The Seduction of Jane Doe

She was not the first freshman to fall under the spell of a popular, good-looking Taylor High School football coach. But she would be the last.

by Skip Hollandsworth

November 1994

(Page 3 of 3)

But Bridget wasn’t satisfied. She began floorboarding her Bronco around town, looking for kids who could tell her what Stroud had done. She asked parents of other girls alleged to have been Stroud’s victims to reveal what Stroud had done to them. “I was a viper snake,” she admits. She and Ben argued about the way she was acting. Ben told her to let the school system handle Stroud; she replied that she wanted to get the school system for not going after Stroud. When she learned that Caplinger and Lankford had been hearing stories about Brooke and Stroud before she had discovered the photographs, she demanded to know why she had never been told. “I want Stroud out of here!” she demanded. But Caplinger said that as long as Brooke and Stroud denied having a relationship, the school had no legal power to remove him.

And with that, the administration stopped investigating the case. Lankford would testify that by the fall of 1987—Brooke’s sophomore year—Stroud had changed. His classroom was more disciplined. He ate with the teachers in the lunchroom instead of off-campus with students. Once, going her way, he walked with Brooke to her class. She told him to stop it: She couldn’t have people talking again. But Stroud bought her carnations from the 7-Eleven and began slipping her notes again. One of the notes said he didn’t understand why their relationship had to end, he really did love her, and if she would just give him a little time, he would leave his wife. Soon, Brooke was sneaking out of the house again, meeting him for sex.

In October, while Brooke was at a Young Life meeting, Bridget went through her daughter’s room and found a stash of notes from Stroud. “I saw you at the pep rally,” one said. “You sure look purty!” her hands trembling, Bridget asked Brooke one more time what was happening with her and Stroud. Brooke again said they were just friends, but Bridget wasn’t buying it. Ben took Brooke to their family attorney. Alone with Brooke, the attorney grilled her until she broke down. Sobbing, she said, “Yes, we did it.” The attorney picked up the phone and called superintendent Caplinger’s office. Incredibly, Caplinger had already received another report that very day about Stroud. It seemed the coach had run his hands up and down the bottom of a girl in his biology class. Apparently, he was already moving in on his next victim.

When told he was being suspended from the school pending further investigation, Stroud asked if he might be able to stay around and help coach the team. He was told he had to be out that day. Before he left, he found Brooke in the hallway, grabbed her hands and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to be together.”

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” said Brooke.

Taylor was not ready for the fallout from the scandal. Many people were unwilling to believe that a sexual Pied Piper, cloaked in the raiment of a popular football coach, had been able to operate undetected for so long. They were more willing to believe that Brooke was a local Lolita who had encouraged the secret affair. When the head football coach convened the team in the field house and announced that Stroud would no longer be coaching, most of the players—and one of the coaches—wept. Everyone on the team thought he shouldn’t be fired. One boy wrote Brooke a letter that said, “You’re a slut. Get out of town.” One older businessman in town tried to explain the situation away by telling a father whose girl had also been involved with Stroud, “When these girls start tittin’ up, boy, anything can happen.” Even some of Brooke’s old friends were not ready to pin the blame on Stroud. “I feel that some of it was provoked, because of the way that she was around him, snuggling up to him in the car,” one of the Taylor girls said in a deposition. Brooke’s old friend Brittani Barron said disgustedly, “She let him do it.” After Stroud pleaded guilty to a charge of sexual assault, receiving a six-month prison term and ten years’ probation, some students stopped speaking to Brooke altogether. “I felt that everybody was mad at me because I had taken away their favorite coach,” says Brooke.

She never heard from him again. She did, however, see Marcie one more time. In late 1987, just before Stroud pleaded guilty, the Taylor girls’ basketball team played the team from Holland, where Marcie went to school, and Brooke found herself guarding Marcie. Afterward, Brooke said to the coach’s daughter, “I don’t want you to think our friendship was just a hoax for me to get to your dad. I cared about you too.” After a silence, Marcie gave her a hug, then walked away.

It took brooke months before she could say out loud that she no longer loved him. According to Bridget, Brooke was wracked by guilt that she had confessed to the family attorney. Once the relationship became public, Brooke felt guilty that she had never tried to stop him from having sex with her. She felt even more ashamed when her parents told her they were separating. Ben and Bridget tried to tell her that their marriage had been falling apart for a long time, but they couldn’t deny that what Stroud had done to their family was the final straw. In early 1988 Bridget and Brooke moved to an apartment in North Austin (Ben gave up the Ford dealership, moved briefly to California, then settled near San Antonio). At her new high school, Brooke told no one what had happened in Taylor. A psychologist who regularly saw her reported that Brooke was going through an “acute crisis.”

