An Understanding Ear: How Martha Goddard Became An Advocate For Victimized Women

My research into the history of the rape kit and the story of Martha Goddard has stretched on for more than four years. By now, I know so much about her I can visualize her whole life as if it were a movie. When I run that movie in my imagination, the first shot pans down Halsted Street in Chicago in 1972 and along a row of boarded-up buildings, a brick wall painted with a faded ad for Coca-Cola, and a dime store with a steel grate over its door.

A taxicab pulls up, and Marty Goddard steps out onto a street, picking her way around oily puddles and piles of trash. With her briefcase banging against her hip, Marty Goddard hurries toward a dilapidated town house with a sign nailed up out front that read, “Metro-Help,” and she disappears inside.

In 1972, Goddard hadn’t met Louis Vitullo yet. She worked for a philanthropic organization that provided services to poor people in Chicago. A thirty-one-year-old divorcée, lanky and blond, she dressed in a silk blouse and knee-length skirt, and she crisscrossed the city in taxicabs for meetings with activists and community groups.

On this particular day, she had just signed up for volunteer shifts at Metro-Help, a crisis center for homeless teenagers. Most of the other volunteers were hippies, college students with scraggly manes and jangly love beads. But not Marty Goddard. She covered up her eyes with owlish glasses and kept her hair short. She didn’t wear much makeup, maybe just a plum lip for a special day.

Her name was Martha, but everyone called her Marty. She liked hiding inside a man’s name, because it was useful to her. And she wanted, above all, to feel useful.

At the crisis center, Marty answered calls from the kinds of troubled teenagers who were then called runaways. In the era of acid rock, communes, and free love, most everyone assumed the kids joined a psychedelic circus when they ran off. But as she fielded the hotline calls, Marty discovered the real reasons that teenagers ended up on the streets. One girl confessed to Marty that her father had touched her. Another that her uncle had forced her to do something unspeakable. Or it was the priest. Or a teacher. The phones rang with the news that kids didn’t feel safe around their own families.

“I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem,” Marty said later in an interview. The runaways were pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out. As the girls called in and sobbed on the other end of the line, Goddard realized that she had stumbled upon a dark and terrible underworld. So many teenagers on the streets were there because they were fleeing from a predator or an abusive parent. When cops found girls wandering around downtown, they’d charge them with vagrancy or prostitution and send them to a juvenile hall. No one talked about the crimes that had driven those girls out of their homes. When Goddard connected the dots, she began to see the shape of a horrifying crisis: thousands of predators were out there, molesting children and getting away with it. She burned with fury and an inconsolable desire to prove these girls were telling the truth.

*

In 1962, a pediatrician named C. Henry Kempe launched the modern child-protection movement with a paper describing the invisible wounds he discovered when he X-rayed babies and small children. “To the informed physician,” he wrote, “the bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell.” Kempe had discovered a hidden epidemic of what he called the “battered child” syndrome.

In 1974 the federal government enacted the first major child-protection law, but information on incest and pedophilia remained in the shadows. “Virtually no literature exists on the sexual abuse of children,” observed the therapist David R. Walters in 1975. And because no one looked for it or studied it or talked about it, no one saw it. A psychiatry textbook estimated that incest occurred in only about one in every million families, and, according to the textbook, incest was the fault of girls who seduced their fathers.

Even when abusers kidnapped girls and forced them into prostitution, few people recognized this as child sexual abuse. A New York Times article from 1975 provides a shocking glimpse into the attitude of the time. The news story, called “Little Ladies of the Night,” described the nuisance caused by a “14-year-old girl in platform soles and hot pants on a street corner on Eighth Avenue, asking passers-by whether they want a good time. Runaways in New York have created a widespread problem of teenage prostitution.” These girls were jailed on “runaway” or prostitution charges, while the men who sold and hired them walked free.

Almost no one identified runaway girls as victims rather than as criminals. But after listening to teenagers sob on the phone at Metro-Help, Marty Goddard did.

*

One day in the early 1970s, Marty Goddard called up WLS, a Chicago radio station, and asked to speak to the news department. Gil Gross, the anchor, picked up the phone. In an email that he sent me in 2020, Gross told me about the woman on the other end of the line. She was “tremendously concerned about runaways who were escaping homes because of sexual violence.” Marty Goddard described to him how cops swept downtown streets for homeless kids and then warehoused them in juvenile detention homes. There, the girls were often victimized all over again. They had to fend offguards and other inmates.

Goddard’s call inspired Gross to launch an investigative news series on the issue. “We were Chicago’s #1 rock station at the time, and though we had a sizable news department of 18 people…we didn’t do a ton of investigative journalism,” Gross told me. But Marty Goddard stirred something in him. She gave a damn, and she persuaded him to give a damn, too.

She supplied Gross with a list of names and phone numbers of girls who lived at one halfway house as well as of the social workers who counseled them. Working offthese leads, Gross put together a series that exposed a hidden epidemic of child abuse in the juvenile justice system.

Soon after that, Gross was transferred to the network in New York. He fell out of touch with Marty. But even decades later, he still remembered her voice on the phone, her outrage, and how she had awakened in him a new awareness of injustice.

*

But I didn’t know any of this yet, because Gross surfaced much later in my search for Marty.

At first, I pored over newspaper articles, patents, and marriage records. I was desperate to find clues to Goddard’s current whereabouts. Nothing. Every lead withered into a dead end. Marty Goddard turned out to be far more invisible than any of the previous invisibles that I’d searched out during my years in journalism.

And then, a few months in, I made a glorious discovery. In 2006, an Arizona college student named Hannah Myers had somehow learned of Marty and interviewed her for a school project. Marty had been in a confessional mood that day. She must have assumed no one would ever hear the recording. Little did she know that the tape would end up in a history archive in Arizona. When a librarian sent me a digital file of the tape, it was so full of pops and hisses and blank spots that I struggled to make out the words. And yet, as I listened to that recording over and over again, I began to understand something of the passion that drove her. And I no longer thought of her as a historical figure whom I’d refer to formally as “Goddard.” In my mind, at least, I was now on a first-name basis with her. She was just Marty.

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From The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story by Pagan Kennedy. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Pagan Kennedy.