Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, July 21, 2002

A baffling case: The hunt for the predator

Although the Center City Rapist was caught in Colorado, painstaking police work in Philadelphia played a crucial role.

By Barbara Boyer,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Philadelphia homicide Detectives Jeffrey Piree, left, and Chuck Boyle. Inquirer photo by Michael Bryant

He experiences a mixture of excitement, anxiety, anticipated pleasure and fear. This offender does not like what he is doing and does not want to hurt his victims.
- FBI profiler report by Special Agent Frederick C. Kingston, prepared in 1999 for the Philadelphia Police Department.

Scanning the crime scene, it took just minutes before disgust and frustration swept veteran Philadelphia detectives Chuck Boyle and Jeffrey Piree.

They inventoried it all: burglar bars, open window, pillowcase, gentle voice. ...

"Our boy has struck again," Boyle concluded.

The two men, both lean, both intense, instantly recognized the pattern of the intruder. They knew, too, that he would almost certainly surface to rape again.

This time, in late August 1999, the man - skinny and agile as an acrobat - had slipped through the open window after methodically undoing at least a dozen screws to remove burglar bars. Once inside the Center City apartment, he had covered the victim's head with a pillowcase. In a soft voice, he had sought to comfort her.

"Don't be scared," the victim recalled him saying. He promised not to rape her.

As an FBI profiler would later point out, it appeared that the attacker did not want to hurt the victim, as he had stopped short of battering her.

Still, he forced the 18-year-old brunette to perform oral sex. Then he disappeared before dawn.

Who would be next? When would he strike again?

Not for a while, not in Philadelphia.

Twenty months later and more than 1,750 miles away, Detective Dave Hart surveyed a crime scene in Fort Collins, Colo., and logged the evidence: open window, pillowcase, soft voice.

An intruder had crept through the open window of an apartment and attacked a 20-year-old woman in her bed, jarring her awake about 3:30 a.m.

"Don't worry," he had whispered. He promised not to rape her. Then he added a polite gesture: "I wish we would have met under different circumstances."

He placed a pillowcase over her head. He told her she was attractive and had beautiful hair. He put soothing music on the stereo. And he warned her that if she didn't cooperate he would kill her.

When she struggled, he pressed a sharp object against her neck. Then he forced her to perform oral sex. He left through the front door, disappearing into the breezy night.

Hart had no way of knowing it, but police on opposite sides of the country were seeking the same sexual predator.

The guy they were hunting was skillful, heartless and elusive.

In Philadelphia, he sexually assaulted six young women around Rittenhouse Square from 1997 to 1999. One woman, graduate student Shannon Schieber, 23, fought back and was choked to death.

In Fort Collins, he followed the same pattern of violent coercion and endearments in seven assaults in 2001 through April of this year.

Their quarry was smart, police knew, with a chameleonlike ability to blend into the well-to-do section of a gritty city, and then move easily among the students of a suburban college town. Victims thought he might be white, heavily tanned, or even Israeli. Police came to think he might be of mixed race.

Had he simply stopped after the Philadelphia attacks, detectives likely would never have picked up his trail.

In fact, initially police failed to investigate.

He has no intent to punish, degrade or hurt his victims, in spite of the fact that he has murdered. It is highly unlikely that he will kill again, unless threatened.
- FBI profiler report

In the first attack, the assailant raped a 27-year-old artist after squeezing through a seven-inch opening in burglar bars. The gap was so narrow that police refused to believe any man could have passed through it.

As a result, the investigator assigned to the case stamped it "inactive" and dismissed the victim as a fantasist.

The following month, the intruder struck again. This time, he turned violent when the victim fought back. He squeezed her neck so hard that blood vessels burst in her eyes. Then he raped her.

Because she couldn't remember much from the attack - she had been out drinking with friends that evening and had fallen into a deep sleep - detectives downgraded the complaint to a burglary and failed to investigate.

In 1997, that was common practice in the Philadelphia Police Department, which has made significant reforms since then. But whatever missteps marked the early years, investigators later assigned to catch the man known as the Center City Rapist were devoted and relentless.

