Stacey grew up in Michigan, in a town no bigger than a square mile where she was the leggy blonde who liked to rescue things.

She took in stray dogs, cared for wounded field mice, befriended the kids in high school who no one would sit with at lunch.

But she was also the type of girl who did things her way. At 16, she was set up on a double date with the cousin of a friend, who was two years older and visiting from Tennessee. They were engaged a few months later. By her senior year, she moved 650 miles away from her family to enroll at Cleveland High School so she could be close to Blaine. They wanted to get married, but Stacey’s dad refused to sign the consent form.

Thirty days after she turned 18, they got married outside City Hall on Christmas Eve.

In the next few years they grew up, finished college, found jobs and started having babies, but life wasn’t perfect.

Her daughter, Jaelyn, had lingering health problems after she was born and teetered on death. At the same time, her mother received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Four months later, Stacey found herself pregnant again but miscarried. The doctors were worried and told her she had post-partum depression.

Then in 2002, Blaine and Stacey separated and got a divorce. But they couldn’t live apart. They never remarried, but continued to call each other husband and wife.

She eventually found her footing and was happy for a few years. Her mother hung on. Stacey got pregnant a fourth time. The doctor discovered she had cervical cancer but caught it early. She started to home school.

Then Stacey’s depression would come back and she would fight to get out of bed. But some days she didn’t.

A doctor prescribed her Xanax to take when she couldn’t sleep or when she had panic attacks.

She tried not to take them, unless it was necessary.

It was nights like Jan. 24, when she hadn’t slept in three days, that Stacey took multiple pills to fall sleep.

She was struggling. She and Blaine couldn’t stop fighting. She popped four halves of Xanax, double the amount she was supposed to take in one sitting, and one dose of Flexeril. She texted a friend from her hometown in Michigan.

“I’m over it. I’m done. I’m taking my meds.”

Her friend asked if Stacey was OK, but when she didn’t hear back she called Stacey’s sister, Cindy Piercefield. Piercefield called 911.

“Communications?”

“I hope you guys are the right people to call,” she told a 911 dispatcher. “My sister said she took a handful of pills.”

It was 9:21 p.m. when three Bradley County Sheriff deputies rapped on Stacey’s front door.

The noise woke the sleeping pit bulls and Jacolby, Stacey’s teenage son. He nudged Stacey, who had fallen asleep on the coach.

“What are you doing here?” she asked the police.

“Have you taken any medication tonight?” one officer asked. “We’ve had a call of suspected overdose.”

Stacey tried to convince the police she was fine, but her speech was slurred. She seemed groggy, fuzzy headed. She asked if her husband could take her to the hospital.

The officers ran Blaine’s driver’s license. An inactive restraining order pinged. You need to come with us, they told her.

She finally agreed.

She rode in the back of their police car for the five-minute drive to SkyRidge Medical Center. Blaine followed in his Mustang.

Inside the emergency room, she was taken to a room next to a vacant nurses’ station.

A security guard was stationed outside her door. Every 15 minutes, he was supposed to mark down on his patient checklist what she was doing.

When Blaine asked to see his wife, he was told to leave.

From her cellphone, Stacey told him she had to undress and put on a hospital gown. She couldn’t sleep. She asked to go home; they wouldn’t let her.

A few hours later, a male hospital employee kept opening her door. He scowled and stared. She was scared and called her husband again.

Stacey didn’t trust men easily. Her first sexual encounter at 16 had been unwanted. She says she was drinking at a high school party and a boy she was kissing took it too far. She says she told him no, but he didn’t stop. She never mentioned a word of it to her parents or the police.

Last summer, she says a male therapist harassed her and tried to kiss her during a therapy session. Her husband went to confront him and recorded the conversation. In it, the therapist says he is sorry, that he would return the money they paid for the sessions.

Then two months later, in August, Blaine got angry during a fight and ordered Stacey to have sex with him.

Later, he texted her. “I made u cry and made u [expletive deleted] me! I’m truly sorry Stacey. That is not love.”

