New York City detectives announced on Tuesday they had cracked a 23-year-old rape case that a newspaper columnist wrote at the time was a hoax. A woman was walking through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park during the daytime in 1994 when she was attacked by a stranger, who choked her from behind, dragged her up a wooded slope and raped her. She gave police a detailed description of her attacker but the NYPD initially cast some doubt on her account and shared its skepticism with the media.
- The late New York Daily News columnist, Mike McAlary, wrote that he had heard from a police source that the woman invented her story because, as an activist, she thought it would bolster a speech she was planning to give at a rally protesting violence against lesbians.
- police soon reversed their stance and reported that semen had been collected from the victim’s body and clothing, although with the technology available at the time they were not able to separate it from the victim’s DNA and search for a possible match.
- recently applied new technology and were able to match the sample from the rape kit with a known perpetrator on file.
- “The newspaper stories, which were relentless, day after day, were nearly as traumatizing as the rape itself,” Garbus said.
- modern technology had been used to retest the evidence and his team had matched the DNA to a notorious serial rapist, James Edward Webb, as first reported in the New York Post. Webb is currently serving 25 years to life in prison in upstate New York for raping a total of 10 women, six in the 1970s and then four in the mid-1990s during a stint out on parole. Boyce called Webb a “savage”, even though when challenged in his cell the inmate denied knowledge of the Prospect Park case.
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