TOWSON, Md. — Police say 70-year-old James Shipe, Senior of Parkville, had his past catch up with him when he was charged in connection with a series of rapes dating back to the 70s and 80s.
“It’s been my experience that when suspects go a long period of time, they do believe sometimes that they’ve gotten away with something,” said Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough.
What Shipe could not have foreseen was forensic evidence from his alleged crimes would reveal him as a suspect had been preserved for decades.
Back in the 1970s, a doctor at Greater Baltimore Medical Center began collecting slides of bodily fluids from his patients who had been sexually assaulted.
Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker, now considered a pioneer in forensic pathology, preserved the samples long before DNA would provide a signature for identifying a suspect.
Now, Baltimore County is receiving about $2 million in grants from the state and the non-profit Hackerman Foundation to test slides from 1400 other cases, which remain unsolved.
“It’s the day that we say to those hundreds of victims that what happened to them matters, that we see them, that we want to do the work, do the investigations and do the prosecutions to hold their rapists and their assaulters accountable for their crimes,” said Sen. Shelly Hettleman, (D) Baltimore County.
Hettleman co-sponsored a bill, which became law earlier this year, allowing the courts to recognize the evidence from the slides on a par with rape kits to gain convictions and long-awaited justice for the victims.
The grants will pay for all of the slides to be tested by the end of next year.
