Rape kits languish, untested, in SC police evidence rooms

The key to some of Greenville’s unsolved sex crimes could be sitting in the rows of file boxes shelved in a basement evidence room.

A few stray hairs, a blood-stained rag, even fingernail clippings — these are the sorts of things that could potentially bring justice to the dozens of rape victims whose assailants were never caught.

And yet, in many cases, rape kits were never submitted to a crime lab for analysis.

Information requested under an open-records campaign by the USA TODAY Media Network found tens of thousands of neglected kits accumulating in police evidence rooms around the country.

Records obtained from the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office show that 205, or 63 percent, of 324 sexual assault kits collected between 2011 and 2014 remain untested. Data for the Sheriff’s Office prior to 2011 was not immediately available.

By comparison, the Greenville Police Department reported 45, or 29 percent, of 153 rape kits collected between 2000 and 2014 remain untested.

Evidence logs during that same period at other police agencies reveal 389 untested kits in the city of Columbia, 100 in Lexington County and 56 in Charleston County, records show.

Greenville County Sheriff Steve Loftis referred questions to Lt. Ty Miller.

“The Sheriff’s Office takes sexual assault kits very seriously and does its best to make sure every victim is treated with the utmost respect, with the common goal to bring to justice anyone who sexually assaults another person,” she said.

The process of collecting evidence for a rape kit is invasive and can take hours. Bodies are picked over, blood is drawn, clothing and underwear bagged.

The hope is that the samples contain a match to a DNA profile already in the FBI’s national offender database — what police call cold hits. The system has been used to identify suspects, resolve decades-old cases and prevent future assaults from occurring.

Laura Hudson, executive director of the S.C. Crime Victims’ Council, said DNA evidence is a particularly powerful tool in investigating cases of sexual assault because rapists seldom stop with one victim.

“Rapists don’t wake up at age 35 and say, ‘I think I’ll be a rapist,’ she said. “They’ve been doing it, and they’re going to do it again if they get away with it.”

With no state law stipulating how sex crimes evidence is handled, testing practices are inconsistent even between Greenville law enforcement agencies.

City of Greenville police don’t have specific guidelines for sexual assault kits, so it’s up to individual investigators to submit a request to the county’s crime lab, according to department spokesman Johnathan Bragg.

The Sheriff’s Office policy focuses on prosecutable cases or assaults in which the suspect can be identified.

“Unless extenuating circumstances exists, the vast majority of sexual assault kits remain in Property and Evidence until a (possible) suspect is identified,” the policy states.

There are legitimate reasons behind why a kit isn’t processed, Miller said.

Victims can decide to withdraw a complaint or refuse to cooperate, making the case harder to prosecute, Miller said. Or the assault could turn out to be unfounded.

Some of Greenville police’s untested kits are also from cases that went cold years ago.

“Nine times out of 10, they didn’t have enough DNA to either put in (Combined DNA Index System) CODIS or even compare to a potential suspect later on down the road,” Bragg said.

So investigators waited for technology to advance.

In 2013, three of those kits were resubmitted for testing after a department-wide inventory of active cold cases. Two kits collected in 2000 didn’t have a large enough sample to enter into CODIS.

A third sample from a 2006 case also wasn’t large enough to enter into the database, but forensic technicians said a suspect match could be made if investigators had a viable suspect, according to Bragg.

Miller said that another reason kits aren’t tested is because the rapes were reported anonymously.

Since 2009, under federal law, rape victims too traumatized to go to police are entitled to receive an anonymous forensic exam, and the samples collected can be kept in a sealed file until they decide to press charges.

Sheriff’s Office records showed 11 “Jane Doe” cases between 2011 and 2014. How long those kits are stored varies, but state law requires them to be kept for at least a year, said Ginny Walker, executive director of Sexual Trauma Services of the Midlands.

Walker said testing all unprocessed rape kits is a controversial issue among victims’ advocates, particularly in instances when the assault occured years ago and the victims have moved forward with their lives.

Additionally, Walker said that rape kits often don’t yield evidence that can lead to a conviction in court.

Rather than testing, she said resources could be better spent on police training that leads to more arrests and stronger cases against sexual assault offenders.

This story was originally published July 15, 2015 at 8:00 PM.