Philadelphia Inquirer
Tuesday, November 7, 2000

Expert: Patterns in rapes missed

Police had overlooked a serial rapist, according to testimony at a hearing in a suit filed by slaying victim Shannon Schieber's parents.

By Craig R. McCoy,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

By "downgrading" the first two known attacks of the so-called Rittenhouse Square rapist, the Philadelphia Police Department blinded itself to a predator attacking young women in Center City, an expert witness testified in federal court yesterday.

Walter Connery, a former director of in-service training for the New York City Police Department, took the stand yesterday in a pretrial hearing of a civil lawsuit filed against the City of Philadelphia and police by the parents of University of Pennsylvania graduate student Shannon Schieber, who was killed by the rapist in 1998.

Sylvester and Vicki Schieber of Chevy Chase, Md., plan to present further testimony from Connery at a civil trial on their claim that the two officers who responded to their daughter's Center City apartment on May 7, 1998, missed a chance to save her. The officers, who had gone to Shannon Schieber's apartment after a neighbor called 911 to report screaming, knocked on her door and left after not getting an answer. Schieber, 23, was found dead the next day.

DNA evidence has established that Schieber's killer, who remains at large, previously assaulted four women in Center City in 1997. After killing Schieber in 1998 - she was the only victim to fight back - he raped another woman in 1999. No attacks have been linked to him this year.

In articles on the pervasive practice of the city's rape squad of dismissing sexual-assault complaints, The Inquirer reported last year that the sex-crimes unit refused to classify the first two attacks as crimes. The unit classified both as "investigation of person" cases, a noncrime designation that the squad no longer uses and that Police Commissioner John F. Timoney has derided as "stupid."

In court yesterday, Connery, who served on the New York City police force for 23 years, described the investigations of the first two attacks as "grossly inadequate."

He said Philadelphia police failed to pick up the pattern of four attacks, all within blocks of one another in Center City, all after midnight, all behind closed apartment doors.

"When you link one, two, three and four together, you had a serial rapist," Connery said. "So by downgrading, you broke the pattern. So they never got on the radar screen."

Lawyers for the Schiebers said in court yesterday that the officers who responded to their daughter's apartment have testified in pretrial depositions that they did not know a serial rapist was at large in Center City.

Said Connery: "They were deprived of the information that there was a serial rapist that preyed on young women."

Capt. Leonard Ditchkofsky, who took command of Center City's Ninth District in 1998 while the attacks were unfolding there, has also said during a deposition that no one briefed him on the first two attacks, the Schiebers' lawyers said in court. The third and fourth attacks - rapes a block apart on Pine Street - took place after he became captain.

The information about the department's response to the initial attacks emerged yesterday as lawyers for the Schiebers and the city argued before U.S. District Judge Norma L. Shapiro about which witnesses should be permitted to testify before a jury in the lawsuit.

Lawyers for the city downplayed the importance of the handling of the earlier sexual assaults. Deputy City Solicitor Jeffrey M. Scott argued that the issue of the police response to the first two rapes was not relevant to the lawsuit.

"You may say that," Shapiro replied from the bench. "I don't know how people would agree with you."

Connery also was critical of the officers who responded to Schieber's apartment, with regard to questions they asked of the neighbor who had called 911.

The Schiebers' lawyers said that the police had asked the neighbor how he would feel if they knocked the door down and nothing was amiss inside. The neighbor replied that he would be embarrassed.

Said Connery: "The police should not be asking questions that cause the complainant to doubt."