What Rape?

Police in Pennsylvania's largest city learned a hard lesson when they dismissed rape victims. A young woman was murdered by a man whose earlier rape victims had been ignored.

The man who raped and strangled Shannon Schieber on May 7, 1998, had previously attacked four women in her neighborhood. But police were oblivious to a pattern because they had dismissed the first two complaints as not being credible sexual crimes -- a practice similar to that defended by St. Louis police as the proper way of handling what they consider questionable cases.

It was 18 months after the Philadelphia murder before police there, at the prodding of a team of reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer, matched DNA from those disregarded cases to the killer.

Schieber's parents, Syl and Vicki Schieber, of Chevy Chase, Md., said they believe their daughter would be alive if police had paid proper attention to the victims who preceded her.

"They were complicit in our daughter's death, period, " said Syl Schieber.

Serial crimes are often compared to jigsaw puzzles. Police need to assemble enough pieces to see a picture of the predator. Philadelphia police hid puzzle pieces from themselves. But at least they still had them.

In St. Louis, potential pieces were periodically shredded.

In both cities, detectives avoided writing rape reports if they deemed the victims to be lying or uncooperative -- or when they thought the claims seemed implausible.

Philadelphia police classified such cases with a four-digit code: 2701. It meant "investigation of person, " a category of dead files where officers dumped about a quarter of their rape complaints from 1995 to 1997.

In St. Louis, detectives avoided writing official crime reports in such cases, opting instead for informal memos kept in a file in the Sex Crimes Section -- invisible to other officers, to computerized record-searching and to FBI crime statistics.

Earlier this year, the Post-Dispatch asked for copies of every memo. The department provided about 200 -- all but a few for 2003 and 2004 cases. The earlier memos were destroyed, it said. The newspaper's request arrived just in time to spare the 2003 memos.

There was no log of memos written or destroyed before then -- only an index card file with minimal information about contacts with victims.

There is no way to know how St. Louis police might have handled the two rapes discounted by Philadelphia police.

But if Philadelphia police had followed St. Louis' policy, they could have shredded records of the rapist's first two victims.

Eighteen months after Schieber's death, there might have been nothing to test.

Undetected, a rapist kills

On June 20, 1997, a man wriggled through an air-conditioner opening in a Philadelphia apartment. The occupant, 28, awoke with him on top of her. She talked him out of raping her. Later, she sketched him for police and provided some hairs he left. Detectives discounted her, doubting a grown man could have squeezed into her home. The case was classified as 2701.

Three weeks later and three blocks away, another woman, 25, awoke in her apartment, nude. Her phone was disconnected. The mirror showed strangulation marks on her neck. She had no memory of being assaulted.

Police seized her underwear as evidence. They classified the incident as a 2701 but later upgraded it to a burglary.

There were two more attacks that August. Detectives classified those as rapes but saw no greater connection.

One night the next month, someone reported a prowler. An officer stopped Troy Graves only blocks from the neighborhood where the rapes had occurred. Wiry and fit, Graves had the build and strength to scale fire escapes and wriggle through window bars of Philadelphia row houses. But he had a clean record and a plausible alibi; he said he was walking to his girlfriend's apartment.

Had the officer known about the rapes, he testified later, he might have brought Graves in for questioning.

It might have ended there.

"You need to reopen this case"

The following spring, Schieber, 24, was finishing graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The night of May 7, 1998, a man climbed through the sliding-glass door on Schieber's balcony. He raped her. She scratched and bit him. The attacker would confess later that he put his arms around her neck to subdue her, and she died. A neighbor concerned about the commotion knocked twice, then called 911.

Police knocked on Schieber's door. Hearing nothing, they left.

Eight months later, a break: Her killer's DNA matched two rapes from August 1997. It was the first signal of a serial rapist. But the puzzle was still missing two pieces.

Early in 1999, a police source tipped off an Inquirer reporter that the department had mishandled earlier rape cases that might have been attributed to Schieber's killer.

After questions from the Inquirer, the second victim's underwear was retested. A DNA match was made to the first attack.

When the Inquirer reported that the Sex Crimes Unit had buried thousands of rape cases over two decades, the city seethed and the reforms rolled out.

The police assigned 45 detectives to reopen thousands of old cases.

Among the most significant reforms: Outsiders could now monitor police handling of sex cases. A coalition of women's groups now reviews all rape complaints that Philadelphia police deem "unfounded."

Amid the cacophony, the rapist seemed to disappear.

In fact, he found new turf. He got married and moved to Fort Collins, Colo.

Eight women around Fort Collins reported rapes in 2001 and 2002. DNA tied those attacks to the Philadelphia cases.

Fort Collins police arrested Graves after matching him to a fingerprint left at a crime scene.

He pleaded guilty to murder and rape charges in Philadelphia and was sentenced to life in prison, to be served in Colorado.

"I sat in the courtroom that day, and I was surrounded by cops, " the second victim said. "I couldn't even focus on Graves. I was finally allowed to be angry -- and I was angry at them."

Memos "not an abstract thing"

Syl and Vicki Schieber sued the city of Philadelphia, but a federal jury found the city was not liable for Graves' acts.

Jurors agreed with the Schiebers that police had discounted sexual assault cases. But for the Schiebers to be awarded damages, they needed to prove police were violating rape victims' rights to due process and equal protection.

In the end, the jury took the city's position: Police discounted other crimes, too, not just rapes. There was no evidence that police were intentionally discriminating against women.

The Schiebers were heartbroken. But publicity from their suit changed the city for the better, their attorney said.

"They really did raise consciousness in the city of Philadelphia, " said the lawyer, David Rudovsky. Reforms that resulted "have restored some public trust, " he said.

Syl Schieber recently visited St. Louis and met with a Post-Dispatch reporter to briefly review the St. Louis police memos. Each victim, he felt, could have been the one right before his daughter.

"This is not an abstract thing for me, " Schieber said. "I have two nieces in this town, both married with kids. A few years from now their kids could be going to St. Louis University. They could be walking down the street and . . ."

He drifted off. His thoughts were with his daughter.