She filed for a restraining order, but dropped it a week later because she didn’t like the wording. She stayed in Michigan with her mom and the kids.

So the hospital employee upset her, triggered old feelings of vulnerability.

Blaine called the nurses’ station to complain. When he called Stacey back, the same male employee walked into her room and grabbed her phone.

“The person on the other line is causing me trouble,” she remembers him saying about Blaine.

It was 3:30 a.m.

Stacey can’t account for the next 14 hours at SkyRidge. The hospital never pumped her stomach, and when the psychiatric drugs she had taken at home took affect she fell into a coma-like sleep.

The doctors’ orders, nurses’ writings and the security guards’ observations all give differing views of the time frame.

Yet one thing is certain.

Eighteen minutes after Stacey said her cellphone was taken, she was moved to a new room.

A surveillance video showed a security guard wheel her, covered in blankets, from E-8 down the hall to E-10 at 3:48 a.m. The new location was three doors down from the nurses’ station at the front entrance of the ER.

The guard brought her a blanket. He was in her room about 25 seconds before he came out with her cellphone on top of a stack of papers.

But Stacey can’t remember moving rooms. Neither can she remember that Dr. Jesse Coleman ordered her to be restrained by putting her in seclusion at 6:52 a.m. because of her violent behavior.

Notes from the security guards that checked on her every 15 minutes never declared that she was unruly, shouting or physically abusive to herself, but a doctor wrote that she was a danger to herself and needed to be restrained. The records explain that the type of restraint used was seclusion for four hours, but the notes don’t explain further what that means.

Yet hospital records contradict each other.

The nurses’ evaluation shows that she was restrained at 11 p.m., shortly after she was brought to the hospital. But Coleman signed off on his order for restraints seven hours later and Dr. James Torrence issued another order at 2:48 p.m.

A security guard’s records document that she was sleeping when the restraints were ordered.

Torrence’s orders show she was given 120 milligrams of Cymbalta and 20 milligrams of Prozac at 5 p.m., while a security guard noted that she was given daily medication twice — once at noon and a second time at 2 p.m.

When Blaine tried to visit her that morning, he was told she had switched rooms because of an “incident.”

What was it? They wouldn’t tell him. He got angry. Then they told him to leave the hospital, and he started cursing when a security guard tried to escort him off the property.

At 5:42 p.m., Stacey was released from the emergency room’s care and transferred to Parkridge Valley, a psychiatric hospital. She was told she had to get a psychiatric evaluation.

But at Parkridge, she noticed something strange. When she went to the bathroom there was bright red blood on the toilet paper. She dismissed it, maybe it was her period. She felt sore, but she also ignored that.

A psychiatric evaluation by the Parkridge attending doctor found she was anxious, but not suicidal or psychotic.

“Some mild chronic depression and anxiety,” Dr. Vijayalakshmi Appareddy wrote.

On Jan. 26, she was discharged against medical advice.

When Stacey got home, she shed her clothes and let the hot water from the shower wash away the last two days.

But as the water hit her genital area, she screamed. It burned. She looked down and the area was bright red. She was confused and then terrified. She hadn’t had sex with her husband in a week, and there had been no other partners. Blaine ran into the bathroom when he heard her screaming.

She asked him to look close and take pictures with his cell phone. There was significant bruising and tearing. Her anus appeared to be prolapsed. He asked her to go to the emergency room in Chattanooga. She refused. She said she would go see her doctor in the morning.

Dr. Lee Ann Stabler noted after her exam the next day that Stacey had two tears, one in her vagina, another near her rectum. The doctor also noted that there appeared to still be sperm inside Stacey.

Stabler sent Stacey to the Chattanooga Rape Crisis Center, where they did a rape kit. When the nurse told her there was semen inside her, her stomach wrenched.

Afterward, she stumbled to the bathroom and threw up.

On the 40-minute drive back to Cleveland, she hung her head out the passenger window and vomited again.

A few hours later, in the small windowless room at the police station in Cleveland, Stacey told her story to Officer Edwin Millan and Detective Bill Parks.

