Forty-nine years after Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker had enough foresight to save DNA evidence from the rape kits he collected from women at least once a day, Baltimore County has committed to testing all of that preserved evidence over the next 13 months.
A $1.5 million grant from the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services and a grant of up to $500,000 from the Hackerman Foundation is helping expediate the testing of the cold case evidence. By the end of 2024, the remaining approximately 1,400 cases will be tested, according to Baltimore County.
How it started in the 1970s
Breitenecker, a forensic pathologist, worked at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC), a hospital just outside the Baltimore city limits. After seeing rape victims sit in emergency rooms for up to 10 hours after their attack, and then have a rudimentary exam performed, Breitenecker knew there had to be a better way.
He opened the Rape Care Center within the hospital, a unit dedicated to doing better for the traumatized women who wound up there. He trained physicians on how to conduct respectful but meticulous exams and how to preserve the evidence of a possible crime. At the time, there was no standardized rape kit or way to test the DNA. But that did not deter Breitenecker.
“It could be useful one day. You save as long as you have to,” Breitenecker told ProPublica two years ago when Catherine Rentz first debuted the story of the good doctor and his evidence collection.
At the Rape Care Center, a physician trained by Breitenecker would swab the vagina, vulva, cervix, legs and wherever else there could be physical traces of the attacker. They put a small amount of saline water inside the vaginal canal to collect the washings into test tubes. The swabs and tubes were then transported to a hospital laboratory where Breitenecker smeared the contents from the swabs onto thin glass slides, then slid the evidence under a microscope, which he used to check for spermatozoa.
Breitenecker also extracted fluid from the test tube to measure the level of acid phosphatase, which would confirm the existence and approximate timing of the semen release. He then typed the summary and conclusions in a report that would go to the Baltimore County police if they were investigating the case.
Breitenecker stuck tiny labels on each of the tubes and slides that included the last two digits of the year, last name of the patient, the pathology department case ID and the number of the slide or tube, added another sticker that said Greater Baltimore Medical Center, and recorded every case in a logbook. He opened a deep freezer and placed the tubes from the vaginal washings inside for preservation. He then opened a room-temperature cabinet, where he placed the microscopic glass slides, also for long-term storage.
Essentially, Breitenecker created one of the first DNA databases in the country.
However, the evidence was underused, overlooked and essentially ignored. By time Breitenecker retired in 1997, relatively few of his 2,252 evidentiary samples had made it past storage at GBMC. The hospital ultimately discarded samples from 1975 and 1976 in accordance with their policy, leaving the collection at about 1,800 before Rose Brady stepped in.
In 2004, Rose Brady, the first woman to serve as the head of the Baltimore County Police Department’s Special Victims Unit, heard about Breitenecker’s trove of microscopic slides. Over the next 10 years, with a small but dedicated team of detectives, she obtained subpoenas for 158 sexual assault kits and scoured the police property room for any remaining forensic evidence from cold cases. Police then developed 101 DNA profiles, generating 84 hits in the FBI’s DNA database.
Brady’s team made 62 arrests and got 49 convictions, according to arrest records and court files obtained by ProPublica. Several men were arrested multiple times for different cases, including Alphonso W. Hill, known as the worst known serial rapist in the state.
While doing research for the series, ProPublica helped tie Hill to another crime—the 1983 murder of Alicia Carter. In fact, Hill’s DNA has matched 11 hospital slide cases so far, including DNA from the assault of a Goucher student in the same location where Carter’s body was found. After ProPublica’s investigation and police inquiry, he confessed in 2021 to raping and murdering her.
How it’s going in the 2020s
The confession gave ProPublica’s story even more traction and credibility, to the point where Baltimore County Police’s SVU Cold Case Squad really began focusing on the treasure trove of evidence.
Although they had been working with the slides since 2019, in the first quarter of 2022, the Baltimore Police Department processed DNA from 49 of the 1,800 cases. Ten of them yielded actionable DNA profiles.
Today, the slides have led to the arrest of at least 49 criminal convictions. Most recently, DNA from the slides led to the arrest of now-70-year-old James Shipe Sr., who is the main suspect in the rape of five Baltimore County women from 1978 to 1986.
So far about 500 GBMC slide cases have been transferred from hospital storage to the Baltimore Police Department, who has been outsourcing them to Bode Technology. Now, with the new monies available, Bode has agreed to accept and test the slides in higher volumes. Thus, Baltimore County expects to have the remaining approximately 1,400 cases tested by the end of 2024.
The $1.5 million supplemental appropriation comes from the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services. Another up to $500,000 comes from the newly created BreitLight Justice Fund, created by The Hackerman Foundation and Season of Justice, in order to administer private philanthropic funding to support the testing of all slides.
“Dr. Breitenecker’s groundbreaking work collecting forensic evidence has empowered our office,” said Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger. “By obtaining all remaining slides, Baltimore County will be able to more effectively test evidence and our office remains ready to work with our partners in the Baltimore County Police Department to aggressively pursue cases and seek justice for victims.”
Background case information provided by Catherine Rentz in her Cold Justice series.