DNA brings finality for victim

By Jennifer McMenamin

The woman with dark, wavy hair, pale skin and wide eyes sat board-straight on the courtroom bench. Toying with the necklace at her throat, she leaned in slightly to hear the prosecutor.

She was nervous, she would say later. Still not quite believing that she was sitting in the same room as the man identified by DNA evidence as the stranger who grabbed her on the street 25 years ago, put a long knife to her throat, dragged her into a dark yard and raped her.

For years, she fled grocery stores, concerts, malls - just about any place with crowds of strangers. For two decades, she couldn't walk down the street during the day by herself. Nighttime walks, even with her boyfriend, are still out of the question. And she has chosen not to have children, fearful that she could never keep a baby safe since she hadn't been able to protect herself on April 25, 1981.

Her attacker is one of a dozen men charged in recent years in Baltimore County as part of a review of unsolved sex crimes. Since 2003, county police have used federal grant money to systematically examine cases that might have evidence worth testing for DNA.

For the women involved, the renewed investigations often require reliving memories that have haunted them while also offering a measure of finality to crimes that have sometimes permeated every aspect of their lives.

"These DNA rape cases are stranger rapes, and they're horrible," Baltimore County prosecutor Susan H. Hazlett said. "They're the kinds of crimes they make TV movies out of. This was one of those."

The key to cracking the April 1981 case was hidden in the fabric of the underwear police took from the woman at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center that night. The clothing was carefully wrapped in brown paper and packed away in the basement of Baltimore County police headquarters in Towson, waiting for the day when investigators might have some use for it.

Twenty-two years later, they did. The DNA on the woman's underwear led police to prisoner No. 194706, Kevin Siler, 44, who has spent most of his adult life - but for a few months in 1981 - in Maryland prisons.

Last month, the woman he was convicted of raping during that brief stretch of freedom filed into a crowded courtroom with her mother and sisters for Siler's sentencing hearing. Taking a deep breath, she turned to face him.

"Safety became my main concern, always looking over my shoulder, unable to relax," she said. "I lost my freedom."

Returning to her seat, the woman then waited to hear whether Siler would ever be set free again. She listened intently in the hushed courtroom as a judge crafted a sentence designed to keep the convicted rapist behind bars at least until he is a very old man, if not for the rest of his life.

It was 1:30 on a chilly morning in April 1981. An argument with her parents had sent the 17-year-old girl out the door of the family's Woodlawn home. Sobbing, she started walking to her older sister's apartment in Catonsville.

She didn't notice the young man heading toward her until he was nearly in front of her.

"At that point, I still trusted in things," she said recently. "I had no reason to believe this was going to happen to me."

The woman, 42, who now works for a law firm, recalled the attack during a two-hour interview in her home. She did not want to be identified by name. The Sun does not identify sexual assault victims without their permission.

She said the man walked right for her.

"He put the knife right up to my throat, like he knew what he was doing," she said. "Years later, it occurred to me that he had probably done it before."

The man kept the blade at her throat through the attack. When he stood, she scrambled to her feet and ran. With her pants and underwear still at her ankles, she stumbled into a fence, according to the account she gave police that night. She crawled under the wire fencing and ran, screaming and crying, into the middle of Woodlawn Drive.

Two women driving by picked her up and drove straight to the police station. It had been too dark during the attack for her to provide detectives a good description of the rapist.

Officers took her to GBMC, where hair samples and her clothing were collected. Everything was packaged and stored in the Police Department's property room, according to the police report.

Within 45 days of the attack, the trail was cold. "No investigative leads having been developed, this case is considered suspended pending any useful information," a detective wrote in June 1981.

A decade later, advances in forensic science began changing the way police departments across the country investigated crimes. The use of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) stems from the premise that everyone has a different genetic makeup and that scientists can find that unique pattern in any cell, whether from skin, semen, saliva, blood or hair.

As the technology improved, laboratory scientists found ways to create DNA profiles from smaller and older samples. Wrongly convicted men and women were exonerated and released. Others who had managed to elude police on unsolved crimes were locked up.

