On summer nights a year apart, two women left bars in downtown Austin, Texas. Before they could get home safely, both were raped.
One knew her rapist. He was an acquaintance, she said, who saw she was intoxicated and offered her a ride on the handlebars of his bicycle before sexually assaulting her as she drifted in and out of consciousness.
The other did not. She told police she was attacked by strangers who pinned down her arms and legs while one of them raped her.
Neither investigation led to an arrest.
Years later in 2021, Austin police received a significant new lead: DNA found on one woman’s jeans matched DNA from a swab of the other’s neck. It suggested that the two women had been attacked by the same man – a serial rapist.
This is the kind of breakthrough officials across the country hoped for when they pledged to test sexual assault evidence that had been neglected for years in law enforcement storage rooms. Since 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice has given out nearly $350 million in grants to 90 local and state agencies through the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. Officials promised the money would put rapists behind bars and give victims long-awaited answers.
Instead, a USA TODAY investigation found, cases hit the same roadblocks they did when victims first came forward: kits left untested, haphazard or cursory reviews by police and prosecutors, and a reluctance to inform people about what happened to evidence collected from their own bodies. By the Justice Department’s count, the program has led to 100,000 kits being tested and 1,500 convictions so far – nearly half from two agencies, while others have seen meager results.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, a backlog of about 2,300 kits has netted 14 convictions.
In Mobile, Alabama, a backlog of about 1,100 kits has led to convictions of eight men.
In Austin, officials faced a backlog of more than 4,400 kits. They have secured just one conviction.
After the two Austin cases matched through DNA, a detective reviewed the files. Police said they contacted the woman who had reported being raped by a stranger, but she did not want to speak with them, and her investigation was again closed. Officials did not tell her that the man linked to her kit could be a serial rapist.
On the other case, police botched their new review and did nothing.
Krystal Allison, the woman who made that report, did not learn that the acquaintance she accused of rape had been linked to another reported sexual assault until USA TODAY contacted her this summer.
“That seriously sent chills down my spine,” Allison said, her voice shaky. “Nobody has reached out to me at all. I know nothing of it.”
America’s untested rape kits piled up across the country over the course of decades.
Boxes about the size of a hardcover book each held evidence of a reported sexual assault – dried swabs of saliva and semen and blood, strands of hair, debris scraped from under fingernails. Each was collected from a person, most of them women and girls, during an hourslong exam. And each was shelved without being processed for DNA. The evidence crowded storerooms, tangible proof of law enforcement’s failure to support victims and hold rapists accountable.
Testing the kits was supposed to be the first step in righting that wrong. In some places that received federal grants, not even that happened.
A least a dozen grant recipients carved out exceptions to testing, leaving kits unprocessed for a second time. In one California county, officials boasted they had cleared their backlog, but only after deeming more than half of their kits ineligible for testing.
In many cases, officials have done little beyond sending the kits to a lab, reviewing the results and again closing the files. In Maryland, according to a state report, some law enforcement agencies have shown “significant reluctance” to reopen investigations and have even stated outright that they are disregarding DNA matches.
What’s more, some officials all but abandoned the idea of providing victims answers about what happened to their rape kits or apologies for how long testing took. One Kansas police agency has tried to reach just 17 victims from roughly 1,100 sexual assault kits. An official there said there are instances where DNA testing has identified the names of suspects for the first time but the victims have not been told, because officials don’t think their cases can be prosecuted.
Noël Busch-Armendariz, a University of Texas at Austin professor and researcher who has interviewed women with backlogged kits, said it is disheartening that victims – yet again – have been overlooked.
“Survivors of sexual assault mostly feel betrayed by the silence around what happened to them,” she said.
Tell us your story:If you know of a rape case that was neglected, or have experience with the system, tell us here.
Officials from the Department of Justice who oversee the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative declined to be interviewed.
In a written statement, spokeswoman Katherine Brown said the program has been instrumental in helping agencies across the country process untested kits, although she also noted that local laws and regulations can influence what happens next. Angela Williamson, who has led the federal program since its inception, acknowledged in a separate statement that local success will vary based on the level of commitment.
But Williamson said the program has contributed to a “critical cultural shift” around the importance of testing sexual assault evidence. In addition to seeking justice in backlogged cases, the initiative aims to overhaul how the criminal justice system responds to sexual assault. Grantees have also used their funding to improve DNA collection and its use, train police and prosecutors and modernize how survivors and their families are treated.
Williamson said it is too early to gauge the program’s success by the number of rapists who have been convicted because it can take years for cases to move from testing to potential conviction. Agency officials said DNA matches also can pop up long after a kit is tested as more profiles are uploaded to the federal database of DNA samples.
Williamson made a similar argument – that it’s too soon to judge the results – when The Atlantic highlighted the program’s paltry outcomes five years ago.
Yet the program’s data tracking is so poor that in some places, the federal government has no idea how many rapists were convicted – and likely never will.
Federal performance data is riddled with errors, misleading figures and blank fields, and officials were overcounting convictions on their website by 20% until after USA TODAY pointed out a discrepancy. At least 10 grant sites told USA TODAY they have not been reliably tracking key metrics such as the number of victims contacted or convictions won. A 2022 audit by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found grant staff at the Department of Justice failed to identify “problematic and struggling grantees” and that three of five sites reviewed couldn’t provide documents confirming the numbers they reported to the government.
Officials from the Department of Justice who oversee the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative declined to be interviewed.
In a written statement, spokeswoman Katherine Brown said the program has been instrumental in helping agencies across the country process untested kits, although she also noted that local laws and regulations can influence what happens next. Angela Williamson, who has led the federal program since its inception, acknowledged in a separate statement that local success will vary based on the level of commitment.
But Williamson said the program has contributed to a “critical cultural shift” around the importance of testing sexual assault evidence. In addition to seeking justice in backlogged cases, the initiative aims to overhaul how the criminal justice system responds to sexual assault. Grantees have also used their funding to improve DNA collection and its use, train police and prosecutors and modernize how survivors and their families are treated.
Williamson said it is too early to gauge the program’s success by the number of rapists who have been convicted because it can take years for cases to move from testing to potential conviction. Agency officials said DNA matches also can pop up long after a kit is tested as more profiles are uploaded to the federal database of DNA samples.
Williamson made a similar argument – that it’s too soon to judge the results – when The Atlantic highlighted the program’s paltry outcomes five years ago.
Yet the program’s data tracking is so poor that in some places, the federal government has no idea how many rapists were convicted – and likely never will.
Federal performance data is riddled with errors, misleading figures and blank fields, and officials were overcounting convictions on their website by 20% until after USA TODAY pointed out a discrepancy. At least 10 grant sites told USA TODAY they have not been reliably tracking key metrics such as the number of victims contacted or convictions won. A 2022 audit by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found grant staff at the Department of Justice failed to identify “problematic and struggling grantees” and that three of five sites reviewed couldn’t provide documents confirming the numbers they reported to the government.
