Nearly three decades later, a fresh look at the bitter lessons of a high-profile Center City murder case
In 1998, Penn student Shannon Schieber was killed by the Center City rapist. It's crucial that the police learn from their missteps during the investigation into her death.
On May 7, 1998, Shannon Schieber, a doctoral student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was killed by a serial rapist who had broken into her apartment in the Fitler Square section of Center City.
The two of us — one a retired Philadelphia police detective who worked nearly four years on the homicide investigation into Shannon’s murder and the other Shannon’s father — recently took a fresh look at the evidence in the case.
We both believe important information about her murder has gone undisclosed. Her killer, an assailant who came to be known as the Center City rapist, was convicted in 2002 of Shannon’s murder and a dozen sexual assaults in two states. He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Shannon’s family unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit against the city after her death, in which they raised concerns about how police handled the case. Ultimately, a jury found that the police had been downgrading sexual assaults but held that the city was not liable in Shannon’s death.
While the two of us respect that verdict, we believe that even after nearly three decades, Shannon’s case contains far too many lessons to be forgotten.
Our review of the case file identified lapses we believe could have made a difference in Shannon’s case and possibly helped prevent other victims from being attacked.
In one instance, we found evidence that Shannon’s assailant had broken into the apartments of four other women in her neighborhood and sexually assaulted or raped them in the year before Shannon was attacked.
Two cases, we found, were classified as non-crimes by the sex crimes unit, although one of them was later classified as a burglary.
Our review showed that Detective James McGinnis quickly determined that a victim in the burglary case had been sexually assaulted and concluded that the case was likely linked to a string of attacks in Center City. McGinnis asked to meet with sex crimes investigators to discuss his findings, we found, but that meeting never occurred.
Ultimately, McGinnis would face departmental review over his work.
We examined testimony from a departmental review hearing where Lt. Kenneth Coluzzi, then the head of a sex crimes investigations unit, said that “Detective McGinnis had clearly overstepped his authority” and was improperly conducting a sex crime investigation.
McGinnis was ordered to drop his investigation, and the case would not be linked to the Center City rapist until October 1999 — 28 months after the burglary occurred and 17 months after Shannon’s murder. Police would not announce that they had successfully linked the cases by DNA until after Inquirer reporters began asking questions about the attacks.
The key evidence in the case was what Detective McGinnis ordered up before he was ordered off the case. At the time the case was linked to Shannon’s murder, it was still classified as a non-crime by the sex crimes unit.
We believe that if the prior four cases had been properly classified and investigated by the sex crimes unit, the assailant might have already been in jail the night Shannon was killed.
Because the cases were not properly investigated, the police department‘s Ninth Police District commander, its detectives, and patrol officers didn’t know there was a serial assailant working their territory.
Our review of the evidence file also underscored a little-known aspect of the case: Most people have never heard that Officer Tyrone Winckler picked up the assailant in the early hours of Sept. 9, 1997. Winckler was responding to a 911 call from a woman reporting someone peeking in her windows.
Winckler stopped the man near where the prior four assaults occurred, ran a background check on him, but let him go when it turned up nothing.
Had Winckler known there had been several sexual assaults in the area — and had he seen the composite that was later drawn with the help of one of the victims — he might have brought the suspect to the precinct station that night for questioning by a detective.
If the suspect‘s DNA had been collected at that time, he would have been directly linked to the prior assaults and arrested.
Even after nearly three decades, Shannon’s case contains far too many lessons to be forgotten.
The final lapse we identified in our review occurred on the night Shannon was attacked. She screamed out for help, and a neighbor called 911. Two patrol officers arrived at Shannon’s apartment near 23rd and Manning Streets about six minutes after the call was made.
The officers saw no signs of forced entry into Shannon’s apartment. They knocked on her door but left when no one responded. Those officers were on site for only five minutes.
When Shannon failed to show up for a scheduled lunch the next day, her brother, Sean, went to her apartment building and rang doorbells until one of the other tenants — the neighbor who had called 911 earlier — let him into the building. Together, Sean and the neighbor broke down Shannon’s door and found her dead.
We believe that if those two officers had known of the four earlier sexual assaults, each occurring in the early morning hours by an assailant making an almost acrobatic entry into his victims’ apartments, they would have broken down Shannon’s door.
If those officers had broken into Shannon’s apartment that evening, they might have captured the assailant in the act of strangling her. If so, the attacker would not have been able to sexually assault another young woman in that same neighborhood in August 1999. Nor would he have been able to assault or attempt to assault eight more young women in Fort Collins, Colo., in 2001 and 2002, before he was captured there.
Shannon’s death shed a grim light on missteps by Philadelphia police — missteps that reflected what we found to be a rotten culture in a crucial investigative unit where mistrust, toxic power dynamics, and workplace territorialism impaired collaboration and hampered effective police work.
That culture, sadly, also meant that other good officers were deprived of essential information that might have helped them catch a killer.
Charles Boyle spent 30 years with the Philadelphia Police Department, including 14 years with the homicide unit. Sylvester Schieber lives in Frederick, Md.