The Cleveland Police Department had been riven by scandals in the last few years. Two police chiefs retired after sex scandals, one after he was caught on tape rendezvousing with a woman at a storage unit and another chief was caught having an affair with a subordinate’s wife and lied about the incident. The department also saw the demotion of one ex-chief’s brother-in-law for conducting multiple sexual affairs, had two officers sentenced to state prison for statutory rape and another fired and sued over allegations of sexual assault.

Stacey explained to the police in a recorded interview that she believed she was sexually assaulted when she was unconscious.

Parks, a broad shouldered, bald officer who works in the police department’s property crimes unit but was on call Jan. 27, interrupted.

“Since you’ve had some time to think about this, do you have any recollection at all about a sexual assault happening?” he asked.

“No, I can’t recall anything. I just have all the physical…,” Stacey’s voice trailed. “It’s days later and I’m still really sore and everything. It definitely feels like something happened.”

“I’m trying to tell myself it’s not as bad as it is. Because I don’t want to feel like this.”

Parks felt like Stacey sounded unsure of herself. It seemed like she didn’t know if she was raped. He also thought she might have changed her story.

First, she told an officer she couldn’t remember anything in the hospital between the hours of 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. Then she told another officer 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. Then she told Parks it was 4 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“She kept stressing, ‘if I was raped,’” he said later in an interview with a reporter.

Yet, fragmented memories are normal for victims of trauma, experts say. When there is danger, the brain’s amygdala, which is located within the brain’s circuitry, takes over, firing hormones that tell the rest of the brain to fight back, flee or freeze.

The part of our brain that records information in logical order, known as the prefrontal cortex, located in the forehead, will start to shut down at that point, according to research by Dr. David Lisak, a leading researcher on the study of sexual violence. Once this happens, the brain will likely remember sensory details like touch, sounds or smells, rather than facts.

When asked fact-based questions, the victim may try to fill in the blanks by drawing a logical conclusion, trying to be helpful. But, Lisak’s research shows, those questions are inappropriate for someone that has experienced trauma because it might lead the police or a potential jury to doubt the victim’s story, when in reality the police asked the wrong questions.

Parks questioned why Stacey didn’t report the allegations when she was transferred to Parkridge or why she didn’t go to the hospital after she got home and discovered the swelling and tears.

Why did she wait another day to go to her doctor and the police?

She had been afraid, she explained. She didn’t want to go back to a hospital.

After the recorder was turned off at the police station, Stacey said the police asked: Are you sure you want to press charges?

You know many rape cases are false, she remembers them insisting.

She left the police department uncertain. She had done everything right, she thought.

Surely, they would investigate.

Surely.

Stacey’s case was open for just two days.

Detective Parks began his investigation by taking another officer with him to SkyRidge on Jan. 28. He was asked to bring back a subpoena if he wanted to review video footage of the emergency room.

Parks later said he came back after an hour to pick up a copy of the video. But in his case summary, he stated that he came back nearly seven hours later.

The CD he brought back from SkyRidge contained about 14 hours of footage of the emergency room hall. There were no security cameras inside either of Stacey’s rooms.

Parks said he didn’t interview anyone at the hospital who worked the night Stacey was brought in. While police records indicate the man that Stacey suspects raped her was interviewed, Parks said no one interviewed him either.

A little more than two hours after Parks picked up the video, he called Assistant District Attorney Cynthia Lecroy-Schemel, who works in the 10th Judicial District.

Based on the video, there is no evidence that the sexual assault took place at SkyRidge, he told her.

She concluded that since the video didn’t show anything happened at SkyRidge, the case was unfounded.

“The rape had to have happened in another jurisdiction,” Parks later wrote in his case summary. “Case cleared as unfounded.”

That was Jan. 29.

Stacey stepped out of her therapist’s office when her phone vibrated in her purse.

“We’ve decided not to pursue the case,” Parks said.

He explained that he gave the SkyRidge security team three hours to view the surveillance video and flag places where the door to her room opened.

