Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, May 10, 2002

Rape suspect crossed paths with police

Troy Graves, accused of sex attacks in Phila. in 1997, was questioned that year and in '99. He was let go because he wasn't being sought for a crime.

By Barbara Boyer, Leonard Fleming and Mark Fazlollah,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

A month after a series of 1997 sexual assaults now tied to Troy Graves, Philadelphia police stopped, questioned and released Graves on a midnight prowling complaint in Center City.

That Sept. 9, 1997, stop was one of at least two occasions that police in Philadelphia questioned Graves for suspicious behavior and then released him after discovering he was not being sought for a crime, police records released yesterday show.

In the other documented encounter, campus police at the University of Pennsylvania questioned Graves at 4:18 a.m. on Jan. 5, 1999, investigating a report of a suspicious man.

Moreover, Philadelphia authorities were not alone in singling out Graves for scrutiny, only to let him go.

Police departments in five other states stopped Graves in recent years for suspicious behavior, always releasing him after concluding that he had done nothing unlawful and that there were no outstanding warrants for his arrest. Until April, in fact, Graves had no arrest record.

Last month, police in Fort Collins, Colo., arrested Graves, 30, an Air Force missile mechanic, and charged him with assaulting eight women there.

Authorities in Philadelphia say DNA evidence shows that Graves, who lived in Philadelphia from 1991 until he joined the Air Force in 1999, sexually assaulted five Center City women and killed a sixth, graduate student Shannon Schieber.

Graves has entered no plea in either the Philadelphia or the Fort Collins cases.

After Graves' arrest, friends and acquaintances described Graves as a voyeur and prowler who would disappear at night for long periods.

The police information further confirms that portrait, showing a history of behavior that drew police attention.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson noted that Graves had no criminal record until his arrest last month.

"We stop thousands of people," Johnson said. "We had no reason, at that point, to do anything other than what we did."

Schieber's father, Sylvester Schieber, contended otherwise yesterday.

He noted that while Graves is now alleged to have assaulted four women in 1997, investigators rejected the account of his first victim as a liar and dismissed the second as a burglary, not a sex crime. Police did classify the final two 1997 attacks as rapes.

Had police quickly linked all four 1997 attacks, said Schieber, who is suing the city and the Police Department over his daughter's killing, officers might have paid far more attention to Graves when he was stopped on Sept. 9, 1997.

That encounter took place the month after an Aug. 6 attack at 16th and Pine Streets and an Aug. 13 attack at 17th and Pine.

On Sept. 9, police received a complaint of a prowler in the narrow 1200 block of Cypress Street, records show. The block is near 12th Street, between Spruce and Pine Streets.

When Graves was questioned by police, he gave his address - an apartment at 10th and Pine Streets. The police report listed a description similar to that provided by victims of his 1997 attacks.

Police released him after he was taken to the person who filed the complaint and that person could not identify him as the prowler, police said.

In 1998, police say, Graves struck again, killing Schieber.

Sylvester Schieber said that police should have noticed the similarities in description and that Graves lived close to where the crimes occurred.

"If you don't process evidence in attacks, your ability to catch suspects is limited," he said yesterday. "So it doesn't surprise me that they bumped into him and he walked away."

Eight months after Shannon Schieber's strangulation, police on the Penn campus had another encounter with Graves.

On Jan. 5, 1999, Penn police received a call about a suspicious person on South 41st Street, near Pine. Graves was stopped two blocks away.

"He was walking on the street," said Maureen Rush, who commands the university's force. "At 4 a.m. there are not a lot of people walking around on South 41st Street."

According to the police report, Graves gave his mother's address in Myrtle Beach, S.C., as his residence.

His name was run through national and state databases to see if he was wanted. With no reason to hold him, police released him, Rush said.

According to police sources, Graves had been stopped in six states throughout the years, more than once in some states. Details about these stops could not be obtained yesterday.

While Philadelphia police yesterday provided documents confirming the 1997 and 1999 stops, Graves' former girlfriend has detailed another encounter with police.

Cherie Ward said yesterday that Graves would take the fire escape to the roof of the apartment building at Seventh and Pine Streets where they lived between 1992 and 1994.

Ward said he told her he was stargazing with a telescope and binoculars, but she has concluded he was spying on neighbors.

Once in the middle of the night, she said, Philadelphia police pounded on their apartment door, saying they were responding to a complaint that a Peeping Tom had darted into their apartment after being spotted on the roof.

Ward said she was wakened by the police knocks. At that time, she said, she believed Graves was asleep in the apartment. She told the police that no one had entered the apartment, and the officers departed.