THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RAPE KIT: A True Crime Story, by Pagan Kennedy

In 2021, the Smithsonian acquired something called the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit for Sexual Assault Examination. It was a 10-by-6-inch cardboard container filled mostly with items you could buy at any pharmacy, but for millions of American women, the “rape kit,” as this 1970s invention is now known, was a revolution in a box.

Oh, and one important detail: The Chicago police sergeant Louis Vitullo didn’t invent the kit that initially bore his name. That credit goes to Martha “Marty” Goddard, a determined, soft-spoken woman who came up with the idea of a consistent set of tools to collect evidence after an assault — but then disappeared before it became the national standard it is today.

How Goddard dreamed up her creation is the central question of “The Secret History of the Rape Kit,” by Pagan Kennedy, a journalist with a “feverish obsession” with the subject. “How,” she asks, “does a tool that empowers women ever get built in a man’s world?”

Out of necessity, in this case. As a volunteer at a Chicago crisis center, Goddard began to see “a dark and terrible underworld” of young rape survivors. She set about understanding their experiences, wheedling her way into local police departments and interviewing hospital and crime-lab personnel to learn what it would take to solve cases.

Solving cases at all was a novel idea, apparently. Kennedy argues convincingly that not much had changed in the 400 years between when an English judge dismissed rape as “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved,” and 1970s Chicago, where a police training manual taught that “it is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge” against “a boyfriend with a roving eye.” When officers did do forensic exams, she writes, they were “Kabuki theater” usually designed to expose a mendacious woman, or to conveniently convict a nearby Black male. Physical evidence was lost; victims were left humiliated; justice was rare.

What if, Goddard wondered, there were a consistent, court-approved way of collecting the evidence that would bolster a survivor’s word? Her assembly of tools — bags for semen or fingernail samples, swabs, a tiny comb for pubic hair — was nothing fancy, but she persuaded the Playboy Foundation to design the packaging. The result had an air of professionalism — and sincerity. It “promised to treat a victim with dignity, as an eyewitness whose body might reveal real evidence of a violent crime.”

Its namesake, Vitullo, screamed at Goddard when she presented him with her proposal, but subsequently embraced the idea — and Goddard, understanding that law enforcement would more readily accept the kit if it bore a man’s name, helped “collaborate in her own erasure.” The history of that erasure is a fascinating subplot of this book, as Kennedy traces the way generations of canny American women have been denied credit and profit and glory for their brainchildren.

And Goddard did more than just devise the kit — she proselytized for it across the country. She added cards that shared counseling resources, and forms for police officers to sign — meaning they could be held accountable for losing evidence. She spoke to Girl Scouts, church groups, and F.B.I. criminologists. By the mid-1980s, her invention was everywhere.

But if you’ve heard of the rape kit, you’ve probably also heard of the rape-kit backlog. During the 1990s, cities slashed funding for collecting rape evidence, and literal mold grew on Goddard’s invention, with hundreds of thousands of untested kits piling up. When investigators opened one storage unit in Detroit in 2009, they discovered more than 11,000 rape kits — three decades of evidence from victims ranging in age from one month to 90 years old.

Outrage erupted, and once kits began to be widely tested the results offered what Kennedy calls “spectacular proof” of their value. Old crimes were solved. Myths about serial rapists were debunked. And false convictions dropped; as DNA testing became more widespread, fewer Black men were wrongfully convicted of the rape of white women than in prior decades, per one report.

Marty Goddard had vanished from public life by the time all this happened, and Kennedy works to solve her “mysterious disappearance.” But the truth she eventually uncovers feels beside the point. There is another equally urgent narrative here, and it’s Kennedy’s own. She herself, she confides, was molested as a child — and the brutally economical descriptions of the violence she endured are the real “true crime story” of the book, a tiny handful of passages that rise off the page, incandescent.

For most of her life, Kennedy kept her memories and her anger to herself: “My rage had always seemed greasy and salty, like something I binged on when I was alone, in fits of self-hatred.” When she wrote an earlier version of Goddard’s story, she spent days inserting and then deleting a single mention of her own experience, wishing she could bury “molested” somehow “so that just a bit of the word poked up, like the tip of a bombshell. Did I deserve to make any kind of claim at all?”

Too many readers will recognize that doubt, and Kennedy’s love for her subject reverberates throughout the book. Kennedy’s own mother hadn’t understood what happened to her, but Goddard, she writes, “was the woman who had believed little girls.”

There’s a heartbreaking passage in which Kennedy explains her decision not to name her assailant. She opts not to do so, she writes, “because I have no physical evidence, nothing compelling to back up my account.”

Marty Goddard provided a way to preserve that evidence, for generations of victims. No wonder Kennedy wanted to tell this forgotten story. And along the way, her own.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RAPE KIT: A True Crime Story | By Pagan Kennedy | Vintage | 256 pp. | Paperback, $19