Penn State Confidential: What Mike McQueary Heard And Saw, Part 2

PART TWO:  Editor’s Note:  Here is the second and final excerpt on Mike McQueary and Allan Myers from The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, by Mark Pendergrast.

By Mark Pendergrast

for BigTrial.net

McQueary's Quandry [From Chapter 12]

On Friday, Nov 11, 2011, Sara Ganim, who had publicly identified Mike McQueary as the “graduate assistant” in the grand jury presentment who had supposedly witnessed Sandusky sodomizing a boy in the shower, wrote that McQueary was “getting blasted by the public for doing too little.” 

He had received several death threats. The same day, newly appointed Penn State President Rodney Erickson announced that McQueary was being placed on administrative leave “after it became clear he could not continue coaching.”  Erickson pointedly continued:  "Never again should anyone at Penn State feel scared to do the right thing.”

McQueary was hard to miss around town.  He stood six feet five inches, topped by short bristles of bright orange-red hair, which gave him the nickname Big Red.  Now people were asking one another, “Why didn’t Big Red stop it?”  

On Tuesday, McQueary had called an emotional meeting with his Penn State players.  He looked pale and his hands were shaking.

 “I’m not sure what is going to happen to me,” he said.  He cried as he talked about the Sandusky shower incident.  According to one of the players, “He said he had some regret that he didn’t stop it.”  

Then McQueary revealed that he himself had been molested as a child. Perhaps because he had been sexually abused, McQueary was particularly alert to possible abuse, and so he leaped to the conclusion that the slapping sounds he heard in the Lasch Building locker room were sexual.

It is clear from the testimony of Dr. Dranov and others, however, that McQueary did not witness sodomy that night in February 2001.  He thought something sexual was happening, but as he emphasized later, the entire episode lasted 30 to 45 seconds, he heard the sounds for only a few seconds, and his glance in the mirror was even quicker. 

Ten years after the event, his memory had shifted and amplified, after the police told him that they had other Sandusky victims.  Under that influence, his memory made the episode much more sexually graphic.

As I have written previously, all memory is reconstructive and is subject to distortion. That is particularly true when many years have intervened, and when current attitudes influence recall of those distant events. It is worthwhile quoting here from psychologist Daniel Reisberg’s 2014 book, The Science of Perception and Memory: A Pragmatic Guide for the Justice System.

“Connections between a specific memory and other, more generic knowledge can allow the other knowledge to intrude into our recollection,” Reiserberg notes. “Thus, a witness might remember the robber threatening violence merely because threats are part of the witness’s cognitive ‘schema’ for how robberies typically unfold.”

That appears to be what happened to McQueary, who had a “schema” of what child sexual abuse in a shower would look like.  He had thought at the time that some kind of sexual activity must have occurred in the shower.  The police were telling him that they had other witnesses claiming that Sandusky had molested them. Thinking back to that long-ago night, McQueary now visualized a scene that never occurred, but the more he rehearsed it in his memory, the more real it became to him.

“As your memory for an episode becomes more and more interwoven with other thoughts you’ve had about that episode, it can become difficult to keep track of which elements are linked to the episode because they were, in truth, part of the episode itself and which are linked merely because they are associated with the episode in your thoughts,” Reisberg writes. That process “can produce intrusion errors – so that elements that were part of your thinking get misremembered as being actually part of the original experience.”

 In conclusion, Reisberg writes, “It is remarkably easy to alter someone’s memory, with the result that the past as the person remembers it differs from the past as it really was.”

On Nov. 23, 2010, McQueary wrote out a statement for the police in which he said he had glanced in a mirror at a 45 degree angle over his right shoulder and saw the reflection of a boy facing a wall with Sandusky standing directly behind him. 

“I am certain that sexual acts/the young boy being sodomized was occuring [sic],” McQueary wrote.  “I looked away. In a hurried/hastened state, I finished at my locker. I proceeded out of the locker room.  While walking I looked directly into the shower and both the boy and Jerry Sandusky looked directly in my direction.”

But it is extremely unlikely that this ten-year-later account is accurate.  Dranov was adamant that McQueary did not say that he saw anything sexual.  When former Penn State football player Gary Gray went to see Joe Paterno in December 2011, the month before he died, Gray told Paterno that he still had a hard time believing that Sandusky had molested those children.  “You and me both,” Paterno said. 

