ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story is the last of a three-part series. Read part one and part two, and sign up for the Cold Justice newsletter to go behind the scenes of this investigation.
Editor s note: This story contains a brief description of a rape.
Christopher Grant, a veteran detective with the city of Baltimore’s police department, had to take a refresher course in 2007 on investigating sex crimes. At the last minute, the instructor backed out. They would watch a video instead.
The video was an old “48 Hours” episode involving a rape victim named Laura Neuman. Neuman was a teenager when she was raped by a stranger in Baltimore in 1983. Her rapist had never been caught, but she had never let go. She called Baltimore police over the years until she found two determined city detectives to investigate her case in 2002. They solved it in less than a week using a fingerprint that police had never bothered to load into a state
Distressed by authorities’ poor treatment of rape victims and destruction of evidence, one doctor became a DNA archivist long before we had the technology to test it. For potentially hundreds of survivors, his faith in science is paying off.
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Editor s note: This story contains several brief descriptions of rape.
Rose Brady walked alone between bus stops on a busy street in Baltimore County one evening in April 1987. She was 28, with long, curly brown hair and blue eyes perfect prey for the predator local police had named the “Sunglass Rapist.”
She hoped so, anyway.
Brady worked for the Baltimore County Police Department and had just been promoted to corporal. When she signed on in 1977 at age 18, she had been one of only 15 female officers in a department of about 1,100. Within a year, though, she’d shown her value, going undercover to help take down a pimp operating out of massage parlors. She had met the suspected pimp with no gun, no cellphone, no wire. Supervisors told her and another female cadet working with her to throw a glass ashtray out the window if he started to make trouble.