Parks then told her he watched the video in fast forward and stopped it at the flagged places. The male employee that Stacey complained about was only in her room twice, he said: once for 26 seconds and again for 40 seconds. He later said the male employee had only been in her room a total of five to six seconds.

Stacey recorded it in her journal, like she did everything else.

Police say there is no way a rape happened at SkyRidge.

Stacey and Blaine called anyone they could think of for help. They tried Mayor Tom Rowland’s office. City Manager Janice Casteel. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The press. They talked to Lecroy-Schemel, the assistant district attorney.

That’s about the time that Lecroy-Schemel called Parks back. Get Stacey’s medical records and take another look at the case, she told him.

But instead of subpoenaing Stacey’s records, Parks asked Stacey to pick up all her records and fax them to him.

At SkyRidge, she was told her file would cost more than $100, but she could only afford the summary. The incident report that might have explained why Stacey was moved to another room wasn’t part of the records.

Stacey never saw the report, and there is no mention of it in police records.

On Feb. 10, Parks met with the district attorney’s office.

This time Assistant District Attorney Joseph “Mac” McCoin — whose brother George McCoin has represented SkyRidge in past litigation — looked over the file along with Lecroy-Schemel.

The district attorney’s office later said Mac McCoin’s connection to SkyRidge didn’t influence his decision.

Parks had several pages of Stacey’s medical record, he noted, and a copy of her exam from the Rape Crisis Center that the nurse hand-delivered to the detective.

Later, Parks would explain that he initially decided not to further pursue the case because there was no clear evidence a rape occurred at SkyRidge. The video, which Stacey was never permitted to review, showed that no one was in her room long enough for a rape to occur, he said. When asked what he thought about her injuries, he was nonchalant.

“It was a few scratches that could easily be explained away,” he told the Times Free Press.

Two weeks after Parks turned over his investigation to the district attorney’s office, prosecutors supported his decision.

In a letter to Parks, McCoin explained why that office, too, would not pursue her case;

• Her lack of memory makes it impossible to go forward;

• Her admitting diagnosis is depression with intentional overdose;

• She states that she was “pretty sure something happened” but was going in and out of consciousness;

• She was under suicide watch and hospital security was involved as a routine matter;

• By her own admission, she made prior allegations of improper sexual advances against her own psychological counselor over a year ago.

“Based on a review of the extensive investigation by the Cleveland Police Department, there is not enough evidence in this case to proceed. This matter is closed.”

Bradley County prosecutors said they wouldn’t send Stacey’s rape kit — which was stored in a locked cabinet at the Rape Crisis Center — off to a lab to be tested. But if she chose to do so, the letter stated, she could contact Hamilton County law enforcement and ask them to reopen her case.

Stacey stopped leaving her house alone, except to drive to and from therapy twice a week and pick up her medication once a month.

She didn’t want to have sex. It was too painful, too confusing. She stopped cooking and Blaine brought home frozen food and takeout.

Most of her friends stopped calling, stopped visiting. How could she explain that she thought she was raped, but was unconscious and couldn’t know how it happened? How could she explain that the dead case left her panicked, that she searched her mind for recollections that might lead somewhere but couldn’t find any? How could she explain that the police told her she wasn’t raped at the hospital but her body told her she was?

It was awkward. People already thought she was a little off. Sometimes she argued that what seemed unbelievable could be true. Those trails of clouds in the sky might be part of a government conspiracy, she liked to say.

After the case closed, she fell into paranoia. She imagined the police might try to punish her for bringing the case forward. She feared they would put her in a psych ward. When she told her story, she always paused for validation, as if a part of her doubted herself.

Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think I’m crazy?

In late February, she met with Amelia Roberts, a Chattanooga attorney. Roberts agreed to take her case and assured Stacey she would get her rape kit tested.

Less than two weeks later she sent Stacey a draft of the lawsuit.

“As a direct and proximate result of the Defendant(s) John Doe(s) actions, the Plaintiff Stacey Cordell suffered extreme pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and loss of future wages and earning capacity,” the suit stated.

“Please review this Complaint for accuracy. I would like to get it filed this week,” Roberts wrote on March 9.

