For more than a decade, according to Rachel Fisher, the 47-year-old Stowe resident was terrified to speak out against the man she says surveilled, bullied, harassed and sexually and physically assaulted her for years.
The reason was simple: He was a cop — and she was a single mother and housecleaner.
Fisher’s abuser, she said, repeatedly insisted “that he would be the last person anyone would think would do what he did.” He referred to her, meanwhile, as merely “the cleaning lady,” she said.
“I was often told never to say anything to anyone,” she told VTDigger. “The implication was clear: Don’t come forward, no one will believe you over me.”
But last month, after the Stowe Reporter published an account she said gave readers a “false mental picture” that they had a consensual relationship, Fisher decided to speak out.
In a letter to Stowe officials and state law enforcement, and then in interviews with VTDigger and the Stowe Reporter, Fisher outlined years of abuse she said she suffered at the hands of Kyle Walker, a former police officer and still the chief of the Stowe Fire Department.
Fisher alleged that Walker — while on duty and dressed in his police uniform — assaulted her and coerced her into performing oral sex on more than a dozen occasions between 2009 and 2013. He also repeatedly choked her, she said. The incidents allegedly took place in public parking areas along the Stowe recreational path and in a Stowe police cruiser, Fisher said, and ended only when he stopped working night shifts in December 2013.
Walker, now 39, adamantly denies the allegations.
Theirs was a two-year “affair” between people who were in “unhappy marriages,” he told VTDigger. He insisted that “it was absolutely mutually consensual” and that he did not “exert any power over anyone.” Walker said he was surprised by Fisher’s allegations and categorically denied that he stalked, choked or assaulted her.
The claims against him were “thoroughly investigated for close to three months” by two female detectives from the Vermont State Police, and they “could not find any evidence to corroborate the allegations of criminal misconduct because they are not true,” he said.
The nature of consent is at the heart of Fisher’s and Walker’s competing accounts of decade-old events that only they witnessed. Fisher says Walker ignored her protestations and she acknowledges that she went along with the abuse because she was too scared to say no to a man wearing a gun and a uniform.
“I didn’t want any of it,” Fisher told Vermont State Police investigators earlier this year. “I was paralyzed with fear. I don’t know how else to say it, I just complied because I was afraid. I felt like I had to do it.”
Only after she sought out therapy — in the middle of the five-year period of abuse in which she lost 28 pounds and was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder — did she come to understand that what she was experiencing was assault.
“I struggled with it being surreal,” Fisher said.
After coming to that realization, she became psychologically stronger and found ways to deter his advances, she said.
She said she didn’t initially intend to talk to police investigators, but did so after suggesting to them that they look at Walker as a possible suspect in a local arson. Another man was later charged in that case.
Walker, for his part, described the events entirely differently. In an interview with the state police, he said Fisher welcomed the sexual activity and “at no point, at any time that we knew one another, did I get the impression, the feeling, that she was upset about anything, or anything was unwelcomed along the way.”
The encounters were “inappropriate,” Walker told investigators, because they were both married to other people at the time, but he “never hurt anyone, not even close to being where I would hurt anyone, or pressured, or coerced, or anything along those lines.”
According to Karen Tronsgard-Scott, executive director of the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, it’s common for survivors of abuse to freeze as part of a survival strategy. They can experience a change in brain chemistry as a result of trauma.
“You imagine yourself fighting like hell, but your body doesn’t listen to that,” she said.
It’s also common for survivors to take years to overcome the shame and self-loathing that comes with abuse to feel safe enough to come forward, Tronsgard-Scott said. By then, it can be difficult — if not impossible — to attain justice.
Though Fisher did not share her story with authorities until earlier this year, she described the alleged abuse years ago to therapists, her partner and two former employers.
In 2017, Fisher confided in Eric Verdon, whom she has since married, that she had been sexually assaulted. “She told me she was victimized by a cop. I didn’t ask her who it was,” he told VTDigger. “I got the impression she was raped.”
A year later, she told two previous Stowe employers about her alleged encounters with Walker — Wendy Valliere, who owns the interior design firm Seldom Scene, and Charlotte Brynn, who runs the nonprofit Swimming Hole fitness center.
Walker had a gun and “he threatened her,” Valliere said. “It went on and on and she couldn’t get away. She was terrified of him.”
