The most shocking thing that struck Rose Brady when she moved from the murder team to sexual offences at the Baltimore Police department was how differently the two crimes were treated.
It was 2004, and the unit that she had been tasked with leading appeared to be the ‘poor relation’ to homicide, which she had run for nine years.
‘In homicide, you got whatever you need, whether it was equipment, the mobile phones, extra bodies to work on the cases – we got it,’ Rose tells Metro from her home in Maryland.
But rape wasn’t taken quite so seriously when it came to resources, convictions or sentencing, so Rose could only work with the what she had – that was until one night she went out to play bingo with her friend Mary.
As the pair played and chatted, Mary, who worked in the forensic pathology department in the hospital, asked Rose when she was going to come and get her boss Dr Brightnecker’s slides.
Rose had no idea what she was talking about, until Mary explained that the doctor had saved biological evidence from every rape exam he’d ever performed at the hospital – dating back to 1977. He had thousands of pieces of evidence.
‘I didn’t find out until I went into sex crimes, but departments all over the country, for years had destroyed evidence because they didn’t have enough space to store it. This was before DNA so no-one knew evidence they took from that victim would actually point to a suspect,’ explains Rose, 67.
‘In those days, if you didn’t have a positive ID from a lineup, the rapist generally got away with it. But Dr Brightnecker was a visionary. When he started his clinic in the 70s he started storing this evidence because he felt that what he was collecting from these women would someday point to a suspect.’
It was a remarkable coincidence that her friend could bring her so much invaluable knowledge and Dr Brightnecker’s records proved to be a gold mine. Plus, it was personal, as Rose’s friend had been raped by a stranger in 1978, and when she found these records went back to 1977, she knew she had to get hold of them.
‘I’ve never had this feeling before in my life, the hair on the back of my neck was starting to stand up. It was unbelievable’, she remembers.
Armed with the silver bullet, Rose and her small team started to pull up all the unsolved rapes from Baltimore over the previous three decades.
She began running the evidence through a fledgling national DNA database of criminals, but it was slow and expensive. Thankfully, another remarkable coincidence occurred.
Rose was at home for Christmas when her boss called and mentioned a name that she hadn’t heard since the beginning of her career in the 80s: Thaddeus Clemons.
A rapist with a very specific MO; Clemons would grab teenagers and young women as they got off the bus at night, put a gun to their back, force welders glasses on them so they couldn’t see, drive them to a deserted baseball field at a local elementary school and assault them. Known as the ‘sunglass rapist’, police had been unable to catch him because his victims were blinded.
Concerned that Clemons would go on to commit more rapes or even a murder, Rose, who was in her twenties at the time, had offered to act as a decoy. It wasn’t a recognised method by the force, but she’d seen it used on cop shows, so she pitched her idea to her boss who agreed.
‘I was determined to get this guy. I wasn’t scared, because there were police officers everywhere watching me’, Rose remembers. ‘I was walking in the area, waiting for him, when a load of police cars flew by. I didn’t know what was going on, but then one of the officers told me Clemons had tried to grab a woman three streets down, but she was the first one to get away.’
Although they managed to arrest him, without the other victims’ evidence, Clemons was released without charge and left free to roam.
That was, until 2004, when Rose’s work was able to connect him to the rapes and she could authorise his arrest. The following year, Clemons was convicted of five assaults.
‘It felt awesome to get him. He also taught me how serial rapists work,’ she explains. Their victims all have the same height, the same weight, and looked really similar. Rapists would get older over the years but their victims’ age would say the same.’
Armed with her newfound DNA evidence, Rose developed a fool-proof strategy of nailing the offenders. Her team would begin with an arrest, which would often blindside the rapists as the attacks were decades old.
‘Next, my detectives would show him a picture [of his victim] and ask do you know this person? And they’ll look at it, and they’ll say “No, I’ve never seen her before. I’ve never heard of that name. Never seen her in my life”,’ says Rose, who shares her story on the latest episode of the true crime podcast The Girlfriends: Spotlight from Novel.
The conversation would be recorded for use in court. Then, when the defence attorney later tried to paint them out as having had a relationship, or the victim as being a prostitute, the tape would be played – incriminating the rapist for good. It also meant that the victim didn’t have to testify.
Rose’s detectives would repeat this process over and over again, across the years. For her, it was incredibly fulfilling to achieve justice for women long traumatised by the attack. ‘They had spent their whole lives looking over their shoulders, literally. Because they didn’t know who had attacked them. The only closure you can give the survivor in a stranger rape is locking the guy up,’ she explains.
But she had to fight hard for longer sentences and more resources. One survivor told Rose she was particularly distressed by the 17 year sentence her rapist got. ‘She said “I’ve been living in a prison for the past 20 years, never knowing who raped me. He got 17 which means he’ll be out in half that.”’
Her words made Rose double down on her efforts, working with judges and lawyers so they realised the devastating impact of being sexually attacked by a stranger. Soon sentencing went up, with perpetrators being sent down for 30, 40, 50 years – even life. Rose even exhumed two bodies; a victim and a rapist to retrieve their DNA.
Then, in another incredible coincidence, Rose’s team identified the man who had raped her best friend in the late seventies.
A fellow police officer, she had returned home to her apartment to find a man hiding out in the bushes near the entrance. When she opened her door, he forced his way in and sexually assaulted her. Over the following two months, two other women in the same building were attacked in the same way.
Reviewing the case, a forensic artist on Rose’s team decided to age the composite drawing, so they could see what the suspect looked like more than twenty years after the attack. While working on the drawings at home on her dining room table, her husband, also a police officer, recognised the image. He looked like a man who had been on a documentary about a recently solved rape: Alphonso Hill.
Hill was even more prolific than Thaddeus Clemons and was already serving time after confessing to the rape of an 18 year old, but with the DNA evidence they found he had committed more. Hill, who had been applying for parole, pleaded guilty to the other rapes and was told he would never be released from prison.
‘It was great to identify him because I can tell you from looking at his timeline, if he had gotten back out, the attacks would have continued. He was a monster who thought he’d gotten away with it.’
Rose retired from the unit in 2018 after 14 years and with 40 years’ service under her belt. Today she runs a ranch and lives a very different lifestyle. So what does she make of all the incredible coincidences that helped her nail these serious offenders?
‘I think it was just meant to be, to get closure for these women. Is it fate? I don’t know. But these cases just seemed to fall together in these incredible ways.’
● Rose tells her story on The Girlfriends: Spotlight, from Novel and iHeartPodcasts, available everywhere you get your podcasts.