Philadelphia Daily News
Thursday, February 19, 2004

Cop brass didn't share info on rapes

Schieber trial told of 1997 memo

By JIM NOLAN,
nolanj@phillynews.com

By the end of August of 1997, Ken Coluzzi was onto something.

The veteran cop, a lieutenant in the special investigations unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, had studied a group of unsolved sex crimes cases and identified what appeared to be "one big pattern" of attacks covering the Rittenhouse Square and Fairmount sections of the city.

So Coluzzi put the information on a grid. And he authored a memo, or "white paper" on the pattern. According to proper procedure, it was sent up the chain of command to the chief inspector of detectives, the deputy police commissioner for operations and the police commissioner.

Whether that memo ever made it back down the chain of command to district cops and supervisors grappling with a string of unsolved rapes was a focus of debate yesterday during the fifth day of testimony in the $3.8 million federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the City of Philadelphia by the parents of slain Wharton student Shannon Schieber.

Vicki and Sylvester Schieber contend that police did not take steps that would have either caught their daughter's killer, Troy Graves, or, at the very least, saved her life following his attack at her apartment on May 7, 1998.

A key component to the Schiebers' case is the claim that a police practice of downgrading sex offenses hampered the ability of cops to identify and investigate Graves.

However, testimony from a half dozen police witnesses presented by the City yesterday seemed to refute the idea that cops were not thorough in their investigations of Graves' four sex attacks in the summer of 1997 - including two of the attacks that had been downgraded.

But the proceedings also revealed apparent lapses in communication and coordination on sex cases between various levels of the police department.

Files were transferred without detectives being told. Detectives were unable to tell victims if their case was related to other attacks because they were handled by other units and investigators.

Prior to Schieber's murder, beat cops received no bulletins or specific details of the Pine Street rape pattern after it had become known to upper levels.

It was also unclear whether Coluzzi's memo ever made it back down the chain of command from high command.

"Ideally, that's the purpose," he said.

Ninth District Police Capt. Len Ditchkofsky testified earlier in the case that he never received a copy of Coluzzi's report from superiors. But he did speak with Coluzzi about the rapes shortly after taking over in August of 1997.

In Fairmount, where four rapes occurred, Ditchkofsky had cops hand out bulletins at a community meeting and he placed an officer at the address of an elderly woman who had been attacked.

On Pine Street, where there had been two rapes in two weeks, Ditchkofsky assigned two undercover cops for two weeks.

In the fall of 1997, a man was caught and linked to the Fairmount attacks. Then cops realized they were dealing with another predator on Pine Street.

After four attacks in two months in the summer of 1997, it would be another nine months before Troy Graves struck again, this time murdering Schieber.