[Baltimore County police have started testing a backlog of
evidence from rape cold cases. Ten of 49 cases processed so far have
yielded actionable DNA profiles. In at least one case, the answers
came too late. ]
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EARLY RESULTS ON DNA EVIDENCE FROM DECADES-OLD RAPE CASES ARE BOTH
PROMISING AND ALARMING  
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August 10, 2022
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_ Baltimore County police have started testing a backlog of evidence
from rape cold cases. Ten of 49 cases processed so far have yielded
actionable DNA profiles. In at least one case, the answers came too
late. _

Micah's DNA, micahb37 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

Baltimore County police are starting to get back test results from a
long-delayed project to process the oldest known collection of DNA
evidence from rape cases.

Last year, ProPublica wrote about the trove of evidence
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prescient doctor who began assembling it
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the 1970s, long before preserving forensic evidence was common police
practice. Police have processed DNA from 49 of about 1,800 remaining
cases as of the first quarter of this year, according to a department
memo obtained through a public information request and follow-up
communications with a sergeant in charge of the cold case unit. Ten of
the 49 cases yielded actionable DNA profiles, according to the
sergeant. The results, even from such a small batch, are at once
promising and alarming:

* The DNA profiles of unidentified suspects in three “stranger
rape” cases have been uploaded into a federal DNA database. Sgt. Moe
Greenberg wrote in an email that there are no results in those cases
yet.
* Police identified a suspect in a 1979 case. The prosecutor’s
office initially decided not to move forward with charges, but
Baltimore County Deputy State’s Attorney John Cox said his office is
now reevaluating and looking at what options are available.
* A suspect was identified in a 1978 case, but the answers came too
late: The suspect died in October, and the victim died years ago.
* Police connected a fourth victim to a serial rapist whose identity
has eluded them since 1978; they have his DNA profile, but it
doesn’t match anyone in the FBI database. That could mean the person
was never arrested for a crime that would result in his DNA profile
being uploaded into the database or that his profile remains in a
backlog somewhere. According to the memo, police have sent the case to
a private lab, Bode Technology, for forensic genealogy testing, which
will try to identify a suspect by looking for possible relatives in
publicly accessible DNA databases.

“It’s frightening but also heartening to think there are more
serial rapists who may be caught with this testing,” said Wendell
Carter, whose sister Alicia was killed in 1983 on the Goucher College
campus by a serial predator who terrorized women across the Baltimore
region between 1978 and 2000.

Police developed DNA profiles from testing 100 cases between 2005 and
2014, which eventually exposed Alicia’s killer, Alphonso W. Hill, as
the worst known serial rapist in the state. Those cases placed him in
the same spot on Goucher College campus where two other students were
raped in the years before Alicia was killed. He has admitted to those
rapes. He has since been linked to 25 rapes around the region, mostly
thanks to forensic clues provided by this database. Hill confessed to
killing Alicia
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year after our investigation.

Though the evidence has delivered some promising results so far,
ProPublica’s investigation exposed how much more must have been lost
when some hospitals and police departments destroyed evidence and when
police delayed testing.

Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker saved glass microscope slides and tubes
containing samples from 2,252 sexual assault examinations conducted in
his hospital between 1975 and 1997. He was the founder and director of
the Rape Care Center at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, and he
started saving the samples years before rape kits were standardized
and DNA testing technology was invented. His forensic pathologist
background led him to believe it was better to save than to destroy,
as others were doing at the time.

The doctor’s evidence collection went largely ignored until retired
Sgt. Rose Brady heard about it in 2004 and began the first systematic
effort to process and test Breitenecker’s savings. Investigators
focused on stranger rape cases that had a high probability of being
solved, and they ultimately arrested nearly 20 suspected serial
rapists. The project stopped in 2014 due to lack of funds. Before
Brady got involved, the hospital had destroyed some of the oldest
slides in the collection in accordance with its retention policy.
Today, about 1,800 cases’ worth of evidence remains untested.

Following scandals over police using questionable investigative
practices
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evidence from sexual assault cases
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recently, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. announced
reforms and a new testing effort in 2019 thanks to a grant from the
private Hackerman Foundation. Shelly Hettleman, a state senator from
Baltimore County, requested funding from the foundation after
sponsoring a law that mandated the testing of newer rape kits. The law
does not cover the older evidence.

Hettleman said it is too soon to conclude much from the early results,
but she expressed frustration that the testing has been so delayed.
She and other officials say the pandemic and restricted lab capacities
have slowed the new effort down
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At the current rate, processing the rest of the evidence could take
another half a century.

Advocates say such a delay is unacceptable, especially considering
that many sex offenders assault more than one person
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research
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documents how these predators can become one-man crime waves who also
wind up charged with burglaries and murders. “How can we value women
so little that we allow this to continue?” asked Jane Manning, a
former prosecutor who now leads the Women’s Equal Justice Project,
which helps survivors navigate the criminal justice system.

Special victims units typically work with relatively anemic resources
given their daunting case loads. Baltimore County’s SVU team added
19 new cases in a recent stretch of 11 days.

Cold case squads frequently have even fewer resources
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not devoted a single full-time detective to investigating the
doctor’s evidence before the 2019 effort began, despite earlier
pleas from the SVU team after they began to discover how many serial
criminals
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in the untested slides. The dynamic is exacerbated when the media
focus on newer cases, putting the pressure on officials with limited
funds to deprioritize cold cases.

Now, Baltimore County’s SVU squad actually has a cold case group
with one sergeant, two full-time detectives and three assistants.
Despite this boost in resources, the workload is nevertheless
tremendous considering the 1,800 cases from Breitenecker’s
collection that are still waiting to be gone through, in addition to
other cold cases. When investigating decades-old crimes, it’s often
a challenge just to locate victims and witnesses. But the effort can
be worth it.

Martha Southworth said it was very difficult not knowing who had
attacked her at the edge of Goucher College campus in 1979. She
thought her case would never be solved. But after police began testing
the hospital slides in the mid-2000s, the slides from her case exposed
Hill as a serial predator and provided a major clue that was vital to
solving two other cases on the campus: Julie Wood
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rape in 1980 and Alicia Carter’s murder in 1983. Southworth said
that going to court and seeing Hill sentenced to 30 years “was such
a freeing experience for me. I didn't have to be afraid anymore.”

That is one reason, Manning said, that it is so important to pursue
these cold cases. The ex-prosecutor also said that those frustrated
with investigations have other avenues they can use to pursue justice.
They can reach out to elected officials to push for new city and state
laws that would enable survivors to file lawsuits against law
enforcement for failure to protect, as people can do in New York City
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can also reach out to the Department of Justice, which investigates
police departments, and ask it to look into the way local law
enforcement is handling sex crimes. The federal government
investigated the Baltimore city police in 2016 and found indications
of gender bias and a general failure to sufficiently process sexual
assault evidence
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looked to be suspected serial offenders. The city police have since
undergone reform efforts. The Justice Department is also investigating
the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for its response to
sexual misconduct, according to The Baltimore Sun
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Most importantly, Manning said, survivors can organize politically
around the issue to “let public officials know that there will be a
price to pay if you continue to allow impunity for rape.”

Baltimore County police wrote in the memo that the pace of testing
should pick up now that they have expanded staffing and added another
private DNA lab to help process the evidence. Greenberg said in an
email that in addition to this first batch of test results, 75 more
slide cases have been outsourced for testing. Testing has been
completed on 17 of those cases so far, and the results are still under
review.

_ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
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* criminal justice
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* dna evidence
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* Rape
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* forensics
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