Brooke was having trouble coming out of her room. Her grades plummeted, and she considered suicide. A furious Bridget, already stunned that Stroud would spend less than half a year in prison, wanted justice.

For a year, Bridget tried to find a lawyer to file a civil suit. “I want heads to roll,” she would say. Besides Stroud, she said, she also wanted to sue Eddy Lankford, Mike Caplinger, and the entire Taylor Independent School District. Attorneys told her that by federal law, school districts and their officials are almost always protected from legal responsibility for the acts of teachers. To win damages from a school district, a plaintiff has to prove that certain civil rights were violated—and the courts had never made it clear that a teacher’s having sex with a student was a specific civil rights violation. Furthermore, the attorneys told Bridget, it would be hard to sue a school district and its officials for sexual misconduct when Brooke consented to have sex in private away from the school. Perhaps, Bridget was advised, it would be better just to sue Stroud and get whatever damages she could.

With each visit to each new lawyer, Bridget took Brooke along and had her repeat the story of Stroud’s seduction. Over and over, Brooke halfheartedly talked about Stroud. She still could not bring herself to blame him. But one afternoon, as she described the way Stroud would talk her into intercourse at his own home, she suddenly looked up and stared at her mother. “I was raped,” she said. She was ready to fight.

The case was eventually taken by Brian East and another Austin civil rights attorney, Nell Hahn. Lankford and Caplinger submitted motions saying they should be immune from the lawsuit. But in an 8-6 vote earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit rejected their claims that Brooke was involved in a “purely personal and consensual relationship” with Stroud. The majority opinion declared that this was not a case of casual sex but one of power. Stroud “took full advantage of his position as Brooke’s teacher…to seduce Brooke.” The court added that Taylor school officials were so inattentive to Stroud’s behavior that it seemed like they were condoning it. Although the appeals court ultimately dismissed Caplinger from the lawsuit because he knew less and had “responded appropriately, if ineffectively, to the situation,” some of the justices characterized Lankford’s inaction as “deplorable.” The court found that school officials can be held liable if they show “deliberate indifference” to the civil rights of a school-child.” An outraged Lankford appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that if the lower court rulings were allowed to stand, then all public school officials would be “responsible for the private lives of school employees and students, all day, every day, year round.” Many state and national school organizations—such as the Texas Association of School Administrators—filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court agreeing with Lankford’s arguments. But in October the Supreme Court rejected Lankford’s appeal, siding with Brooke’s right to sue. Attorneys on both sides agree that the ruling gives students substantial legal power to sue their teachers and administrators. Already, according to one document before the Supreme Court, Brooke’s lawsuit has become “a significant catalyst in the explosion of sexual abuse litigation that has been brought against public schools and school officials throughout the country.”

According to some sources, the Taylor Independent School District is arranging a settlement with Brooke, and the case will likely not go to trial. Lankford still lives in Taylor but has taken early retirement. Caplinger has quit his job as superintendent and moved out of the district. And Stroud remains on the family farm outside of Taylor. He works in hospitals as a respiratory therapist, and his wife, Pat, who has stayed with him throughout the ordeal, says he is a different person. He has gone through extensive therapy, she says “and it’s now time for people to just leave us alone. Our children don’t need to be burdened with this bad publicity. We need to move on with our lives.”

Brooke Graham is trying to do the same thing. According to a report by her psychologist entered into court records last year, “Brooke still feels extreme shame, and it is difficult for her not to blame herself….She has a great deal of difficulty trusting people, and rarely allows herself to get emotionally close to others.” But Brooke says that she knows she’s getting better. Sitting on her couch in shorts and a T-shirt—not looking much different from her high school photographs—she says, “Just to know I’m winning in court gives me some sense of relief, don’t you think?”

As she leans back in the couch, her arms crossed, her face focused on her lap, she says that not a day goes by without her thinking about Stroud. “I still see him in my sleep,” she says. “In this dream I have, I’m in a pickup truck in a grocery store parking lot, and suddenly there he is, coming up to the driver’s-side window. I try to get the truck in gear, but it won’t move. He starts banging on the window. And I keep pushing on the gears, trying to get the truck to move. It’s crazy. I’m stuck. I start screaming. He keeps banging and banging.” Brooke finally raises her head. “When I wake up,” she says, “I can still hear the banging.”

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