Brynn said she noticed that Fisher had lost a significant amount of weight in 2010 and 2011, but wasn’t aware of the alleged cause until 2018, when Fisher told her she had been sexually harassed at the fitness center and sexually assaulted in a nearby parking lot by a police officer.
“It was a gut punch to hear that,” Brynn said.
Mental health records Fisher provided VTDigger also describe a history of abuse. An intake form filed with Lamoille Health Partners in 2018 shows that she sought treatment for PTSD associated with sexual assault and stalking.
Even as the alleged abuse was taking place, Fisher made clear to a family member that she was in trouble.
After one particularly brutal incident in 2011, she recalls wiping semen from her shoe and putting the sample, along with an old cell phone with texts from Walker, in a package — and mailing it to her brother right away. She was so terrified, she recalled, she couldn’t write the officer’s name in a letter explaining what to do with the contents. It felt like “when you’re being watched that you can be caught at any moment,” she said.
The letter included Walker’s phone and license plate numbers, Fisher said. She asked her brother only to open it “if anything ever happens to me.”
Her brother, Daniel Fisher, told VTDigger he received the package and put it in a safe. “She never said what it was for,” he said. In January, he provided it to the Vermont State Police for their investigation.
That investigation did not, ultimately, lead to any charges.
In April, Washington County State’s Attorney Rory Thibault declined to prosecute Walker, concluding that a reasonable jury would not return a guilty verdict on a sexual assault charge because Fisher had falsely accused Walker of committing arson — thereby undermining her credibility.
Thibault described the matter as a he said/she said case that boiled down to “an unhealthy sexual relationship.” He said there wasn’t enough evidence to take the allegations to trial.
Fisher’s allegations, the prosecutor said, “fall short of demonstrating lack of consent for any specific encounter or a sufficient basis upon which to conclude the acts were forced or coerced by the words or actions of the subject.”
‘Something was off’
One cold night in 2009 as Fisher was working alone cleaning the Swimming Hole fitness center, the fire alarm went off and Walker was the first police officer to arrive on the scene, according to Fisher.
“I could tell right away something was off,” she recalled. “He wanted to know which nights I worked. He took my cell phone from my hand and sent a text to himself to obtain my number and went across the road to observe me after the fire call was over.”
Walker was again on duty the next night. He drove up to the fitness center, she said, and texted her demanding that she let him into the building.
“He told me not to tell anyone that he was there because his then-chief wouldn’t like it if he found out and he had seen people ‘fired for less,'” she recalled.
Fisher said she was often so terrified she couldn’t speak when she encountered Walker. She says he obsessively texted her and stalked her both at the Swimming Hole and her apartment on South Main Street in Stowe. The police officer, who also worked nights, lurked outside the Swimming Hole and would shine the cruiser’s search light into the building as she cleaned, accosting her before, during and after work, she said.
According to Fisher, she repeatedly turned down his advances and “never once” initiated or asked for any physical contact with Walker. She said she was intimidated by the policeman’s violent behavior and believed she had no choice but to comply.
She said he “clearly propositioned me for a sexual relationship. I repeatedly declined.”
“It did not matter,” Fisher wrote in her letter to the town manager and law enforcement officials. “I tried to reason with him. He did not take no for an answer. I was polite and almost apologetic about it as I was absolutely terrified, which I regret. My fear and trembling and almost inability to speak was very apparent to Mr. Walker. My fear seemed to fuel him even more, though.”
In the ensuing months and years after that first encounter in 2009, Walker allegedly forced her to perform oral sex and sodomized and stalked her at her home and place of work. Fisher says he also choked her three times until she gasped.
“After each incident I would be determined to be stronger and stop any more contact, to uphold my beliefs,” Fisher wrote to the town manager. “He was often outside and watching at both my place of work and at my home and the places in between and peppered texts to me. Disoriented again. Compliant again. It was a vicious cycle.”
Walker’s own public account of their relationship has shifted over time.
In a written statement to the Stowe Reporter last month, he described it as “an isolated event many years ago.” The newspaper characterized it as a single rendezvous in a cop car.
But in a subsequent interview with VTDigger, Walker expanded the scope, saying there were 10 sexual interactions over the course of two years.
“Obviously it was a poor choice on my part to engage in that affair while on duty as a policeman,” Walker said. “And, you know, some of it did not occur on duty, but some of it did and for that I, you know, hold myself accountable.”
