SERIAL INDIFFERENCE
Harris County authorities charged a convicted rapist again and again. So why was he still out on the streets assaulting homeless women?
Jenny met her rapist at a bus stop near the Fiesta in Midtown. She was living on the streets in May 2013, a 22-year-old suffering from bipolar disorder. She hadn’t showered in four weeks and wanted a change of clothes.
Keith Edward Hendricks introduced himself as “Slim” and said he could help. She thought he had a kind face. He took her by the hand and led her down the street. They walked about a half mile to a vacant, one-story home painted blue near Hutchins Street.
Once inside, he closed the door and yelled at her to take off her clothes and get on her hands and knees. Then he raped her while she begged him to stop. She struggled, but he put his hands around her throat, choked her and punched her in the face.
Finally, Hendricks let her go.
Jenny fled the house and ran until she flagged down a motorist, pleading for assistance.
Eight days after the rape, Pedro Moreno sat across from her at a picnic table in the courtyard of a Fort Bend County women’s shelter. A veteran Houston police sex-crimes investigator, Moreno could still see the
evidence on the woman’s freckled face and thin frame.
Jenny’s left eye was swollen, the cuts on her lip scabbing over. The red rings around her neck and scrapes on her knees were just beginning to fade. She looked numb, tired and scared.
Hesitantly, she described the attack, tears rolling down her cheeks.
When she finished, Moreno laid a photo spread in front of her with pictures of six men. She quickly pointed to the third picture. Hendricks.
As Moreno listened to her anguished account, he could not believe this was happening again. He rushed back to police headquarters in downtown Houston and filed rape charges against Hendricks for the fifth time in seven years.
The next time Jenny saw Hendricks was in a Harris County courtroom, 2 ½ years later, before she was jailed to ensure her testimony.
Her case would become a national scandal and dominate the district attorney’s race last year after she filed a federal lawsuit claiming that her jailing amounted to being “re-raped.”
Prosecutors defended the tactic as necessary to protect Jenny and finally put Hendricks away. But that’s not the whole story. Jenny had been raped because the Harris County criminal justice system failed her, and a long line of other women, over and over.
Frustrated and angry, Moreno knew that Hendricks should have been locked up years earlier, long before he lured Jenny to that abandoned blue house. BBB
Pedro Moreno was HPD’s “go-to guy” in the sex-crimes division for investigating serial rapists. His fellow officers called him “Father Pete” because of the confessions he’d coaxed over the years from sexual assault suspects. He was serious but warm, a good talker and an even better listener.
He remembers the case that led him to Hendricks. The report on his desk in the summer of 2007 said the attacker had brandished a knife during a rape and was particularly violent.
He felt certain this rapist had attacked other women.
He asked the division’s crime analyst to pull all cases that had similar details from Houston’s Midtown. From experience, he knew that serial rapists usually did not stray far from one part of town.
Stocky and broad-chested with short dark hair, Moreno had been a Houston police officer for more than two decades. He’d wanted to work homicide, but they needed more Spanishspeaking investigators in sex crimes. After working his first case, he was struck by how traumatizing sexual assault was for women. He felt deeply for them and knew then it was his calling.
During his career, he would file charges against more than 30 repeat offenders, he said, and almost all of them had been convicted. He was used to putting them away.
HPD received as many as 1,000 sexual assault reports a year, with sex-crimes investigators working 30 or so cases at a time.
Moreno was driven by a responsibility to victims, to bringing their attackers to justice. Every one, no matter her circumstances, deserved nothing less, he felt.
The crime analyst soon brought him hundreds of cases to pore over, reports of rapes and assaults, sexual and physical.
He separated them into stacks, made notes in the margins, found the parallels.
The victims were homeless women.
The rapes all took place within about a 2-mile radius of the distinctive 1939 Sears store and Fiesta Mart, lit in yellow and red neon, on Wheeler near the Pierce elevated bridge.
Moreno was driven by a responsibility to victims, to bringing their attackers to justice. Every one, no matter her circumstances, deserved nothing less, he felt.
In many instances, the assailant was friendly at first, usually offering the women drugs, persuading them to go with him. Then he took them to vacant homes, behind bridges or other areas shielded from view.
He often brandished a knife or a box cutter.
He held his victims down, choking them during the rape. If a woman showed any significant resistance, he would beat her.
And there was this: Some of them could identify the assailant by his street name.
They called him “Slim” or “Chicago Slim.”
Moreno entered the names into a database HPD maintained for suspects’ aliases.
He sifted through the hits until one of those aliases came back to a name in a report:
Keith Edward Hendricks, a convicted rapist from Indiana. BBB
Why Hendricks came to Houston, and exactly when he arrived, is unclear. Court records show he has been incarcerated for almost half his life.
He was convicted of rape in Marion County, Ind., in 1978. Hendricks, then 17, was accused of robbing and confining a couple at gunpoint, then raping the 54-year-old wife.
Hendricks was tried as an adult and pleaded guilty. A judge sentenced him to 30 years for the rape. After serving 15 years and six months on the rape charge, he was released from prison and placed on parole in 1993, an Indiana Department of Corrections spokesman said.
After his parole expired about a year later, Hendricks was convicted of numerous additional crimes in Indiana, including battery and possession of narcotics.
He picked up his first Harris County criminal charge in September 2005, for felony possession of cocaine. He pleaded guilty, receiving six months in a state prison.
Upon his release in June 2006, authorities failed to make sure Hendricks, then 46, registered as a sex offender.
He was arrested two more times that summer and fall. A background check by either the arresting officers or prosecutors would have turned up his rape conviction in Indiana and his failure to register, a felony punishable by two to 20 years in prison. Anything close to the maximum sentence could have prevented some or all of his subsequent rapes.
