COLD-CASE BUST
DNA TIES INMATE TO 1994 RAPE
DETECTIVES appear to have cracked a nearly 25-year-old rape case after connecting DNA recovered from the crime scene at Prospect Park in Brooklyn to a “career rapist” serving a life sentence in prison.
James Webb, 67, has been identified as the bearded brute who grabbed a 27-year-old woman on a park footpath on April 26, 1994, then pulled her into the bushes and raped her.
“He’s a savage,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said about Webb, who’s at Sing Sing serving a 75-year prison sentence for raping four women in 1995.
He will almost certainly die in prison. He’s eligible for parole in 2070.
When detectives went to Sing Sing to question Webb, he shrugged off the allegations, Boyce said. He told cops he didn’t know what they were talking about.
Webb’s name surfaced after police, using more advanced technology, ran the DNA evidence again.
Boyce said the initial rape case was a “perfect storm” of problems for investigators. Some cops and a high-profile Daily News columnist thought that the woman, a lesbian who was in the middle of organizing a feminist rally, had made it up.
“She was treated badly in certain issues,” Boyce admitted. “The DNA evidence we collected was commingled with the victim’s. At the time, we didn’t have the technology to subtract the two and get a profile.”
In November, detectives took fresh look at the case, armed with the technology to separate the two DNA samples.
“We went back to the victim, asked her for her DNA, which she gave us, redacted it from the sample and ran the (suspect’s) DNA and got a hit.”
Webb was convicted of raping six women between 1969 and 1973 and was paroled in 1993, according to court papers.
About a year after the woman was raped in Prospect Park, cops arrested him for forcing himself on four more women near Fort Greene and Clinton Hill.
“We spoke with the victim last night,” Boyce said. “You can imagine how emotional she was. I think my detectives cried with her.”
Boyce will be bringing the case to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, although Webb may be saved by the current statute of limitations on rape cases.
“I would love to charge him,” Boyce said. “The point is not to charge him, because he is not getting out of jail until he dies. The point is to get this woman some closure.”
The victim, a Yale graduate who currently lives in another state, told police she was raped in the park about 5 p.m. Her account was quickly met with skepticism by some cops and Mike McAlary, a columnist for The News whose doubts were fueled by accounts from police sources.
“It’s awful what was done to her,” the victim’s attorney Martin Garbus said. “She has lived for 23 years with the allegation that she was not telling the truth. The press misreported the story, only adding an additional level of pain.”
McAlary reported that several police sources had told him she had made up the attack. He wrote three columns about the sex assault, claiming detectives were unable to corroborate the woman’s claims — and that she may have fabricated the story to promote the rally.
The columnist called her a hoaxer and suggested she should be arrested.
Garbus refuted McAlary’s claims and filed a $12 million libel suit against him and The News. A judge ultimately dismissed the suit because McAlary accurately reported what police sources told him at the time.
“This court finds that Mr. McAlary was given information by the police that was inaccurate, but that he reported that misinformation accurately and drew reasonable inferences from it,” said Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Ramos in dismissing the case. McAlary died in 1998 at 41. One of McAlary’s police sources was John Miller, who is currently the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. A source said that while Miller discussed the case with McAlary, he never said he doubted the woman’s claims.
Garber said Miller should resign in light of his client’s vindication.