In 2003, Baltimore County police received a federal grant that allowed the department to assign a detective to review unsolved sex crimes for DNA evidence. Twelve men have been charged as a result, police said, and several have been convicted. Other cases - including that of two men charged with abducting and raping two women in 1986 - are winding through the court system.

Early in the review, a biologist examined the underwear collected from the April 1981 rape and concluded that there was a biological sample that could be tested.

But the woman wasn't interested in reopening the case, Cpl. Steve Duffey wrote in a report after speaking to her in 2003.

"I was stunned when they called," she said. "My initial response was no, let's just leave it where it was. I was scared. I didn't want to bring it all up."

Four months later, Lt. David Diseroad persuaded her to change her mind. When officers drove to her suburban home in March 2004 to interview her, she told them, according to a police report, that if the lab work led to a suspect, "she would want to confront him just to show him that she's okay, [that] she survived and to ask him, 'Why her?'"

Like most people, the rape victim owes much of what she knows about police work to TV crime dramas.

"We all watch CSI," she said. "I thought they'd submit the DNA and it would come right back."

It took seven months from the time police sent a swatch of the underwear to a lab in May 2004 until Maryland State Police reported that they had matched the DNA profile to one in the state database of felons.

The match, Kevin Siler, grew up in Baltimore, worked for a disc jockey on Lexington Street at some point and was convicted at age 17 of his first adult offense, armed robbery, according to court records.

Twice convicted of escaping from prison, he was locked up at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup for armed robbery and handgun violations when police matched his DNA to the 1981 rape.

Diseroad called the victim three weeks later with the news. It took more than a year to bring the case to trial.

"She told me on two different occasions that she was done, that she didn't care what happened and she wanted me to leave her alone," said Hazlett, the prosecutor. "She felt as though she was putting herself out there ... and the fact that it was going to take so long to finally resolve this was very distressing."

On April 10, the fourth scheduled trial date, prosecutors and the defense picked a jury to hear the case, which centered on testimony from the victim, her sister and scientists who scrutinized the DNA evidence.

When jurors came back with questions, the victim panicked. "She was outside, pacing the plaza," the prosecutor said.

Soon, however, the jurors returned with unanimous verdicts, convicting Siler of rape and a first-degree sex offense. The judge scheduled Siler's sentencing for June 20.

In 3 1/2 years on the bench, Baltimore County Circuit Judge Patrick Cavanaugh has developed a reputation for handing down tough sentences and verbal lashings to defendants convicted in his courtroom of violent crimes.

He sentenced a teenager convicted in the 2004 Randallstown High School shootings to 100 years. He imposed three life terms on a man who orchestrated the murder of a teenager who was choked and set on fire to keep her from testifying in a statutory rape case. And when he sentenced that man's co-defendant, Cavanaugh tacked a life term onto a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, just in case "somewhere down the road some liberals down in Annapolis" water down the meaning of life without parole, the judge said.

At last month's sentencing, Cavanaugh did not lecture Kevin Siler. He did, however, give him a 90-year sentence.

Structuring the consecutive sentences the way he did - suspending all but 60 years of a life term for rape and all but 30 years of a life sentence for the sex offense - Cavanaugh ensured that Siler won't have a chance of being released before he is 89.

Siler, who has maintained his innocence, has twice asked for a new trial, arguing that his lawyer did not follow through on several of his requests and that prosecutors withheld a composite drawing that they say does not exist.

Still, the woman said she now enjoys a freedom that had eluded her in the 25 years since the rape.

Before the DNA test, she was afraid of the man who attacked her and of every man who might be him. Describing the many activities she has avoided out of fear - driving to unfamiliar places by herself, using automated teller machines, taking walks at night, having children - she explained, "It wasn't if - if the attacker comes. It was when - when the attacker comes back - that worried me."

Some of that burden has lifted, leaving her feeling freer than she's felt in years.

"I never dreamed this person would be caught. I had no idea who he was, where he was," she said. "Now, it's solved. It's done. It's no longer a cold case. People have to know that there are times when it actually works."