FORT COLLINS, Colo. - When police here finally closed in on Troy Graves, he tried to lie his way out.
Over seven hours of interrogation on April 22, Graves denied that he had ever been accused of being a Peeping Tom.
Yet only hours earlier, police had learned that military police had caught Graves, an airman, peeping into a woman's residence on a base in 2000.
Asked if police could fingerprint him, Graves said that permitting that "felt weird."
Finally, police obtained a judge's order to obtain the fingerprints. Two hours later, a police technician matched the prints with three recovered from the balcony of a woman who was sexually assaulted and tied up here the previous August.
Graves had tried to elude his interrogators with the same Houdini-like gymnastics with which he made his way in and out of the apartments of the women he raped.
It didn't work. In the end, a detailed police affidavit shows, even his wife helped implicate him.
After voluntarily arriving at police headquarters here for that interview, Graves, now 30, never returned home.
Police believed they had identified the man previously known here as the Center City rapist.
In Philadelphia, Graves is charged with murder for the 1998 slaying of Wharton graduate student Shannon Schieber, 23, as well as five other sexual assaults.
On Friday, Graves pleaded guilty to charges involving eight victims, which included seven sexual attacks in Fort Collins. He was sentenced to life.
Philadelphia prosecutors are trying to work a deal similar to Colorado's. In exchange for pleading guilty to the crimes here, Graves will not face the death penalty and will be permitted to serve his time in Colorado.
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The swift denouement in court here Friday was in stark contrast to the grim march of the five-year investigation in Philadelphia, an inquiry marred by DNA miscues and an initial police failure to believe victims.
After police failed to make headway, former Police Commissioner John F. Timoney declared in 1999 that detectives were at their "wit's end."
So desperate for leads were Philadelphia police that they fruitlessly scanned sports schedules, thinking that a check of game dates against attacks might turn up a pro athlete as a suspect.
Then Graves, apparently compulsive in his need to attack, surfaced again here, attacking seven women between May and August 2001. Philadelphia civilian dispatcher Victoria E. Randall saw a computer alert from Fort Collins about the attacks and passed it along to Philadelphia detectives.
Before long, DNA evidence had shown the Center City rapist was the man behind the Colorado attacks.
With the hunt awakened, Graves' increasingly reckless behavior, and dedicated, if tedious, database work finally cracked the case.
Within days of the DNA match in September, Lt. Thomas McDevitt of the city's Special Victims Unit and homicide Detective Paul McKelvey flew to Fort Collins.
In Philadelphia, Lt. Edward Monaghan, of the department's computer unit, had painstakingly built a crucial list.
Culled from credit-card records and other public sources, the Philadelphia list held the names of about 80 people who had been in Philadelphia during the 1997-99 attacks and here during the Fort Collins crimes.
On that list was the name of Troy Graves.
Philadelphia investigators kept fine-tuning the data and pared it down to just two targets. One, still, was Graves.
Philadelphia police had traced Graves to his posting at the Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., about 50 miles from Fort Collins, where Graves lived with his wife.
Fort Collins Police Chief Dennis Harrison said Friday that his officers made six attempts to speak with Graves since last September, but never found him home.
Harrison said investigators chose not to leave a message, not wanting to alert him that he was under scrutiny.
Graves was being watched, however. On Sept. 24, 2001, a Fort Collins woman called police saying her neighbor, Graves, matched the description of the suspect. That sketch from Philadelphia had only become available once the two-city DNA link had been made.
After seven months without an assault, a new attack took place here.
Three days after that April 12 incident, the same neighbor who had warned Fort Collins police about Graves the previous fall called back. She again urged police to take a look at Graves.
One week later, Philadelphia Police Officer Linda Pace, with the Special Victims Unit, made another connection. She informed Fort Collins police that military records showed that Graves had the same blood type - Type A positive - as that of the suspect in the Philadelphia attacks.
On that same day, Fort Collins learned that Graves had been caught in 2000 trying to slip through an open window of a female dormitory on his military base. It was past time to call Graves. This time, Fort Collins police simply telephoned his home and asked him to come in for a talk.
He arrived at the police station at 7:40 p.m. with his wife of a year, Amy Wade.
Graves initially acknowledged living in the Philadelphia suburbs. But he never mentioned living in the city itself.
By then, police had compiled an exhaustive dossier on Graves' travels. They knew that he had lived in Center City when the attacks took place.
As Graves' lies began to unravel, his wife was speaking in the other room with Detective Ginger Mohs. Her husband had an "insomnia problem" and often disappeared at night, Wade said.
"Ms. Wade recalls waking several times in the middle of the night... to discover her husband was gone," according to an affidavit released Friday.
"She said that was when she first thought her husband was the suspect in a series of sexual assaults."
Then, Mohs showed Wade something damning - a baseball hat with the logo "Quiksilver," left behind by the Fort Collins attacker at a 2001 crime scene.
"She acknowledged that her husband had owned the same black 'Quiksilver' hat," the affidavit reads. "She said she had not seen it in some time and could not be certain he still had it."
In the next room, her husband was losing his battle against police. The evidence was mounting. Once the fingerprint match was made, the case had been solved.
