Mangum's life: conflict, contradictions

Accuser struggled with mental illness, alcohol

Crystal Gail Mangum insists she was sexually assaulted at a Duke lacrosse team party, even though the state attorney general dropped all charges this week because of a lack of evidence and her conflicting versions.

Mangum isn't offering an explanation. She continues to avoid reporters as she has in the year since she first claimed she was raped by three athletes. Even the people who know her only obscure the picture with their own contradictions about who she is.

But interviews and records obtained by The News & Observer make this much clear: The 28-year-old woman has struggled with poverty, alcohol abuse and psychological instability. In recent years she turned to therapists for help with bipolar disorder and other mental problems and took anti-psychotic medication.

As N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper said at Wednesday's news conference, the special prosecutors and State Bureau of Investigation agents who interviewed her concluded that "she may actually believe the many different stories that she has been telling."

Her emotional problems surfaced as a teenager.

She was 14 when she took up with a man twice her age. Three years after that, in 1996, she told police that the boyfriend had "shared" her sexually with three friends in a trailer home on a country road in Creedmoor. She filed a police report but never provided a written account of what happened, as an officer had requested, and the case was not pursued.

Still, she wrote about the incident in her diary, according to a boyfriend who told police he came across the entry in 2000.

Her parents say the assault left her depressed and that she saw a therapist for a year after and took prescription medicine. But they insist she didn't suffer lasting psychological damage.

Crystal Mangum enlisted in the Navy in 1997, the year after she graduated from Hillside High School, and married a man 14 years her senior while in training school in Virginia. Her Navy stint was tumultuous and brief.

Soon after being assigned to an ammunition ship in California in January 1998, Mangum began a relationship with a fellow sailor, Richard Ramseier, and she quickly became pregnant. Within six months she was abruptly discharged for reasons that have not been made public, although it wasn't because she was pregnant.

She gave birth to a son in February 1999, and 14 months later had another child, a girl. The couple broke up after she returned to Durham in 2000, and he remained in the Navy on the West Coast.

Ramseier declined to talk with The N&O about Mangum, other than to say he wasn't aware of any psychological problems she might have had.

Mangum had tried several jobs but she discovered that dancing in strip clubs was a quicker way to make a living. Still, it made her uneasy and she turned to her family's minister for advice.

"The first time she came to me I said, 'Girl, you're just opening yourself up to a wild pack with this exotic dancing," said Delois Burnette, Mangum's former minister who has known her since she was a child. "They're drinking, and they don't know their head from their tail."

Burnette eventually realized that Mangum also had a drinking problem. She had been arrested in 2000 for driving while impaired, although she wasn't convicted. Court records reflect that she later lost her driver's license but don't indicate how. Her boyfriend, Matthew Murchison, then 32, had just gotten out of state prison on a conviction as an habitual drunken driver.

Then in 2002 came a night of bizarre behavior that would be repeated in the coming years, including at the lacrosse party. That night in 2002, she appeared coherent one moment and falling-down intoxicated the next. She had been performing at a Durham strip club late on a Thursday night, and while fondling a customer who was a taxi driver she slipped his keys out of his pocket, according to a Durham County Sheriff's Office report.