After Schieber's killing in May 1998, Chief Inspector John Maxwell created a task force from the 7,000-member department to go after the predator. Although Schieber was one of 338 people killed in Philadelphia that year, police realized that her murderer was a serial rapist and had to be stopped.

Initially, the brunt of the task force work fell mostly to homicide detectives. They included the mild-mannered Detective Paul McKelvie and partners Boyle and Piree, a duo known among their fellow cops for their refusal to let go of a case.

In December, sex crime Lts. Thomas McDevitt and Mike Boyle pulled Maxwell aside at a party to tell him they hadn't given up on the case either. They were working with crime lab technicians, they told him, and sending information to every state checking for similar cases that might not yet have been entered into a national law enforcement database.

Philadelphia sex crime investigators, from left, Thomas McDevitt, Linda Pace and Carl Latorre helped zero in on Graves. Inquirer photo by Michael Bryant

McDevitt and Boyle convinced Maxwell that the Special Victims Unit, which investigates sex crimes, needed to be more involved in the investigation. Although the Center City Rapist had killed, they told Maxwell, his behavior suggested that his next crime would likely be a sexual assault rather than another homicide.

They were right. On Aug. 28, 1999, the attacker raped again.

By then, McDevitt and Boyle weren't the only rape squad members working the case. Investigators Carl Latorre, James Griffin, George Hicks, Linda Pace and Crystal Williams were logging long hours, too.

"I saw their commitment," Maxwell said. "They never stopped working it."

Maxwell himself pitched in, scrutinizing reports, searching for patterns in other parts of the country and passing suggestions to the task force.

Month after month, detectives pursued promising leads, only to watch them die. Every tip - more than 1,200 came in - was followed up.

The task force scoured old cases to find out if the rapist had other victims. They went back to the women assaulted earlier, asking for help to create a composite. Soon they had their sketch and posted it everywhere.

Commanders assigned female officers to serve as decoys walking Rittenhouse Square at night. Plainclothes officers sat in Center City bars. Nearly every thin, young man in the area, it seemed, was a suspect. Detectives took DNA samples from 300 men. They consulted with expert profilers, including one with the Vancouver Police Department, to puzzle out the rapist's psyche.

The assaults, Piree and Chuck Boyle noticed, took place during warm weather, which gave the intruder the chance to use open windows. What, they wondered, did he do in the winter? Was he perhaps a student who came here for summer classes? They checked with local colleges for enrollment lists. Was he a worker on a ship come to port? They asked port authorities for help and turned to immigration officials for foreign registries.

They cross-checked professional sports schedules and player rosters, looking for any correlation between crimes and games.

The circus had been in town. So they contacted Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey in Sarasota, Fla., asking for lists of clowns, animal trainers and other agile performers who could be suspects. They did the same with the ballet, looking for a man both fit and thin enough to squeeze between burglar bars.

They searched gyms, taverns and restaurants.

"We were doing everything we could to catch this guy," said Piree. At one point he and Boyle became so frustrated working every possible lead that they decided they had to take a much-needed breather from the investigation.

Prosecutors then picked up on their end. The investigation was racing against the clock; the five-year statute of limitations was looming on the Philadelphia sexual assaults dating from 1997 (though there is no limit on murder). To assure they could prosecute on all the cases, in December 2001 the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office took the unusual step of charging not a named suspect, but a DNA genotype. By charging the genotype extracted from rape-scene evidence, prosecutors were within the statute of limitations.

"This wasn't just any case; this was a case where we knew who it was before we knew who he was," said Arlene Fisk, the Philadelphia assistant district attorney who prepared the arrest warrant.

With the warrant and no suspect, detectives needed fresh leads.

Then came a bulletin out of Fort Collins.

Ensure that the offender's DNA profile is put into the FBI DNA data bank as soon as possible. Because of this offender's likelihood of continuing to commit sexual assaults, a future comparison may ultimately solve this case.
- FBI profiler report

On Aug. 6, 2001, at police headquarters in Center City, civilian dispatcher Victoria Randall, 50, was doing the mundane job of answering telephone calls, logging warrants, and sifting through more than 100 messages in the department's Crime Information Center. The usual tap of computer keyboards and friendly chatter marked a typical afternoon until Randall spotted an all-points bulletin about a series of sexual assaults in Colorado.