In a letter to the Penn State Board of Trustees after the trial, Gray recalled their conversation about McQueary’s telling Paterno about the shower incident.  “Joe said that McQueary had told him that he had seen Jerry engaged in horseplay or horsing around with a young boy.  McQueary wasn’t sure what was happening, but he said that it made him feel uncomfortable.  In recounting McQueary’s conversation to me, Coach Paterno did not use any terms with sexual overtones.”

Similarly, in November 2011, when biographer Joe Posnanski asked Paterno about what McQueary told him back in 2001, Paterno told him, “I think he said he didn’t really see anything. He said he might have seen something in a mirror. But he told me he wasn’t sure he saw anything. He just said the whole thing made him uncomfortable.”

If McQueary had told Paterno, Curley or other administrators that he had seen Sandusky in such a sexual position with the boy, it is inconceivable that they would not have turned the matter over to the police. 

This was not a “cover-up.”  Sandusky didn’t even work for Penn State by the time of the incident, so what was there to cover up?  Paterno and Sandusky had never really liked one another, and Paterno was famed for his integrity and honesty.  If he thought Sandusky was molesting a child in the shower, he would undoubtedly have called the police.  

It is clear that Paterno, Curley, Schultz, and Spanier took the incident for what it apparently was – McQueary hearing slapping sounds that he misinterpreted as being sexual.

McQueary gave five different versions of what he heard and saw, but all were reconstructed memories over a decade after the fact.  They changed a bit over time, but none of them are reliable.  

McQueary had painted himself into a difficult corner.  If he had really seen something so horrendous, why hadn’t he rushed into the shower to stop it?  Why hadn’t he gone to the police?  Why hadn’t he followed up with Paterno or other Penn State administrators to make sure something was being done?  Why had he continued to act friendly towards Sandusky, even taking part in golfing events with him?

When angry people began to ask these questions, that first week in November 2011, McQueary emailed a friend.  "I did stop it not physically but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room,” he wrote.  He now said that he had in essence contacted the police about the incident by alerting Joe Paterno, which led to Gary Schultz talking to him about it, and Schultz was the administrator the campus police reported to.

 “No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30-45 seconds," McQueary said. "Trust me…. I am getting hammered for handling this the right way ... or what I thought at the time was right … I had to make tough, impacting quick decisions.”

Subsequently, McQueary changed his story somewhat.  He now recalled that he had loudly slammed his locker door, which made Sandusky stop the abuse, and that he had taken yet a third look in the shower to make sure they had remained apart.  

At the trial, he said that he had “glanced” in the mirror for “one or two seconds,” then lengthened his estimate to “three or four seconds, five seconds maybe.”  During that brief glance, he now said that he had time to see Sandusky standing behind a boy whose hands were against the shower wall, and that he saw “very slow, slow, subtle movement” of his midsection.

But neither the newly created sodomy scene nor the slammed locker would save McQueary’s career.

The Elusive Allan Myers [From Chapter 13]

By the time of the trial, eight accusers had been “developed,” as Assistant Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach put it.  But Allan Myers, the boy in the shower in the McQueary incident, had been so public and vehement in his previous defense of Sandusky that the prosecution did not dare call him to testify.  

When police inspector Joseph Leiter first interviewed him on September 20, 2011, Myers had emphatically denied that Sandusky had abused him or made him uncomfortable in any way.

After the Grand Jury Presentment was published on November 5, 2011, with its allegations that Mike McQueary had witnessed sodomy in a locker room shower, Myers realized that he was “Victim 2,” the boy in the shower that night, but that the sounds McQueary heard were just snapping towels or slap boxing.  Myers then gave a detailed statement to Joseph Amendola’s investigator, Curtis Everhart, denying that Sandusky had ever abused him.

But within two weeks, Myers had become a client of Andrew Shubin. For months, Shubin refused to let the police interview Myers without Shubin being present, and he apparently hid Myers in a remote Pennsylvania hunting cabin to keep them from finding him.

After a February 10, 2012, hearing, Shubin verbally assaulted Anthony Sassano, an agent for the attorney general's office, outside the courthouse, cursing him roundly.  “He was very vulgar, critical of me,” Sassano recalled.  “Let’s call it unprofessional [language], for an attorney.”

 Shubin was angry because the Attorney General’s Office wouldn’t interview Myers, who, he claimed, had stayed at Sandusky’s house “over 100 times” where he had been subjected to “both oral and anal sex.” But the police still refused to allow Shubin to be present during any interview.

