What Rape?

St. Louis long seemed like a safe house from rape -- a place where the crime was seldom reported and where the rare offender was usually brought to justice.

What the public did not see was that police made choices as to which women to consider as victims.

Some women's complaints of rape were written as official police reports. They were counted in crime statistics, computerized for easy access and analysis, and investigated.

But many women's reports of sex crimes were relegated to informal memos. St. Louis police should have counted them but didn't. Usually a paper record, these went into a filing cabinet for a year, two at the most, and eventually to a shredder.

Police used memos for at least two decades, during a time in which the city's rape totals steadily dropped to a fraction of those in similar cities.

The Post-Dispatch analyzed many of these cases and found police often discounted claims by women who were reluctant to testify, easy to discredit or difficult to locate.

When the Post-Dispatch started asking questions last fall about the use of memos, Police Chief Joe Mokwa ordered a halt to the practice. Rape numbers have risen since.

Sixty-one rapes were on the books at the end of October of last year, when the questions started; the last revision put the 2004 calendar year count at 171. Some of the increase came when the police upgraded incidents they had classified as lesser crimes; others were memo cases that had never been counted.

As of June, the city was on pace to finish this year with 216 rapes, which would be its highest total in eight years.

Memos were a symptom of greater problems in the city's handling of rape cases. The Post-Dispatch investigation found that:

* Some women were given forms to sign that released police from investigating and counting the complaints as crimes, even when officers seemed to have little reason to believe the women were lying.

* The department might have covered the tracks of serial criminals by destroying memos that detailed allegations of violent sexual crimes.

* Officers often made judgments on the spot about women reporting rapes, improperly rejecting many complaints that crime experts told the newspaper should have been counted as crimes and investigated.

* Women said officers insulted them with questions loaded with doubt, or told them nothing could be done.

* Investigations sometimes stalled because sex crimes detectives were too busy to handle cases referred by street officers.

* Police sometimes collected but didn't analyze physical evidence that could have identified rapists by their DNA.

The newspaper asked for the lab results from six "rape kits, " typically semen and hair specimens taken by medical workers during an intimate examination of a woman claiming sexual assault.

In each of the six, the women reported being abducted by strangers. Police wrote memos instead of official reports, largely because the women did not contact them for follow-up interviews after officers left their business cards.

Only one kit was examined for DNA evidence. In every case, the department had planned to destroy the only supporting paperwork, rendering the corresponding evidence virtually useless.

"Ted Bundy would have loved this reporting practice, " said Louis Arcangeli, a retired Atlanta deputy police chief who blew the whistle six years ago on a similar practice there that discounted rape complaints. Bundy was a serial killer of women who was executed in Florida in 1989, having confessed to 28 murders and under suspicion in 12 more.

In Philadelphia, where police also used to screen out rape complaints they doubted, the parents of a murdered woman say their daughter would be alive had officers not classified her killer's earlier attacks as noncrimes.

Carol E. Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project there and a central figure in reforms that followed, spent an hour reviewing the noncrime memos from St. Louis and said the handling of many St. Louis cases would be unacceptable in her city.

Tracy said it was "staggering" how many cases in memos that St. Louis police did not consider crimes, and even more troubling, that records like the ones she was reviewing had been destroyed for decades.

At least Philadelphia could exhume old paperwork, she noted. "The destruction of documents a year after a complaint, while the statute (of limitations) is still running?" she said. "This is worse."

She added, "It precludes any charges (against suspects) for subsequent acts who could be identified just by the DNA analysis." Shredding these types of documents means police will never catch a serial attacker, she said.

Difference in definition

After Mokwa ended the department's use of memos late last year, he confirmed that the Sex Crimes Section had used them for at least two decades.

In an internal review of the cases, the department also found that it had classified about one-quarter of the city's rapes last year as other crimes -- lesser sexual crimes, simple assaults and even a case of drunkenness -- that would not show in nationally published statistics.

Mokwa ordered that 25 informal memos from last year be reported in crime statistics as official reports of rapes. Seven were later deemed unfounded and subtracted from the stats.

He said he added the rapes "to err on the side of caution, " although he insisted that not all were really rapes.

"I ordered those to be turned into crimes, although there was a directive or a recommendation not to, " Mokwa said.

