What Rape?

Woman Reporting Abuse at School Waited 15 Months for Charges

An 18-year-old developmentally disabled woman was attending classes at the Nottingham Community Access & Job Training High School in St. Louis in May of last year when she reported something alarming:

A young man pulled her into a classroom, pressed her between a locker and the wall, and tried to take her pants off. She told people at the school that he showed her his penis.

The girl's mother, Alice Obenhaus, said her daughter asked: "'Can I take a shower because he got me all sticky, and can you wash my sweater, because he got my sweater all sticky.'" Obenhaus gave the sweater to the St. Louis police.

Police filed an official crime report about the case. But Obenhaus said the detective told her there was not much police could do: The young man did not actually rape the girl, he was mentally handicapped, so he might be difficult to prosecute, and the girl seemed to have suffered no ill effects.

Obenhaus said the detective called again recently -- 15 months later -- with a change of heart.

"We have his DNA, " Obenhaus said the detective told her.

On Aug. 4, Terrell Travis, 19, of Hillsdale, was charged with sexual abuse, a felony.

Obenhaus learned through acquaintances about the Post-Dispatch investigation and said she thinks it prompted the renewed interest in her daughter's case. She called the department to complain about the detective.

Lt. John Harper, commander of the Sex Crimes and Child Abuse sections, met with Obenhaus.

"He just inferred to me it was like an internal audit, " she said. "They were going back over old cases, and this one looks like one that we should have followed up on."

Police did not make Harper available for an interview.

Abused by the System

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."

Girl Who Accused Her Father is Put on Hold for Years

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.

Changing Attitudes Led to Creations of Sex Crimes Section

St. Louis was among many U.S. cities in the 1970s whose police departments recognized a problem:

Rapes and other sexual assault cases were often being dumped on detectives in district stations, generalists who had little training and little time to handle them. Police weren't giving sex cases the same scrutiny they gave homicides or assaults.

"Police were not believing the woman, " said Penny Harrington, of Portland, Ore., who in 1985 became the first female police chief of a major U.S. city.

"If there was any way the police could consider it her fault -- if she had been out drinking or maybe it was an ex-husband who raped her -- they just wouldn't pay any attention to it, " Harrington said. "They were very cold about dealing with victims. They just didn't have the training or the sensitivity to deal with the victims of rape."

Nor did society put much stock in women who complained about rape.

A four-day Post-Dispatch series in 1979 focused on an "uncommon amount of ignorance about so common a crime, ignorance so widespread that it dies hard if at all."

Wrote the author, Charlotte Grimes: "If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it is the advice still handed out by collectors of popular wit and wisdom."

Police philosophy shifted as the feminist movement took root and police ranks swelled with women.

Rape was increasingly seen as a crime of violence worthy of police intervention. Starting in 1969, the federal government dedicated millions of dollars to anti-rape programs.

St. Louis founded its Sex Crimes Section in 1974 on the fourth floor of headquarters at 1200 Clark Avenue.

"The department thought maybe we could show a little bit more sympathy for victims, " said the unit's first commander, Celeste Ruwwe, the city's first woman to achieve the rank of sergeant.

"I think we achieved that, " said Ruwwe, who retired in 1985.

The section trained detectives to be more sensitive in interviewing victims, she said. It also worked more closely with prosecutors and hospitals.

The Sex Crimes Section had 10 detectives at its beginning in 1974, and the 1979 story said it had maintained that level -- 10. Today, there are seven detectives.

Harold Nation, one of the city's first sex crime investigators, told the Post-Dispatch's Grimes 26 years ago that rape victims carried an undue burden of guilt and shame.

"You'd be surprised how apologetic many victims are, " he was quoted as saying. "They even apologize for taking up our time. They shouldn't feel they have to do that. It's not right that they're made to feel that way."

Harrington said women's complaints of assaults that were written as memos rather than official police reports in St. Louis reminded her of how police routinely dismissed sexual assaults before the creation of specialized rape squads.

"It's hard to believe this is happening in 2005, " she said. "This is what we saw back in the '60s."

The St. Louis Police Department did not make Lt. John Harper, commander of the Sex Crimes and Child Abuse sections, or Sgt. Steven Dougherty, sex crimes supervisor, available for interviews.

Waivers Wipe Out Reports of Rape

The young woman came to St. Louis police headquarters to report a rape. She gave detectives a detailed account of what had happened, then refused to answer more questions and "stared at the wall, " according to a detective's memo about it.

Despite her report, a detective asked her to sign a statement that she, against police advice, had not reported a rape. Her signature released them from an investigation.

The woman said in an interview with the Post-Dispatch that she wanted to report the rape but was unsure about pursuing criminal charges.

The incident in June 2003 was not counted in the city's annual crime tally. It was not investigated. Police wrote an informal memo rather than an official report. All records of the case were scheduled to be destroyed last fall; a Post-Dispatch request to view police memos saved it from the shredder.

It appears to have been a common series of events at St. Louis police headquarters: Women report rapes and then are given forms to sign that say they didn't.

The process removed rape complaints from police caseloads and from the crime statistics, a Post-Dispatch investigation has found.

The young woman described a classic date rape: a teenage make-out session that escalated beyond her consent. Tickling on the sofa led to watching a video in a spare bedroom. He wanted to go all the way, but she didn't. He pulled off her pants and forced her to have sex, she said.

A memo by a sex crimes detective seemed to capture her allegation in cinematic detail: the hand working down her pants; her arms being pinned down; semen spilling on the mattress; Austin Powers jesting on the TV in the background.

