On a recent Tuesday morning, members of the DNA Cold Case task force in Cleveland, Ohio, gathered for their weekly meeting. The conference room filled with detectives, prosecutors, a crime analyst, several victim advocates—and one journalist. Rachel Dissell is a reporter for The Plain Dealer, one of two who first uncovered and wrote about neglected rape kits at the Cleveland Police Department in 2010. Dissell has been covering the ongoing story ever since.
The meeting started as it usually does with “all hands on deck” cases—the ones running up against the statute of limitations—then moved to other open investigations. Cleveland is not the first city to tackle a rape kit backlog, but it is one of the only municipalities to investigate every case so doggedly. Since 2011, when the city began sending rape kits to the state’s crime lab, almost all of its 4,000 kits have been tested; of these, over 1,600 contained usable DNA. Three hundred and fifty cases have led to grand jury indictments, and as of this month, over 100 rapists have been convicted, some of multiple rapes.
[For more of this story, written by Chava Gourarie, go to http://www.cjr.org/local_news/rape_kit_reporting.php]
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