In August 2018, Great Falls, Montana police received a call regarding a possible sex offense that occurred a week earlier. The caller alleged that her 12-year-old daughter was the victim of an assault perpetrated by a couple who rented the basement of her home.
When police arrived, the 12-year-old child’s stepmother told police that a 20-year-old man had raped her daughter. She told officers that the girl had been using a phone to talk to people over Snapchat. The stepmother said she did not know where the phone came from or have any clue how the girl would have gotten it.
When the stepmother checked the girl’s Snapchat messages, she discovered numerous inappropriate messages between the girl and 43-year-old Kimberly Cooke, a friend of the family and one of the two tenants that resided in the basement of her home.
Those sickening messages talked about a man named Josh Gardipee coming to see the girl again. The stepmother confronted the girl about the messages. The girl began crying and told her stepmother that she and Josh had sex multiple times over the past few weeks.
The 12-year-old told her stepmother it began when she was babysitting Josh’s daughter. The man approached her, making sexual advances. Several days later, he asked the 12-year-old for oral sex; she agreed. A week later, she said Josh told her he was nervous about having sex with her because of her age, but they had sex anyway.
The stepmother took screenshots of the messages to give to the officers. The photos were placed into GFPD evidence. Officers could not locate anyone named Josh Gardipee, so the girl’s parents provided them with the license plate number of the suspect's vehicles. He was identified as 29-year-old Joshua Rowland, the second person who rented the basement with Cooke.