But the detective wrote that the woman, then 18, was too vague. She kept answering "I guess" and "probably."

After a while, he wrote, she was just staring at the wall. Two of his colleagues couldn't draw her out any further.

What did police give the teen to sign? St. Louis police call it a "Sexual Assault Victim Waiver."

"We will present a waiver to a victim after they've told us either they don't want any further action taken, if they've misrepresented the truth, if they want this case to stop (or if) they don't want to be involved in any way, " said Capt. Mary Warnecke, former commander of the Sex Crimes Section.

Said Chief Joe Mokwa: "We have a certain responsibility to respect the victims, so if a victim signs a form or tells us they don't want to communicate with us, we choose, based on the victim's choice, not to communicate with that victim any further."

"No gray areas"

While most police departments have some way of documenting a victim's reluctance to cooperate, experts in crime data and rape investigations said they had never heard of police using such a form to nullify a report of a crime.

FBI crime reporting guidelines instruct police departments to make permanent records of crimes brought to their attention, regardless of whether a victim cooperates. Those are to be counted in a city's Uniform Crime Report; police may subtract complaints that are proven false, including cases in which the victim recants.

The incident involving the 18-year-old should have been reported as a rape, according to Bill Ault, who audits St. Louis crime data for the Missouri Highway Patrol. "There are no gray areas here."

If a woman reports a rape, her failure to cooperate is not enough to erase the complaint, the FBI guidelines say. Authorities don't need a victim's permission to go forward with a case, particularly if they think an attacker poses a danger to others.

Michelle Anderson, an expert in rape law, said the interview with the St. Louis victim revealed "no understanding of how sexual trauma actually manifests itself in victims."

"It manifests itself often as confusion, selective memory, disassociation, hyperarousal and sensitivity, " said Anderson, a professor at Villanova University School of Law, near Philadelphia. "So, for instance, in (this) case, she's staring at the wall and spacing out. That's an absolutely normal reaction to trauma."

An expert in rape investigations said the crime should have been counted -- and investigated.

"What gives them the right not to call this a crime?" asked Joanne Archambault, a retired San Diego police sergeant who trains police nationwide in how to investigate sexual crimes. "We have no idea how much interrogation this victim is getting before she gets to Sex Crimes. And then she says, 'OK, I'm leaving, ' and they don't understand why?"

In St. Louis, waivers are unique to the Sex Crimes Section. Police don't ask shooting victims, for example, to decline to file assault reports.

Sex crimes detectives used waivers several dozen times in the previous two years, a Post-Dispatch review has found. Many of the cases went uncounted in crime statistics, although they should have been included under uniform crime reporting guidelines.

About half involved people who admitted fabricating at least part of their complaints. One example -- a teenager who made up an abduction to explain a missed curfew. Those should have been reported to the FBI as unfounded complaints, and subtracted from crime totals, according to the bureau's guidelines.

But police also failed to count cases in which women signed waivers but did not recant their allegations. Those should have counted as crimes, the FBI guidelines say.

Experts who reviewed the memos said it appeared the St. Louis detectives were screening cases to determine the likelihood of criminal convictions.

Police should not be weeding cases out of the criminal justice system, said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston, who reviewed several St. Louis memos at the newspaper's request. It's their role to collect information -- not prosecute cases, he said.

Traumatized twice

One case left out of statistics involved a 15-year-old girl from north St. Louis County who told police in January 2003 that a boy drove her to a deserted spot on the city's riverfront. They had consensual oral sex, but then he raped her while she pleaded for him to stop, she reported.

Her mother told the Post-Dispatch that police had been pleasant throughout the ordeal, but when it was clear that her daughter was too traumatized to press charges, they asked her to sign the waiver.

The mother, a teacher, said she did not know it meant that her daughter's complaint would not be considered a real crime.

"We just didn't feel she could stand up in trial, " her mother said. "It would have been far more devastating for her."

Shortly after the department provided the memo about her daughter's case to the Post-Dispatch, a detective called the mother to see whether her daughter had changed her mind about prosecuting, the mother said.

It was an option she wouldn't have been able to exercise had the department destroyed the memo last year, as planned.

The girl declined once again, however.

"I thought it was strange they called, " the mother said. "This happened almost three years ago."

Questioning rape claims

In another case, a 17-year-old girl told police that she awoke in a friend's bedroom after a night of drinking, wearing only her socks. The friend confessed that he and another man had sex with her after she passed out.

"Could you tell the difference between us?" she said he joked.

Though she couldn't remember the intercourse, she felt violated, she said.

"If someone has to tell me I slept with him, it's rape, " she said.

She was examined at St. Louis University Hospital immediately afterward. A nurse collected evidence for a rape kit. A uniformed police officer interviewed her at the hospital and referred the case to the Sex Crimes Section.

Nearly three months later, she went downtown to meet a detective about her case; she ended up signing a waiver.

A memo written on Feb. 20, 2003, by a detective says the victim "decided not to report the incident." The case was neither investigated nor counted in crime statistics.

Why would someone sign a waiver after describing the incident for police -- twice -- and submitting to a rape examination?

"Because they made me feel like dirt when I went down there, " said the woman, now 20. "They kept asking me, was I sure that I didn't sleep with them purposefully and that I didn't just change my mind? They kept asking in different ways each and every time."

She said police explained to her that the questions were necessary because "some people lie about it."

Ultimately, she worried about what would happen if a jury did not convict the man.

