By Justin Jouvenal
Gretchen Van Winkle was transfixed as the hit Netflix series "Unbelievable" played on her TV screen in 2019.
The dramatised version of a true story of one woman's rape and betrayal by police was so similar it could have been hers.
Just like the protagonist, Van Winkle was sexually assaulted in her apartment by a knife-wielding intruder, who bound and gagged her.
Van Winkle remembered the same kinds of searing questions lobbed at her as detectives accused the woman on-screen of making up her assault.
"Unbelievable" ends with a measure of justice: A partial DNA match helps identify the victim's rapist and proves she was telling the truth all along. That moment had eluded Van Winkle for more than two decades.
Van Winkle had already asked Virginia authorities to take a fresh look at her 1995 assault case, and now she pressed for new DNA testing.
But any hope of an "Unbelievable"-style ending was soon dashed by a stunning series of calls and texts from a Fairfax County police cold-case detective.
Van Winkle's rape kit had been destroyed, in what police officials later concluded was a violation of department policy.
So had the knife, her bloody bedsheets and the clothes she wore when she was attacked. In fact, police said detectives scoured the property room and found every bit of physical evidence in her case was gone.
Then the detective wrote in a text that she had discovered more missing evidence in another old case. Van Winkle responded in disbelief: "Wow. This has left me kind of speechless."
"Me too," the detective punched out.
The best chance for bringing Van Winkle's attacker to justice was gone, but the detective's words put her quest for answers on a new path.
How could a department trash evidence in a sexual assault? How many other victims were in her shoes?
What Van Winkle worked to uncover was worse than she had imagined - an investigation by Fairfax County police found the same detective who probed her case had marked evidence for destruction in dozens of unsolved felony sexual assault cases. Victims remain unaware.
Why it happened, whether the evidence was improperly destroyed and the impact on cases is still not fully known.
Fairfax County police have begun a review of each one to see what evidence remains and what can be salvaged, but they have refused to release many details about the cases in question or what the re-examination has found so far.
Van Winkle's case is part of a broader but little-known problem: hundreds of rape kits have been destroyed at police departments across the US in recent years.
A top police commander in Fairfax now says the department believes Van Winkle's account of her sexual assault, and police have apologised to her, but it has brought her little comfort. She decided to speak publicly because she thinks the reckoning within the department is not yet complete.
"What the police did was worse than the rape," Van Winkle said.