That recommendation, the department said, came from Bill Ault, who audits crime data that are collected by the Missouri Highway Patrol from St. Louis and various other departments before being passed to the FBI for national publication.

Ault said in an interview Aug. 5 that the Police Department had largely used generic terms to solicit his opinion about the complaints in question. After two hours of reviewing informal memos obtained by the Post-Dispatch, he said he had a clearer picture.

"From the standpoint of uniform crime reporting, these are reported crimes, " he said.

Some of them were clearly unfounded complaints, Ault said, but still should have been formally reported as such in crime statistics.

St. Louis officially reported just one "unfounded" rape complaint in 2003, one of the lowest rejection rates among U.S. cities, according to the FBI's crime statistics.

Dallas and Baltimore reported that they had rejected the highest percentage of rape claims -- 16 percent.

But if the St. Louis Police Department classified all of the 70 memos concerning reports of rapes as "unfounded" claims, it would have meant that the department had rejected 46 percent of their rape complaints that year.

Mokwa and his top commanders adamantly deny any suggestion that the department discounted rapes or destroyed records of real crimes. They said they were justified in destroying records they had no room to store.

In two interviews with the Post-Dispatch, Mokwa included Kathleen Hanrahan, executive director of the St. Louis Regional Sexual Assault Center.

Her agency dispatches volunteers from the YWCA in Clayton to meet women who report sexual assaults and who check in to emergency rooms in the area.

"There's no malfeasance here, " she insisted.

St. Louis' practices, she said, seem "light years" from the discounting of rapes in Philadelphia.

In an interview Aug. 2, Mokwa and his top aides said police were required to report only complaints in which those who alleged rapes cooperated by providing intimate details -- and that memos were written when that cooperation or those details fell short.

Capt. Mary Warnecke, a former Sex Crimes Section commander chosen by Mokwa to answer a reporter's questions, said, "When someone says, 'I've been raped, ' it's not enough to make a police report." She added, "I can say I've been raped on the corner of Tucker and Chestnut, and it's still not enough. I can tell you the time of day, and that's still not enough information."

Lt. Col. David Heath, head of the department's Bureau of Professional Standards, emphasized that no rape is counted unless a woman specifies vaginal intercourse with force or intimidation and without her consent.

A national expert in crime reporting said St. Louis police appeared to be applying their own rules that are at odds with a standardized process.

"I'm telling you they're wrong, " said Vincent R. DeBlasis, a retired chief inspector with the Philadelphia police, who has conducted large-scale audits of crime data in Atlanta and Baltimore.

"If a woman comes in and says, 'I was raped at 9 o'clock last night at Broad and Erie, the police department is stuck with a rape, " DeBlasis said.

It is common, he said, for a woman reporting a rape not to want to divulge more, and even more common for her to be difficult for police to find again. Those are not reasons to ignore what she says, he said.

FBI crime reporting guidelines say cooperation from a woman alleging a sexual assault is not necessary for police to count a crime as a rape.

"If you don't want to classify it as a rape, you have to prove it never happened, " DeBlasis said.

"Their policy in St. Louis is that a victim must prove to the police that an offense occurred . . . , " he said. "A good analogy is the defendant having to prove he's innocent."

An "unfounded" case

So who were the people whose complaints were discounted in St. Louis?

A Post-Dispatch reporter spent six months tracking down about three dozen of them, for stories that will unfold this week. It is an unavoidably small cross section; 18 of the past 20 years of memos have been destroyed.

Often, they were society's down and out. Some reported rape by an acquaintance but were reluctant to press charges. Some said officers talked them out of reporting rapes or refused to accept their claims. Most said they had no idea that police did not consider their claims as real crimes.

Consider two consecutive early mornings at St. Alexius Hospital in July 2003, a month in which just five women reported rapes in St. Louis, according to published statistics.

That's a figure way out of line with what big cities typically report in a summer month. Kansas City, for example, reported 31 rapes that month.

On July 10, a woman taken to St. Alexius told a police officer that a man bashed her in the face, dragged her into a building off Cherokee Street and sexually assaulted her. She said she knew his first name: Jimmy.

A memo detailing the incident says officers searched the area for Jimmy but came up empty.

A sex crimes detective collected snapshots of her swollen face and waited while nurses swabbed evidence for a rape kit, according to his memo. He wrote that he was unable to learn more because the woman was incoherent.

