Philadelphia Daily News
Saturday, Feb. 21, 2004

Timoney testifies in Schieber case

Says it's unlikely cops could have linked her killer to earlier attacks

By JIM NOLAN
nolanj@phillynews.com

When John Timoney took over as police commissioner in Philadelphia in March 1998, one of the first things he noticed was that the Police Department had a problem with how it classified crimes.

"There was a significant error rate which needed to be dealt with," the former top cop told a jury yesterday in the $3.8-million federal civil-rights lawsuit filed against the city by the parents of slain Wharton student Shannon Schieber.

Timoney, now Miami's police chief, said the problem had been "across the board," spanning any number of offenses. The miscoding of sex-crime cases turned out to be the worst area.

An investigation subsequently launched by Timoney covering 1995-1997 revealed that some 2,500 sex-crime cases had been misclassified to a noncrime category, "investigation of person." Among them were roughly 600 alleged rape complaints, or one out of every four rapes reported in the city during that time.

One of those cases involved an attack in summer 1997 committed by Center City rapist Troy Graves, who months later, on May 7, 1998, raped and strangled Schieber in her South 23rd Street apartment.

Another of Graves' four attacks that summer had been classified as a burglary.

Lawyers for the Schiebers have argued that such misclassification, or downgrading, prevented police from picking up Graves' serial-rape pattern.

As a result, the Schiebers claim that cops lacked key information that would have helped them capture Graves before he killed Schieber, or, at the very least, could have saved her life the night of the attack.

Testimony to date in the trial has somewhat refuted the claims, revealing that top investigators had been aware of a pattern and that even the downgraded attacks ultimately attributed to Graves had been investigated.

Cops who were summoned to Schieber's apartment through a neighbor's 911 call also testified that they still would not have knocked down her door if they had known more about the unsolved Pine Street rapes.

Medical experts for both sides essentially agreed that Schieber had been unconscious and likely brain-dead by the time cops arrived.

But testimony has also revealed communication gaps among units in the department, showing that local commanders and beat cops did not know everything that was available about the trail of Graves, who was arrested in April 2002 in Colorado and is now serving consecutive life sentences.

One question the jury must consider involves Officer Tyrone Winckler, a 6th District beat cop who stopped Graves in September 1997 - nine months before Schieber's murder and a month after the fourth in a string of unsolved rapes in a neighboring police district.

Winckler, who is being represented by Schieber attorney Dave Rudovsky in an unrelated lawsuit he filed against the city, testified earlier in the trial on behalf of the Schiebers.

He said he would have called detectives or taken Graves in for questioning if he had been made aware of a pattern of unsolved rapes nearby and had seen a composite sketch of the assailant.

Instead, Winckler let Graves go after finding no outstanding warrants or evidence of any wrongdoing on his part.

Yesterday, Timoney said he doubted whether Winckler would have been able to link Graves to the attacks even if he had been better informed of what the cops knew at the time.

"The notion that you would make an automatic connection to a serial rapist...at 2 a.m., with a sketch that didn't resemble...I am hard-pressed to believe that connection could be made," he said.

"Maybe he's a better cop that I am," the commissioner said later outside court. "But that's quite a leap."

During cross-examination by Rudovsky, Timoney acknowledged that if Winckler had a reliable description of the rapist and a DNA match linking four attacks - learned only after Schieber's murder - Graves likely would have been investigated or arrested after that night.

Closing arguments in the case are expected when the trial resumes on Monday.