America's Cold-Case Crisis

by Linda Fairstein Info

Linda Fairstein is a bestselling crime novelist and the former chief prosecutor of the New York County District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit. Her new novel, Silent Mercy, is in stores next week.

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Testing old rape kits could put countless rapists in prison—and exonerate others who were wrongly convicted. Linda Fairstein on the tragedy of letting these truth-tellers collect dust.

Charles Courtney, Jr., was arrested in Franklin County, Indiana, in September 1996, for the knifepoint rape of his wife, Mary Jane, when she told him she wanted a divorce the night he returned from a trip on his job as a long-distance truck driver. Like defendants in many domestic-violence cases, Courtney was offered a plea to a lesser charge of sexual battery. As such, his two-year sentence was far lighter than it would have been had he raped a stranger—a sad truth about many rapists whose victims are partners or acquaintances. That conviction earned the government the right to put Courtney's genetic profile in the FBI's convicted-offender databank. He was released from prison on January 4, 1998.

Rape kits stored by the Cleveland Police Department. The Department of Justice estimates the number of untested rape kits nationwide to be more than 200,000. (Photo: Lonnie Timmons III, The Plain Dealer / Landov)

Three months later, a 21-year-old woman named Amberly Lakes was kidnapped in a parking lot outside a grocery store in Fairfield, Ohio, and taken to a remote location where her unknown assailant raped her repeatedly at knifepoint. In 2001, Lakes' case was solved when the evidence preserved during her medical exam after the attack yielded DNA that matched Charles Courtney's profile. Even though her evidence kit had languished on a storage shelf for more than two years, when Ohio authorities finally moved to eliminate their backlog, the result was a conviction in the case and a 30-year jail sentence.

Even more shocking was the news that Helena Lazaro received last fall. In August 1996, stopped at a car wash in Pico Rivera, California, in the VW Rabbit she'd been given by her parents as her 17th birthday present, she was abducted at knifepoint and sexually assaulted multiple times before her attacker abandoned her. Like Amberly, she consented to the collection of evidence during her lengthy hospital exam. Though she had called the Los Angeles Sheriff's Office many times in the 14 years that elapsed, it wasn't until 2010 that she learned her kit was among those tested in a backlog sweep in 2003, at which time it also matched to Charles Courtney—although Helena was never told of that result until she pressed for information six months ago. Here was a criminal viewed only as a danger to his wife, who was in fact a serial stranger rapist, with who knew how many other unsolved cases possibly linked to him from evidence shelved in warehouses along his cross-country truck route.

The backlog of untested rape evidence collection kits in cities across America—estimated by the Department of Justice to number more than 200,000—continues to be a national disgrace. Debates continue about how to resolve the problem and whether to devote resources to testing kits stored in police property warehouses for years, but one critic of the movement echoed some of the most common misunderstandings about this issue this month. In a completely irresponsible piece posted on Womens enews on February 9, Wendy Murphy dismissed the importance of the backlog by ignoring the facts about sexual assault.

It is stunning to see how science can take the onus off the witness and ultimately ease her progression through the criminal justice system.

For 26 years, from 1972 until 2002, I was the prosecutor in charge of the country's pioneering Sex Crimes Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. I was among the first lawyers to be introduced to the revolutionary science of DNA in 1986, three years before it was accepted as a valid technique by our courts. When the first databank became operational in 1994, my colleagues and I watched with amazement as computers began to solve cases, matching offenders' genetic profiles to evidence gathered during a sexual-assault investigation—cases in which the crime scene is the victim's body. By the late 1990s, the law-enforcement community knew that rape kits, which were previously only tested if specific suspects were identified by the police for comparison, were mounting by the thousands. In 1999, under the leadership of New York City's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and Police Commissioner Howard Safir, the radical decision was made to outsource close to 17,000 kits to private labs, at enormous government expense, in order to attempt to obtain results that might offer justice to victims of these heinous crimes, and make offenders—often recidivists—accountable.