Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, April 28, 2002

Missteps early, then DNA led police in 2 states to one suspect

By Linda K. Harris, Thomas Ginsberg and Leonard N. Fleming,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

Troy Graves is seen in a police mug shot released by the Larimer County Sheriff's Office in Fort Collins, Colo.

His childhood was bitter.

His heroin-addicted father beat him.

He started off a voyeur and ended up an accused killer.

Soft in voice, shy and polite, Troy Graves killed one woman and raped or sexually assaulted 13 others as he terrorized two cities on opposite sides of the country, police say DNA evidence shows.

In Philadelphia, Graves is now identified by police as the rail-thin intruder, the attacker who chatted up his victims, the Houdini who slipped through 7-inch gaps in window bars.

In Fort Collins, Colo., police say he is the man who blindfolded and sexually assaulted eight women in less than a year.

Until Tuesday, he didn't have a name, only a DNA genotype. Suddenly, the composites of the Center City rapist were replaced by a mug shot.

That day, Fort Collins police arrested Graves, 29, a newlywed building a career in the military.

The Air Force was an attempt to start a new life, leaving behind a succession of jobs: movie usher, bank teller, restaurant worker, bookstore clerk.

He also penned angry, profane, misogynistic poetry that stunned a friend who previously had never heard him curse. The friend recalled these lines:

"They lie, they cheat, those... ho sluts...

"They tease you by wearing that short black skirt,

"Then they drive a knife thru your chest..."

Graves' arrest last week showcased detective work in Fort Collins, just as the attacks on the East Coast helped expose how the Philadelphia Police Department had secretly buried thousands of rape and sexual-assault cases over two decades, dismissing the victims as liars.

In Fort Collins, Graves had grown more reckless, breaking from his Philadelphia pattern when he attempted to assault two women in the same apartment, police said.

Police were methodically narrowing their hunt, building a list of suspects in both cities.

After Graves' arrest, police from New Hampshire to Texas, all places where Graves visited, were reexamining sex-crime files, comparing his DNA with evidence gathered from past crime scenes. So far, police say, they can only link him to violence in Philadelphia and Fort Collins.

• 

Four-and-a-half years after they married in Harlem on July 24, 1965, Clayton and Michal Graves moved to Minneapolis. They had one son, and a crumbling marriage.

"When they got back together again, the result was Troy," said Marc Graves, 36, Troy's older brother and only sibling.

Struggling financially, the family moved back to Harlem, then Ridley Park in Delaware County, then Bucks County.

The two-story townhouse in Feasterville was a step up. But Clayton Graves, a quiet man with an explosive rage, was bedeviled by his need for heroin. He died last year in New York City, strung out and homeless, his family said.

"He was abusive. He was violent," the older brother said. "I caught the brunt of that. Troy takes things closer to heart than I do. It hit him harder than it did me."

Cheri Ward, 28, who lived with Troy Graves in the Philadelphia region in the early 1990s, said he told her he had also been sexually abused growing up.

Marc Graves made no reference to sexual abuse. Even years later, Marc said, he and Troy had trouble talking about the abuse they suffered.

"We had been through it and that's all there was to it. We both knew," Marc Graves said. "Maybe if we had discussed it, maybe things would have been different."

Troy Graves and Ward met as teens. They worked at the same Bucks County movie theater.

She adored punk-rock music, sported blue-black hair, and donned Chuck Taylor Converse high-top sneakers. Graves, a year-and-a-half older, was nervous around girls.

"Talking to him was always like pulling teeth," she said. "It was always hard to ask him questions and to get him to talk."

Ward said Graves did tell her that he was picked on as a boy because he was a light-skinned African American. Some would taunt him and ask if he was really black.

In 1991, Ward and Graves, who had dropped out of Bensalem High School in 1989, moved to Center City. Graves, Ward said, would take long walks at night, telling her he walked through "dark alleys" of the city.

At times, he would go on the roof of their apartment building with a telescope and binoculars.

"I'm looking at the stars," he told her.

• 

"A person who is a voyeur is more likely to become a rapist than the exhibitionist. The next step is to break into a forbidden place, gradually progressing from being a voyeur to burglar, to rape."