Soon afterwards, Shubin relented, allowing a postal inspector named Michael Corricelli to talk to Allan Myers alone on February 28, 2012. But during the three-hour interview, Myers never said Sandusky had abused him. On March 8, Corricelli tried again, but Myers again failed to provide any stories of molestation. On March 16, Corricelli brought Myers to the police barracks for a third interview in which Anthony Sassano took part. Asked about three out-of-state trips, Myers denied any sexual contact and said that Sandusky had only tucked him into bed.

“He did not recall the first time he was abused by Sandusky,” Sassano wrote in his notes, nor did Myers recall how many times he was abused. “He indicated it is hard to talk about the Sandusky sexual abuse because Sandusky was like a father to him.”  Finally, Myers said that on a trip to Erie, Pennsylvania, Sandusky put his hand inside his pants and touched his penis. Sassano tried valiantly to get more out of him, asking whether Sandusky had tried to put Myers’ hand on his own penis or whether that had been oral sex.  No.

Still, Myers now estimated that there had been ten sexual abuse events and that the last one was in the shower incident that McQeary overheard. “I attempted to have Myers elaborate on the sexual contact he had with Sandusky, but he refused by saying he wasn’t ready to talk about the specifics,” Sassano wrote. Myers said that he had not given anyone, including his attorneys, such details. “This is in contrast to what Shubin told me,” Sassano noted.

On April 3, 2012, Corricelli and Sassano were schedule to meet yet again with the reluctant Allan Myers, but he didn’t show up, saying that he was “too upset” by a friend’s death.  

“Corricelli indicated that Attorney Shubin advised him that Myers had related to him incidents of oral, anal, and digital penetration by Sandusky,” Sassano wrote in his report. “Shubin showed Corricelli a three page document purported to be Myers’ recollection of his sexual contact with Sandusky.  Corricelli examined the document and indicated to me that he suspected the document was written by Attorney Shubin.  I advised that I did not want a copy of a document that was suspected to be written by Attorney Shubin.” Sassano concluded:  “At this time, I don’t anticipate further investigation concerning Allan Myers.”

That is how things stood as the Sandusky trial was about to begin.  Karl Rominger wanted to call Myers to testify as a defense witness, but Amendola refused.  “I was told that there was a détente and an understanding that both sides would simply not identify Victim Number 2,” Rominger later recalled.  The prosecution didn’t want such a weak witness who had given a strong exculpatory statement to Curtis Everhart. Amendola didn’t want a defense witness who was now claiming to be an abuse victim.  “So they decided to punt, to use an analogy,” Rominger concluded.

Mike McQueary Takes The Stand [From Chapter 15]

Mike McQueary then took the stand to tell his latest version of the shower incident with “Victim 2” (i.e., the unnamed Allan Myers), where he heard “showers running and smacking sounds, very much skin-on-skin smacking sounds.”  (Later in his testimony, he said he heard only two or three slapping sounds that lasted two or three seconds.)

 

He had re-framed and re-examined his memory of the event “many, many, many times,” he said, and he was now certain that he had looked into the shower three separate times, for one or two seconds

each, and that he saw “Coach Sandusky standing behind a boy who is propped up against the shower. 

The showers are running and, and he is right up against his back with his front. The boy’s hands are up on the wall.”  He saw “very slow, slow, subtle movement.” After he slammed his locker, McQueary said, they separated and faced him. Surprisingly, he said that Sandusky did not have an erection.

 

When Amendola failed to object, Judge Cleland inserted himself, obviously fearful of future appeal or post-conviction relief issues.  “Wait, wait, wait, just a second,” he warned McGettigan. “I think you have to be very careful for you not to lead this witness.”

A few minutes later, the judge asked both lawyers to approach the bench.  “I don’t know why you’re not getting objections to this grossly leading [questioning],” he told McGettigan, who said, “I’m just trying to get through it fast.”

McQueary recounted how he had met with Joe Paterno.

“I made sure he knew it was sexual and that it was wrong, [but] I did not go into gross detail.”  Later, he said, he met with Tim Curley, the Penn State athletic director, and Gary Schultz, a university vice president. 

In an email quoted during his testimony, McQueary had written, “I had discussions with the police and with the official at the university in charge of the police.” He now explained that by this he meant just one person, since Schultz oversaw the university police department.

 

With only an hour’s warning, Joe Amendola asked Karl Rominger to conduct the cross-examination of McQueary and handed him the file.  Rominger did the best he could, asking McQueary why in 2010 he had told the police that he’d looked into the showers twice but had now added a third viewing, and he questioned him about his misremembering that the shower incident occurred in 2002 rather than 2001. 