"They said that if it goes as far as court and everything, that he still might get off with it, so they were saying we could go through all this and he still gets off, it would basically be a waste of time."

Anderson, the rape law expert from Villanova, said she was troubled by interviews that seemed aimed at poking holes in sexual assault claims and suggested it could be a reason some girls and women changed their minds about reporting rapes.

"In these cases, the Police Department is functioning as a first line of the suspects' defense team, aggressively cross-examining traumatized victims and seizing on minor inconsistencies to discredit them, " she said.

The woman who reported the rape said she felt discredited.

"They just made me feel -- they handled it in a bad way, " she said. "The way they talk to people, it was automatically as if I was a bad person, not the victim."

Missing Patterns

Three years ago, serial killer Maury Travis taught St. Louisans a lesson: Prostitutes can be rape victims, too.

He picked them up from the city's Baden neighborhood, forced them into sex acts and snuffed out their lives -- at least one with his home video camera running. Authorities don't know how many people he killed but think it may be as many as 20.

Women on the edge -- prostitutes, runaways, addicts, transients -- are sitting ducks for sexual predators, who know such victims may get less attention. Crime experts say the Travis killings illustrate the value of investigating crimes against women who cling to society's bottom rung.

Barely a year after Travis hanged himself in jail, another young prostitute in the Baden area reported on Jan. 22 of last year that she was kidnapped, held captive for two days and raped repeatedly.

Police neither investigated nor wrote a crime report. They called her mother to pick her up.

A memo written that night by a Sex Crimes Section detective, says Erinn Steinbeck called 911 from a gas station on Hall Street. She "never reported being raped, " he wrote, adding that her mother concurred that Steinbeck "has nothing to report."

Steinbeck and her mother, Christine Dawes, dispute that.

"That's not true, " said Dawes, who recalled in a recent interview how her daughter was adamant about leading authorities to the scene. "She was literally insisting that they go with her there. Erinn wanted to show the cops where he locked her in. She really insisted they take her back to the place because she felt there was enough evidence there.

"But they said, 'We're not going to get a good case out of this. Nobody is going to believe a crackhead. All the guy would have to say is that he didn't pay her and she was upset.'"

Capt. Mary Warnecke, a former Sex Crimes Section commander who now is a commander of the 2nd District, disputed that Steinbeck really reported a crime.

"In this particular case, the young lady with her mother gives us information that she's suffering from an illness and she didn't have a crime to report, " Warnecke said. "You can't say 'rape' and make a crime report happen. You have to give specifics and you have to give particulars to substantiate any crimes, whether it be a rape or any crime. This was not provided."

Steinbeck, a drug addict and former prostitute, is typical of a group of women reflected in police memos examined by a Post-Dispatch reporter who spent six months tracking the women and trying to verify their stories.

For decades, sex crimes detectives wrote memos instead of reports about some incidents. While crime reports were counted in statistics and computerized for easy access and analysis, memos were not counted as crimes and were paper records kept in a file drawer.

Some outside experts who reviewed memos written in the last two years, the only documents available, said many incidents appeared to be crimes. Those memos were routinely destroyed, sometimes before the statute of limitations had expired.

In an interview, Police Chief Joe Mokwa insisted that a victim's social status is not a factor in how vigorously a crime is investigated.

Regarding Steinbeck, Warnecke said, "If this particular victim has a crime to report to us, we'd be happy to hear from her."

Did memos hide predator?

If Steinbeck's ordeal happened as she described, a rapist got away with one crime and remains a threat. Crime experts and police in other cities say that is why it is imperative to look seriously at such claims.

"You do yourself a disservice in dismissing those cases, " said Philadelphia police Capt. John Darby, commander of his department's Special Victims Unit.

"The worst case scenario is that the next victim is somebody's mother or sister or daughter who happens to be walking through the area, unbeknownst to what goes on in that area, and is misidentified -- identified as an addict or a prostitute and becomes your next victim, " he said.

The practice raises questions about how police investigated what may have been the city's most prolific and elusive sexual criminal -- Dennis Rabbitt, better known as the South Side Rapist. Although Rabbitt told the Post-Dispatch he was active in the 1970s and '80s, police didn't begin recognizing a pattern until the spring of 1992.

The newspaper sought to examine memos written in the 1970s and '80s, when Rabbitt said he was active. Department lawyer Jane Berman Shaw said all but a few memos written before 2003 were destroyed over the years.

Several crime experts interviewed for this story said such treatment of rape claims -- and the rote destruction of what records were made -- might have helped hide the work of serial rapists.

"They are destroying an opportunity to catch repeat offenders by destroying DNA and by turning these cases from incidents into memos, and then destroying memos, " said Michelle Anderson, an expert on rape law and a professor at Villanova University School of Law, near Philadelphia.

In Atlanta, a retired police commander said a serial rapist convicted there in January could have been caught sooner if police had thoroughly investigated rape complaints by prostitutes.

Some of his crimes had been relegated to informal complaints and kept out of crime statistics.

Police didn't see a "good case"

Steinbeck acknowledges that few people would be sympathetic toward her. After a suburban upbringing, she spent years on the street selling sex and stealing purses to buy heroin. She recently served almost a year in jail in St. Louis County for forgery and plans to enter a treatment center soon.

On the night she was attacked, Steinbeck said, it was too late for a bus home after two days of drinking and drugging with friends. A man on a porch offered his phone to call her mother. She said she followed him into a house being rehabbed on Church Road, north of Halls Ferry Road. As a prostitute and a drug user, she was accustomed to following strange men into houses.

