WARNING: This story describes details of sexual abuse.
Hers isn't a household name but in the 1970s, Martha Goddard created one of the most powerful tools ever invented to bring criminals to justice.
It was a period of great social change, spurred on by the women's liberation movement, increased opportunities in the workforce and Roe v Wade, which guaranteed the nationwide right to an abortion.
But a silent epidemic was happening in plain sight. Goddard was working at Metro Help, a Chicago crisis hotline, answering calls from teenage runaways who had left home after being sexually abused.
"I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem," Goddard told an interviewer in 2003.
At the time, rape was considered rare and cloaked in secrecy and stigma. Survivors had few rights and legal protections in the criminal justice system, their reports often discredited as "he said, she said".
Before DNA testing came into effect, many sexual assault cases also had low prosecution rates because there was no standardised procedure for collecting and preserving evidence.
Goddard started asking what could be done to improve the situation. She consulted survivors, police officers and hospital staff about establishing a set of protocols for evidence collection that could be presented in a courtroom to support legal cases.
The first iteration was a cardboard box containing items like sterile swabs, plastic combs, nail clippers and envelopes to store evidence.
The kit was first adopted by hospitals in Chicago, then in Illinois before it eventually spread to other emergency rooms along the east coast of the United States.
But as its popularity increased, Goddard's involvement with the project shrank from view, according to Pagan Kennedy, a journalist and author of The Secret History of the Rape Kit.
"I think it was, probably, much more important for her to actually run a successful program and get it through and make change, than to have her name on it," she says.
In an effort to get the Chicago police department to participate in the project, Goddard had agreed to erase her name from the kit and allow another to claim credit for it.
And for most of its existence, the box design was largely attributed to a man: Louis Vitullo, a police sergeant who worked in the city's crime lab.
Goddard the crusader
In the early-to-mid 1970s, Goddard was working for the Wieboldt Foundation, a philanthropic organisation based in Chicago that donated money to progressive causes.
She was not a scientist, nor a lawyer, but an advocate for crime victims.
A 30-year-old blonde armed with serious suits, ostrich glasses and steely determination, Goddard would push her way into rooms where decisions were being made and talk until people saw her view on things, or coughed up cash.
"One of her friends from that time described her as f***ing relentless," Kennedy says.
In 1974, Goddard convinced the then-state's attorney Bernard Carey to appoint her to a citizens' advisory panel to investigate the failures in policing of sexual assault.
This led her to a Chicago crime lab, where she discovered countless problems in the collection and storage of evidence. Medics, detectives and lab technicians pointed the finger of blame at each other, but the issue ran much deeper.
Rape kits existed but they were limited, experimental and few knew how to use them properly, Kennedy says.
Since there was no standardised procedure for collecting and preserving evidence, items were mistakenly thrown away or left to gather dust in backrooms.
To address this, Goddard came up with a kit design and accompanying checklist of protocols and forms for both the examiners and the victim, which would allow anyone to use it.
Her next hurdle was finding the resources to properly develop the tool.
Goddard pitched her idea to a man she knew at the police department but was warned the people working in the crime lab may be offended by her idea.
"[Her friend] advised her, 'Look, if you want to go forward, you should really get Louis [Vitullo] on your side' because he was Chicago famous at that time," Kennedy says.
Vitullo was the chief microanalyst in the city's crime lab and had worked on a series of high-profile cases, including the mass murder of eight student nurses in 1966.
Goddard met with him, and presented a written description of the rape-kit system. But the meeting didn't go well.
Vitullo yelled at Goddard and threw her out, Kennedy says.
Then he appeared to have a change of heart. Some time after their fateful encounter, Vitullo studied the design Goddard had given him and showed her a prototype of the exact kit she'd proposed.
The catch? He'd made some tweaks and now believed it to be his own invention.
How a man was credited with the rape kit
Goddard's goal wasn't simply to create a kit. She wanted a professional tool backed by medics to help give survivors more credibility in the courtroom.
To do this, she needed the support of the police department and the state attorney's office since they had the final say in whether the new kit system could be implemented.
"[It meant] there was a lot of ruffling of feathers and egos," Kennedy remarks.
Goddard ultimately ceded credit to give the project the greatest chance of succeeding on a larger scale.
"It wouldn't have seemed as shocking at that time for the woman who is actually funding and running this program to step into the background when she needed to because a woman's name just had a lot less power [then]," Kennedy says.
"And [Goddard] was somebody who was just really interested in getting things done."