It was the Stowe Reporter story that prompted Fisher to go public. She said Walker had reduced five years of harassment, intimidation and assault to an isolated incident of “canoodling in a cruiser.”
Thibault’s assertion that the interactions with Walker were “an unhealthy sexual relationship,” Fisher said, were “the most offensive thing I had to read.”
“This was not a relationship,” she said. “Kyle Walker was not my friend or partner of any sort.”
A series of fires and a reluctant interview
In January of this year, Fisher was disturbed by video stills she’d seen of a Stowe arson suspect who had set fire to Stowe Cable. Fifteen buildings in town had been set ablaze since 2015, including the Helen Day Arts Center.
The Vermont State Police had recently taken over the arson case and asked the public for information. On Jan. 7, Fisher called the Vermont Arson Tip Line and asked to “anonymously relay my concern” as a longtime member of the community. One of her employers had suffered a big loss in one of the fires.
“I did feel the subject in the stills of the video released that day bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Walker, based on my years of contact with him,” she wrote in the letter sent to town officials and law enforcement in May.
She was connected with Detective Sgt. Todd Ambroz, who wanted to meet with her at the Dunkin Donuts public parking lot in Stowe. Afraid to be seen with a trooper in town, she agreed to talk with him behind the Cider Mill in Waterbury.
At the meeting, Fisher asked him “simply to consider” Walker when ruling out suspects. The state police had already looked into other members of the fire department, she wrote, “but not Mr. Walker.”
Fisher “emphasized that anonymity was extremely important” to her because she feared for her safety, she wrote in the letter.
Ambroz asked her to talk with investigators about Walker’s behaviors and she did so “reluctantly,” she wrote. On Jan. 11, over the course of two hours, she detailed her experiences with Walker in an interview with two female troopers.
On Jan. 13, Jeffrey Nolan, a 62-year-old man with a history of mental illness, was charged and arrested for eight of the 15 arsons. He was released and then subsequently arrested by federal agents and is being held as his case is brought before a grand jury. Nolan faces between five and 20 years in jail, according to the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, Fisher’s interview with the troopers set in motion a state police investigation into Walker’s alleged sexual misconduct. But according to Fisher and her allies, the cops never took her seriously.
In the investigative report, troopers appeared to accept Walker’s statements without question while prodding Fisher’s decision not to come forward sooner. They commented on the disjointed nature of her retelling and noted her inability to provide a linear account of what happened.
Fisher recalled being deeply distressed. She believed she was there to talk about the arson and was not prepared to talk about the alleged abuse.
Becky Gonyea, executive director of the Clarina Howard Nichols Center, a nonprofit that provides support for victims of domestic and sexual abuse, dealt directly with Fisher’s case earlier this year. She said it’s common for survivors of abuse to struggle to tell their stories in a coherent narrative.
“This wasn’t a one-time incident,” Gonyea said. “It can be even more difficult for survivors to tell the story sequentially and coherently when abuse occurred over an extended period of time and many times earlier.”
According to Thibault, the Washington County prosecutor, it was Fisher’s call to the arson tip line that doomed her case.
Because another man was charged with the crime, Thibault said, her credibility would likely be undermined by defense attorneys who could demonstrate that she has an ongoing animus toward Walker.
“Whether that’s true or not is a different question, but the concern was that type of evidence could be used to attack her credibility in that proceeding,” Thibault said.
Stripped of his badge
Walker had been a volunteer firefighter from the age of 15, worked for the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department and then landed at the Stowe Police Department in 2008, about a year before the abuse allegedly started.
He became a sergeant in the Stowe police department in 2018, and was promoted to fire chief and health officer in June 2020, earning about $78,000 a year, according to town manager Charles Safford. Walker also retained his role as a part-time officer so that he could continue offering firearm training to other law enforcement.
After the state police began a probe into Fisher’s allegations in January, the town put Walker on paid administrative leave. When Thibault declined to prosecute, he left the question of police misconduct up to local officials. Walker subsequently admitted to Safford that he “made a regrettable mistake a decade ago by engaging in a personal relationship while on duty.”
Last month Walker lost the authority to serve as a Stowe police officer. Safford stripped him of his badge and gun, suspended him without pay for 10 days and placed a reprimand in his permanent personnel file. He was allowed to stay on as fire chief and is required to go to counseling — paid for by the town — and sexual harassment training.