"As I came in, he grabbed me from behind, " she said. She described repeated rapes in an unfinished room. He left at times, she said, locking her in the dark with nothing but blankets. She said no one responded to her cries for help.

After two days, she said, he let her go shortly after midnight.

"It was like he was done with me, " she said.

Steinbeck called 911 from a pay phone at Gimblin and Hall streets.

In three paragraphs, Detective Blaskiewicz wrote that Steinbeck appeared "intoxicated and mentally ill." Officers summoned her mother, Dawes, from her home in Florissant. Blaskiewicz wrote that Dawes said her daughter was on drugs and seeing a psychiatrist, and "added that her daughter has nothing to report." The memo gave no details of her complaint.

Blaskiewicz provided two forms for the mother and daughter to sign. The first was a "no-prosecution" form stating that Steinbeck would not help prosecute the unidentified offender. The second was a "victim waiver" stating that she understood police would not investigate her claim and that she had "nothing to report at this time."

Steinbeck and Dawes signed each form, and the officers left.

Dawes said recently that she felt she had to sign them, under the circumstances.

"I wasn't forced in any way, " Dawes said. "I'm 48 years old and I grew up in Florissant. It's 3 a.m., I'm standing in my pajamas with my coat over them in a really scary place. I wanted to do whatever was quickest to get out of there after it was apparent they weren't going to do anything. They were going to leave."

Dawes said her daughter wanted to take her to the house, even after police refused to go there.

"She wanted me to go back and see it, " Dawes said. "I said, 'Oh, no, honey, I'm not going back. She kept saying, 'They've got to see! They've got to know!'"

Dawes said she immediately felt guilty about signing the waivers.

"I thought this guy is going to do this to someone else, and they're going to find a dead girl in that building, " she said. "I keep fearing I am going to see that on the news and know I could have prevented it."

Dawes also thought her daughter should have been arrested.

"She's a drug addict who had just admitted to doing crack, " she said. "They keep letting them go and letting them go and letting them go, and the problems start piling on."

Later on, Dawes said, she saw a TV report about Maury Travis, the serial killer, and realized how close her daughter might have come to meeting death at his hands. Her lifestyle "shouldn't be a death sentence, " she said.

Chief Mokwa ordered that the Steinbeck memo, and scores of others, be converted to crime reports last fall, after the Post-Dispatch raised questions about the handling of rape complaints.

The report was written on Jan. 5 -- nearly a year after Steinbeck called for help. But it did not change the outcome. Police classified the report as "unfounded, " allowing the department to keep it out of the official crime count and off the Sex Crimes Section's list of active cases.

After turning over the record of Steinbeck's complaint to the Post-Dispatch, another police detective called Dawes at the end of June.

"She said they wanted to reopen the case if Erinn would like to speak with them, " Dawes said. "I said, 'How would you reopen the case? You have no evidence. Anything that was there was gone a few years ago.' I said, 'I assume this has something to do with the fact that she's been talking to a reporter.' And she says, 'Oh, no, we weren't aware of that at all.'

"They're going to pull this file and reinvestigate it all of a sudden? How stupid do you think I am?"

Dawes said she felt intimidated by the call.

"I haven't said anything but the truth, " she said. "I'm not trying to sue them. So let them do what they may."

Injuries -- but no report

Another St. Louis woman whom police knew as a prostitute never had a chance to sign away an investigation.

Police did it for her.

The 38-year-old woman told police on Nov. 3, 2002, that a man in a red car abducted her, beat her up and raped her. The officer who responded, Thomas Carroll, noticed facial injuries and that the victim "appeared to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol, " according to the memo he wrote.

Carroll referred the case to the Sex Crimes Section. But the detective on duty, Michael McAteer, was working another case; no one else was available. The woman was taken by ambulance to Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where a nurse collected evidence in a rape kit.

Carroll made no record of the woman's case; McAteer wrote a memo, based on what Carroll told him. The case was not counted as a crime and was not among those later converted to crime reports.

The memo said Carroll asked the woman to contact McAteer. It also said that McAteer left his card at her home later that day. While similar memos obtained by the newspaper typically listed the victim's home address and telephone number, this one did not. McAteer did not indicate where he looked for the woman.

When there was no word from her in three months, McAteer picked up her rape kit from Barnes. It went to police headquarters but was never analyzed for DNA.

He also checked her record and found she had multiple arrests for prostitution, and allegedly had made eight prior reports of being sexually assaulted, according to his memo.

Not all of them had been unfounded complaints, however: The police later confirmed that they had led to at least two arrests.

The police insist the case did not warrant a report -- that the woman should have called them back.

"We need to be able to establish the elements of this crime, " Warnecke said. "You have to give us the elements of the crime, and she didn't do that."

Said Chief of Detectives Timothy Reagan: "We left business cards. She clearly knew how to contact us."

A Post-Dispatch reporter needed just hours to find the woman, through a message left with her sister at her listed phone number. The woman expressed surprise that McAteer said he had visited her home.

"Really, which address did he go to?" she asked. "I was homeless at the time, and I told them that. I didn't have an address." She said she did not know that police had never written a report on her case.

And she disputes the idea that police could not find her. They found her when they needed information about a higher-profile case, she said.

She said they showed her pictures of some of Maury Travis' unidentified victims. She told them she recognized some of the faces from the streets.

She also told them something else: She knew Travis. She said she was almost one of his victims.

Months before, she said, he picked her up outside a bar in Baden and drove to the Walnut Park neighborhood. They were sitting together in his vehicle in an alley and a motion-activated light on the rear of a house kept switching on and off, she said. It seemed to make him nervous.

