Maryland is on track to process a nearly 50-year-old backlog of rape kits

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

One of the country’s oldest backlogs of untested evidence from rape exams is on track to be processed by the end of the year after new laws in Maryland put more than 1,400 cases dating back to 1977 on an expedited timetable.

As detailed in ProPublica’s 2021 series “Cold Justice,” a doctor at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center began quietly preserving physical evidence obtained during exams of rape survivors in the 1970s, believing that one day the technology would exist to be able to connect specimens to perpetrators.

Despite advancements in DNA science that proved Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker right, and despite the fact that sporadic tests of his evidence have led to the exonerations of two men and solved 80 cold cases, much of the trove has sat unused by the Baltimore County Police Department.

The old samples weren’t considered part of the state’s official backlog of untested rape kits, which are subject to legal protections and speedy processing requirements, and they were in danger of being destroyed until ProPublica exposed this gap last year, prompting a new law that brought them under the umbrella of sexual assault kits.

Now they are all at a lab, which has a contract to process them by Dec. 31, 2024.

The process will determine whether the samples match any DNA profiles logged in national police databases. Before pursuing prosecution, police may have to investigate further; the most recent charge stemming from the trove came not from a direct DNA match to an individual in the system but from a breakthrough relying on other clues that led officials to a fingerprint they had on file. They also have to track down victims, who may have since moved away from Baltimore or died.

A third of the samples have already been tested, though police won’t say what they have learned. But a new law requires them to enter all updates into a new tracking system by Dec. 31, 2025.

Since the tracking program, which covers all rape kits in the state, went live in late May, 44 survivors with new cases have logged in to check the status of their cases at least 269 times.

For survivors trying to find out more about the evidence kits that Breitenecker saved, which have not yet been entered into the system, answers have thus far been elusive.

Though county officials held a press conference in April asking survivors who were treated at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center between 1977 and 1997 to call a hotline for more information about their cases, it’s been more than two months and ProPublica has learned that at least some of those callers are still waiting for information. Now, representatives with the police and the nonprofits that handle calls — the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault and TurnAround — have said they have worked through logistical and legal issues and are focused on helping survivors as soon as possible.

All the while, a woman named Melanie waits, frustrated. She asked that her last name not be used because she still fears for her safety. She was taken to the emergency room at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center in 1978 after a stranger broke into her home holding a gun and a knife and attempted to rape her.

She was 13 at the time and had just gotten home from middle school. She said the man did not succeed in raping her, but he beat her after she fought back and that the hospital and police may still have preserved evidence from the attack; she remembers the emergency room visit but doesn’t remember whether she got an exam for sexual assault.

She lives out of state and found out about the testing through local media after the county held a press conference in the spring. More than two months after she called the hotline, she said, she was still waiting for a response from the police.

She attributed the delay to the hundreds of other victims who she assumed had called. But the nonprofit charged with operating the hotline said it fielded just seven calls in the month after the press conference.

Baltimore County police declined to comment on Melanie’s case, saying they limit what information about these cases is disclosed to the public.

Baltimore County is not unlike many police jurisdictions across America, which for decades sat on and even destroyed DNA evidence from rape cases before a national movement took root to clear backlogs and solve cold cases.

Shelly Hettleman, a state senator who represents Baltimore County, has championed reforms since 2017 to protect evidence and speed up testing. “The more I dug into this issue, the more I learned that so much needed fixing,” she said.

Her “committed and tenacious” efforts have helped Maryland become one of 20 states to achieve “full legislative rape kit reform,” according to End the Backlog, an initiative of the nonprofit Joyful Heart Foundation that advocates nationally for an improved response to sexual assault cases.

But Maryland still has a seemingly insurmountable number of untested kits — more than 6,000. That’s one of the highest totals in the country, according to End the Backlog figures, and does not include the evidence collected by the doctor at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center.

Authorities have focused in the past on testing kits from cases where the perpetrator appeared to be a stranger to the victim and may have been involved in multiple attacks. As a result, many of the untested kits may prove to hold the DNA of people who were known to the victim and were suspects at the time, such as ex-boyfriends, family members or priests. But academic research shows known suspects can be serial rapists as well, flipping between known and unknown victims. The Department of Justice recommends testing DNA even when a suspect has already been identified because it can help solve other cases.

Since authorities have been less likely to test a known suspect’s DNA, those perpetrators are less likely to have a genetic profile in law enforcement databases and their names may not come up even if they attacked others whose kits are now being tested.

“There are some things you can legislate and fund, like the tracking system, and there are things you can’t, like culture and mindset,” said Anthony Brown, Maryland’s attorney general, who leads a committee overseeing sexual assault evidence in the state.

Many of the serial rapists arrested so far with this cold-case evidence had long criminal histories including assaults, attempted assaults, battery, Peeping Tom complaints and burglary. Some of the rapes might have been prevented had crimes such as the physical assault and attempted rape reported by Melanie been more thoroughly investigated.

Last August, for example, police arrested James William Shipe Sr. in connection with five rape reported rapes between 1978 and 1986. Most of the attacks happened on streets near where Melanie lived.

Police connected the five cases through the slide-testing project. Four of the profiles matched each other, but not anyone in the FBI’s DNA system (initial testing didn’t yield a profile from the fifth, according to prosecutors). The break allowing investigators to identify Shipe came from a fingerprint found in an attempted rape case in 1979 for which Shipe was arrested and charged. (Prosecutors dropped the charges at the time; it is unclear why.) Shipe is awaiting trial on multiple rape charges. His lawyer did not respond to inquiries. He has not entered a plea, according to the Maryland judiciary’s online records.

The technology to find Shipe had been around for decades; the difference that led to him to be found now was staffing the effort with a cold-case detective, paid for with funds from the reform effort.

Melanie said that after she reported the assault in 1978, police began looking for holes in her story. “The first priority of police was to prove the fallacy,” she said. Even though she recalls that police took fingerprints at her home, she doesn’t recall them looking for a perpetrator and now wonders whether it was a serial offender who went on to attack others.

She asked, “How many cases could have been prevented had they believed me and taken the case seriously?”

Survivors treated at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center between 1977 and 1997 can call the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault at 833-364-0046 or email notification@mcasa.org to opt in or out of receiving information about their sexual assault evidence. Leaders of the coalition and of TurnAround, another local support organization, are separate from law enforcement and survivors can work with them without interacting with police.