- Robert L. Sadoff, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania

• 

Before long, Ward said she realized there was a serious problem: Graves was a Peeping Tom.

One night, she said, she was awakened by a scream from their female roommate, who was taking a shower.

A few moments later, Graves came into the bedroom, shaking.

"I did something bad," she recalled that he said. "I was trying to look at your roommate."

The two women kicked Graves out.

He left town briefly, then returned to his old Center City neighborhood, living at 10th and Pine Streets - now with a new girlfriend.

It was then the attacks began.

Moving west on Pine Street over three months in 1997, a man slipped in and out of apartments in predawn darkness, attacking women as they slept.

The first two rapes, in June and July 1997, were ignored by Philadelphia police, who refused to classify the assaults as sexual attacks, articles later published in The Inquirer showed.

The first victim gave police hair recovered from her bed, but it would not be tested for DNA for 28 months.

In the second attack, the woman was choked into unconsciousness; police recovered semen-stained underwear from her bedroom but again waited months to test it for DNA.

Police classified this crime as a burglary. Investigators from the sex-crimes unit would wait two years to interview the victim.

In August 1997, two women were attacked inside their apartments within one block of each other on Pine Street.

Still the police failed to alert even their own officers, much less the public.

On a warm evening in May 1998, the rapist struck his most vicious blow.

He entered through a sliding-glass door of a second-floor apartment at 23d Street near Locust, and startled Shannon Schieber, 23, who had just finished a late night of studying.

Schieber screamed and fought back - the only victim to do so.

The noise caused a neighbor to call police. Two officers arrived, knocked on the door of Schieber's apartment, then left when they heard nothing. Her brother found her dead the next day.

Because of a problem with Philadelphia's computerized DNA analysis, eight months passed before police realized that Schieber had been strangled by the same man who had committed the Aug. 13, 1997 assault.

After that DNA match in January 1999, the news broke that a serial rapist was on the loose.

Police composite sketches suddenly appeared in shop windows, taped to cash registers, pinned to public message boards.

Then, on a sultry summer weekend, in August 1999, the rapist struck again, this time near the corner of 19th and Lombard Streets.

The victim reported that the soft-spoken rapist had advised her how to repair the bars on the window that he had slipped through.

• 

Two days after the last rape in Center City in 1999, Graves started a new life. He joined the Air Force.

"He was tired of working these dead-end jobs, and he couldn't go back to school while working full time," Michal Graves said.

He landed in San Antonio on a balmy Wednesday, Oct. 13, 1999. There his quiet, solitary manner earned him scorn initially from the younger recruits, some of whom took to calling him "faggot." His mother said later that his initial thrill at enlisting had turned sour.

But a friend and fellow recruit, Ryan Dakdduk, said Graves lived down the ribbing and quickly became well-liked.

"He would stay up all night before inspection," Dakdduk said. "He had no problem staying up multiple nights."

While Graves was in basic training in Texas, the crimes continued to roil Philadelphia.

Schieber's parents had sued the city for failing to save Schieber during the 911 response.

Philadelphia launched an extraordinary review of all sexual assaults - including those now blamed on Graves - after The Inquirer revealed profound defects in the department's Special Victims Unit. DNA exams would finally link all his victims.

Fear and anger were consuming Center City over a suspect who was now 2,800 miles away.

"I passed a guy in the street wearing a baseball hat, and I wanted him to take it off so that I could look at his hair," Jenny Stromer-Galley, a Wharton graduate student, said at the time.

After five months of technical training in California, Graves was posted on April 11, 2000, to the maintenance squadron at the Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., a nuclear missile station. He moved into a dormitory on base and began earning $16,620 a year.

A month later, on a night in May, Air Force officials say, Graves slipped into the base's women's dormitory without permission. He was given a letter of reprimand. The Air Force would not reveal other details.

In his new job, Graves was earning the respect of superiors, if not all of his coworkers.

"He was a very punctual, conscientious worker," said Master Sgt. Ron Navarra, the first sergeant for Graves' 90th Logistics Group. "He was a solid airman."

• 

By spring 2001, Amy J. Wade had been out of college for just two years, a 24-year-old accomplished classical pianist and preacher's daughter with degrees in English and health science from Walla Walla College, in eastern Washington state.

