Columbia, Missouri police have officially closed their investigation into the alleged 2010 rape of former Missouri swimmer Sasha Menu Courey after more than a year of digging.
Menu Corey died in 2011 of a Tylenol overdose that was ruled a suicide. Her story really went public in January of 2013, though, when ESPN’s Outside The Lines dug into the situation and reported that Menu Corey believed she had been raped by a member of the Missouri football team. Outside The Lines also reported that the University of Missouri failed to investigate the alleged sexual assault or report it to law enforcement.
That prompted the Columbia Police Department to start investigating the case later that month.
Last month, after just over a year of investigation, police closed the case without prosecuting any suspects, citing a lack of hard evidence or a suspect identified enough to prosecute. That news comes courtesy of ESPN, which reports that the police department talked to several members of the football team, but weren’t able to find conclusive enough evidence to implicate a specific suspect.
You can get a more thorough look at the investigation in that ESPN piece, but a the major hangups were “a lack of evidence, uncooperative witnesses and the lack of a clearly identified suspect.” Several football players on the team at the time spoke to both police and ESPN about the evening, but the length of time between the 2010 incident and the 2014 investigation had blurred memories enough to hamper the investigation.
You can read the full ESPN report here, but be warned that it is somewhat graphic in its recounting of various players’ testimonies.
