Rape victim sees justice served — 18 years later
Assaulted woman was told by officials to ‘go on with your life’
NEW ORLEANS — Marie picked up the phone and dialed the number the detective gave her 10 days before, on the night she was raped at knifepoint outside a friend’s house in New Orleans. It was the first of many calls Marie would make in an 18year ordeal to track down and convict her attacker.
“Just checking to see if there are any leads, if you’ve caught anyone,” Marie recalls.
“Nothing’s turned up yet,” he responded. “Why don’t you go on with your life?”
“What about testing the DNA? The rape kit?” she asked.
“We can’t. There’s no money for that,” the detective said.
The same rapist went on to attack at least six more women, including a 16-year-old raped three months after Marie.
For Marie, the trauma continued long after the assault and was compounded, she said, by the incompetence and callousness of the New Orleans Police Department.
“I felt like I was a problem,” the 60-year-old stockbroker said at her suburban New Orleans home. “They wanted me to just go away.” (the Associated Press generally does not identify victims of sexual assault. Marie agreed to be identified only by her middle name.)
Largely through her own persistence did police finally nab the suspect: a serial rapist on the brink of walking free from prison.
Police detectives and prosecutors who handled Marie’s case declined to comment.
Attacked at knifepoint
Court and police documents reviewed by AP corroborate much of Marie’s story, and her account serves as a window onto the police force’s troubled sex crimes squad.
On Sept. 19, 1994, Marie had just returned to her hometown of New Orleans for a job interview. She drove to a friend’s house and headed indoors.
A man walked by, then grabbed her from behind and put a knife to her throat. He pushed her off the sidewalk and into some bushes. He raped her and fled.
Two patrolmen in a cruiser responded to the 911 call. The rape squad was called in. A detective took Marie to a hospital, where staff examined her and took DNA evidence.
And that was where the effort to find Marie’s attacker essentially stopped.
A 2010 U.S. Department of Justice investigation exposed a pattern of misconduct in the NOPD’s sex crimes unit, including downgrading rape complaints, failing to investigate rapes and blaming the crime on the victim. The probe also found about 800 rape kits sat untested, part of a nationwide backlog estimated in the thousands.
In 2013, the scandal-plagued police department entered into a consent decree with federal authorities to clean up the squad. It sent untested kits off to labs and reopened cases. Detectives were given new training and the department said it was fixing its problems.
Nevertheless, a city inspector general’s report a year ago showed five detectives had failed to properly investigate hundreds of rape and child abuse cases between 2010 and 2013.
In the years after her rape, Marie kept calling but always got the same response: nothing new.
Finally, about a decade after her attack, she got a sympathetic cold case detective to send in her rape kit for testing. It came back with a hit. The man who raped her was locked up in Tennessee. His name was Jimmie Spratt.
‘Some form of accountability’
Marie’s painful saga wasn’t over. Hurricane Katrina interrupted the investigation. Then the prosecutor who had interviewed Marie left the district attorney’s office.
Finally, with Spratt’s release from prison in Tennessee approaching in 2010, Marie was invited to the district attorney’s office for the first time.
Spratt was brought to New Orleans. He was convicted March 9, 2012, of three counts of aggravated rape and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Marie has become an advocate for rape victims. She speaks on their behalf at meetings reviewing the Justice Department consent decree.
“What I’d really like to see now,” she said, “is some form of accountability that the reforms are actually resulting in more arrests and convictions.”