Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, April 24, 2002

Same DNA, different response by police

In Ft. Collins, Colo., tests focused attention quickly on a serial rapist. Phila. investigators were slow to react and made mistakes.

By Mark Fazlollah,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

As the predator stalked Philadelphia's Rittenhouse neighborhood and later a Colorado college town, his pattern was the same. He would strike late at night, attacking young, single women as they slept.

DNA evidence would eventually show that the same man was responsible for attacks in Philadelphia and Fort Collins, Colo. Troy Graves, 29, a onetime Center City resident, was arrested yesterday on the Colorado charges. Police said he was a prime suspect in the Philadelphia attacks, as well.

But police responded very differently in the two cities.

"If Philadelphia had run their department the way Fort Collins does, my daughter would be alive today," said Sylvester J. Schieber, the father of Shannon Schieber, a University of Pennsylvania doctoral student believed killed by the same predator.

In Fort Collins, the 152-officer department quickly made DNA matches that showed that a serial rapist was active there.

Soon after the initial attacks in spring 2001, police immediately alerted residents, particularly students at Colorado State University, of the threat.

By contrast, the Philadelphia police investigation has been marked by missteps.

Investigators in the department's long-troubled rape squad discounted the accounts from victims in the first two known Philadelphia attacks, in June and July 1997.

Officers refused to characterize the first assault as a crime, and they waited 28 months to conduct DNA tests on evidence that the victim had given them: several strands of her attacker's hair, which she found after he left.

Similarly, the rape squad refused to classify the second attack as a sexual assault, instead writing it off as a burglary.

The department failed to immediately notify Center City commanders or street officers that a serial sexual predator was active.

Part of the problem may be the nature of big-city policing. The Philadelphia Police Department, with 7,000 members, faces an unrelenting workload of violent crime in a city 12 times as populous as Fort Collins. In Fort Collins, rapes usually are the most serious crimes that police will handle. The city of 125,000 has had no murders this year, one in 2001, and none in 2000.

Still, there is no doubt that a big part of the problem also had been Philadelphia's history of ignoring rape cases.

Though police and women's advocates say the rape squad has been reformed in recent years, police brass have acknowledged that the squad improperly shelved several thousand cases over much of the last two decades.

This happened with the Center City rapist's attack in June 1997. The rail-thin man slipped through the narrow security bars to enter a 28-year-old artist's apartment on 21st Street near Spruce Street and molest her.

But the sex-crimes investigator who handled the case decided that the victim's account was implausible. Within days, the case was stamped "inactive" and the eventual DNA match was delayed for more than two years.

The predator's second assault, in July 1997, was just three blocks away. Again, police botched the case.

In that attack, the man choked his 25-year-old victim unconscious and stripped her naked inside her apartment. The victim's semen-stained underwear was sent to the police lab, but it took 27 months before the lab linked DNA in the underwear to evidence from other attacks by the rapist.

The same man raped two more women in August 1997, and then went on to kill Schieber the following year.

Police were slow to pick up the pattern.

The police lab botched the DNA identification that would have linked Schieber's death to the earlier attacks. Noncompatible databases delayed discovery of the match until January 1999, eight months after Schieber was murdered.

Schieber's parents are now suing the city and the Police Department, contending that police disregard of the first two 1997 assaults had contributed to their daughter's death.

Moreover, their federal lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, is also critical of how police responded to her attack. A federal appellate court is considering whether the city has immunity.

In the May 1998 case, two police officers responded to a 911 call from one of Schieber's neighbors, knocked on her door, and left when they received no answer.

Schieber was found dead in her apartment the next morning.

Police officials say the officers responded properly, based on what they knew at the time. The family's lawsuit contends that the police missed a chance to catch the Center City rapist by failing to knock down the door.

Contact Mark Fazlollah at 215-854-5831 or mfazlollah@phillynews.com.