Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, September 19, 2001

In Colorado, portrait of rape suspect grows

DNA indicates that the Center City rapist has lately struck in Fort Collins. Phila. sketches are now being circulated there.

By Thomas J. Gibbons Jr. and Larry Fish,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

FORT COLLINS, Colo. - Stephanie Schmidt, a senior at Colorado State University here, took a short break from cramming for a sociology test to explain the steps she has taken in response to the knowledge that a sexual predator is loose in the community.

"I have a hammer next to my bed, and my roommate has a knife," Schmidt said.

Her study partner, Ashley Trahan, said she and other women on campus were mostly using "common sense - always using the buddy system" when venturing out at night.

Fort Collins, a growing city of 120,000 on Colorado's Front Range, has known since late June that a lone intruder has been entering ground-level apartments at night, blindfolding women, and sexually assaulting them. Six such assaults - on a total of seven women - have been reported, the most recent Aug. 23.

What anxious people here did not know until Monday was that DNA traces left by the intruder match those of the Center City rapist who committed six assaults from 1997 through 1999 and killed Shannon Schieber, 23, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student.

In Philadelphia yesterday, Police Commissioner John F. Timoney provided a timeline for the DNA link. The match came after Philadelphia police were routinely told Aug. 6 that a sexual predator was being sought in Colorado.

On Aug. 8, a detective assigned to the Special Victims Unit contacted Fort Collins. Police in both cities then agreed that attacks were highly similar, and Philadelphia police sent DNA samples to Fort Collins for comparison.

"We forwarded that out on Sept. 12. We got back confirmation that the person responsible for the rapes in Center City is the exact same person as in Colorado," Timoney said.

"This is a bad actor. This is a bad individual. My sense is he's hit elsewhere."

Timoney said he hoped that police departments across the country would check their unsolved rapes and sexual assaults to find out whether the Philadelphia and Fort Collins predator has also operated in their communities.

On Friday, Lt. Thomas McDevitt of the Special Victims Unit and Homicide Detective Paul McKelvie - two investigators assigned to the Center City rapist case - left for Fort Collins. Because of airline problems, the trip took 26 hours.

The pair have since joined eight Fort Collins investigators assigned to the case.

Meanwhile, patrols focusing on the assailant will continue in Center City.

"That task force is there for that reason," Timoney said. "We'll keep that going until this guy is caught.

Fort Collins police called the DNA link highly important, not least because it literally fills in the public portrait that the Philadelphia victims had provided. Police in Philadelphia were able to make two composite drawings based on information provided by the victims, while none of the women in Fort Collins could describe their attacker because they had been blindfolded.

Fort Collins police had developed a sketch from a victim of an attempted burglary, who described a man she struck with a hockey stick when he tried to break into her home. Police think that man is likely not the serial sexual attacker but decided to distribute the sketch in case they are wrong.

Those composite drawings from Philadelphia are being widely circulated in Colorado, including on the front page of yesterday's issue of the Colorado State newspaper.

Fort Collins residents said that although they hoped the information would speed an arrest, it wasn't likely to add to the already fairly strong tension.

"Awareness was already pretty high. You think, every night, is my window locked?" said graduate student Beth Mozolic of Ocean County, N.J. "I would never, in a town like this, worry about whether my windows are locked. But now I'm pretty cautious about riding my bike at night."

The six Fort Collins attacks have no particular tie to the university, other than that nearly anything in a city this size affects the 23,000-student campus.

Lt. Karl H. Swenson of the Colorado State police force said one of the attacks involved a university student, and Fort Collins police say that one of the rare instances where the intruder attempted to assault two women in one apartment involved students at nearby Front Range Community College.

Unlike the Center City attacks, those here have not been bunched geographically. Two took place within a few blocks of the main Colorado State campus, but others were several miles away.