My Chemical Romance

Darin Back

Jill's police report of the rape was a confusing mess. First, she claimed that Jeff was a new ­patient who'd made an emergency appoint­ment, entered the office in an agitated state, and raped her. But when detectives examined the building's security tape, it showed the two of them walking down the hall, chatting amiably.

The man was very nervous, Jill countered, so she'd actually met him at the front door. Police took her at her word, cropped her out of the video, and sent it to every tele­vision station in the Twin ­Cities. A couple of days after Jill called the police, "Jeff's" police sketch was all over the news.

"There was a hammer under her couch with evidence that it had been used in a really brutal way" in a sex act, said Sergeant Paul Schnell, who acted as lead investigator on the case for the Saint Paul police. "She was describing a middle-of-the-day stranger rape. Our number one objective was to find the person who did this and get him off the streets."

However, when officers interviewed staff from the bar downstairs from Jill's office
the following day, they heard a very different story. Jill and Jeff had been there together, and she'd consumed two Long Island iced teas. Under questioning, Jill also admitted to purchasing $425 worth of S&M
equipment and triple-X movies the weekend before. She suggested Jeff might have seen her and followed her back to her office. But when police visited the adult store to check through security tapes, they discovered Jill had returned the day after she was attacked to return a defective vibrator.

"It was unusual in my mind for someone to go into a sex store the day after a rape," Schnell said. "But human beings do weird, human things. This simply wasn't evidence that a sexual assault didn't occur."

In the meantime, a week after she'd contacted the police, Jill e-mailed Jeff to say she was sorry. She was working hard to protect his identity and her own "wonderful life."She offered to speak with an attorney he'd hired and tell him the whole story. And she did so, meeting Strauss—the man who'd later describe her as disheveled and inarticulate—at a restaurant.

More than two months into the investigation, after police had served a costly and embarrassing search warrant on a fellow psychologist with whom she'd once had a dispute, Jill admitted to Sergeant Schnell that she'd contacted Jeff online. But she ­insisted that her purpose had been to ­create a sex­ual fantasy for her husband. Jeff was a "consultant," like a wedding planner, she said. Only, when he arrived to advise her, he raped her instead.

On February 7, 2007, just as police were nearing the truth, Jill wrote to Jeff again: "I need to apologize—really had a freak-out experience and messed up quite a bit. I'm sorry. Wondering if I could ever see you again? You could take your anger out on me—I'm sure I would enjoy it." She signed this message with a winking emoticon.

According to Midwest ­Urology's records, during this period Jill continued to take testosterone (at a lower dosage, 1/8 teaspoon two or three times per week), and her blood level was 430 ng/dl—still several times higher than the normal female range.

On February 23, the Saint Paul police, who had tracked down Jeff through his Internet service provider (using the e-mail address Jill gave them to support her consultant story), executed a search warrant and found a man Schnell described as an "ordinary midlevel professional guy in the suburbs," whose wife had just left for work. "We knocked on the door and he opened it and said, `I told my attorney we should just call you,'  " Schnell recalls. "The guy was relieved because for five months every time he saw a squad car or heard a siren, he thought we were coming."

Jeff handed the officers a stack of printed e-mails from Jill proving she'd solicited him ­before and ­after the events of October 24. While they read, he called his lawyer, who invited Schnell to his office, where he listened to the tape in which Jill confessed to every detail of her crime.

The Saint Paul police had spent nearly four months and literally thousands of man-hours on Jill Ajao's false rape case.

This Is A Developing Story

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