Though authorities never made this connection, they had entered Hendricks’ DNA profile into a national law enforcement database. The Combined DNA Index System, called CODIS, allows law enforcement to connect crimes through known offender DNA profiles.
This could have enabled Houston police to link Hendricks to three rapes between August and October 2006 — if the department had been testing all the rape kits instead of stockpiling many of them, creating a massive backlog.
DNA testing at HPD’s crime lab had been suspended in 2002 after an audit revealed shoddy forensic work, unqualified personnel and lax protocols. Although the department outsourced some kits to private labs, the backlog continued to grow. By the time testing resumed in 2006, thousands of rape kits sat on the shelf, collecting dust.
Two of those three 2006 rapes wouldn’t be connected to Hendricks for eight years, after the city finally sent a backlog of more than 6,000 untested kits to two private labs. The third ended up on Moreno’s desk among nearly a dozen alleged rape cases he’d pulled that appeared to fit the pattern. BBB
Moreno needed to find the women, and he needed to find “Chicago Slim.”
In some of the cases he had identified, initial investigators had merely sent letters to the victims at homeless shelters — which they’d listed as their home addresses — and reported that they had not responded.
That’s where those investigations ended, until Moreno took them over in 2007.
He knew a letter or a phone call alone would make little difference when trying to locate homeless victims.
For days, he drove a couple of miles over to a small pocket of Midtown near Third Ward, parked his truck and set off on foot near the Fiesta Mart.
The area is a patchwork of luxury housing, homeless shelters and commercial buildings, showcasing the city’s lack of zoning laws and relentless desire for development. Scattered with homeless shelters and sobriety clinics, the area is known for its large transient population.
Dressed in a suit, the Texas summer sun beating against his face, Moreno walked for hours, speaking with the homeless, asking questions about Hendricks and the victims.
“Call me any time, day or night,” he would say, handing out his card with his cellphone number.
He knew it would be difficult to find the victims. Their homelessness only compounded
their powerlessness. They often didn’t report crimes because they thought their claims would go uninvestigated. Or they feared they would get labeled “snitches” on the street or end up arrested. Worse yet, they feared their assailant would find them again before the police found him.
As Moreno continued his search, another homeless woman told police she was raped several blocks east of Minute Maid Park on Aug. 19. Melissa Jackson, 44, said she met her assailant near a bridge, where he offered her crack. All she had to do was bring him other customers. She followed him behind a freeway overpass, near the 500 block of McKee. Then he brandished a large knife and placed it down on the ground next to her.
Then he raped her, she told police.
Melissa remembered whispering to herself, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, save me.” She called 911 and reported that a man she knew only as “Chicago Slim” had raped her.
She was taken to St. Joseph Medical Center, where a sexual assault examination was performed and a rape kit was taken.
A week later, Hendricks again allegedly pulled a knife and raped her in the 3900 block of Travis. She reported the attack two days later.
Melissa says she’s been raped at least 15 times during her years on the street. She never reported most of them because she thought no one would believe her. She feared being treated as a suspect, not a victim. But Hendricks terrified her. He would stalk her, corner her, she said.
“Every time I turned around, I felt like there he was,” Melissa said.
An analyst in the sex-crimes division flagged the two reports for Moreno.
He started looking for Melissa and soon spotted her walking around Midtown.
Moreno told her who he was and took her to his office downtown. He laid out a photo lineup with six pictures.
She immediately picked out Hendricks’ photo, identifying the man she knew as “Chicago Slim” as her rapist.
She gave Moreno a sworn statement, a huge step forward. BBB
Days later, Moreno got a call from one of the informants he’d cultivated: Hendricks was underneath the U.S. 59 overpass across the street from the Fiesta.
Moreno picked up his partner at headquarters and raced out there. He spotted Hendricks lying among a group of homeless people. He was balding and gaunt, with a faint goatee.
Moreno walked toward Hendricks, stopped and tapped him on the foot.
“Chicago, get up,” Moreno said.
Hendricks stood up, displaying his height — 6 feet 2 inches tall — and skinny frame. Moreno could see where Hendricks got his street name.
When the officers arrested him on Aug. 30, 2007, they found a crack pipe and a Husky box cutter.
They took him to the city jail at 61 Riesner, next to the municipal courthouse, just outside downtown.
Then Moreno got another call: A victim he’d been looking for named Renee, 41, was outside a homeless shelter on Fannin. She had told police in April that a man fitting Hendricks’ description had lured her to an abandoned house near La Branch and Wheeler with a promise of crack.
Moreno raced off and found her at the shelter.
She, too, picked Hendricks out of a photo lineup and gave a sworn statement. Afterward, as he did with all victims, Moreno told her that if her case went to trial, she shouldn’t be afraid to testify. He would be there, too.
If only it would be that simple.
Moreno then drove back to the city jail. He sat across from Hendricks in a small interview room.
Hendricks seemed cocky, with an attitude, Moreno recalled.
He questioned Hendricks about 12 women and 13 incidents. Hendricks said he knew a few of the women — including Renee and Melissa.
But he denied knowing all of them. And he denied any rapes.
“I do admit that I do crack, but so do all these other women that are making allegations against me,” he said in a sworn statement.
Despite the denials, Moreno thought he had what he needed to move forward — the photo identifications and sworn statements from two of the women, Renee and Melissa.
He called the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors accepted the charges against Hendricks the next day, on Aug. 31, and he was sent to the Harris County Jail without bail.
Upon his arrest, as per standard procedure in such cases, police had collected two swabs of DNA from inside Hendricks’ cheek to test against rape-kit evidence, if only those kits were being tested.
But Moreno felt relieved and hopeful that Hendricks would be in prison for many years, given the evidence he had already gathered against him.
“I could tell this is the kind of guy that doesn’t stop,” he said.