Baltimore County to use new funding to complete testing of sexual assault evidence by end of 2024
BALTIMORE — Baltimore County officials say they will use new state and private funding to finish testing evidence slides related to more than 1,000 decades-old sexual assaults by the end of 2024.
County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. and Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said at a news conference Wednesday morning that the county will use more than $2 million in new funding to test slides associated with about 1,400 sexual assault exams performed at Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson.
“Every resident in Baltimore County deserves to feel safe in their community. An important part of that safety is ensuring that our police department has the tools and resources they need to analyze evidence and bring justice, especially in the case of sexual assault,” Olszewski said Wednesday.
The late Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker began preserving biological material from survivors of sexual assault in the 1970s, before modern sexual assault kits and before DNA technology was used widely in criminal investigations.
Since then, the GBMC slides have helped solve dozens of cold cases and exonerate a wrongfully convicted man. And in August, county police arrested James William Shipe Sr. after matching the 70-year-old’s DNA to material from the slides of five women. Shipe is charged with raping the women, who all lived in different ground-floor Cockeysville apartments during the 1970s and 1980s.
Baltimore County will use $500,000 from its general fund for the effort, along with $1.5 million from the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth and Victim Services. The state grant is slated to go before the Baltimore County Council in December.
The Hackerman Foundation will contribute up to $500,000 and solicit additional donations through the BreitLight Justice Fund, named for Breitenecker. If more money is needed, the county will use up to $500,000 in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding to complete the testing.
A task force that Olszewski convened in 2019 found county police and prosecutors could do better at investigating and prosecuting sexual assaults. Police often failed to test rape kits and were reluctant to bring charges when victims had not physically fought their attackers, the audit found.
“People who commit sexual assault violate a person’s body and sense of safety. To victims of sexual assault: You did not deserve what happened to you,” McCullough said Wednesday. “I want to assure you our commitment to you is strong, no matter how long ago your assault happened.”
In 2019, the Hackerman Foundation gave the county $300,000 to fund cold case investigations, a grant that contributed to Shipe’s arrest, the foundation’s president, Nancy Hackerman, said in a news release. By March of this year, the county had finished testing GMBC slides for about 124 cases since the effort began.
Laura Neuman, a former Anne Arundel County executive and sexual assault survivor, has criticized the county’s progress in testing the slides.
Breitenecker performed exams for more than 2,200 sexual assaults between 1977 and 1997, producing slides for about 1,900 cases. The slides remaining to be tested correspond to about 1,400 sexual assault victims, but there might be more than one slide per case.
A new law passed this year in the Maryland General Assembly categorized the slides as sexual assault forensic exam kits and now requires police departments to keep kits for 75 years. With new legal flexibility, GBMC’s pathology department began the process of counting and transferring the slides to the police department.
Because the slides were considered medical records, the county previously had to issue subpoenas to the hospital before the police department could acquire the slides and then send them out for testing at forensic lab Bode Technology. Although subpoenas are still used, investigators no longer have to connect each case with slide evidence to a Baltimore County crime report before the hospital transfers the slides, said Capt. Brian Edwards.
“A lot of investigative work had to go into finding that nexus,” a process that legally redefining the slides as SAFE kits has streamlined, Edwards said in an interview.
This summer, McCullough created Edwards’ temporary position in the police department to coordinate the slide project, allowing for the transfer of 500 cases from GBMC since Oct. 1. Analysis of the slides cost about $1,000 per slide, a police spokesperson said in March.
County leaders said Wednesday that Bode Technology had agreed to continue testing the slides at a higher volume than it had in the past, allowing testing on all the slides to be completed by the end of 2024.
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