But days later, Roberts dropped Stacey as a client. She wouldn’t return Stacey’s calls but implied in her letter that Stacey’s previous allegations against her husband and therapist hurt her credibility.

“Unfortunately, this will confirm that this firm will not represent you,” the letter stated. “Because of the allegation that was lodged against your prior therapist and your partner within just a few months of this event, we cannot represent you in an action for the alleged sexual assault in January of this year.”

After Stacey read the email, Blaine’s niece came and picked up her 8-year-old son, Paxton.

When he was gone, she pounded her fists into the carpet.

The evening before Stacey planned to confront the police, her nightmares returned.

It was four months ago that she had first gone to the police, and she had thought a lot since then. Sure, she had accused others of making unwanted sexual advances, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t raped. Sure, she didn’t remember anything about that night, but that was because she was heavily sedated. Sure, she was having emotional issues, depression, anxiety, but she wasn’t psychotic. She wasn’t imagining the pain and the blood and the bruising.

And wouldn’t she be the perfect victim, she thought, a women blacked out, on suicide watch. Who would believe her?

“I’m at that crossroads,” she said. “I could choose to let it ruin me or I can choose to stand up and fight.”

After lunch, she grabbed her purse and traveled the few miles to the police department.

Inside, waiting in the lobby, she wrung her hands together.

Detective Parks walked out, his face solemn. As he led her to an empty room, the sound of shoes clicking echoed through the hall.

When they were seated Stacey leaned forward.

“Officer Parks, I’m so disappointed in you,” she said. “I thought you were the good cop.”

Her words hovered in the air.

“There’s no way possible it could have happened at SkyRidge,” Parks told her.

“And the video is the only thing we’re basing this case on?” Stacey asked. “You guys are the only ones allowed to see it? Did you view it second by second to make sure there is no editing in it, that there’s actually 20 hours of video on it?”

“I’m not watching 20 hours of video,” he replied.

Stacey’s eyes widened. She jumped up.

“I’ve got to go. I can’t. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get out of here.”

She ran. Past the detectives’ offices, past the front reception and out the door. She didn’t stop until she was across the street from the police department where she ducked in the doorway of Hardwick’s, a local clothing store. On the sidewalk, she crouched on the ground and rocked herself.

“I shouldn’t have done this,” she told Blaine on the phone. “I shouldn’t have.”

The call came less than 24 hours after Stacey sprinted from the police department.

“Have you heard the news?” Stacey’s counselor, Kristin Brannen, at the Rape Crises Center, asked.

District Attorney Steve Crump had ordered her rape kit to be sent to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab for testing. An investigator had picked up her kit that morning.

District attorneys across Tennessee and the country were facing enormous public pressure from advocacy groups and public officials to have rape kits tested after discovering that thousands of kits were sitting abandoned and in storage in police departments, hospitals and crime labs nationwide. After Crump heard about Stacey's untested kit, he said he ordered it to be sent to the crime lab to tie up any loose ends.

“So that’s good, right? I should be happy, right?” Stacey asked.

She began to feel some relief. Then, she thought about everything that could go wrong. What if they messed up the test? What if the kit wasn’t stored just right?

Think positive, Blaine told her. The test would prove that there was sperm, that sex had happened, that a rape had happened, that she was telling the truth.

Yet she couldn’t keep her skepticism at bay. If sperm was found, would they be able to match it to a hospital employee? Would anyone be held responsible? Would the truth match what she believed happened?

After all, Stacey has never heard from SkyRidge. Hospital officials told to the Times Free Press that they investigated Stacey’s allegation and didn’t find any evidence to support her claim.

And if someone was found, what would a hearing or a trial be like? She hasn’t even thought about the possibility of standing in court, answering probing questions about her private life, convincing a jury. Even if she made it to a courtroom, the case could go the way of so many others and she would be left, forever, in limbo.

In 10 years, in her relatively small city, only 17 victims have heard the words “guilty of rape” and their cases were likely far less messy, less mysterious.

Still, she tells herself she’ll be among them. She has to be.