Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, May 24, 2000

Police knocks turned rapist into killer, FBI profile says

The victim's parents filed the report in a suit, saying officers could have stopped the Rittenhouse attacker.

By Sudarsan Raghavan, and Craig R. McCoy,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

Had Philadelphia police knocked down Shannon Schieber's door, they would likely have interrupted a death struggle between the young graduate student and her killer, FBI profilers contend.

The FBI's famed profiling unit, in a report never before made public, dissects the evidence in Schieber's 1998 murder to assert that a panicked killer strangled his victim to silence her because two police officers were outside her door.

"It was not the offender's [initial] intent to murder Shannon Schieber," the report concludes.

"It was the victim's aggressive resistance and the offender's fear that caused him to murder. He knew that, with police officers at the door, if she screamed again, it would surely result in his immediate arrest."

In attacking Schieber, the man who has become known as the Rittenhouse Square rapist encountered a victim who fought back. FBI Agent Frederick C. Kingston, the author of the FBI profile, said she was the only victim to do so in the six known attacks in Center City since 1997.

Kingston, a supervisory special agent and 22-year FBI veteran, drew upon police and autopsy reports and his own expertise to put together a portrait of the rapist - and of Schieber's last moments.

The pair grappled, his report says. The attacker punched her in the face. She cut him as they struggled. He bit one of her fingers. The pair crashed onto Schieber's massive bed, shifting it in the turmoil.

When a neighbor and then police pounded on the door, he strangled her into silence, leaving her dead with burn marks on her knees. Once police had left, he made his getaway, leaving blood on the balcony deck and curtain.

"It's the first time he's been hurt by one of the victims," said Kingston, who is based at the FBI academy in Quantico, Va., and who has consulted on more than 80 such profiles nationwide.

This detailed scenario of the death of Schieber, 23, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, was developed by the FBI's profiling team as it reviewed the fatal attack and the other sexual assaults by the Rittenhouse Square rapist, who is still at large

The unit's 1999 report and a deposition by Kingston were filed last week by lawyers for Schieber's parents. A trial is expected this fall on their federal lawsuit contending that police lost a chance to save Schieber's life.

Asked yesterday for a response on the FBI report, City Solicitor Kenneth Trujillo said: "We cannot comment" because of confidentiality restrictions imposed by the judge in the civil case.

Police Commissioner John F. Timoney has said the police responded correctly in the Schieber case, given what they knew at the time. A neighbor who told 911 operators that he had heard screaming from the apartment grew equivocal once police arrived, Timoney said. He said police, constrained by privacy laws, lacked the probable cause to break into the apartment.

Moreover, in legal papers filed this year in defense of police, city lawyers maintained, without elaboration: "Ms. Schieber was dead at the time the defendant officers arrived at her apartment." The FBI profiler, however, disagreed.

In the profile report and in the deposition, Kingston said that the rapist might have attacked as many as 18 women - three times the number of his known victims.

As the trial on their lawsuit nears, Schieber's parents, Sylvester and Vicki Schieber of Chevy Chase, Md., have been fiercely fighting with the city over which police documents must be turned over to their lawyers.

Most recently, they have sought to learn whether the Philadelphia police investigating Schieber's murder also believe she was alive when officers arrived. The Schiebers have demanded that the city tell their lawyers what the homicide investigators told the FBI about whether their daughter was alive when officers came to the door.

The FBI and city police, however, both oppose release of the material. They say that doing so might discourage other police forces from seeking help from FBI profilers.

All sides in the dispute signed a confidentiality agreement last year that forbade the public release of many key documents generated by the lawsuit, including depositions.

However, the 1999 FBI profiling report and Kingston's deposition were attached by the Schiebers' lawyers to legal papers filed last week in U.S. District Court to buttress their case for exploring the police view of when precisely Schieber died.

The Inquirer, as part of a routine review of public filings, photocopied those documents.

Under cross-examination from a city lawyer in the deposition, Kingston said that the initial knocks on the door from a neighbor might have been enough to provoke the killing. But, he said, "the most likely scenario" was that she was killed "during the time the police officers responded to the call."

Schieber died in her second-floor apartment on 23d Street, between Spruce and Locust Streets, on May 6, 1998. Finals were approaching, and the Wharton doctoral candidate had been up late studying.

Sometime before 2 a.m., she took a break to take a bath.

"Based on the bath water being drawn, her notes she was studying from, the fact that the bath water was clean and her clothing is not ripped or in any way appeared to be the result of a scuffle, Shannon was most likely awake and probably just preparing to go into the bath," Kingston said.

After she undressed, the intruder entered her unit and "a very violent struggle" broke out, Kingston said.

He said Schieber, 5-foot-10 and 135 pounds, was about the same size as her attacker.

"She is brilliant; she is extremely athletic; she is one who, I think, is a very no-nonsense, take-charge, kind of driven person," he said. "Her demeanor is such that she would be more likely to aggressively resist his attempts to rape her."

Alerted by the sound of a muffled scream from Schieber's apartment, a next-door neighbor pounded on the door, heard no response, and called 911.

At 2:08 a.m., two police officers arrived. One banged on the door to Schieber's second-floor apartment. The other inspected the outside of the building, shining a flashlight to determine that the sliding-glass door on her balcony appeared closed, its curtain shut.

Philadelphia police documents, Kingston said, report that the officers stated that the neighbor "began to waffle to some extent as to how sure he was as to what he heard, when he heard it, and exactly where it may have come from."

About 2:20 a.m., the officers departed.

At roughly this time, Kingston said, the killer was in the apartment with Schieber - alarmed by the knocks on the door from both a neighbor and police, as well as the shining of the flashlight on the balcony door.

These incidents, Kingston said, could have left the killer "feeling trapped, into feeling out of control, into feeling as if he had to take some action, which may not have been his original intent when he first arrived at the apartment."

That "action" was murder.

The next afternoon, Schieber's brother, Sean, and the neighbor broke down her door and found her dead.

The balcony doorway was now open about 10 inches. Her parents contend that this indicates that the killer was inside her apartment when officers arrived, and that he fled after they left.

Detectives found blood on the balcony deck and on the curtain of the balcony's sliding-glass door, according to the FBI report.

The locked front door, along with the bloodstains and the open balcony door, were evidence that the killer escaped by climbing down the balcony after police had driven away, Kingston said.

However, city lawyers, in questioning the agent, suggested the intruder cut himself not in a fight but in clambering over security wire as he entered the apartment.

In the deposition, Kingston said Philadelphia police were greatly concerned, following Schieber's murder, about whether the rapist would murder again.

The FBI profiling report sought to answer that.

"He has no intent to punish, degrade or hurt his victims, in spite of the fact that he has murdered," it reads.

"It is highly unlikely that he will kill again, unless threatened."