MILWAUKEE — Late for school, the 7-year-old girl was hurrying along South 18th Street, going as quickly as she could in her puffy snowsuit. The man appeared suddenly, wrapped his hand around her right wrist and pulled her behind a house. He raped her. Then he disappeared.
Six years later, at midnight on Dec. 2, the unknown rapist would have been forever free from punishment, saved by Wisconsin's statute of limitations for sexual assault. Instead, he has been charged with rape and kidnapping.
His identity, such as it is, was revealed for the first time in the November arrest warrant: "John Doe, unknown male, with matching deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA] at genetic locations D2S44, D4S139, D5S110, D10S28, D1S7 and D17S79."
In a novel effort to beat the statute of limitations on a pile of unsolved sexual assaults, an enterprising team of investigators and prosecutors here is testing the legal boundaries of DNA evidence. Instead of listing the traditional name or physical description used in a John Doe warrant, they are detailing the suspect's most basic genetic makeup.
But the tale of one young victim's second chance for justice also is a sobering story of the nation's state-run DNA databanks--and, in turn, the FBI system designed to link them. Hobbled by a lack of funding, a mammoth backlog of samples and fundamental differences between systems, the promise of DNA databanks--perhaps law enforcement's most promising tool since the FBI's fingerprint catalog--is far from being realized.
Wisconsin is ahead of most states, and yet the semen from the girl's rapist sat untested in a police property room for nearly six years. Now that the sample has been cataloged, Wisconsin still can search for the rapist in only 22 other states, since the rest don't yet have the funding to tie into the FBI's year-old Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.
In the end, the girl, now 13, was the beneficiary of investigators with a heart-wrenching task: Go back to cases on the verge of expiring and decide which might be salvaged by an untested legal tactic, and which to write off for certain.
"We had to pick the ones where we had good evidence and the victim was still available," said Det. Lori Gaglione, a soft-spoken, hard-boiled veteran of the city's Sensitive Crimes Unit. "We had to choose."
Semen in Case Untested For Nearly Six Years
The girl didn't know the man, or even where he came from. She knew that he was wearing jogging pants and that they were still pulled down when he told her she could go.
