Not only is Marie—played by Kaitlyn Dever—telling the truth, but as the eight-episode limited series plays out, we discover that the man responsible for her rape has committed numerous other sexual assaults. Had the police in Marie’s case believed her in 2008, they may have been able to stop similar sexual violence against other women.
Unbelievable is based on a 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning article and doesn’t stray too far away from the facts of Marie’s story, as told in the piece co-published by ProPublica and the Marshall Project. However, there are some small changes—specifically the names of the detectives involved in the case (played by Merritt Wever and Toni Collette) and the name of the serial rapist who is eventually caught in 2011.
In Unbelievable, the serial rapist that is apprehended by Detectives Karen Duvall (Wever) and Grace Rasmussen (Collette) goes by the name Chris McCarthy. He is played by actor Blake Ellis.
But the real Chris McCarthy is a man named Marc O’Leary, who is currently serving a 327-and-a-half-year prison sentence for multiple counts of rape in Colorado.
Who is Marc O’Leary?
O’Leary is an Army veteran who perpetrated multiple rapes in Washington and Colorado between 2008 and 2011, when he was eventually caught and convicted.
O’Leary was charged with the assaults of two women in Washington, including Marie, and four in Colorado.
The Army veteran was stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Washington, between November 2006 and September 2009, when he targeted Marie in Lynnwood, Washington, in August 2008. Another victim, a 63-year-old woman, was assaulted in October 2008 in Kirkland, Washington.
O’Leary was caught in Colorado in February 2011, after detectives investigated four rapes across the state and found a similar pattern used by the assailant in each case. O’Leary was living in Lakewood, Colorado, at the time of his arrest.
O’Leary was convicted of 28 counts of rape and other felonies in the Colorado cases and sentenced to 327-and-a-half years in prison. For the two cases in Washington, he was sentenced to a further 68-and-a-half years.
According to the ProPublica and Marshall Project article in 2015, O’Leary told police after his arrest that he took steps to evade being caught, such as erasing genetic material from the crime scenes. O’Leary made his victims shower thoroughly after he assaulted them and removed soiled bed sheets from their homes.
O’Leary first assaulted Marie before going on to commit the five more attacks between October 2008 and 2011. He assumed he’d be caught after the attack on Marie because he knew the U.S. Army had his DNA on file.
“If Washington had just paid attention a little bit more, I probably would have been a person of interest earlier on,” O’Leary told police.
At his sentencing hearing in December 2011, O’Leary agreed that he should be jailed. “I am a sexually violent predator, and I’m out of control,” he said. “I’ve been out of control for a long time. As gruesome as these details are, words are just inadequate to describe how horrible I acted and how much damage I caused.”