She said he offered her some crack and she declined. That made him even more nervous, she said. "He thought I was the police because I wouldn't smoke crack with him, " she said. "He never got a chance to do any harm to me."

Today, the woman said, she has been clean and sober for more than a year, and was recently married. She works in a shop downtown, exercises in a fitness club and says, "I'm much better now."

In May, the Post-Dispatch asked the Police Department for a copy of the 911 call reporting the attack, to see exactly what details it contained. The department refused, citing provisions of a Missouri law that restricts such access.

But within days, the woman said, a detective called her.

"The lady detective said, 'It sounds like you think you weren't treated fairly.'"

Philadelphia's Pain: Parents Blame Police Practie in Daughter's Killing

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.

In Atlanta, Fallout Over Policy Ended in Disciplinary Action

Rape detectives with the Atlanta police kept the same secret as their counterparts in St. Louis: They weren't investigating every rape claim made to them.

It wasn't a lot of cases: An audit turned up 34 that got little or no follow-up, and weren't counted as crimes, in 2000. The victims tended to be prostitutes and addicts, typically women whom investigators said they couldn't locate after an initial hospital visit.

Atlanta Police Chief Richard J. Pennington recommended discipline for nine officers -- and a grand jury has subpoenaed witnesses in an inquiry into whether failure to investigate rape complaints violated Georgia law.

In the extreme, some officers could face felony charges punishable by prison.

What set St. Louis apart from Atlanta is that its Sex Crimes Section shredded previous years' paperwork, making it difficult to know how long -- and to what extent -- the department kept such complaints out of the public domain.

At the request of the Post-Dispatch, Louis Arcangeli, one of the Atlanta police officials who blew the whistle on his department's practice, reviewed a selection of St. Louis cases.

He noted that in both cities, many of the women making those complaints were prostitutes or drug addicts.

"Certainly, detectives were being selective about the ones they chose to write memos on, but they can't make that judgment, " Arcangeli said. "You have to record them. You have to go through the proper process of 'unfounding' it. You can't just leave it in a memo."

He said that the St. Louis memos generally seemed more detailed than those written by their Atlanta counterparts and that they appeared to be done with supervisors' support, which wasn't the case in Atlanta.

"On some level, they were doing due diligence" in St. Louis, he said. "But then, of course, they started getting to judgments, which is where things started to go wrong."

At least Atlanta kept permanent records and could re-examine shelved cases after the practice was exposed, Arcangeli noted. By shredding memos, St. Louis police hurt local, and possibly national, efforts to link unsolved crimes with DNA or other methods, he said.

Arcangeli scoffed at a recurring theme in St. Louis and Atlanta files: A detective suspends a rape investigation and withholds an official report because he can't locate the complainant. "When police don't want to do a case, the classic line is, 'I left a business card at her address, '" he said. "You see that consistently through these cases."

Atlanta police commanders were first made aware of their cases in early 2001, when Detective Lisa James openly questioned why her colleagues were dumping complaints into a file drawer instead of processing them as official reports.

Inflated success rate

"If someone makes an outcry of a crime that has been committed, or has happened to them, that's an outcry, that's a crime, " James said in an interview. "The police department's responsibility is to protect people. If you cover it up and fail to report it, you're doing them a huge disservice. That's your job -- to report crimes.

"I wasn't going to be made to do something that was illegal or wrong, " she said.

Deflating crime statistics was only a byproduct in Atlanta, she said; the primary motivation was to lighten investigators' load and make it appear they were solving a higher percentage of cases.

A prosecutor was checking whether officers had violated their oath to uphold the law, which is a felony in Georgia; Missouri has no equivalent law.

Risk of serial rapes

In Atlanta, the harm caused went beyond skewing crime statistics, Arcangeli said.

DNA samples that might have helped to nail serial rapists were never tested, he said. Patrol officers weren't told about crime reports in their precincts.

In January, Atlanta-area serial rapist Christopher Baker was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms. Arcangeli and James said later that the city's sex crimes detectives had unwittingly helped Baker avoid detection by disregarding rape complaints by prostitutes.

"In . . . Atlanta, when police were making those decisions regarding prostitutes, there were serial rapists operating who were not detected because police were not accepting the information that (the FBI) said they should be accepting, " Arcangeli said.

"So if there is not a serial rapist in St. Louis, it's because maybe they were lucky, but it's not because of best-practice by the Police Department."

City Police Delayed Releasing Key Records Sought by Paper

St. Louis police resisted releasing many records the Post-Dispatch reviewed during the newspaper's investigation, delaying for weeks or months before turning them over.

The department complained that the newspaper was abusing freedom-of-information laws. Key records the newspaper asked to see in February were turned over in mid-July.

At one point, the department claimed that producing six reports of rapes for the newspaper cost $700 in salaries because police legal staffers had to make phone calls to courthouse workers about whether elements of the complaints could be considered public records.

A crime report is the most basic public record, Post-Dispatch Editor Ellen Soeteber said.

"The public gives great power to its police, and it is imperative that people be able to assess how the police wield this power, " she said. "How can police be accountable to the public if they try to conceal basic crime records?"

The newspaper first requested records on Dec. 15, when it asked for copies of informal memos that had been written in lieu of official reports of crimes, including rapes, from June 2003 through May of last year.

The department copied about 500 memos but gave them first to a panel appointed by Police Chief Joe Mokwa to examine the department's crime reporting. He appointed the panel after the Post-Dispatch began reporting about issues involving crime statistics.

