In a prelude to his expected guilty pleas tomorrow, serial rapist Troy Graves waived a preliminary hearing in the murder of a Wharton graduate student and five Center City sexual assaults dating back to June 1997.
Showing little emotion and speaking in a soft and steady voice, Graves yesterday told Municipal Court President Judge Louis J. Presenza that he was waiving his right to a hearing of evidence against him in the sexual-assault cases from the Rittenhouse Square area.
The hearing momentarily was stalled because of a clerical error in the address where Graves is accused of murdering Shannon Schieber, the University of Pennsylvania student who was strangled in her 23d Street apartment during a May 1998 rape.
After Presenza corrected the error, Graves - an Air Force enlisted man who already has been sentenced to life in prison in Colorado for a series of sexual assaults there - agreed to also waive the hearing of evidence in Schieber's killing and rape.
Graves' DNA matches evidence from Schieber's apartment and the scenes of the other Philadelphia sexual attacks, police said.
By waiving the preliminary hearing, Graves spared the Center City rape victims the ordeal of presenting evidence against him.
One of the women Graves is accused of attacking was present at yesterday's hearing, watching silently from a back row in the courtroom during the 10-minute session. She left without making any comment.
Dan Stevenson, Graves' public defender, later said that his client would enter a formal plea to all charges at tomorrow's court session.
Stevenson dodged questions about whether Graves, 30, would plead guilty. But saying the plea was a "threadbare secret," Stevenson acknowledged that typically, a case would be developed differently if a defendant were going to fight the charges.
In tomorrow's session, Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner is expected to accept Graves' guilty plea in Schieber's murder and in the attacks on the five other Philadelphia women.
In preparation for the plea, Stevenson and prosecutors met yesterday with Lerner in a closed session for 40 minutes.
The agreement reportedly will allow Graves to return to Colorado to serve the life sentence with no possibility of parole.
Graves was arrested in Fort Collins, Colo., on April 22 after police there matched his fingerprints to those found at the scene of one of the attacks in Colorado.
A former resident of Center City, Graves enlisted in the Air Force after his last alleged Rittenhouse Square-area rape in August 1999.
The Colorado attacks started shortly after Graves was stationed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., just across the state line from Fort Collins.