Rominger also noted that McQueary had told the grand jury, “I was nervous and flustered, so I just didn’t do anything to stop it.” Now he was saying that he slammed the locker, which allegedly ended the incident.

 

Without meaning to, McQueary indirectly helped Sandusky’s case by explaining the demanding work schedule of a Penn State football coach, typically reporting to work Sunday through Tuesday at 7 a.m. and working until 10 p.m. or later.  Then, Wednesday through Friday, it was 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.  If Sandusky kept the same hours, it was difficult to see when he would have managed to molest all those boys, at least during preseason training and football season.

Finally, McQueary revealed that he had filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Penn State for having removed him from his football coaching job in the midst of the Sandusky scandal. “I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong to lose that job," he said.

What Mike McQueary Told Dr. Dranov [From Chapter 16]

In his brief appearance for the defense, physician Jonathan Dranov recalled the February night in 2001 that his friend and employee, John McQueary, had called to ask him around 9 p.m. to come over, because his son Mike was upset by something that had happened in a Penn State locker room.  

When he came in, Mike was sitting on the couch, “visibly shaken and upset.” The younger McQueary said he had gone to the locker room to put away some new sneakers and “he heard what he described as sexual sounds.” 

Dranov asked him what he meant.  “Well, sexual sounds, you know what they are,” McQueary said.  “No, Mike, you know, what do you mean?” But he didn’t explain. “He just seemed to get a little bit more upset. So I kind of left that.”

McQueary told him that he looked toward the shower “and a young boy looked around. He made eye contact with the boy.” Dranov asked him if the boy seemed upset or frightened, and McQueary said he did not. Then, as Dranov recalled, McQueary said that “an arm reached out and pulled the boy back.”

Was that all he saw? No, McQueary said “something about going back to his locker, and then he turned around and faced the shower room and a man came out, and it was Jerry Sandusky.”  Dranov asked McQueary three times if he had actually witnessed a sexual act. “I kept saying, ‘What did you see?’ and each time he [Mike] would come back to the sounds. I kept saying, ‘But what did you see?’ “And it just seemed to make him more upset, so I back off that.”

Karl Rominger asked Dranov, “You’re a mandatory reporter?” Yes, he was, meaning that he was legally bound to report criminal sexual activity to the police. He did not do that, since he obviously didn’t conclude that it was warranted.  He only told Mike McQueary to report the incident to his immediate supervisor, Joe Paterno.

As a follow-up witness, a Second Mile administrator named Henry Lesch explained that he had been in charge of the annual golf tournament, in which Mike McQueary had played in June 2001 and 2003. The implication was that this seemed strange behavior, supporting an activity in which Jerry Sandusky was a leading sponsor and participant, if McQueary had witnessed sodomy in the shower in February 2001.

Allan Myers Takes The Stand [From Chapter 20]

One last hearing took place three months later, on November 4, 2016, when Allan Myers finally took the stand. He had evaded all subpoena attempts for the August hearings.  Jerry Sandusky could hardly

recognize the overweight, bearded, sullen 29-year-old, who clearly didn’t want to be there.

He wouldn’t use Sandusky’s name, referring to him as “your client” in response to Al Lindsay’s questions. Yes, he had gone to the Second Mile camps for a couple of years “until your client hand-picked me,” he said. He admitted, however, that he had regarded Sandusky as a father figure and that he had lived with the Sandusky’s the summer of 2005, before he attended Penn State.  “I left because he was controlling,” Myers said.

Lindsay had him read the notes of his September 2011 police interview, in which he said that Sandusky never made him uncomfortable and had not abused him, and that he didn’t believe any of the allegations. 

“That would reflect what I said then,” Myers said, “not what I would say now.” That would become his refrain during his testimony, which appeared to be well-rehearsed, along with “I don’t recall.” 

Yes, he had told Curtis Everhart that “Jerry never violated me while I was at his home or anywhere else….I felt very safe and at ease at his home, whether alone with Jerry or with others present.” Yes, he had denied any anal or oral intercourse or any abuse at all.  “That’s what I said then," he said.

Yes, Shubin was Myers’ lawyer for his DUI charge, and then he represented him as a claimed Sandusky victim, and yes, he had received a settlement from Penn State. And yes, he said, he was Victim 2.