The newspaper finally got copies of the memos on Jan. 28, after threatening a suit.

After Mokwa confirmed that sex crime investigators had written memos for at least two decades, the newspaper sought to examine the memos that had been written through the years and asked the department to also provide any log or registry of memos.

On Feb. 28, Police Department lawyer Jane Berman Shaw said the memos had been destroyed periodically, usually every year.

But she confirmed the department had kept a catalog of 4,300 index cards that corresponded to memos written since the 1970s.

The newspaper repeated its request for the remaining memos and the index cards in a letter to the department on May 2 and paid for them on May 27.

The department waited another seven weeks before providing the index card file on July 14.

Shaw said copying all the records was time consuming for a department that was strapped for staff.

Panel Investigating Crime Data Here Had Multiple Ties to Police Dept.

St. Louis joins Philadelphia and Atlanta as cities whose police shelved rape cases. But only in St. Louis did an inquiry find little wrong with the practice.

Last November, Police Chief Joe Mokwa picked two of his employees and five outsiders to examine his department's crime reporting. He assembled the panel after the Post-Dispatch began asking questions about the department's crime data. A Post-Dispatch investigation found that police were using informal memos for hundreds of incidents instead of official reports that were included in FBI crime statistics.

In a report to the Police Board on Jan. 19, the panel applauded Mokwa for ending the use of informal memos to record crimes but said the practice had a negligible effect on the city's crime count. It also stood behind the department's methods for counting crimes.

The panel's chairman, Edward L. Dowd Jr., was responsible for reviewing the rapes and other sexual crimes that St. Louis police detectives wrote about in informal memos. He said he spent a Sunday reviewing about 88 memos written in 2004 that detailed claims of sexual crimes and found that none seemed credible.

"My conclusion is still the same, " Dowd said in an interview Aug. 11. "I don't think there was any attempt to conceal or fudge the numbers on the crime statistics."

The panel called itself independent. But a review of city records suggests otherwise. Four of the five outside members came from organizations with financial ties to the Police Department. Two academics on the panel, who did most of the analysis, had already made thousands of dollars from police contracts. Each is following up on the panel's findings through contracts awarded this year.

One member of the panel is a public relations consultant without any background in criminal justice. He confirmed in a recent interview that he did none of the analysis. His role was to help communicate the panel's findings to the public, he said.

The newspaper obtained the panel's notes and e-mail messages through a public records request. The material reveals that the audit never strayed far from the Police Department.

The panel's report was written by the police chief's speechwriter, Susan C. Ryan, who also wrote the talking points for Dowd, the panel's chairman.

"She was basically a person who put together our findings for us, " said Dowd, a former U.S. attorney who is now a partner in the Bryan Cave law firm.

The firm in March 2002 signed an open-ended contract with the Police Board to provide advice about sexual harassment allegations made by two police officers against the board president. The firm also signed a $17,000 contract in January 2003 to represent the police to state legislators.

Other panelists with connections to the Police Department were:

Gerald Carlson, a partner at the accounting firm KPMG. His firm was paid more than $327,000 to conduct accounting audits for the Police Department from 1999 through 2004.

Scott H. Decker, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. The Police Department has paid Decker and UMSL researchers about $22,500 in the past five years to analyze traffic stops for racial profiling, the department's disciplinary practices and the department's rape statistics.

James F. Gilsinan, dean of the School of Public Service at St. Louis University. He had been paid $10,000 in the past two years to analyze the police work force by gender and race, to run promotional examinations and to audit 2004 radio calls.

Barbara Wright, executive director of planning and technology for the Police Department.

Maj. Paul Nocchiero, a special assistant to Mokwa.

The final panelist was Tripp Frohlichstein, president of MediaMasters Inc., which teaches public relations tactics.

No members of the panel were paid for their work. But the Police Board immediately awarded contracts for thousands of dollars to follow up on the panel's findings.

Decker and UMSL researchers were paid $7,500 in June to analyze why St. Louis police reported so few rapes compared to other cities its size.

St. Louis University was paid $24,192 for Gilsinan and an associate to audit calls for police in 2004, to determine whether officers were accurately reporting crimes.

Gilsinan acknowledged that it might appear to be a conflict of interest for a police contractor to serve on what the Police Department billed as an "independent" panel but called it a "two-edged sword."

"In order to be effective on the panel, you probably needed people who understand the system and weren't starting from zero with how the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting works, " he said. The experience working with the police "makes for a more effective panelist."

Members of the panel interviewed recently said their work was independent. Frohlichstein said he accepted the post because of Mokwa's "high moral ground" in asking the panel to determine whether there were errors in the city's crime reporting and to suggest solutions.

"If there was any pressure, " he said, "it was to make sure we did it right."

Dowd said he was unaware that his employer, the Bryan Cave law firm, had ever represented the police, but he said it wouldn't have had any effect on his impartiality. He also said the department would have been hard-pressed to find people to serve on the board who didn't have connections to the police.

"I think that everyone in that group was determined to find out what the facts were, what had happened, what were the problems, " he said. "We identified the problems as best we could and made recommendations to the chief and the Police Board."

Mokwa was not involved in its deliberations, Dowd said.

The panel, not Ryan, made the conclusions in the report, he said.

Ryan said panel members "were absolutely committed to making sure that the report reflected their work. They wanted to make sure every word in there was right."

"Not.o.o.independent"

An expert in police accountability said an independent panel cannot include people with a stake in the department.

