City Releases Trove of Documents in Central Park Jogger Case

On a spring afternoon in 1989, detectives brought a special-education teacher, Daniel Kany, downtown to ask him questions. Stories about a nighttime beating and rape in Central Park had been rippling through his classroom on West 103d Street for days since a student at the school had been arrested in the park.

A 14-year-old student had been making pelvic motions, Mr. Kany told detectives, according to a police report. Another student told the teacher he had been in the park at the time of the rape, too — and then hid under Mr. Kany’s desk for the better part of a day. A third told Mr. Kany he had raped the woman in Central Park. Detectives later said that student was “a confirmed liar.”

None of those students was ever implicated in the rape. They seemed to have been making up stories. But knowing about the attack — or saying you had taken part in it — had become a kind of currency in Mr. Kany’s classroom. The distortions that spread — one of many dead-end leads for detectives — showed how a devastating crime morphed into a public spectacle, making it ever more difficult to sift truth from fiction.

Only years later did investigators conclude that five other teenagers who were arrested and confessed to taking part in the rape — the Central Park Five — had been wrongfully convicted. The teenagers, aged 14 to 16 at the time of the attack, said the statements had been coerced. Twelve years after they were convicted in two separate trials in 1990, another man, Matias Reyes, confessed that he alone had attacked and raped the woman. DNA evidence confirmed his story.