The assailant had entered apartments through unlocked doors or windows in the early morning hours. He covered the eyes of his victims, the message read, and forced them to perform oral sex.

Randall flashed back to the frenzy created by the Center City Rapist, to the sketch that stared at passersby from so many downtown business windows when the hunt had been hot. Now the case was cold and detectives were looking for, hoping for, any lead to revitalize it. Randall weighed the value of the information on the computer screen before her.

"I thought, you could be in Colorado in a matter of hours. ... This could be our guy," said Randall. "I figured, I'll send it to our people and I'll let them decide."

Sex crimes detective Latorre, 51, fielded the message. After years of dead-end tips, he was dubious. His mood elevated, however, after he spoke with Fort Collins detectives and learned more about how the attacks in Colorado resembled those in Philadelphia.

There was no need to go on hunches alone. Because the intruder had attacked again and again in the two cities, he had left physical evidence - a sweat-stained baseball cap, semen, hair and saliva - from which DNA could be extracted.

On Sept. 12, 2001, a technician at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation compared the DNA patterns from the evidence in Colorado and Pennsylvania.

The DNA matched. The Center City Rapist had moved to Fort Collins.

This gave detectives in both cities the biggest break in the case yet.

That day, Piree, 56, and Boyle, 51, felt sure it was just a matter of time before the Center City Rapist would be caught.

"That was the beginning of the end," Boyle said. "Now you've just narrowed the play."

This is a high-risk/high-thrill crime. The offender preselects his victims, usually by surveillance or peeping activties. He may target several victims in advance and usually strikes victims in their homes.
- FBI profiler report

Fort Collins is a safe place. On average, there are three murders a year. And most sexual assaults there follow the national pattern; they are not attacks by strangers. So when the first Fort Collins victim reported she had been attacked on May 10, 2001, by an unknown man, police quickly warned the community about the sexual predator.

A month later, the rapist struck a second time. A week after that, a third attack occurred.

Although he left incriminating evidence behind, he seemed to be growing savvy about crime scenes. During a July 26 assault, for instance, he ejaculated in a cup or a rag. To be sure, he wiped the victim with a damp cloth.

Police, however, kept building a case. When he struck Aug. 5, police recovered a shoe print, as well as fingerprints from a balcony railing.

While officers interviewed the victim of that attack, patrol officers Dan Knab and Sam Hagerman stopped a possible suspect speeding near the crime scene. He was nervous, but cooperative as he puffed on a clove cigarette.

He offered to let police search his car, but warned he had a knife with a five-inch blade he kept for protection.

"Fort Collins is a fairly safe town for the size," Hagerman told him.

"Things happen in Fort Collins," the driver responded ominously.

He said he had watched the television show America's Most Wanted and had seen that a woman from the area had been abducted and bludgeoned with a dumbbell.

Then Knab pulled orange twine from the car. The driver said he had used it to secure a mattress.

Knab found a notebook with handwritten poetry and passed it to Hagerman. The verse described a man raising his hand in anger, then "spreading the legs and raping so sweet."

But the driver's clothes didn't match those described by the victim. Still, the officers carefully retrieved the cigarette butt the driver had tossed on the ground; the butt might yield DNA.

Eventually, Fort Collins authorities ruled that man out as a suspect. He was another dead-end, one more promising lead gone bust.

As the FBI profilers had predicted, the assailant was getting more daring. He was surfacing more frequently and taking more risks.

He struck again in August, attacking one woman and then going after her roommate. In all, in the summer and the following spring he assaulted seven women.

Like Philadelphia before it, Fort Collins was growing increasingly frightened. Although none of the Fort Collins victims had been able to describe the attacker, the sketch Philadelphia had been able to provide filled the void. Before long, Fort Collins was papered with wanted posters displaying the image that still haunted Center City. More tips poured in.

"We had received an overwhelming amount of information," said Rita Davis of the 236-member Fort Collins Police Department.

On Sept. 26, detectives already frustrated that they couldn't catch the rapist received a taunting letter.