“I hope I am not judged solely by this, but rather that the community looks at the full picture of who I am,” Walker told VTDigger in an email. “I hope they can forgive me for my actions. I promise that I have done my best to serve this community since then and will continue to do so going forward.”
Safford said he isn’t a judge and isn’t responsible for meting out criminal justice, but he ultimately became the arbiter when Thibault dropped the case.
According to Safford, disciplining Walker was among the most difficult personnel decisions he’s made in 34 years of municipal administration, nearly half of which he’s spent in the resort community of Stowe. “This matter was taken very seriously,” he said.
The two men have known each other for more than a decade. Safford promoted Walker to fire chief and health officer last year and heavily relied on him during the pandemic.
In making the determination to retain Walker, Safford weighed his “exemplary career,” a willingness to “acknowledge a sex act during work time with a civilian,” and apologies for “his lapse in judgment,” against information from the Vermont State Police report and Thibault’s letter. The town manager also cited how much time had elapsed since the last known incident in 2013 “with no evidence of similar events since” as a mitigating factor.
“There is no question that events were disconcerting and reflect poor judgement on the part of the officer for which he was fired as a police officer, suspended, and put on notice that future infractions would result in further corrective action up to and including termination,” Safford wrote in an email.
“Even otherwise good people can act badly and modify inappropriate behavior and move forward,” he continued.
Safford said he received a similar complaint about Walker through a third party about five years ago, but a police report was not filed. No names, dates or events were provided, he said. Stowe Police Chief Donald Hull waited to see if anyone came forward. No one did.
Gonyea, the local advocate for victims of domestic and sexual abuse, said she believes Walker should have been terminated as fire chief and health officer.
“We do not understand how someone who can lose their badge and lose their gun and be told they can never be law enforcement again should be allowed to maintain a position of trust and power and authority in the community,” Gonyea said.
Safford sees Walker’s punishment as significant, but survivors in the town of Stowe will not, Gonyea said. “The fact that we keep hearing well, if there’s new information or, well, if someone else comes forward, is not acceptable,” she said.
Brynn, the executive director of the Swimming Hole and Fisher’s former employer, said the town’s response has been insufficient. Stowe should have a zero-tolerance policy for police misconduct, she said, and Walker should be fired because “he used that position of power to assault this individual,” she said. “It’s not enough to say he’s not going to do it again.”
Walker said he hoped people in Stowe who had lost faith in him would regain trust over time. “I think that my record, and my personality and my character … stand for something and I hope that we can move forward.”
Walker said he is trying to turn this experience “into something positive for the community.” He said he hoped to “use this opportunity to improve our training, supervision, and policies,” adding, “With this experience, and a lot of additional training, I believe that I could have a positive impact, through public speaking, on the lives and careers of many aspiring men and women.”
Gaining strength
Fisher describes the years of contact with Walker as “the darkest of my life.” She lost so much weight her sister said she looked like a concentration camp survivor. The toll of the abuse on top of her exhaustion from working nights put her over the edge. Two and a half years into the ordeal she reached out for help and was diagnosed with extreme PTSD.
As a single mother, she worked nights to be with her 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son during the day. Her son, who has autism and psychological problems, needed specialized treatment that required frequent doctors’ visits.
“Every single day was brutal,” she recalled. “I had zero skills to deal with a predator like Mr. Walker and I was an easy target.”
Eventually, after years of PTSD treatment and therapy, she gained the strength to stand up to Walker. And then, when he no longer worked the night shift, the long torment was suddenly over, she said. “It is a long process and I stand by my decision to focus on my health and to prioritize my children and their special needs over the years,” Fisher said.
Domestic violence advocates urged her to lodge a lawsuit years ago, but she felt too threatened, too sick and too overwhelmed to pursue a legal battle. To this day, after years of intensive therapy at her own expense, she dreads the sight of a police cruiser, she said.
Fisher said she never sought to come forward in the first place. She worries about how going public will affect her family, but she said, “The truth is uncomfortable.”
“Mr. Walker always seemed to know that he could get away with what he did and now I’m beginning to know why,” Fisher said. “I have learned during this process that I have no say. Just as I had no say in the day he picked me out to abuse, I have no say in the laws that are in place, and no say in the fact that law enforcement agents who are suspected of a crime are not allowed to be treated like they get to treat suspects.”
Correction: Charlotte Brynn’s title at The Swimming Hole has been corrected.
