CLEVELAND (AP) — When Stacey Fifer arrived at the prison one day last September, she was carrying four old photos of women, strangers to one another but bound by terrifying memories of the same man.
The criminal investigator had strong suspicions Dwayne Wilson was that man. A "hit" letter from the state crime lab had linked Wilson's DNA to a sexual crime spree — including three rapes for which he'd never been charged and a fourth case that had been dropped, all within 34 months beginning in 1994.
He was now in the Grafton Correctional Institution on an unrelated sexual battery conviction, but perhaps not for long. On her printout from the corrections department, Fifer had highlighted in yellow the date — Oct. 18, 2014 — of Dwayne Wilson's expected release. He could be free in just 23 days.
And another deadline loomed. One DNA "hit" had linked Wilson to a November 1994 rape, meaning time was running out to charge him under Ohio's 20-year statute of limitations.
Fifer had come to confront Wilson about his past. She was there as part of a special Cuyahoga County task force organized to investigate new test results from hundreds of old rape kits.
At first, she tried to put Wilson at ease, but he was tight-lipped. Then she got to the point: His name had surfaced in some cold cases. One by one, she displayed driver's license photos of the four women taken around the time each was raped. The youngest had been just 16.
"Do you recognize this woman?" she asked, four times. Wilson, she says, mumbled, shaking his head no at each photo.
"Did you have sex with any of the women?" she continued.
A long pause.
Then, according to Fifer's notes, he responded: "'I doubt that. I mean not that I would remember any face but none of them look familiar.'"
She pressed him: "Is there any reason why your DNA would be found in these sexual assault kits?"
Wilson, now 54, said he could have "partied" with them, she recalls, then added in a soft voice: "'You're talking two decades ... I don't know, I don't remember.'"
He was scared, Fifer thought. And surprised.
For 50 minutes, she and a second investigator questioned Wilson. They asked, among other things, whether he'd carried boxcutters or knives with him, since all four women had been threatened with blades by their attacker. Fifer says he told them he'd carried tools in his cars and trucks because he'd done odd jobs back then. He also acknowledged some "wild times" in his past when he drank and smoked weed.
As Fifer prepared to leave, she told Wilson she'd be seeing him again.
She then watched him return to his cell, walking in the prison yard, moving slowly, his head hanging.
"Things," she says, "were finally sinking in for him."
___
Every Tuesday morning, a group of law enforcement officers meets to revisit an ugly past.
They gather around a long conference table to discuss investigations they're pursuing against hundreds of suspected rapists in the county and women who've lived for years, even decades, looking over their shoulders, wondering if their attackers are still out there.
The Cuyahoga County Sexual Assault Task Force, a team of prosecutors, police, state agents and others, is building cases based on the DNA results of thousands of newly tested rape kits that had, until recently, been languishing on evidence room shelves.
There's urgency to their work, and not just for cases bumping against the statute of limitations. There are predators behind bars for other crimes soon to be released, and a frightening, even more immediate prospect: an untold number of rapists still on the streets.
"We're racing against the clock and we know it," County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty, who formed the task force, warned at one recent Tuesday meeting. "We're going to be taking some god-awful rapists off the street forever and then some."
Dwayne Wilson walks into court for his sentencing hearing in Cleveland on Wednesday, April 1, 2015. Tests linked his DNA to evidence found in a backlog of untested rape kits. Wilson was found guilty of raping four women in the 1990s. He was sentenced to 110 years. Afterward, assistant prosecuting attorney Mary Weston said the streets are now safer, but the four victims "may never get over" what they’ve endured. None of them was in court to see him escorted away in handcuffs.
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