Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, December 3, 2000

Police knew of rapist's pattern

Officers on the beat in Center City weren't told, though, documents in the Schieber family's suit say.

By Craig R. McCoy and Mark Fazlollah,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

When the Center City rapist began his attacks three years ago, top Philadelphia police brass say they picked up his pattern early: He was moving along Pine Street to break into apartments to attack young women as they slept.

But the same top officials did not tell the commander whose beat officers patrol Center City.

And they never passed the word along to the beat officers - including the two who responded to the 911 call when Shannon Schieber was being strangled in her apartment off Rittenhouse Square.

They waited 11/2 years to conduct DNA tests on evidence retrieved from the scene of the first of the Center City rapist's six known attacks. And they waited two years to send a rape-squad investigator to interview the rapist's second known victim.

Court documents released last week in a federal lawsuit disclosed a wealth of new information about the serial rapist's attacks along Pine Street and other blocks near Rittenhouse Square.

The documents show that Capt. Leonard Ditchkofsky, who then commanded the Ninth Police District covering the western part of Center City and the Art Museum area, was unaware of the earliest attacks by the rail-thin predator who could slip through bars only 7inches wide to attack his victims after midnight.

In their lawsuit, Shannon Schieber's parents seek to hold the city liable for the death of their 23-year-old daughter. DNA testing has established that the same man has attacked at least six women, sexually assaulting five and murdering Schieber.

One key contention in the Schiebers' lawsuit is well known. They say the two beat police officers grievously erred by not breaking into their daughter's 23d Street apartment as she was being strangled on May 7, 1998. The officers, responding to a neighbor's 2 a.m. 911 call reporting a woman screaming, knocked on Schieber's door and left after hearing no response.

But the city says the neighbor equivocated when questioned by the responding officers. That left the officers without legal ground to break in, city lawyers say.

Schieber, an academic superstar and doctoral candidate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who tutored inner-city youth, was found dead the next afternoon by the neighbor who had initially called 911. She was the man's fifth victim.

Another part of the Schiebers' lawsuit asserts that systemic problems with the Police Department also contributed to their daughter's death - and slowed beat police and neighbors from waking up to the danger in their midst.

Sylvester J. Schieber, Shannon's father, said in an interview Friday that his daughter was cautious and street-smart. If Center City had been alerted earlier to the rapist, Schieber said, his daughter likely would have added locks to her apartment, among other measures.

"She paid attention to where she was and tried to protect herself," said Schieber, an economist and noted expert on Social Security. "We are absolutely convinced that, had she known what was going on in that community, she would take far more steps to protect herself against this guy."

Through the discovery phase of the suit, new details have emerged about the rapist's modus operandi, notably his predilection for choking his victims.

Police investigatory files show that the rapist throttled his second victim until she fell unconscious. He wrapped a belt around the neck of his third victim while raping her. He punched his fourth as he demanded, "Stop screaming, and I won't kill you."

All that, the Schiebers contend in legal filings, demonstrate that he was a rapist on his way to becoming a strangler. Yet, the family contends, Philadelphia police investigators overlooked these clues because they wrote off his initial attacks under the heading "investigation of person" cases.

Police now acknowledge that the sex-crimes unit mothballed thousands of sexual-assault complaints by using that obscure code.

Police Commissioner John F. Timoney has said that the city's rape squad had been beset by serious problems. But he has also insisted that those weaknesses didn't hamstring the hunt for the Center City rapist.

Timoney declined to discuss the investigation last week. He has conceded that the sex-crimes unit had improperly written off the Center City rapist's first attack as a non-crime. Still, he insisted that the mistake was merely an error in police coding and record-keeping.

"If you're going to get hung up on coding, you're going to miss the point," he said last year. "This case was never dropped. It was part of the pattern. That information was given out to the people of the Ninth District."

In its filings to rebut the Schiebers' lawsuit, the city also maintained that police handled the rapist's first attack properly and then spotted the pattern of attacks as they unfolded.

City lawyers also say that patrol officers in the Ninth District were aware of crime trends and suspects because they are routinely asked to review the district daily logs of crimes.

Moreover, the city has pointed to an internal investigatory memo from 1997 in which Special Victims Unit experts speculated that the same man may have committed four attacks that year in Center City, as well as a series of then-unsolved rapes in the adjacent Fairmount section of the city.

The memo, sent to the chief of the department's detectives, is detailed in court papers that were made public last week.

However, Ditchkofsky, who commanded the Ninth District until late last year, testified in a deposition in the Schieber case that no one ever briefed him on the pattern of the four attacks the slim predator had committed up to that point.

Ditchkofsky took command of the Ninth District in August 1997 - unaware that the Center City rapist was in the middle of his rampage. That June, the rapist had sexually assaulted a woman in her apartment on 21st Street and the next month he had choked a woman near 21st and Pine until she fell unconcious.

