Missouri attorney general: Almost 100 boxes of rape-kit evidence in Cape County remain untested

Cape Girardeau County law enforcement agencies and other entities have almost 100 boxes of evidence from sexual-assault examinations that have never been tested, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office has found.

The untested rape kits include 49 that had accompanying police reports and 46 in which no police report was filed, according to a federally funded, statewide inventory conducted by the attorney general’s office.

Twenty-seven of those kits tied to police reports are in the hands of the Cape Girardeau Police Department, the most of any single law enforcement agency in the county.

Cape Girardeau police Sgt. Joey Hann said the untested kits fall into three categories.

“Some of the victims who had these tests administered by outside resources did not want to make a formal complaint or cooperate with a formal criminal investigation,” he wrote in an email Monday to the Southeast Missourian.

“Some reporting parties who had tests administered came forward to admit that they had filed a false police report of a sexual assault after an investigation was initiated,” he added.

Other kits were recently received from other sources and are secured and preserved, according to protocol, before their scheduled shipment to regional crime laboratories, Hann wrote.

“The Cape Girardeau Police Department supports the efforts on behalf of the state to eventually have all untested kits tested,” he wrote.

The testing “could potentially assist with identifying suspects from past criminal investigations as well as immediately identify suspects in new cases from comparisons with existing samples,” Hann wrote.

More than half of untested rape kits not tied to police reports in Cape Girardeau County, or 29 kits, are in the custody of SoutheastHEALTH, the inventory found.

Statewide, law enforcement and other agencies have almost 7,000 boxes of evidence from sexual-assault examinations dating back to the 1980s. Nearly 6,200 of those kits have not been tested, including 4,438 that had accompanying police reports, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced last week in a news release.

Schmitt said his office wants to clear out the backlog of untested rape kits.

“It’s important to remember these kits are not just numbers. They are not footnotes to the reporting of a crime. They represent real human beings, who have suffered, confronted their fears, reported the assault and submitted a kit,” Schmitt said in the release.

A Sexual Assault Forensic Exam, or SAFE, kit contains samples that could yield DNA or fibers belonging to an assailant.

The attorney general’s office has relied on a $2.8 million federal grant to conduct the inventory and follow-up work.

Schmitt’s report calls for creation of an electronic tracking system and testing the kits.

Federal money would cover part of the testing, which will take place at a private lab to avoid overloading the Missouri State Highway Patrol lab, Schmitt said.

The attorney general’s office estimates it has enough funding to test at least 1,250 kits. The agency plans to seek more funding to test every kit.

The SEMO Network Against Sexual Violence (NASV), based in Cape Girardeau, counsels victims and performs sexual-assault examinations.

“We encourage any victims within 72 hours to gather physical evidence,” said Kendra Eads, executive director of the agency.

The statewide inventory disclosed NASV has 16 untested rape kits for incidents in which no police reports have been taken. The agency also has stored four other rape kits in cases that have been reported to law enforcement.

Eads said rape kits typically go untested because the victims decided against pursuing a criminal case in court.

She praised the attorney general’s office for conducting the inventory and making the statistics available to the public on its website.

Eads said sexual-assault-evidence testing and development of a statewide electronic tracking system for such evidence could help to identify and prosecute assailants.

“We are thrilled they are working on it,” she said.

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Untested rape kits

• SEMO Network Against Sexual Violence, four with police reports; 16 without police reports
• SoutheastHEALTH, 29 without police reports
• Cape Girardeau County Sheriff's Department, nine with police reports, one without
• Cape Girardeau Police Department, 27 with police reports
• Jackson Police Department, two with police reports
• Southeast Missouri State University Public Safety Department, seven with police reports

Source: Missouri Attorney General's Office

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