Philadelphia Inquirer
Monday, August 4, 2003

Phila. rape unit again faces scrutiny

The squad's failure to alert the public of a rape recalls mistakes of the Center City rapist case, Shannon Schieber's father says.

By Craig R. McCoy,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

A rapist strikes, but the Philadelphia police fail to respond aggressively. He attacks again.

This time, he kills. A promising medical student is dead.

The student sexually assaulted and slain last month was named Rebecca Park. But the same pattern unfolded five years ago. In 1998, the slain woman was named Shannon Schieber.

With the death of Park, questions flared once more about the Philadelphia rape squad - and about how much it has shaken off its troubled past.

"Everybody is drawing the parallel between what happened to Shannon and what happened in this particular case," Schieber's father, Sylvester Schieber, said last week.

"The public needs to be aware that there's a dangerous culprit out there," Schieber said. That the Special Victims Unit "could not decipher that from what happened to Shannon and how that backfired on them goes beyond my ability to comprehend."

Chagrined police officials now acknowledge that they failed to alert the news media about a sketch of the rapist who they say later went on to kill Park.

"I feel accountability," Capt. John Darby, who commands the Special Victims Unit, said last week. "Certainly, every mistake, the human factor being what is, is under the microscope. It's going to be looked at. We try to keep that in mind. We try to do the best we can."

Even some former critics say the police are doing much better. The squad's rate for rape arrests and for solving those cases has skyrocketed and the department has begun a new policy of DNA testing that has cracked several less-publicized "stranger rape" cases.

And although it may be small comfort to the Park family, the mistake in her case is dwarfed by police missteps that preceded Schieber's murder.

Schieber, DNA tests have established, was at least the fifth victim of the so-called Center City rapist, later identified as an Air Force missile mechanic named Troy Graves. Graves is now serving a life sentence after admitting that he murdered Schieber, attacked five other Philadelphia women and seven women in Fort Collins, Colo.

But the Philadelphia rape squad refused even to acknowledge that the first two attacks were assaults. It blinded itself - and the community - to Grave's unfolding crime pattern. It delayed and botched DNA tests and kept beat cops and the public in the dark about a compulsive killer on the loose.

Graves sexually assaulted his first victim in June 1997, climbing into her apartment as she slept and molesting her.

But the assigned rape-squad investigator decided the woman was lying, that her burglar bars were too narrow for an intruder to have slipped through.

He classified the assault not as a crime, but as an "investigation of person" case. It was stamped "inactive" and DNA evidence gathered at the crime scene went ignored for more than a year.

A month later, the squad affixed the same "investigation of person" label to a woman who was raped a few blocks away. This victim was attacked as she slept, stripped naked, and choked unconscious. Investigators dismissed her as clueless about what happened, suggesting she would one day realize her own boyfriend was responsible.

Graves went on to rape two other women later in 1997. In May 1998, he raped and killed Schieber in her apartment on South 23d Street. The 23-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate student was smothered to death.

But nine months passed before police tied Schieber's murder to the earlier attacks. It was the police officers who were clueless, unaware that problems with their computers were defeating DNA matches.

Even after making the DNA match, police decided to keep the news secret. Over initial protests from police, it was finally made public by The Inquirer after the information was leaked.

Later, then-Police Commissioner John F. Timoney said his policy was to alert the public "the minute we get a hint that there's a possibility there's a rapist."

He made the remark in an interview with lawyers for Schieber's parents, whose lawsuit against the city over her death is expected to go to trial shortly.

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In the years since Schieber's murder, the Special Victims Unit has been overhauled. Its investigative staff is larger and better-trained, and is scheduled to move early next month into a new $2 million headquarters. The squad has the best rate for solving rapes among police in large U.S. cities, according to FBI 2001 statistics.

After Schieber's killing, Timoney, for the first time, ordered police to run DNA tests on every rape in which the attacker was not an acquaintance.

According to Deputy Commissioner Charles Brennan, who oversees DNA work, this has so far identified four serial rapists, three of whom have been arrested. The lab also helped make the case against Graves.

Last year, neighbors in Germantown praised the rape squad for holding community forums to get the word out about a serial rapist who had attacked four women there in as many months.

The work paid off with an arrest last fall, sparked by a tip from someone seeking a $8,000 award posted after police put out the name of the suspect.

"As soon as the pattern develops, you can't wait," Darby said at the time. "You have to get the information out."

Still, police did not alert the media in the spring that they had a composite sketch of a man who raped a woman April 30 who was jogging along Kelly Drive.

That sketch was only widely disseminated in recent days after DNA tests showed that the same man had raped and killed Rebecca Park, 30. The fourth-year medical student was found face down, hidden under leaves about 40 feet from the trail in the West Fairmount Park area. Police said she was manually strangled.

Details of the communications breakdown remain unclear. Some police officials insist that the Special Victims Unit e-mailed the sketch to the Police Public Affairs Unit for public release. Public Affairs said it never received the drawing.

What is undisputed is that commanders in Special Victims did not call a news conference to publicize the sketch, as they have done in other cases. Moreover, no follow-up call was placed to Public Affairs to urge action on the sketch after it never appeared in the media.

Darby said last week that his officers posted the sketch in the park and showed it to joggers shortly after the attack.

Unlike the Center City rapist case, Darby said his unit had properly classified both attacks as rapes. And he pointed out that the DNA link between the Park assault and the earlier attack was made quickly, only days after Park's body was found July 17.

Amid the furor over the lack of publicity, Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson made it plain that he wants the department to err on the side of getting information out.

Carol E. Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project, said the Special Victims Unit had generally been more active in media outreach in recent years, despite the Park case errors.

Tracy is one of several outside monitors of the Special Victims Unit appointed by Timoney in response to scandal about its performance. She said people should brace themselves for many more news conferences, with police holding up sketches of sexual predators.

"What the public needs to understand is how many of them there will be," she said. "Because violence against women is still at an unacceptable levels. That is the real crisis. The more information there is about that, the more outraged the public will be."