COBB COUNTY, Ga. -- Neglected DNA samples and paperwork jams have plagued Georgia’s justice system for years and may have slowed down the process of putting rapists behind bars – but state officials are starting to catch up.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has taken a closer look at over 5,000 unsolved rape cases in Georgia since the department added new employees to test kits that have sat on evidence shelves since the late 90s. The Metro Atlanta Cold Case Sexual Assault Task Force, established in May, is helping bring those cases to local prosecutors.
The impact is felt in Marietta, where a Cobb County grand jury has indicted one man in three separate rapes over a six-year span. Christopher Charles Sanders, 51, was arrested last week after his DNA matched the rape kits taken from victims in 2006, 2011 and 2012.
In 2006, Sanders is accused of ripping off a woman’s pants and raping her without a condom. In 2011, Sanders is accused of assaulting a woman he knew while she gave him a ride to a store, then again at her house when he walked in uninvited, allegedly raping her on her own couch. He is also accused of raping another woman staying at the Hospitality Inn.
All three women reported the rapes and allowed themselves to be examined by nurses, with the DNA pulled from their bodies stored away in evidence rooms. Those kits remained untested until the GBI examined them earlier this year.
When GBI investigators were able to link the cases back to Sanders, police picked him up in Marietta, where he still lived, after allegedly committing this series of violent crimes. Now, the cases are in the hands of Theresa Schiefer, an assistant district attorney for Cobb County.
“With those hits, we were able to go back and pull each one of those individual cases [and] look at them as a group,” Schiefer told 11Alive. “That’s when we realized it was a bigger issue than just one specific case.”
Schiefer is a member of the Metro Atlanta Cold Case Task Force, which is tackling hundreds of cold cases across the state. Since its launch, two rape indictments have been handed down in Cobb County – Sanders, and another man -- Ryan Neal Walker, who is accused of aggravated sodomy after allegedly forcing oral sex on a woman in December 2006.
While it is impossible to predict what could have happened if the first rape kit connected to Sanders had been tested earlier, Schiefer said it is likely that other, preventable crimes will be found as the GBI continues to whittle down the list of untested kits.
“I think we are going to find there are a lot of offenders that were repeat offenders and, that potentially, there were other offenses committed after the original sexual assault,” Schiefer said.
Each cold case connected to a DNA kit is incredibly complicated making the union between the GBI and Metro Cold Case Sexual Assault Task Force essential - because the investigation often needs to be completely started over again from scratch.
“By putting in these mechanisms now, we hope that we will never have that same issue to address in the future,” Schiefer said.
Nelly Miles with the GBI said that once the backlog is cleared, rape kit testing should become more manageable for state law enforcement.
“There is definitely a plan in place and we believe we are on the right path forward to try and take care of this,” Miles said.
Since 2016, the number of untested rape kits has dropped from over 2,700 to about 73. The GBI expects to be done testing the remaining kits by June 2019.