"im sorry, but i cant let you catch me yet not in Colorado i dont even like it here im not a fan of cold weather," read the typewritten message.

"how do you know its me?" the writer asked. Answering his own questions, the writer detailed the circumstances and precise nature of the sexual attacks, facts only the attacker would have known.

"i admit i want to get caught i don't like what i do ... i don't even like going up to ft collins anymore," he wrote. "you guys are everywhere."

The letter, mailed from Denver, 65 miles south of Fort Collins, was intended to put police off the track. The rapist, however, was living in Fort Collins.

This offender is not evidence-conscious. He doesn't cover his face and uses items at the scene to cover his victims' faces. He did not use a condom and left semen behind. He did not wear gloves in order to prevent leaving fingerprints.
- FBI profiler report

The same month the letter arrived, a computer-savvy Philadelphia police lieutenant began making the links that would give police the next big break.

Learning that the Center City Rapist had resurfaced in the West, Lt. Ed Monahan of the Major Crimes Unit told Chief Inspector Maxwell that he could build a database of men who lived in both cities. Monahan, a specialist in identify theft, routinely studied databases.

Working from the commercially available data compiled from driver's license records, credit-card information and other public records, Monahan, 42, initially came up with a master list of 319 names. Next, he narrowed the search to those who lived in zip codes where the crimes took place. That left 83 names. Then he compared crime dates to the dates when the men he had identified lived in the respective cities. That left about 40 names.

At that point, detectives in the two cities divvied up the workload. One by one, they began striking people from Monahan's list.

The burly McDevitt, 48, veteran in the sex-crimes unit, coordinated the work. Said Boyle: "McDevitt was a pit bull."

He and other investigators, notably Latorre and Pace, methodically ruled out suspects who had alibis, who were behind bars at the time of any of the attacks, who passed DNA-swab tests, or who were just wrong physically (for example, overweight men got a pass).

Troy Graves.

As the number of suspects dwindled, police in Philadelphia became increasingly interested in No. 34. - a man named Troy Graves.

He was a former Center City resident who, the database showed, had relocated to Fort Collins.

Fort Collins police had visited Graves' apartment several times since September 2001 but never found him home, and they left it at that. Philadelphia police thought that wasn't good enough. They wanted him brought in and questioned, and his DNA checked. Fort Collins police said Graves was only one among dozens of suspects and that others looked more promising.

The database aside, someone else in Fort Collins had already pointed to Graves as a suspect. The previous fall, a woman had called police about her neighbor across the street who resembled Philadelphia's composite. He drove a blue Honda, she said, which was significant: After one attack the previous summer, a witness had told police of hearing a woman scream and seeing a man leave the scene in a car, possibly light blue, possibly a Honda.

Moreover, the wary neighbor had jotted down the plate number for the blue Honda parked across the street. Fort Collins had run the tag and found that it was registered to one Troy Graves - the very man on Monahan's list.

As Fort Collins detectives investigated, they were always conscious that warm weather was on the way. They reminded the community that the assailant who had struck the summer before had not yet been caught.

On April 12, there was another assault. The victim fought the attacker as he grabbed her from behind and yanked her hair. He forced her to the floor and began pulling her toward the bedroom when she grabbed a doorknob in the hallway, screamed and broke free. The man got away.

"We were frustrated and anxious," Davis, the Fort Collins spokeswoman, said.

So were police in Philadelphia. Sex-crimes unit investigators Latorre, McDevitt and Pace set out to learn more about Graves in his old prowling grounds. That month, they researched Graves' old Philadelphia addresses - along Pine Street, only blocks from the Philadelphia assaults.

The detectives found Graves' former girlfriend, Elizabeth Robinson, 36. In a telephone conversation on April 19, Robinson told Latorre that Graves was living in Fort Collins. He was in the military, she said, living off-base.

Latorre and Robinson spoke on a Friday. The following Monday, April 22, Pace, 44, called a contact in military records at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. She confirmed that Graves was an airman, currently stationed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., 45 miles north of Fort Collins. In fact, Pace learned, he was working on the base that day.

Pace knew that the man who killed Shannon Schieber had A-positive blood. In the violent struggle before her death, Schieber had drawn blood when she bit the assailant. His blood was found smeared on the balcony door.