In August, the same man raped two young women who lived a block apart on Pine Street.

In the deposition made public last week, Ditchkofsky said he was never told about the attacks of June and July 1997.

At one point, a lawyer from Schieber's family asked Ditchkofsky whether top commanders had ever briefed him on the 1997 investigative memo, the report that pulled together all of that year's attacks.

"No," he replied.

"Would you remember if you had?" the lawyer asked.

"Absolutely," the captain said.

The investigative memo was written before the Schieber murder. The definitive DNA match of evidence taken in her case to evidence from two August 1997 rapes was made in January 1999, eight months after her death. In a deposition taken for the Schieber lawsuit made public last year, Timoney said computer problems in the police DNA lab had delayed that match-up.

As a neighborhood-level captain, Ditchkofsky said, he believed strongly in alerting the community to threats - using information to make the community a partner in the fight against crime.

He said a tip at a community meeting in Fairmount led police to collar another serial rapist within his district.

In October 1997, Ninth District police on stakeout arrested Joseph N. Lynch, then 25, on charges that he raped two women and tried to rape a third, all in the Art Museum area between July and September of that year.

His victims were older, 38 to 85, than those in Center City, who were between 18 and 27.

Before Lynch's arrest, Ditchkofsky said, police had thought the same man might be responsible for the Fairmount and Center City rapes. It's now clear that Lynch was not the Center City criminal. In fact, two separate serial rapists were preying on women in the district.

Ditchkofsky said no public meetings were held in 1997 and 1998 in Center City regarding the attacks there. He said the issue of those assaults came up only once - when a resident raised questions during a meeting of the civic advisory panel.

Ditchkofsky said he responded by discussing only the two August attacks committed after he took over the Ninth.

Although Ditchkofsky said he showered his beat officers with "hundreds" of crime bulletins about crime trends in the Ninth District, he said no such packet was ever issued regarding the attacks by the Center City rapist.

The result appears to be that his beat officers were not alert to the rapist's movements, even though his attacks all were committed within a few blocks.

In fact, Officer Steven Woods, one of the two policemen who went to Schieber's apartment the night she was killed, said in his deposition that by then he had concluded that the man responsible for the Center City rapes had been caught.

Talking in the present tense about his thinking when he responded to the call to Schieber's apartment, he testified: "I believe that the individual had been apprehended."

He was mistaken, of course, and he wasn't alone.

Lawsuit documents suggest that many officers in the Ninth believed the district-wide problem of serial rape had been solved with Lynch's arrest, which had been a cause for celebration among Ninth District officers.

Lynch, now serving a 35-year prison term, was already behind bars when Schieber was murdered.



Other information also appears to contradict the department's position that it aggressively picked up the trail of the rapist.

The 1997 investigatory memo lists the July 1997 attack, in which the victim was choked unconscious, as possibly committed by a serial predator.

The victim, however, in interviews with The Inquirer, said she wasn't interviewed by the rape squad until fall 1999 - two years after the memo was written.

Police interviewed her after DNA testing showed that she, too, had been a victim of the Center City rapist. Previously, police seemed skeptical about the need to talk to her, pointing out that she had been left unconscious.

When rape-squad investigators finally interviewed the victim, she told them that she was attacked after she and friends had spent a night visiting Rittenhouse Square pubs that, it now appears, other victims and the predator also frequented.

The same 1997 memo also specifies that a June 20, 1997, attack could have been the work of a serial rapist.

Yet the department has disclosed that it did not try until 1999 to match DNA evidence recovered in that crime with that found in the five other attacks.

Timoney declined last week to explain the delay. He said the Schiebers' lawsuit meant he couldn't discuss the issue.

Through a spokeswoman, Timoney stressed last week that Philadelphia police, like many other departments, rarely used to test DNA in rape cases unless a suspect had been identified. In January 1999, Timoney noted, he changed that policy, requiring such tests in every instance of so-called stranger rape.

The first known victim of the assailant has refused to cooperate with the continuing investigation. Her lawyers said in court earlier this year that she was upset at how the rape squad had initially handled her case. The squad had coded the attack as a non-crime.

Internal sex-crimes unit records obtained by The Inquirer suggest that senior police investigators simply lost track of the fact that there was physical evidence retrieved in the first attack, in 1997, that could be used for DNA matches.

One official review of the early investigation noted: "There is no indication that the scene was processed or physical evidence was collected and submitted."

In fact, the victim had retrieved several of her attacker's pubic hairs from her sheets.

She carefully attached them with tape to a piece of notebook paper on with she wrote a description of her ordeal.

That evidence languished in police files.

Twenty-eight months after the woman was attacked, a police test on the hairs proved that she was the first victim of the Center City rapist.