The detective said in the memo that he left his business card at the hospital and at her home and asked her to call him for another interview, but she never did.

The detective noted her criminal history included arrests for begging and street demonstration -- a city ordinance akin to loitering for prostitution.

A Post-Dispatch reporter located the woman three times while researching this story -- once through her brother and twice by searching a stretch of Cherokee Street where she spends much of her time.

The woman, 47, said she had more pressing concerns after the rape. After being released from the hospital, she sought treatment for alcoholism. She said she must have been in rehab when the detective left his card.

The memo was slated to be shredded at the end of last year. After Mokwa ordered an end to the use of memos last fall, the detective wrote an official report but coded the case as "unfounded, " a classification that kept it out of statistics.

"This case can't be unfounded" under Uniform Crime Reporting guidelines, said Ault, of the Highway Patrol, after reviewing the paperwork. "The UCR requirements are quite specific. Your investigation has to determine that the complaint was false or baseless."

The woman said she did not know police were waiting for her to call them. She said she had been intoxicated the night of her attack but insisted the attack occurred.

"How am I supposed to know I'm supposed to call them?" she said.

Leaving his card

The day after the detective left her his card, he was sent to St. Alexius again to check on another distraught woman who was reporting a rape.

An officer told the detective the woman had described being approached by two men on South Grand Boulevard and raped, according to the memo that was filed. A physician's report says she had called 911 from a pay phone.

The woman did not stop crying long enough to answer the detective's questions.

"Observing no outward signs of injuries, the nursing staff was looking into the possibility of the victim being mentally ill, " he wrote in a memo. He gathered the rape kit and the victim's clothes, left his card with the hospital and in her purse asking her to call.

She never did, he wrote, and there was no answer twice in August when he knocked on the door of her listed address.

Joanne Archambault, a retired San Diego police sergeant, now travels nationwide, training rape investigators in other cities. Cases like these, she said, are why her services are in high demand.

"So, they just leave her there?" said Archambault, training director for the Sexual Assault Training Institute in Addy, Wash.

Lt. Col. Timothy Reagan, the St. Louis police chief of detectives, said that the case was handled appropriately and that the information provided by the woman was not enough for a crime report.

"We're not able to understand what she means by 'she was raped' because she's so hysterical, " he said. "We're not going to wait four or five hours while she's being treated at the hospital, because again, usually there is one detective working and there are other cases to be investigated, so we leave the contact information by which she can call us, " he said.

Tracy, the Philadephia lawyer involved in reforming her city's response to rape, said it was "ridiculous" that St. Louis police insisted the complaint did not constitute a crime. They had an obligation to count it, she said.

"Imagine if you substituted the word 'rape' in that memo with 'gunshot, '" she said. Detectives would not have left a hysterical shooting victim to be discharged without following up at the hospital, she said. Why should it be different for a woman reporting rape? she asked.

If there was confusion about what the woman meant by "rape, " police could have referred to the physician's report in her rape kit, which said her vagina had been penetrated.

Shelved evidence

Both women on those nights had cooperated with authorities in an important way: Assuming their reports were true, their rape kits might have provided police with the genetic fingerprints of rapists who could threaten others.

Police could have tried to link any DNA evidence found to known offenders or other unsolved crimes by submitting it to CODIS -- the FBI's Combined DNA Indexing System. St. Louis police have used the database to solve at least two crimes in recent months.

But both kits remain in a police storage room, according to department records obtained by the newspaper.

St. Louis, like many cities, has a backlog of DNA evidence yet to be tested. The department places a higher priority on analyzing evidence for cases it is actively investigating, Warnecke said.

"Does a rape kit sit in the lab?" asked Warnecke. "Yes, it sits in the lab unless we feel the need to have it processed. If we had the lab process every rape kit we've encountered, we'd do nothing else."

But had police followed through with destroying the memos as they had planned, the kits would have lost any usefulness. The fact that memos were destroyed for years means that many rape kits may be stored for which corresponding paperwork is long gone.

"If women knew that there was a chance that evidence would end up in a locker somewhere, never being tested, I think that would deter many women from being willing to proceed and come forward and go through the process of having it collected, " said Michelle Anderson, a professor at Villanova School of Law, near Philadelphia, and an expert in rape law.

