Now that the Center City rapist has surfaced in Colorado, the father of Wharton doctoral student Shannon Schieber says he's glad that the investigation is finally out of the Philadelphia Police Department's hands.
Schieber was murdered in 1998 by the suspect, who is linked to five other attacks in Philadelphia. Until yesterday, no leads had surfaced in the case for more than two years.
"It looks like we've got a professional police department working on it, and that's encouraging," said Sylvester Schieber, whose family has filed a lawsuit against Philadelphia Police.
Now that the rapist has been linked through DNA to six attacks in Fort Worth, Colo., near the Colorado State University campus, the investigation is being shared by both departments.
Two Philadelphia detectives will return today after spending the weekend in Colorado. The Schiebers learned of the new development yesterday through media reports.
Schieber said he felt "ambivalent" after hearing the news that the Center City rapist has surfaced once again.
"It renews hope that they're hot on the trail and may catch this guy and keep him from attacking more people in more communities," he said.
In the Colorado assaults, which began May 10, the suspect consistently entered through an unlocked door or window, blindfolded his victims and assaulted them.
All the women were in their early 20s, lived in the same general area and were attacked at the same time of day -- before dawn, usually between 3 and 5 a.m.
This pattern is almost identical to the Center City rapist's attacks here. In Philadelphia, however, two victims were able to see their attacker, and the composite sketch they provided is being used in Fort Collins.
Police in Fort Collins only recently matched the DNA between two of their own cases, verifying that they were indeed after one person.
"We didn't have empirical data, just solid evidence," that the same person was involved in all the assaults, Fort Collins spokeswoman Rita Davis said. "We had assumed from about the second assault, because of the nature of the assaults and the method of assault, that they were being performed by same individual."
Philadelphia Police sent two detectives -- one from the Special Victims Unit and one from homicide -- after the link between the two cases was discovered.
"We have been working with them all through the weekend, and once we were able to go through the cases, we notified press," Davis said.
Philadelphia Police first became aware of the Colorado incidents after Fort Collins Police sent out a national bulletin asking if any other departments had encountered similar incidents in their area.
The bulletin "went through our Special Victims Unit, and they noticed the similarities in the cases," said Lt. Sue Slawson, a Philadelphia Police spokeswoman.
They then called the police in Colorado, and asked them to compare DNA samples between the cases. The match provided Philadelphia Police with the first new lead in the Schieber case in almost two years.
Schieber was strangled in her Rittenhouse Square apartment before dawn in late May of 1998. DNA samples taken from her apartment were later matched to those from the scenes of earlier sexual assaults in nearby areas.
Sylvester Schieber freely admitted that his family has "really had no communications from the city since last October."
He has said police took too long to connect Shannon's murder with several other assault cases. The family also contends that police failed to protect Shannon, after receiving a concerned call from a neighbor and leaving the scene when the former Wharton student did not answer her door.
Schieber commended Fort Collins Police for notifying residents about the attack, and advising them to take proper precautions.
Slawson said that if a suspect is caught, he will be transported back to Pennsylvania to stand trial.
"Although he has committed sexual assaults and offenses in Colorado and God knows where else, he committed a homicide here, and that would supersede the rapes he committed there," Slawson said.
Schieber would like to see his daughter's killer face trial.
"We would like to see this be all over," he said. "We think that this guy should not be on the streets as he's a tremendous danger to vulnerable people."
