'20/20' Helps Crack Unsolved Rape Cases

Aug. 30, 2002 -- For 12 years, the parents of Charlene Antoinette Hardin waited for police to find the man who raped and killed their only child to be caught. Now, after a 20/20 investigation, a man has pleaded guilty to the crime and is behind bars.

Hardin was attacked while on her way home from her first job out of high school, just before Christmas in 1989, just two blocks from her home. Police had no suspect and the case went "cold."

Her mother, Gwen Hardin, told ABCNEWS that every day she would wake up and pray she was not looking into the face of her daughter's killer. She wondered if it could be a friend, neighbor, someone the family encountered regularly.

For years, Hardin said, she could not trust anyone.

Evidence Ignored

What Hardin didn't know about her daughter's case was that the evidence gathered by police at the crime scene had sat untested and essentially forgotten in an envelope in the basement of the Baltimore Police Department. Thousands of rapists have been convicted and put behind bars thanks to DNA evidence. But for all its effectiveness, DNA testing — a remarkably simple procedure — is rarely used by police in rape cases where there is no suspect.

"In probably 90 percent of the country, if you are raped by somebody who you don't know, by a stranger, the probability is that the rape kit will not get tested at all for DNA," says former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir.

In fact, an investigation by 20/20 has uncovered a dirty little secret of law enforcement, unknown to victims and their families. Hundreds of thousands of rape evidence kits sit unprocessed on dusty shelves in police storage rooms around the country simply because police say they can't afford the cost of processing them, which is on average no more than $500 per kit.

Safir, who is now a consultant to a company that owns a DNA lab, was stunned to learn that when he was in office, his department was one of the worst culprits, but by no means the only one.

"That's outrageous," said Safir. "It says to a woman who's a victim: We don't care."

Safir said he found out about his department's predicament when Barry Scheck, a prominent defense attorney, came to see him and told him there were 12,000 unanalyzed rape kits sitting on the shelves of the police department's storage facility.

"I thought he was insane, and I looked into it," said Safir. "I didn't have 12,000. I had 16,000."

Nationwide, Safir estimated that there are half a million unanalyzed rape kits that, if processed, could turn out tens of thousands of suspects.

"In this department alone we have about 2,600 unanalyzed rape kits all sitting here waiting for someone to look at them," said Baltimore Police Commissioner Ed Norris. "The people out there that could be arrested and convicted with the evidence are just running around raping other people, killing other people, committing other crimes. And it's just money preventing us from catching them."

Processing the DNA

To see if that really was the case, 20/20 offered to pay half the cost of processing DNA evidence kits from some 50 unsolved cases, known as "cold cases," to be selected and handled by the Baltimore police. 20/20 would have no input at all, and would merely record the process step by step.

"This seemed like a great opportunity to push this to the fore," said Norris, who was eager to work with 20/20, while some other cities seemingly did not want to draw attention to the problem. "I was extremely excited to get a lot more of my kits analyzed than would be had you not come here," he added.

The 50 evidence kits from Baltimore were sent to one of the country's leading private DNA labs, the Bode labs in Springfield, Va., where Safir helped to arrange testing. Thirty-nine of the 50 kits contained enough DNA to be entered into the state and federal criminal databases.

To the astonishment of the Baltimore police, four of the DNA samples matched with people whose DNA was in the databases. The DNA evidence in two of the rapes led to the same man, who is now facing charges. In another case, processing the rape kit led police to a man who confessed. Also, one man who had been wrongly identified by a rape victim and was awaiting trial, was exonerated.

"I can't tell you how excited we were when we got the news," said Norris. "We physically jumped out of our chairs. This is big stuff."

A Match and Confession

When the DNA results from 20/20's project came back, police said they were finally able to solve the 1989 murder of Charlene Hardin. They identified her attacker as 38-year-old Anthony Mitchell, who was already serving time for robbery and attempted rape. When confronted with the DNA evidence, Mitchell confessed to raping and killing Hardin 12 years ago, police said.

"Once faced with the dead-endedness, the one-way street of DNA, what is there to argue with?" said Sgt. Roger Nolan, head of Baltimore's Cold Case Squad in the homicide division.

Hardin's long-grieving mother was relieved to finally attain closure in the loss of her only child — though she also expressed frustration that the test wasn't performed much earlier.

Norris was also grateful to have the case solved. "If it was just this one case, it was worth it," he said.

But there were more matches from the tests. The rape of a 15-year-old and another rape of a 17-year-old had gone unsolved for four years. When the rape kits for both cases were finally tested, police said the evidence led them to Hubert Taylor, whose DNA was in the database after a drug conviction in Virginia.

Taylor has been indicted on charges of first-degree rape in the case of the 17-year-old, but has not yet entered a plea.

In another case, the DNA evidence didn't put someone in prison, but freed a man who was wrongly identified by a rape victim.

"It's just as important, more important, to get an innocent man out of jail who shouldn't be there than to put a guilty man in jail," said Norris.

Fixing the Problem

Since learning that hundreds of thousands of these cases are unresolved nationwide — simply because of a lack of funds — a private foundation gave police in Baltimore $350,000 to start processing the DNA evidence that has been sitting on shelves for so long.

On Thursday, the city of Baltimore matched that amount.

"This is the responsibility of government," said Norris. "There's been a lot of talk about it, but little action … I don't think people know that in most cities around the country, their evidence is sitting on shelves and in refrigerators. They just don't know."

Since 20/20's report first aired, former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir has established a foundation to collect and distribute private funds to local law enforcement agencies to support expedited DNA testing for rape evidence collection kits across the country. For more information, visit the Web site at http://www.rapeevidence.org.

Brenda Breslauer and Yoruba Richen also contributed to this report.