Pace asked her contact what blood type the military had listed for Graves.

"A-positive," she was told.

Pace was exuberant. "Are you sure?"

She thought: "This has to be the guy."

When a suspect is identified, he should be interviewed in the evening hours in a non-threatening environment.
- FBI profiler report

Pace called Fort Collins police to fill them in.

The department dispatched Detective Neal Hisam back to Graves' modest apartment on Ash Drive. No one was home. Hisam left a business card.

Graves, 30, had been married for about a year. His wife, Amy Wade, 26, found Hisam's card and called detectives. She told them he was working on the base and had a dental appointment there at 3 p.m. She called her husband on his cell phone, and later that afternoon Graves called police and agreed to come in for an interview.

Even then, Davis said, Graves was not their No. 1 suspect. In Philadelphia, detectives were climbing the walls: He was theirs.

Secretly tailed by Fort Collins police, Graves drove from the base to pick up his wife. Together, they headed to the police station.

"Honestly, we were not 100 percent certain that we had our guy," Davis said. So many promising leads had fizzled.

At the police station, Graves faced Hisam, 38, in an interrogation room. Graves had gained some weight since leaving Philadelphia, but he was still trim and strong.

Initially, Graves didn't seem all that concerned. He was cooperative and polite and answered every question. Police said he responded with the discipline of a military man.

Where had he lived before moving to Fort Collins? Hisam asked.

Minneapolis, Graves answered.

Where else?

Pennsylvania.

Where in Pennsylvania?

Bucks County. In Feasterville and Bensalem.

Hisam persisted.

Well, yes, Graves said, he had lived in Philadelphia - on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia.

Hisam bored in: Where else?

At last Graves admitted he had lived on Pine Street in Center City, for five years.

Have you ever, Hisam asked, been accused of peeping in windows?

No, he replied.

Hisam knew this was a lie. Hours earlier, he had spoken with a military police officer at the base and learned that Graves had been reprimanded for trying to sneak into a female soldier's room the previous May.

Elsewhere at the police station, Detective Ginger Mohs was speaking with Graves' wife. Mohs showed her a black baseball hat, emblazoned with a Quiksilver surfing-gear logo, identical to a hat left behind at the Aug. 23 crime scene.

Yes, Wade replied, her husband had once owned such a hat - but she hadn't seen it in some time.

Then Wade told Mohs about her husband's "insomnia," his habit of going for walks in the middle of the night and returning scratched up.

Wade even confessed a suspicion that her husband could be the man assaulting young women in Fort Collins.

Detective Hisam was asking Graves to provide fingerprints voluntarily. Graves said he wanted to think about it. Providing prints, he said, "feels weird."

Asked whether police could swab his cheek for DNA, Graves again replied that he needed to think about that.

But police cut short his contemplation. At 9:30 p.m., three hours after Graves had arrived, officers had obtained a court order compelling him to provide fingerprints and DNA.

While Graves remained at the station, the department's fingerprint examiner, Julie Fulton, got to work. She compared three prints rolled from Graves' left hand - his little finger, ring finger and thumb - to prints lifted from a second-floor balcony railing after the Aug. 5 attack.

By 11:47 p.m., she had her answer. Graves' prints were a perfect match.

As they went into the early hours - the time Troy Graves stalked his victims - his magical ability to evade police disappeared.

He was placed under arrest.

"He was solemn and very resigned," Davis said.

Within 24 hours of his arrest, lab tests confirmed beyond any doubt that Graves was the Center City Rapist as well as the Colorado stalker.

Faced with the evidence, Graves gave up the fight. Dropping all evasions, he abruptly admitted it all. Yes, he had attacked again and again in Philadelphia. Yes, he had killed Schieber in a violent fight. Yes, he had attacked women in Fort Collins. Yes, he had mailed that misleading letter. Yes, he regretted it all, but did not understand how to stop it or why he did it.

"Once we had the DNA, it was over," Chuck Boyle said.

"Game. Set. Match."

Barbara Boyer is an Inquirer staff writer. Contact her at 215-854-2641 or bboyer@phillynews.com.