to prison for rape for 16 and a half years,” he said. The city of Syracuse and Onondaga County dispute Broadwater’s claims. He explained that his life “is still not normal. It will never be normal. How can it be normal?”
Sebold and Broadwater discussed, through intermediaries, the possibility of meeting in person. But their shared reluctance to travel made plans difficult.
Sebold said she recently wrote a letter to Broadwater taking responsibility for her role in his wrongful conviction. The letter describes, she said, “the deep sadness I feel for what happened.”
“I will never write something good enough,” Sebold said of the three pages that took four years to compose. It is “probably, in my mind, the most important thing I will ever write.”