During her cross-examination, Jennifer Peterson asked Myers, “And you told him [Anthony Sassano] that you were sexually abused by Mr. Sandusky, right?” Surprisingly, he didn’t agree.  “I don’t remember exactly what I said in the meetings. I know then I was more forthcoming, but not all the way coming, because still processing everything and dealing with it.” It sounded as if he might have been in repressed memory therapy.

Peterson asked again, “Were you sexually abused?” This time he answered, “Yes,” although he didn’t actually say that it was Sandusky who had abused him. And there the matter was left.

               *                *             * 

Meanwhile, several Sandusky-related legal decisions came down, all of them relying on the truth of the abuse narrative.

Three weeks before Cleland’s recusal, Mike McQueary won his whistleblower lawsuit against Penn State, with the jury awarding the former Penn State coach $7.3 million.  

At the end of November 2016, Judge Thomas Gavin ruled that that amount wasn’t enough, so he added another $5 million.  In doing so, he cited prosecutor Jonelle Eshbach’s testimony during the trial that McQueary had been a terrific grand jury witness:  “He was rock solid in his testimony as to what he had seen,” Eshbach said.  “He was very articulate. His memory was excellent.”

Eshbach, the author of the notorious Grand Jury Presentment, was correct that McQueary had been articulate, but his “rock solid” testimony had morphed from what he told his father and Jonathon Dranov in February 2001 – that he heard sounds but witnessed no sexual abuse – to his grand jury testimony ten years later. 

And he kept modifying his story and memory after that.  Nonetheless, the judge ruled that McQueary had suffered “humiliation” when Graham Spanier publicly supported Curley and Schultz, which by implication impugned the assistant coach. Gavin later added another $1.7 million to pay for McQueary’s lawyers’ fees.

The Fallout [From Chapter 23]

Former federal investigator John Snedden, who interviewed many players in the Penn State drama soon after the trial, concluded that there was no cover-up because there was nothing to cover up.  Mike McQueary had only heard slapping sounds in the shower. If McQueary really thought he was witnessing a sexual assault on a child, Snedden said, wouldn't he have intervened to stop a "wet, defenseless naked 57-year-old guy in the shower?" 

Snedden’s boss told him, as a rookie agent, that the first question to ask in an investigation is, “Where is the crime?” In this case, there didn’t appear to be one. "I've never had a rape case successfully prosecuted based only on sounds, and without credible victims and witnesses.”

             *            *              *

In 2016, psychologist Julia Shaw published The Memory Illusion, a summary of her own and others’ work. “[My colleagues and] I have convinced people they have committed crimes that never occurred, suffered from a physical injury they never had, or were attacked by a dog when no such attack ever took place,” she wrote. 

The Memory Hackers (2016), a Nova public television program, featured one of Shaw’s subjects recalling an illusory crime in three sessions. In that study, over 70 percent of her subjects developed false memories.

“What could have been turns into what would have been turns into what was,” the experimental psychologist explained. Her conclusion?  “Any event, no matter how important, emotional or traumatic it may seem, can be…misremembered, or even be entirely fictitious…. All of us can come to confidently and vividly remember entire events that never actually took place.”

Experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett made similar observations in his classic 1932 text, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.  Our memories, he noted, “live with our interests and with them they change.”  We tend to incorporate details of what really happened, along with other inserted elements, perhaps from a movie we saw or a book we read, or a story someone else told us. This kind of “source amnesia” is amazingly common.  In fact, many of us are sure something happened to us, when it was our sibling who actually experienced it.

That is how Mike McQueary’s memory of the infamous 2001 shower changed.  The night of the shower, he said he had heard slapping sounds but had not seen anything incriminating.  Ten years later, his retrospective bias led him to have questionable memories of seeing Sandusky moving his hips behind a boy in the shower.  With rehearsal, his new memories were solidified, and he became quite confident in them.  That phenomenon, called “the illusion of confidence” by The Invisible Gorilla authors, is not unusual, either.

There may have been other factors influencing McQueary's recollections of that infamous shower incident.

When he was first contacted by police, Mike McQueary, at that time a married man, apparently sent a “sexting” photo of his own penis to a female Penn State student in April 2010.  He may have thought that was why the police wanted to talk to him, and why he didn’t want to meet with them in his home.  

ESPN journalist Don Van Natta, Jr, initially intended to include this information in a feature article about McQueary, but it was cut from the published piece.

In 2017 McQueary, now divorced, texted another photo of his erect penis to a woman. Investigator John Ziegler obtained the text messages and photo and published them at framingpaterno.com.