Goddard isn't the first person to prioritise the success of an idea over getting credit for it. Nor is she the only woman to experience a bias that prevented her contributions from being recognised in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Ultimately, the state attorney's office and the police department, which were both run by men, claimed credit for the rape kit.
And in 1978, Goddard's non-profit, Citizens Committee for Victims Assistance, trademarked the design as the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit.
Adding a man's name to the box opened the right doors.
But Goddard encountered another roadblock in getting her pilot program off the ground: funding.
The government typically covered the cost of forensic evidence processing and collection but not in cases of sexual assault.
Finding a financial backer for a project deemed taboo by polite society was difficult. Mainstream foundations didn't want their name associated with a word like rape, even if the device was helping victims.
It was a friend of Goddard, who was working at the Playboy Foundation providing grants to non-profit groups, that made the program possible with an endowment.
"At the time, the Playboy Foundation was funding abortion rights, it was funding a Ruth Bader Ginsburg project at the ACLU, [and] some of the most feminist groups that you can think of, so it wouldn't be as strange as it seems now," Kennedy says.
The first pilot program delivered the kits to around 25 hospitals in the Chicago area in 1978. A year later, 3,000 kits were rolled out across the city.
By the early 1980s, the rape kit was making its way across the east coast, and Goddard was tapped by the Department of Justice to help other states develop their own evidence collection programs.
"I felt I had to save the world, and I was going to start with Chicago and move to Cook County and move to the rest of the state. And there was something in the back of my mind that said, 'Gee, maybe the circumstances will be such that at some time I can go beyond the borders of Illinois,'" Goddard said in 2003.
She had put her life on hold, working long hours, seven days a week to bring her vision to fruition.
Eventually the kit was embraced at a national level, transforming the treatment of sexual assault in the court room.
"We owe a lot to Martha Goddard," says Jeanne Dorsey, who recently wrote a play about the woman based on interviews with friends, coworkers and family members.
But without her name on the project, Goddard's experience in sexual assault evidence collection and training was eventually overlooked by other experts in the forensics field.
Why Goddard disappeared
The advent of DNA testing in 1986 was a game changer for criminal justice, providing biological evidence that could directly link suspects to crime scenes.
At the same time, forensic science was generating greater attention, and criminologists and experts began to have a bigger role.
Up until that point, Goddard had been travelling all over the country, guiding people in best practices on using the kit.
"Obviously, she was somebody who knew this [kit] backwards and forwards. She knew all about it and had worked with people from the lawyers in the courtroom, to the nurses, to the crime lab," Kennedy says.
But as the field shifted around her, Goddard faced questions about her authority to speak on forensics.
"The fact that she wasn't a recognised expert, [because] she didn't have the [forensics] degree was really, really difficult."
Goddard began to scale back her public appearances and then she disappeared from the field entirely, exiting just as an another problem materialised.
DNA testing was incredibly expensive when it was first introduced and, from the outset, there was a backlog in the testing of sexual assault kits. This only increased as sexual assault awareness grew and each year passed.
"There were warehouses full of thousands of kits that hadn't been tested. And that wasn't really well known or talked about until the 2010s," Kennedy says.
One study estimated that between 2014 and 2018, there were 300,000 to 400,000 unsubmitted rape kits in the United States.
The gap has narrowed recently, after the US Department of Justice distributed nearly US$350 million in grants to 90 local and state agencies through the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.
But the problem has not gone away. American nonprofits, such as the Joyful Heart Foundation, are still tracking the extent of the nation's backlog and attempting to identify best practices for eliminating it.
Rediscovering a lost legacy
As part of her investigation into Goddard and the history of the kit, Kennedy went looking for the woman who started it all.
In the course of her search, she learned that Goddard had been a victim of sexual assault in the late 70s, a crime that may have played a role in her stepping back from her work.
Her final years were spent moving from city to city, living as a "hermit". Goddard was staying in Phoenix when she died in obscurity in 2015.
Unlike Vitullo, no obituaries were written about her.
One of her last interviews was with CNN for a story on the sexual assault collection box. But Goddard's significant role in its development was only fully understood after her death.
"Back then, it was a given that men often took credit for women's work," Dorsey says.
"The circumstances were such that the option for her to take ownership simply wasn't available to her the way it should have been.
"She was an advocate, a powerful one for sure, but she didn't have any leverage to push for ownership and she knew that."
Goddard's hidden work is now the subject of media articles, a book and Dorsey's play. But there is much more to her legacy than the kit.
Her experience highlights the unsung work of women everywhere and the murky history of erasing their trailblazing efforts.
