What Rape?

What Victoria said her father did to her demanded attention.

The 11-year-old told her elementary school counselor in March 2001 that her father sexually abused her during a weekend visit to his home in St. Louis. An advocacy center questioned Victoria on video about her claim; she was upset and uncooperative. A physical examination of Victoria did not confirm her claim of sexual contact. Officials with the Missouri Children's Division believed she was lying.

The division kept the police apprised of its findings. Based on them, a St. Louis police commander said in a recent interview, they wrote an internal memo about Victoria's case and labeled it "Priority Two." It meant her case would wait until police reduced a backlog of more than 200 child abuse referrals.

Victoria's father said in a recent interview that the state soon cleared him of wrongdoing and an official from St. Louis told him he would not face charges.

The story did not end there.

Confusion took over late last fall as police unearthed the memo concerning Victoria. The Post-Dispatch had begun asking questions about the department's use of memos. Hers was one of several hundred cases that Police Chief Joe Mokwa ordered converted to official reports at year's end.

Sgt. Steven Dougherty, the Sex Crimes Section supervisor, went to see Victoria. It was Dec. 2 of last year, three years, eight months and three days after police had been called.

He found her living at Epworth Children & Family Home, a group home in Webster Groves for troubled teens.

The sergeant explained the delay by saying police had a backlog of cases, recalled Lois Rosenfeld, a therapist at the home who witnessed the interview. He assured Victoria that police knew all along that she was in the home and out of harm's way.

Dougherty's arrival was a surprise to Victoria. And she had a surprise for him, too.

Victoria said in a recent interview that she told Dougherty she was confused by his visit and asked whether it was about her stepsister's case.

"He said, 'No, what are you talking about?'" she recalled.

Victoria told him that after her complaint to the school counselor -- and during the nearly four years it remained on backlog -- her father had molested her stepsister.

The sergeant's report says he reviewed child abuse records back at headquarters. There, he found the stepsister's case. It had been reported to police last summer and was being investigated by a detective in a different unit.

Whether that detective ever knew about Victoria's complaint against the same man is unclear. Police had never put it on their computer system, so the other investigator had no obvious way to search for it.

Had police followed up immediately on Victoria's complaint, Rosenfeld said, and, assuming the second girl's claim is proven true, "then perhaps the (step)sister might not have been molested."

Officials had access to two facts in 2001 that might have prompted them to act more quickly.

One was that police already believed her father's home was a dangerous place. They had applied for domestic violence charges against him two months earlier, although prosecutors declined to take the case to court.

The other was that official records show that Victoria was a girl whose family had already betrayed her in the worst ways. Her stepfather was accused of repeatedly raping her when she was 9 and 10; her mother had not reported it right away.

Only nine days before Victoria's visit with her father, prosecutors in St. Louis County had charged her stepfather with two felony sex crimes. He pleaded guilty to the charges later in 2001.

Why the delay?

If police thought the allegation was important enough to send a supervisor to see her after nearly four years, why didn't they do it sooner, Victoria's mother asked in a recent interview.

"It's like nobody believes her, and these are the people who are required by law to protect her, " she said. "It was too much work for them to investigate."

Detectives arrested Victoria's father in February and questioned him about her allegation, but they released him without asking prosecutors to issue a criminal charge.

Three months later, they picked him up again. This time, prosecutors charged him -- on May 10 -- with first-degree child molestation of Victoria's stepsister. He was being held in lieu of $25,000 bail pending trial.

In a jailhouse interview Aug. 4, he tearfully denied sexual contact with either girl. Despite Victoria's claim against him, he said he has sympathy for her.

"Her life is not good anymore, " he said.

The Police Department did not make Dougherty available for an interview.

Police have never before revealed the backlog problem, which they said they reduced to just 19 cases. They said the volume of child abuse cases referred to them forces them to rely on nonpolice to help identify priorities.

"Police sometimes rely on social workers to help them, " said Capt. Mary Warnecke, a former Sex Crimes Section commander. "We have to rely on their expertise. These are individuals who are trained in dealing with children and dealing with the issues that pertain to children and the allegations that they make. . . . We have to rely at a certain point on what it is they find."

Lt. Col. Timothy Reagan, the department's chief of detectives, said the Missouri Children's Division refers about 75 cases a month to city police; the department must sift through them to find the cases that can help the most people. In July, the department "adopted" 18 cases, he said.

"What we have to do is triage, " he said.

Dougherty's belated visit to Victoria came during an internal review of Sex Crimes Section files that followed Post-Dispatch questions about the handling of investigations, department records show. On Nov. 16, a reporter asked Mokwa why the city was recording dramatically fewer rapes than other cities its size.

In an interview, Mokwa denied that officers used memos -- paper records that were not centrally filed or counted in crime statistics -- for cases that police believed were really crimes. Afterward, Mokwa ordered sex crimes investigators to review the memos in its files.

Between Nov. 24 and Jan. 7, more than 100 memos concerning reports of sex crimes were converted to official police reports.

One of those was Victoria's complaint.

Officials said Dougherty's visit to her was unrelated to the newspaper's inquiry.

Less cooperation

Victoria's mother believes that her daughter's defiance may have turned authorities off.

"Victoria is a very opinionated and outspoken child, " said her mother. "She's disrespectful to adults. So their personal judgment on her being an outspoken child, they took it as, 'This child was out of control. We don't believe her, either.'"

Victoria said she was reeling after her stepfather's abuse, and upset because her family and her social worker did not believe her father had victimized her, too.

A few months after providing authorities with a videotaped statement to be used in court against her stepfather, she recorded another one to formally accuse her father.

Victoria said she was less cooperative with the interviewer the second time around. She said she felt scared that her father -- whom she said she loved -- would be sent to prison.

"Those people need to put themselves in the shoes of an 11-year-old girl, " she said.

The confusion of a child accusing both father and stepfather eventually gave the stepfather a break, according to his defense lawyer, Dan Juengel.

While preparing for trial, Juengel asked a prosecutor in St. Louis County to provide the videotape of Victoria talking about her stepfather's case.

The prosecutor provided the wrong tape -- of her claim against her father -- which turned out to be a gift.

The dual accusations gave Juengel an opportunity to question her credibility and helped him bargain for a light sentence -- probation.

It meant the only man who for sure raped Victoria never did a day in prison.