That's "wrong, period, " said Samuel Walker, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

"An independent panel does not include people who have financial interest or have had financial interest, " he said. "That's not the definition of independent."

In Atlanta, the police chief recommended discipline for officers accused of keeping rape complaints out of crime statistics. Then the district attorney began a criminal investigation to see whether laws were broken. The district attorney called in an outsider to investigate because his intelligence chief was a former Atlanta police supervisor in the Sex Crimes unit.

"When the whole question was, did the police act properly, which is a question of public trust, obviously if you're going to answer that, you want the answer to be as free of any question as possible, " said Erik Friedly. He is a spokesman for Paul L. Howard Jr., the district attorney in Georgia's Fulton County.

In March, Howard chose former U.S. Attorney Richard H. Deane Jr., who was once Atlanta's top federal prosecutor, to take over the investigation.

Mokwa, too, selected a former U.S. attorney to lead the local inquiry -- one who was known for helping the government investigate itself. Dowd assisted in the investigation into the deadly 1993 FBI raid of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

From the onset, the St. Louis police panel wanted to operate outside of the public domain. It did not post any notice of its first meeting, Dec. 7. A Post-Dispatch reporter found out about it while it was in session and attended the final minutes.

When the newspaper requested access to future meetings, Jane Berman Shaw, a department lawyer, insisted the panel was exempt from the state's open-meeting law. When the newspaper threatened a suit, Shaw said the panel would provide notice of and access to the meetings, without conceding that the law applied to the panel.

Members divided into subcommittees and kept in touch by e-mail.

Mokwa's assistants kept the panel apprised of the Post-Dispatch's inquiries. When the newspaper requested copies of police records, the department copied them -- and panel member Decker reviewed them first.

After the Post-Dispatch asked his colleague, Richard Rosenfeld, to analyze St. Louis rape data, Decker notified Mokwa the study was being done.

Rosenfeld determined that statistically, St. Louis should have recorded 214 rapes in 2003. But it reported just 81 rapes to the FBI. He posted the results of his study on a Web site with a caution to other criminologists to question St. Louis rape data.

In an e-mail, Decker told Mokwa that Rosenfeld's analysis was "sound."

Police ties, contracts

Citing time constraints, the panel did not fulfill one of its original mandates -- to audit the accuracy of 2004 reports.

It saved that to be done under private contract by one of its members later.

Panel members decided there was not enough time to review a sampling of 911 calls to see whether police were correctly classifying and counting crimes. Instead, two panel members met with police personnel four days before Christmas and viewed flow charts depicting how police reports are written, approved and counted in crime statistics.

They came away convinced the police had a "process" to generate accurate crime statistics and that they were trying to fix problems that had led to errors.

On the day the panel's report was due, Ryan's version of it had the panel saying it had confidence in the 2004 crime statistics. One panelist, Carlson, the accountant for KPMG, balked.

"To say that we have reviewed the stats for accuracy at this time is not true, " he wrote to Ryan.

He suggested the report should say the panel was confident about the department's "processes" to accurately count reported crimes.

Ryan polled the rest of the panel: "The group seems to have high confidence in the accuracy of these statistics. I would like that to be straight forward, but this is your call."

Decker and Gilsinan agreed with Carlson. The final report, therefore, said the panel was confident in the department's "process" to generate accurate crime statistics. But it did not sign off on the statistics themselves.

At the Jan. 19 Police Board meeting, the attention was not on the panel's confidence in the process.

Instead, the Police Department and Mayor Francis Slay issued news releases pointing out the decrease in crime, each noting the panel's work.

Slay's press release was titled, "Dowd Report Confirms What We Already Know."

It began: "There is one question the people of our City want answered. Is this city getting safer? The answer is yes."

Working for Mokwa?

In stories published Jan. 16, the Post-Dispatch disclosed that police were undercounting crime by detailing hundreds of incidents in informal memos instead of in official crime reports that are counted in crime statistics.

The story noted that the police had not complied with the newspaper's requests to copy memos and provide a number of how many were written. The newspaper quoted a police supervisor as saying there could be as many as 3,000 memos written every year. In an e-mail to Ryan that morning, Decker called the story "a disaster." He said the 3,000 estimate was too high.

"I have not vetted this through the Chief yet, " he wrote, "but you are working for him, right?"

The next day, the Post-Dispatch reported that police classified some rapes as lesser offenses and used memos to keep others off the books.

The situation was tailor-made for panel member Frohlichstein. His company teaches executives how to spin reporters and manage public-relations crises.

In an e-mail, he advised Ryan that Dowd's remarks needed to emphasize "the same kind of thing that I lead the exec summary with -- we are doing the right thing for the entire community. He should start with this, end with this and work it into the middle too -- as many times as possible."

Ryan e-mailed the final draft of the report to the panel on Jan. 18. She said panel member Nocchiero, Mokwa's special assistant, needed the final copy by the afternoon. Any more revisions after that should be sent to him, she said.

She added a word of caution: "Please do not bring any papers or draft reports with you to the meeting tomorrow. Anything you bring is subjected to the Sunshine (freedom-of-information law) request. We will have copies of these reports for you in the morning.

"Thanks for your assistance with this, " she concluded. "I hope it reflects your thoughts and comments appropriately."

Days later, Frohlichstein wrote to congratulate the team.

"From what I saw and read, it looks like you all did well, " he said. "TV carried more accurate versions of the report but the Post wasn't too bad. Nice work and thanks for letting me be a small part of your efforts."

After the Police Board meeting on Jan. 19, Decker returned to his e-mail.

