Philadelphia Daily News
Friday, Feb. 13, 2004

Schieber's killer suspected of prowling 8 months before

By JIM NOLAN,
nolanj@phillynews.com

The call came over the police radio at 12:37 a.m. as a report of a prowler near 12th and Cypress in Center City. Police Officer Tyrone Winckler radioed in that he'd check it out.

It was Sept. 9, 1997 - roughly eight months before the rape and strangulation of promising Wharton student Shannon Schieber, 23. Winckler didn't know, until nearly 4 ½ years later, that he was about to come face to face with the Center City Rapist, the man who would kill her.

The cop parked his patrol car and walked up the darkened, alley-like block, where he came upon a man walking alone.

"I asked him what he was out there doing," Winckler testified yesterday in federal court, on the second day of a $3.8 million federal civil-rights lawsuit filed against the city by Schieber's parents, Vicki and Sylvester Schieber.

"He said he was walking on his way home," Winckler recalled yesterday.

Winckler asked the man for identification, and he produced an ID card without a picture that gave his birth date and his name: Troy Graves.

Graves claimed that he was living with his girlfriend in an apartment at 10th and Pine. Winckler ran him through the police computer.

"It came back that he was not wanted for any traffic violations or any outstanding warrants," Winckler testified under questioning by Schieber attorney, David Rudovsky.

So the cop did what just about anyone in his position would do. He let him go.

Winckler later testified that if he had been made aware of a pattern of rapes nearby on Pine Street - and if he had been shown a composite sketch of Graves made from the description given by a victim a several weeks earlier - he would have called detectives or held Graves for further questioning.

It didn't happen, the Schiebers claim, because police downgraded sex crimes, preventing cops from identifying a serial rapist in their midst and passing on the word to cops and residents.