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By Root 196 0

United States Navy; according to various witnesses, he was known to “get girls drunk and take advantage of them.” Burgos had allegedly been seen digitally raping me with four other men witnessing and cheering as he hiked my sweater above my neck and my skirt above my waist. It is alleged that this was the first attack, and it took place on the chapter-room floor while I was unconscious from the green drink. When the police came back to question Burgos after the press broke, he had left his wife and child and gone south. He claimed to have hired a lawyer. That lawyer had not been paid; he said he was not the attorney of record for Burgos. A grand jury subpoena was drawn up for Burgos, but he could not be found—he had become a veritable ghost. He never testified on the record.

I was sickened by this information. I had never heard Burgos’s name, and when shown a photograph I could not recall his face. What he allegedly did to me was vile. But the story of what happened that night was about to get worse.

Another fraternity brother, Roger Messner, came under suspicion after a few of the brothers referred to me as “that girl Messner had sex with in his room.”

Messner, like Burgos, had been questioned early in the investigation. A blueblood from Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Palm Beach, Messner had attended the prep school Choate, and had lived in the same dorm as William Beebe in their first year at UVA. He told police he had no idea who I was. In fact, he said, he was a virgin at the time of the alleged crime, and had remained so until the following year when he met his wife-to-be, so he couldn’t possibly have raped me, or anyone else, for that matter.

But as the investigation progressed, witnesses began coming out of the woodwork regarding Messner’s behavior that night. He had been seen dragging me to his bedroom on the third floor, one floor above Beebe’s. The man who was Messner’s roommate in the house testified that he had found me bleeding and unconscious in their room, after Messner walked to the showers, naked except for a towel, high-fiving friends along the way. How I then got to the second-floor chapter room and sustained the rape by Beebe remains a mystery. Were the injuries I sustained caused by Burgos or Messner or Beebe?

Armed with this new information, Detective Rudman drove to Messner’s home in Wilmington, where he was living with his wife and children. When Rudman remarked, “Nice place you have here,” Messner replied with a wistful sigh, “Well, it’s all going to be gone in a year, isn’t it?” The investigative team found this very telling. Messner stuck to his original story, but immediately hired a Charlottesville defense attorney, Timothy Heaphy, the son-in-law of General Eric Shinseki, the former United States Army four star general and current secretary of veteran affairs. Heaphy, a former United States attorney, had recently turned to criminal defense in Charlottesville with a focus on white-collar crime cases. (Heaphy was also attorney to Kirk Fordham, the former chief of staff of the disgraced Florida congressman Mark Foley.) Served a subpoena, Messner appeared before the grand jury. Reportedly, he took the fifth on every question, on the grounds of self-incrimination.

George Allman, the former fraternity president, now a professor at a Texas business school, was interviewed once on the phone by Detective Rudman. When Worrell and Quagliana went down to Austin to interview him, he had already retained counsel with the help of Phi Kappa Psi’s national organization. He said he was not present in the house that weekend, and there was no reason to believe otherwise. Although he was one of the frat brothers who referred to me in interviews as “that girl Messner had sex with,” he refused to say anything more regarding Burgos or Beebe. He did admit to calling Beebe’s parents soon after, as Beebe was constantly drunk, using drugs, and threatening suicide. He cooperated no further in the investigation.

One witness, Bill Keller, came forward of his own accord once he heard about the case. A former lacrosse