There’s one indisputable fact about the events of the night of May 8, 1981: Alice Sebold, who had earlier that day just completed her freshman year at Syracuse University, was brutally raped while walking home through a park.
Anthony Broadwater was arrested several months later and subsequently convicted of the assault. He’d spend 16 years in prison, repeatedly being denied parole because he refused to admit guilt. Upon his release in 1998, he was required to register as a sex offender.
Sebold would go on 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 vacated Broadwater’s conviction after the Syracuse district attorney joined a motion to clear him and said in court that Broadwater should never have been prosecuted. While the exoneration made headlines around the world, we wondered how many other victims in Syracuse had been left behind and what else the police might have missed.
What we discovered: No part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges overlooked irregularities. And Syracuse University seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than solving it.
Here are some of the key findings from our yearslong 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 rapes surrounding it — decades after the fact here.
As Rape Cases Piled Up in Syracuse, Police Failed to Investigate
At the time of Sebold’s rape in the spring of 1981, Syracuse was experiencing a rash of sexual assaults. Hers was the third such attack in the city’s Thornden Park in about seven months. A fourth had occurred a block away. Like the police report in Sebold’s assault, those cases had also been quickly consigned to the inactive file.
Beyond the park, women in Syracuse were being sexually assaulted in their dorm rooms and homes. A nursing student was later attacked at the same spot as Sebold, on the same day that her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority house by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators, many of whom carried a knife, 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 Quashed 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 quashed media coverage of these attacks.
If a police report was labeled “NO PRESS,” a former detective in the Sebold case explained in a 2025 deposition, it meant that the university “put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary that’s anywhere in the area of Syracuse University.” He testified that seeing this designation on police reports at the time was not unusual.
A spokesperson for Syracuse University said in an email that “we are not in a position to speak to the actions or decisions of prior administrations,” but the university is now equipped with “comprehensive policies, a steadfast commitment to preventing sexual and relationship violence and robust support structures to help every survivor that comes forward.”
Police and Prosecutors Botched the Lineup and Rushed the Case to Indictment
It was not police work or media coverage that led authorities to Broadwater. His arrest only occurred after Sebold saw him on the street months after the assault and believed he was her rapist. Police arrested the 20-year-old, and he agreed to appear in a lineup.
But at the lineup, Sebold did not identify Broadwater as her attacker. Instead, she selected a man standing to his left.
Police had no other evidence linking Broadwater to the assault aside from a pubic hair sample he had volunteered for comparison to one found on Sebold, which, in a world before DNA testing, could essentially tell investigators only that both Broadwater and the rapist were Black.
The current DA says the case should have ended then and there. “Case is over,” he told ProPublica. “Stop.”
But rather than release Broadwater and continue gathering evidence, an assistant district attorney, Gail Uebelhoer, asked Sebold to draft an affidavit on the spot, explaining what had happened. Sebold wrote in the affidavit that she had picked the man in the No. 5 position because he had been looking at her.
In “Lucky,” her bestselling memoir about the rape, Sebold said Uebelhoer tried to allay concerns about picking the wrong man by claiming that the man she picked and Broadwater were “dead ringers” for each other and implied that the two men coordinated their appearance in the lineup to confuse Sebold. Both men have adamantly denied ever appearing in another lineup together.
Hours after the lineup, Uebelhoer presented the case against Broadwater to a grand jury. In a 2025 deposition, she said she could not remember many of the key details in Sebold’s case but asserted that she had done her job by 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 lawyer hoped he’d 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 privately to her during a break in the proceedings, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. If a juror had asked such questions of a witness, they would likely have been kicked off the jury and a mistrial might’ve been declared.
The judge also allowed Uebelhoer — then visibly pregnant and no longer handling the case — to take the stand as a witness for the prosecution, where she appeared to imply that Broadwater was responsible for Sebold’s botched identification at 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 a Possible Suspect Emerged
Broadwater’s conviction did not end the rash of sexual assaults in Syracuse. Only four months after the trial, a high schooler named Thomas Weakfall admitted raping five women, four of them within a mile of Thornden Park. He told police his spree had begun in late 1981.
While there’s no evidence that Weakfall attacked Sebold, he did match key elements of the description she gave of her rapist: Black, 16 to 18 years of age, about 5’7” and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9” and 140 pounds, according to police reports. Broadwater was 20, stood 5’6” and weighed about 175 pounds.
But the rape case against Weakfall collapsed because his confession was deemed inadmissible. Officers had taken his statement without a defense attorney present, unaware that Weakfall was already represented by an attorney on an unrelated burglary charge. He ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary, got five years probation and was released.
Weakfall Confesses Again, but Not to the Sebold Rape
Records show police arrested Weakfall for an attempted rape of a woman inside her car in October 1983. He was released from custody for four months, before pleading guilty to a lesser charge of attempted sexual misconduct. He received a sentence of 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 cluster of blocks over a five-month period, according to contemporary news accounts. Police suspected that one man had committed the crimes.
While police reports in these assaults suggest an older, taller attacker, elements of the crimes — 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 assailant to leave by yelling out that her roommate was coming home. He replied: “I know her, we had a thing, we had a deal in the past.”
In 1985, after being spotted using a stolen ATM card, Weakfall confessed to additional rapes, saying he’d assaulted at least three women in the previous few months. This time, his confession stuck and he ultimately served 12 years of an 18-year sentence.
While Weakfall did confess to committing rapes that occurred indoors, he has denied assaulting anyone outdoors. In interviews with ProPublica, he admitted “violating” women but also said he did not commit all the assaults he’d confessed to.
Producers Trying to Make a Film About “Lucky” Sparked the Unraveling of Broadwater’s Conviction
In 2013, a movie producer tasked with writing 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 replied, noting that there were a number of questions in the case: Was the right person arrested? Was Sebold a good witness? If DNA testing had been available, would there have been the same outcome? However, the producer said Clapper never elaborated on this list, and ultimately this attempt to film “Lucky” fell by the wayside.
Years later, a second producer endeavored to make a movie of 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 Weakfall was guilty. Myers brought his concerns to a pair of Syracuse lawyers, who filed a motion to vacate Broadwater’s conviction in 2021. More than 40 years after the rape, and after more than two decades of living as a registered sex offender, Broadwater was exonerated.
The Aftermath: “I’ll Never Write Anything Good Enough”
Five years after the court vacated Broadwater’s conviction, Sebold has no doubt he is innocent and told ProPublica 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 being a convicted rapist was still hard to shake, even with his record cleared and a multimillion-dollar settlement from New York state. “I’m 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 county of Onondaga are contesting Broadwater’s claims. He explained that his life “still ain’t normal. Ain’t never gonna be normal. How could it be normal?”
Sebold and Broadwater have discussed through intermediaries the possibility of meeting in person. But their shared reluctance to travel has made plans difficult.
Sebold said she did recently write a letter to Broadwater in which she takes responsibility for her role in his wrongful conviction. The letter describes, she said, “the deep sorrow I hold for what happened.”
“I’ll never write anything good enough,” Sebold said about the three pages that took four years to compose. It is “probably, in my mind, the most important thing I’ll ever write.”