Her writing skills helped her get a job at a private educational firm in Fort Collins, where she began producing video documentaries about special education, according to her father, Glen.

At some point in 2000 or early 2001, she met Graves in Fort Collins. Wade could not be located for comment; she has gone into seclusion.

Their artistic interests clicked. Like Graves, Wade dabbled in drawing. Her first love was classical music, especially Rachmaninoff, her father said.

"He was somebody who seemed to be creative, which she was too. He certainly appreciated the fact of her musicianship," her father said.

She told her parents that her new boyfriend was an artist, of sorts.

"I'm certain that might have been something my daughter saw in him," Wade said.

On March 3, 2001 - a year and a half after the Center City rapist's last attack in Philadelphia - Troy Graves, then 28, and Amy J. Wade, then 25, became husband and wife in a civil ceremony at the Larimer County Courthouse in Fort Collins.

Marriage meant liberation from the military base for Graves. Shortly after their courthouse ceremony, Graves and Wade together carried their marriage certificate to the Warren base and Graves signed her up as his "dependent spouse."

They moved into Wade's apartment, on Boardwalk Drive, near the Colorado State University campus.

• 

"Most serial rapists do have some degree of interest and capacity to relate in a consenting relationship, but it doesn't erase the intense cravings that push them in a more dangerous direction."

- Fred Berlin, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

• 

Within two months of the marriage, the Center City rape suspect was back at work, in a new place, police now believe.

On a warm Thursday evening in May, a man entered an unlocked door of the apartment of a 20-year-old woman on Raintree Drive, near Colorado State University, blindfolded and sexually assaulted her.

A month later, a similar assault of another 20-year-old took place one block away. Two weeks later, a third assault on Battlecreek Drive.

Fort Collins police, already on alert, went into high gear, acting far more quickly than their counterparts in Philadelphia. They conducted DNA tests linking the crimes to a single attacker.

Amid the mounting panic around them, Graves and Wade made their first trip to meet her parents, spending a June weekend in Florida.

Back in Fort Collins in July, there was a fourth attack with the same blindfold method. A fifth assault came in August.

Then there was a sixth assault, in which a man got into an apartment with two women, tying up and assaulting one, then trying to assault the other. He was foiled by his first victim, who wriggled free and scared him away.

In August, Graves moved with his wife to the other side of campus, into a small brick duplex on Ash Drive, a short walk from campus. Wade's job took her out of town a lot; she would be gone for several days at a time, her father said. Graves was often home alone.

Back in Philadelphia, police picked up word of the attacks in Fort Collins from a national bulletin and contacted detectives in Colorado.

The two forces compared DNA - and found a perfect match.

The same man, it was now clear, was at work in both places, leaving his genetic fingerprint: "D3S1358: 15, 16; D16S539: 11, 12; TH01: 6, 9.3; TPOX: 8, 11," and on and on.

Police in both cities began cooperating fully. The culprit was displaying similarities and worrisome differences.

Whereas the Philadelphia attacker had been a careful planner and stalker, the Fort Collins intruder appeared more careless, almost rushed, even intruding into an apartment where there were two women.

Police began laboriously assembling a list of people who credit card or other records showed had been in both areas during the crime sprees.

They eliminated women and older men. Fort Collins police increased the number of investigators on the case, and deployed patrols around campus for the incoming fall session.

Nonetheless, with spring came a new attack, on April 12 of this year, the eighth in the sequence.

Then, a breakthrough. Someone sent Fort Collins police an unsigned letter, written on a computer, in which the writer spoke of the Fort Collins attacks and also mentioned an assault in Philadelphia.

Finally, the database work led police in Fort Collins to phone Graves' home.

Wade answered and the officer said he needed to speak to Graves. She immediately called him at work, he came home, and together they went to the station, voluntarily, according to police and Wade's father.

Between questions about the attacks, police took Graves' fingerprints and quickly discovered a match to prints found at one of the Fort Collins attacks. They reportedly also traced the letter to a computer hard drive at his home, police said.

Armed with this evidence, Graves was placed in custody at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday - two weeks shy of the fourth anniversary of Shannon Schieber's murder.

"One page is closed. And that's good," said Vicki Schieber, the mother of the murdered student. "Every time I turned that calender in May, I cringed. That is over now."