Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, February 19, 2004

Detective says he told superiors of serial rapes

He testified that he warned of possible links among attacks months before Shannon Schieber was killed.

By Joseph A. Slobodzian,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

In August 1997 - more than eight months before Penn graduate student Shannon Schieber was sexually assaulted and murdered - a detective in the Philadelphia police Sex Crimes Unit warned three ranking police officials that there appeared to be a serial rapist preying on women along Pine Street in Center City.

What remained unclear yesterday, after a day of testimony by police officers and detectives involved in the investigation of the four Pine Street sexual assaults, is why Lt. Kenneth Coluzzi's memo on the possible links never found its way back to patrol officers on the streets of Center City.

Coluzzi, since October 2000 the chief of the Lower Makefield Township Police Department in Bucks County, was one of five witnesses called by lawyers for the city on the first day of their defense against a lawsuit filed by Schieber's parents over the May 7, 1998, murder of the 23-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

The lawsuit filed by Sylvester and Vicki Schieber of Chevy Chase, Md., contends that Center City rapist Troy Graves - serving life after being arrested in 2002 and confessing to Schieber's murder and sexual assaults and rapes in Philadelphia and Colorado - was never caught because of a police practice of downgrading and discounting rape complaints.

That practice, the lawsuit maintains, led police not to connect crime patterns and give that information to patrol officers on the city streets.

Lawyers for the city maintain that that conclusion is only possible through hindsight and argue that Philadelphia should not be held liable for the acts of a serial rapist.

All the police witnesses testified that they took seriously the rape complaints involving the four Pine Street rapes in the summer of 1997 and followed procedure in fulfilling their role in the investigative process.

"We're thorough," Sgt. Joseph Motto of the Special Investigations Unit in Central Detectives said of steps he took in investigating the July 11, 1997, rape complaint of "M.M.," one of Graves' four assault victims before the Schieber murder.

Motto said the downgrading of M.M.'s case by the Sex Crimes Unit to an "investigation of person" and its reassignment to Central Detectives as a burglary did not affect the quality of his investigation.

The principal problem in M.M.'s case, Motto testified, was that the victim, who had been choked to the point of unconsciousness, had no memory of the assault and could not describe the assailant.

In questioning Coluzzi, Motto and the other police witnesses, Schieber attorney David Rudovsky emphasized what appeared to be a pattern of failures to communicate important information among various police investigators handling aspects of the Pine Street cases.

Motto, for example, said he never learned that the Sex Crimes Unit had been informed that the "rape kit" performed on M.M. was positive for the presence of semen.

Coluzzi, who in 1997 was a detective in the Sex Crimes Unit's Special Investigations Unit assigned to find crime patterns and to "look for the big picture," testified that on Aug. 27, 1997, he sent a memo known as a "white paper" to then-Police Commissioner Richard Neal, a deputy commissioner, and a chief inspector, saying he believed a serial rapist was at work on Pine Street.

"They go up the chain of command," Coluzzi said in response to a question by Deputy City Solicitor Elizabeth S. Mattioni, explaining why he did not relate his theory to police officers in Center City's Ninth District.

"It would only confuse the patrol officers," Coluzzi said, adding that his information was "so broad... we weren't sure what we were dealing with."

In testimony last week, Police Capt. Leonard Ditchkofsky, who assumed command of the Ninth District on Aug. 7, 1997, said he never saw Coluzzi's white paper about the Pine Street rapist.

Neither did Officer Denise O'Malley of the Sex Crimes Unit, who did the initial interview with M.M. on July 11, 1997.

O'Malley testified that in late August 1997 she discovered that her case file on M.M. was missing from her desk. O'Malley said she later found her file in the area of the office occupied by the Special Investigations Unit, along with a "pattern board" created by Coluzzi demonstrating links among the four Pine Street rapes.

O'Malley said she never received a copy of Coluzzi's white paper on the rapes and learned that M.M.'s rape kit was positive only when she called the police lab.

"At that point," she explained, "I wasn't involved in the investigation."