In an Old City bar, Christopher Duffy leaned in to share a little conversation with his date.

"Now don't be alarmed," he told her over their drinks. "But some people think I look like the Center City rapist."

Moments later on that autumn night in 1999, a small army of police officers rushed to their table and took him into custody.

Once again, he was under scrutiny as the shape-shifting, square-jawed man who squeezed through burglar bars to rape six women around Rittenhouse Square, killing one, graduate student Shannon Schieber.

His date sat dumbfounded. It was their first date and their last.

There is something about Duffy, 31, that catches the eye.

He has a Tom Cruise kind of look as he flashes a smile. You might think he favors a young Al Gore when he turns in profile.

But it is his unfortunate resemblance to a composite of the Center City rapist that brought him unwanted attention from police - and prompted suspicious tipsters to call investigators about him at least seven times.

"It was really weird," Duffy said last week, finally free of all suspicion with the arrest, DNA match and conviction of his apparent doppelganger, Troy Graves, 30.

When Graves was still at large, his threat put the Rittenhouse Square area in a virtual lockdown. Undercover police flooded the area as women loaded up on locks, barred their windows, and toted their Mace - and it became a bit dangerous for some men to walk the streets at night.

In all, police fielded and chased more than 1,200 tips, detectives said. They also stuck cotton swabs inside the mouths of more than 300 men, collecting DNA samples to check against the fluids Graves left behind.

Few felt the heat as much as Duffy.

For Duffy, the trouble began at the end of Graves' spree in Philadelphia, long before the rapist moved on to Colorado and resurfaced last year to sexually assault women there.

After Graves' last Center City assault in August 1999, police papered downtown with a composite sketch based on a description from his latest victim. The drawing depicted a young man with strong features, his gaze direct, his lips pronounced, his dark hair modishly parted down the middle.

In short, it showed someone who looked a lot like Duffy.

And people started calling the police. The first two calls naming him came in on Sept. 3, 1999, almost immediately after the sketch and wanted poster were released. Two more people called to point him out the next day, police records showed.

The wanted poster, offering a $40,000 reward, said police were looking for a thin male, 6 feet tall, about 25 years old, with dark hair.

At the time, Duffy was average in weight, 6 feet tall and 27, with brown hair.

Moreover, Duffy, then as now, kept unusual hours, working as a bartender until closing time in the Rittenhouse Square area. Graves' attacks all took place in the hours between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.

In the end, of course, despite his resemblance to the composite, he looked nothing like Graves, a light-skinned African American man.

For weeks, people were stopping Duffy on the street, if they were not giving him a wide berth. Strangers stared.

"Walking on the street, I would keep my head down," he recalled. "That made me look even more suspicious."

Friends and relatives even called his parents.

It did not take long for the police to take an interest, and not just once.

"It felt like harassment," Duffy said. "But they have a job to do, and I understand that when they get a tip, they have to follow it up."

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On Sept. 11, Duffy was sleeping when police pounded on his apartment door.

"Well, you got me," Detective Carl Latorre recalled Duffy saying as he greeted them.

Duffy, groggy at the time, cannot remember saying that. When they told him they were looking for the Center City rapist, Latorre said, Duffy got serious and responded: "You got the wrong guy."

Duffy voluntarily gave them a saliva swab to compare his DNA with fluids found at the crime scenes.

The test cleared him, of course. The detectives gave Duffy a business card to show to police if he was stopped again.

Given his likeness to the sketch, that was more likely to happen than not. Only recently did Duffy learn that police were told repeatedly he resembled the composite.

For example, homicide detectives Chuck Boyle and Jeffery Piree followed a tip about a man at the Rittenhouse Hotel, 210 W. Rittenhouse Square.

Once they arrived, an employee there looked at the sketch and insisted that the hotel's bartender Duffy - and not the man they were looking for - looked just like the composite.

Another time, Boyle and Piree bumped into Duffy on the street while looking for yet another suspect.

"He was pretty good-spirited about it," Boyle said last week about the investigation. "He said he would give us whatever we needed."

On Nov. 28, 1999, after seeing the movie Sleepy Hollow, Duffy and his date stopped for drinks at Lucy's Hat Shop, a trendy bar on Market Street, near Third, in Old City.

He noticed some men at another table staring and whispering.

"They were a little too interested in me," Duffy said.

In retrospect, he thinks they called the police and broke up his date.

When the police showed up, he told his date not to worry.

It turned out that Duffy had a further problem: He was not carrying identification, and he did not have that useful "get out of jail free" card.

Without identification, Duffy was driven a few blocks to Police Headquarters. After a brief interrogation, police confirmed that he already had been cleared.

Unfortunately, his date had ruled him out as well.

Despite the ruckus, Lucy's gave him a chance.

"We felt bad for him, so we had to hire him," said Lucy's manager Kevin Kelly. "He's just Duffy; we knew he could never do anything like that. And, now we're stuck with him."