Nancy Crowden was living her best life in Alaska in March of last year when a call from Miami-Dade Police jolted her back to a time she’d rather forget.
“I thought it was a joke,” she told NBC6 Investigates. “I really had no memory of it.”
It was a night in January 1985 when she says two men she had just met in a Miami Beach bar raped her in a what was an open field along Northwest 9th Street west of Red Road.
“My mind had totally forgotten it,” she said. "I mean, it's almost 40 years."
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Within two hours of the attack, doctors collected DNA from her body that was eventually entered into a database that compares crime evidence to known offenders.
In March 2023, a hit: 63-year-old Gustavo Rivero, whose DNA was collected months earlier after he was convicted of cocaine possession.
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In a Miami-Dade Police interrogation room 4,000 miles away from Crowden in Alaska, Rivero last May asked two detectives. “What’s going on, man?”
He was about to find out.
“You know how we know you raped her?” a detective asked after telling Rivero why he was being detained. “Because your DNA was inside her.”
Rivero appeared perplexed.
“You can’t change your DNA,” the detective continued, “So we know it’s you and this happened in 1985.”
Shown a photo of Crowden from the 1980s, Rivero said he didn’t recognize her.
At some level, she would not recognize herself from the life she lived back then.
“I've been through a lot since then,” she said. “I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict. I got clean and sober in 1991 and I kind of put all that life behind me. I've got a wonderful life here in Alaska.”
But here she was being drawn back to 1980s Miami-Dade and the Miami Beach bar where she crossed paths with men like Rivero, who would become a prolific, if petty, criminal with more than two dozen arrests and convictions - from drug possession to battery and burglary.
On a Wednesday night in January 1985, he and Crowden, then 28, were living blocks away from what was Dave’s Bar, at Alton Road and 9th Street. Both she and Rivero told police they remember hanging out at the bar near where they both lived back then, but that’s about all they agree on.
When first approached by police last year, Crowden could not recall anything about the crime.
But now “I can see basically everything so it's, yeah,” she paused, emotion welling in her voice, “It's been hard. I, I – yeah…”
Her recitation of the facts are laid out in police reports from that time, how she met two men inside Dave’s and agreed to leave with them, first picking up a jacket at her place – “it was a cold night” – then on to westbound State Road 836.
“I thought we were going to go party and do cocaine,” she recalled.
She soon realized they had something else in mind.
“I can remember being in the car. I can remember fighting. I can remember everything now,” including, she said, how one man pulled a knife as they drove into the lot just being developed across the canal from what was Pan American Hospital.
Crowden told police she was punched, acted unconscious and was raped by both.
“They took me out there to kill me. I know that,” she said.
After the DNA testing, Rivero would be charged with armed sexual battery and Crowden said a now-former prosecutor assured her he’d face trial on that charge.
“She told me that they had a great case, and it was he was facing a life sentence because a knife was used,” she recalled.
Crowden is sharing this publicly because of what happened next, saying “I'm not ashamed of what happened. I'm ashamed of the way that it's turned out.”
Rivero was offered a plea deal, presented in court as follow: admit aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, the knife, remain free on 12 years’ probation and avoid a prison sentence.
It’s something academic studies and a data analysis by NBC Investigative units across the country find happens more often than not when it comes to sex crimes: the defendant would not be convicted of the most serious charge he first faced.
Numbers vary, but studies have found arrests are made in less than 20% of the sexual assaults that are reported – and many are not reported at all.
About two-thirds of those reported lead to prosecution and more than 75% of those prosecutions that are resolved lead to plea bargains to some lesser charge.
Only about 15% of resolved prosecutions produce convictions as charged, according to a study of nearly 3,000 sexual violence cases in six jurisdictions between 2006 and 2012 by University of Massachusetts researchers.
It’s negotiated justice and it can leave victims like Crowden frustrated.
It’s one of the most heinous crimes, but prosecutors say sexual assaults can also be among the most difficult for them to obtain convictions.
To make such crimes easier to prosecute, Natalie Snyder, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s sex crimes division chief, said it’s important to report a sex crime as soon as possible after it occurs. Evidence can be recovered from both the scene and the victim, while the state attorney’s office can guide them to professional help.
To anyone who knows a victim, Snyder said, the most important thing they can do is offer whatever support they can throughout the process.
As for Rivero, he declined to answer questions from NBC6.
When he at first rejected the plea offer, his attorney, Sabino Jauregui said in an interview, “He’s innocent. He didn’t rape this woman. He wants to go to trial. And he wants to show he didn’t do anything.”
As for the DNA, Jauregui explained, “If any sex took place, it was consensual."
Snyder said such a defense makes a trial riskier and that a DNA match is not always a silver bullet to conviction.
“Not always the case,” she said. “You have to look at the circumstances and totality. At that point, usually the defense is then going to challenge whether the victim consented to the sexual activity. So, then it relies a lot on the victim's memory.”
Crowden could not remember being raped when first contacted by police nearly 40 years later, which it’s not unheard of in this type of cases.
After further reflection, Rivero decided he did not want to go to trial after all and last month entered his guilty plea in her case to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, not for the most serious charge: sexual battery.
Crowden was given the Zoom information to watch the plea and was given the right to speak, but she declined. “I felt like it would have made me look stupid,” she said.
In accepting Rivero’s plea, Judge Ariel Rodriguez recited some of the difficulties the state faced.
Crowden “didn’t recall much as to what happened … her memory was really vague,” the judge said, adding, had it gone to trial, “It’s clear to me the state is going to have a very difficult time proving this case.”
Told what the judge said, Crowden said, “I understand that. It's just the last hearing when this happened, it was set for trial, and I was ready to go to trial. I'm not a loser. I don't like to lose, and I feel like I lost without a fight.”
But, Snyder said, a plea is not necessarily a loss.
“Plea bargaining has a negative connotation to it,” she said, “but it brings finality to a case that otherwise we might not get… It's an assured outcome for our victims. It brings closure to the case. It brings a conviction, and it brings other things that if the defendant's found not guilty, he walks out, like nothing happened.”
Under the deal, Rivero will enter a sex offender program and have to submit to three drug tests a month. Failing one could lead to a probation violation and up to 15 years in prison.
Speaking generally, Snyder said, if an offender violates probation, “we will do everything that we can (to see) he goes to prison.”
Based on what Rivero said in his May 2023 interrogation, a failed test is a distinct possibility.
“When I have coke, I do coke. And then when I don’t got coke I do weed” he told detectives during the interrogation, revealing he had ingested cocaine within 24 hours of his detention.
And if he does fail, at least one woman in Alaska will be shedding no tears.
"I hope he screws up,” Crowden said.
The National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24 hours. You can call 800.656.HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area.