For many women, the physical and emotional trauma of submitting to collection of the rape kit evidence is second to only the rape itself, she said.

Capt. John Darby, commander of the Philadelphia Police Department's Special Victims Unit, said even in cases where women reporting rapes are uncooperative or difficult to locate, there is value in keeping the investigation active, even if only on the back burner.

Evidence taken in the case might make a DNA match to an unsolved case down the line, he said.

"That might be the key, " he said. "It might be the piece of the puzzle. When you look at it from that viewpoint, every case that is reported is important."

Clarence Harmon, a former St. Louis police chief and mayor, said if rape complaints were written as noncrime memos when he was chief, he didn't know it.

And he insisted that police can recontact a woman who reports a rape if they're committed to doing it.

"I guarantee if this was a witness in a homicide, then we would have found her, " he said.

A history of memos

St. Louis police created the Sex Crimes Section in 1974 during a national push to improve the way police handled rape investigations.

Detectives assigned to the section were supposed to bring comfort to those who say they were raped and extra attention to their cases.

Detectives were writing memos about sex crimes almost from the beginning of the section, according to department records obtained by the newspaper. Exactly what the memos included cannot be known because police shredded them.

Jack Titone, one of the section's first commanders, said that, in earlier days, memos were used when officers were summoned by hospitals treating women who "categorically denied" to police that they had been raped. St. Louis police also wrote memos to neighboring police about offenses that were determined to have occurred in their towns, he said.

"All the people I worked with, nobody is going to make a memo to hide crime, " he said.

Department superiors did not press investigators to fudge crime statistics, said Harold Nation, a detective who retired in 1987. However, there was competition among specialized units in the department to solve the greatest percentage of cases.

In 1985, during Nation's tenure, the department awarded the section an "award of excellence" for solving 84 percent of its cases that spring, which the department said was 30 percentage points higher than the national average.

Nation said he wrote memos instead of official reports when those alleging rape were untruthful, when there were inconsistencies in their statements and when they refused to cooperate.

"Used judiciously, it could save a lot of manpower, " he said, "but used too much, it could be a huge abuse of trust."

Sheila Simmons, who retired last November, worked as a sex crimes detective for five years until she became a supervisor in the 6th District in 1992. She said that when she investigated rapes, detectives wrote memos only for complaints they determined were groundless.

In her last years with the department, she said, the section seemed to lose "a sense of responsibility to the Police Department."

"It got to the point that they were so low on personnel, they would just evaluate (a reported crime) over the telephone, " she said.

"Eventually, I just quit calling down there. My responsibility was to handle the incident, and I started handling it my own way."

Belated follow-up

Since the Post-Dispatch began investigating the use of memos, detectives have been reviewing old complaints and getting in touch with women who had reported being raped.

One of them is a woman who went to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in May of last year, reporting a rape by a man she had considered a friend. Using a sign-language interpreter, the woman told police a friend picked her up for a date but forced her to have sex at his boss's house.

An officer wrote a memo to refer the case to the Sex Crimes Section, saying any further contact with the woman could be made through her caseworker in a program for the deaf. The caseworker said she never was contacted.

An e-mail from the officer's supervisor, Sgt. Steven Schmittgens, to supervisors in the Sex Crimes Section shows what happened. The e-mail was obtained by the newspaper through a Sunshine Law request.

"I have faxed a crime memo regarding an alleged rape which occurred over a week ago to your office, " he wrote. "I attempted to contact a Sex Crimes detective but was informed . . . none was available at this time. No report was prepared by us at this time."

No one followed up, the woman said in an interview with a reporter later. "I have been waiting and waiting and waiting, but the police never came to my house. They should know better than that. It was serious enough for me to go to the hospital."

Said Warnecke, "This particular young lady gave us (an account of) some events that was not sufficient to outline and write a police report."

Ault, the Highway Patrol auditor, reviewed the case at the request of the Post-Dispatch and said it should have been counted as a crime from the beginning.

His comment: "This meets the elements of . . . forcible rape. Kind of obvious there."

Police contacted the woman this summer as the newspaper prepared to publish this story. Asked about the case, police did not explain why they contacted the woman more than a year after she reported the attack.

They wrote an official report about the case, classifying it as a rape. The woman told them she no longer wanted to pursue charges.

She explained her decision in an interview with the newspaper:

"It's too late."