"So the first story out of the box, while hardly laudatory it (is) not extremely critical, " Decker wrote to Mokwa and others. "Does it make sense to consider having the chief write an Op-Ed piece to the American, Belleville News-Democrat and the Post detailing what was found and what his commitment to the city is?

"I still think that the award won by the Sex Crimes Division needs to be better publicized. Again, it was a pleasure to work with all of you."

Nocchiero, Mokwa's special assistant, replied.

"We're thinking about the Op-Ed. I'll let you know."

He concluded: "Thanks for everything today."

2006 Dart Award Final Judges

Radio

Margaret Blaustein, Ph.D. is the Director of Training and Education at The Trauma Center at JRI in Brookline, MA. Dr. Blaustein is a practicing clinical psychologist who specializes in the assessment and treatment of complex childhood trauma. She is co-developer of the Attachment, Self-Regulation, and Competency treatment framework, designated a promising practice for treatment of childhood trauma by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, and has provided didactic and interactive training to over 3000 clinicians, educators, professionals, and consumers regarding the impact of and intervention for childhood-onset trauma.

Laura Jackson has worked as an independent radio and video producer for the past 20 years. In 1996 she was selected to be the first Independent Producer-in-Residence at WHYY in Philadelphia. Jackson has taught documentary production at Swarthmore College and the University of the Arts. She has received many awards, including a regional Emmy for Beyond Beijing: Women & Economic Justice. Her most recent radio work has been as senior producer for PeaceTalks Radio. In 1994, Ms. Jackson founded Nightingale Productions. She is a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow.

Yoseñio V. Lewis is a dark skinned Latino female to male transsexual who has been an activist since 1973. A health educator, speaker, writer, performer, trainer, and facilitator, he is on the Board of Directors of the Task Force (NGLTF). He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center. Yoseñio is also a co-founder of Big Boys’ Ink™ Productions, a theatrical writing and performing company. He has been a subject of several documentaries, including Christopher Lee’s “Trappings of Transhood” and the television channel A&E’s “Transgender Revolution.”

Suzan Shown Harjo is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than one million acres of land and numerous sacred places. She has developed key federal Indian law since 1975, including the most important national policy advances in the modern era for the protection of Native American cultures and arts: the 1996 Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act and the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Ms. Harjo is president and executive director of The Morning Star Institute, a national Indian rights organization founded in 1984 for Native peoples’ traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research.

Frank Ucciardo reports on foreign affairs at the United Nations for CBS News. The Emmy award-wining anchor/reporter has been a familiar face in the New York television market for the last two decades. His live reporting has included the visit of Pope John Paul II, TWA 800 and the September 11th terrorist Attacks. Ucciardo served as a campaign correspondent for national political conventions; his special report on the 50th Anniversary of the Berlin Airlift received The Society of Professional Journalists top prize. Ucciardo’s work as an investigative reporter forced the Department of Energy to close down its main research nuclear reactor in New York. He serves as the broadcasting chairman for the United Nations Correspondents Association and is the Executive Council Chairman for the Society of Professional Journalists in New York City. He has also worked as correspondent for the AP, NBC, CNN and WNBC-TV.

Newspaper

Jimmie Briggs has a personal mission to share the voices and stories of the disenfranchised and voiceless. The release of his first book entitled, Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War, is the culmination of six years of painstaking investigation. He served as a Special Consultant for the United Nations Special Session on Children in 2002. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude, with a degree in philosophy from Morehouse College. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, People, Vibe, The Source and Fortune. He is a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow.

Andrew Innerarity has been a Senior Staff Photographer at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida since 2005. He began his career at the Miami Herald in 1985 before joining Associated Press in Atlanta in 1994, and then The St. Petersburg Times in 1996. He also worked six years at the Houston Chronicle where his photography was featured in the 2003 Dart Award winner, “Legacy of Love and Pain.” He received a Bachelor of Arts in European History from the University of Southern California in 1985.

Felicia Lynch is a senior associate with Bradford & Associates, a collective of consultants in health care and organizational development. She is a national board member of Family Violence Prevention Fund and formerly oversaw Ryan White Care Act Title I and II in the District of Columbia Department of Health HIV/AIDS Administration. Her most recent professional experience was as president and CEO of Women and Philanthropy, an organization of men and women who recognize that regardless of race, ethnicity, age or sexual orientation women’s voices lend depth and meaning to issues we face as a society. Ms. Lynch chaired the board of the Center for Women Policy Studies. She currently sits on the national board of the Americans All Foundation.

Elana Newman, Ph.D. is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa and has conducted research on a variety of topics regarding the psychological and physical response to traumatic life events, assessment of PTSD in children and adults, understanding the impact of participating in trauma-related research from the trauma survivor’s perspective, and the exposure of journalists to trauma-producing events. She was the key investigator on the Dart Center’s research survey on photojournalists’ exposure to trauma. As a clinical psychologist, she has worked with survivors of all types of events and is currently addressing trauma-related problems with substance-abusing women. Dr. Newman is president-elect of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Anthony Shadid is the Islamic affairs correspondent for the Washington Post and is based in the Middle East. Previously, he worked for two years in Washington with the Boston Globe, where he covered diplomacy and the State Department. Since September 11, 2001, he has traveled to Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Europe, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel and the Palestinian territories. Prior to working for the Globe, he was news editor of the Los Angeles bureau of the Associated Press. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent, speaks and reads Arabic, which offers him insights not available to most Western journalists working in the Middle East.