Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, Dec. 21, 2001

Letters

Police department's handling of Center City rapist cases

In his exit "question-and-answer session at the Down Home Diner" (Commentary, Dec. 10), Police Commissioner John F. Timoney once again misleads the Philadelphia community in his comments about what the police knew and did about the Center City rapist. Timoney has consistently misled the public about this investigation since holding a press conference on May 8, 1998, the day after my daughter, Shannon Schieber, was murdered.

In his valedictory comments, the commissioner said, "Get the facts straight." He should follow his own command. He was right that the first four known attacks by the Center City rapist occurred before he was appointed commissioner. But Timoney was deceptive about the handling of DNA in those attacks and linking that evidence to Shannon's murder.

Timoney said that after Shannon was killed, they tested the DNA of the attacker and discovered they had another serial rapist on their hands. He suggests that the police thought they had solved the four 1997 Center City cases with the arrest of the assailant who was charged and pleaded guilty to three other sexual assaults in the Fairmont section of the city.

Timoney brags how Philadelphia has "that rare police department that not only takes a DNA sample at a crime scene, but also follows through on the test instead of waiting for trial." It may be true today, but it was not the case until long after Shannon was dead.

If Timoney's claim were true, then the police in 1997 ignored lock-tight biological evidence that the Fairmont rapist was not responsible for the Center City attacks. If the police thought he had been the assailant in those cases, why didn't they check his DNA against the four Center City case files - and alert officers that he was not the attacker in those cases? In addition, if they thought they had solved the Center City cases with the arrest of the Fairmont rapist, why did they leave the four case files open? Police departments, including Philadelphia's, love to brag about solving crimes.

The Fairmont rapist was in jail the night Shannon was killed. He had already pleaded guilty and been sentenced for the other set of cases. There is no way his DNA could have been linked to Shannon's or the other Center City cases. Indeed, the Fairmont rapist was never charged with any of the Center City cases after his arrest in October 1997.

But if the police routinely process DNA in crimes in Philadelphia, as Timoney asserts, then he owes someone an explanation of why they did not link the DNA in any of the other Center City rapist cases to Shannon's murder until January 1999, eight months after she was killed. They did not link DNA in Shannon's case to the first two cases until October 1999, 17 months after the murder. The reason it took so long, of course, was because the evidence was not processed on a professional or timely basis.

Timoney's claim that his is a rare department in processing such evidence is belied by the Center City rapist's experience in Fort Collins, Colo., this past summer. Within two weeks after the second of the attacks there from which they could collect DNA evidence, the Fort Collins police had successfully matched the biological evidence. The difference in how the two departments dealt with their respective serial assault sprees does not stop in the handling of evidence or operation of their labs.

As soon as the Fort Collins police determined they had a serial rapist in their community, they went to the media to warn about the series of attacks on women. By comparison, the Philadelphia police did not put out any such warnings to the Center City community when they identified the pattern of attacks there in late August 1997. In fact, when they linked DNA evidence in Shannon's case to two earlier attacks in January 1999, it was kept secret.

It was only when The Inquirer broke the story of the linkage in mid-February 1999 that the department acknowledged Shannon's murder was linked to a series of other sexual assaults in the community. Only then did women in Center City begin to understand the danger they faced.