W. Griffin - Special Operations

"You just stay where you are, miss," Dohner said. "I'll get somebody to help us."

He got out of the car and walked quickly through the doors to the Emergency Room.

There was a middle-aged, comfortable-looking nurse standing by the nurse's station.

"I've got an assaulted woman outside," he said. "All she has on is a blanket."

The nurse didn't even respond to him, but she immediately put down the clipboard she had been holding in her hands and walked quickly to a curtained cubicle, pushing the curtains aside and then pulling out a gurney. She started pushing it toward the doors. By the time she got there, she had a licensed practical nurse, an enormous red-haired woman, and a slight, almost delicate black man in a white physician's jacket at her heels.

"Any injuries that you saw?" the doctor asked Dohner, who shook his head. "No."

The LPN, moving with surprising speed for her bulk, was at the RPC before anyone else. She pulled the door open.

"Can you get out of there without any help, honey?" she asked.

Mary Elizabeth Flannery looked at her as if the woman had been speaking Turkish.

The LPN leaned into the car and half pulled Mary Elizabeth Flannery from it, and then gently put her on the gurney. She spread a white sheet over her, and then, with a little difficulty, pulled Dohner's blanket from under the sheet.

"You're going to be all right, now, dear," the LPN said.

Dohner took the blanket. The doctor leaned over Mary Elizabeth Flannery as the LPN started pushing the gurney into the Emergency Room. Dohner folded the blanket and put it on the front passenger-side floorboard. Then he picked up the microphone.

"Fourteen Twenty-Three. I'm at Chestnut Hill Hospital with the victim."

"Fourteen Twenty-Three, a detective will meet you there."

"Fourteen Twenty-Three, okay," Dohner said, and then walked into the Emergency Room.

None of the people who had taken Mary Elizabeth Flannery from his car were in sight, but he heard sounds and detected movement inside the white curtained cubicle from which the nurse had taken the gurney. Dohner sat down in a chrome and plastic chair to wait for the detective, or for the hospital people to finish with the victim.

The LPN came out first, rummaged quickly through a medical equipment cabinet, muttered under her breath when she couldn't find what she was looking for, then went back into the cubicle. The nurse then came out, went to the same cabinet, swore, and then reached for a telephone.

Then she spotted a ward boy.

"Go to supply and get a Johnson Rape Kit," she ordered. "Get a half dozen of them, if you can."

She looked over at Dohner.

"She hasn't been injured," she said. "Cut, or anything like that."

"I'd like to get her name and address," Dohner said.

"That'll have to wait," the nurse said.

A minute or two later, the ward boy came running down the waxed corridor with an armful of small packages. He went to the curtained cubicle, handed one of the packages to someone inside, then put the rest in the medical equipment cabinet.

Officer Dohner knew what the Johnson Rape Kit contained, and how it was used, and he felt a wave of mixed rage and compassion for Mary Elizabeth Flannery, who seemed to him to be a nice young woman, and was about to undergo an experience that would be almost as shocking and distasteful for her as what the scumbag had already done to her.

The Johnson Rape Kit contained a number of sterile vials and swabs. Blood would be drawn from Mary Elizabeth Flannery into several of the vials. Tests for venereal disease and pregnancy would be made. The swabs would be used to take cultures from her throat, vagina, and anus, to determine the presence of semen and alien saliva, urine or blood.

It would be uncomfortable for her, and humiliating, but it was necessary to successfully prosecute the sonofabitch who did this to her, presuming they could catch him.

The "chain of evidence" would be carefully maintained. The assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, presuming again that the police could catch the rapist, would have to be prepared to prove in court that the results of the probing of Mary Elizabeth Flannery's bodily orifices had been in police custody from the moment the doctor handed them to Dohner (or a detective, if one had shown up by the time the doctor was finished with his tests) until he offered them as evidence in a courtroom.

Detective Dick Hemmings arrived at the Chestnut Hill Hospital Emergency Room twenty minutes after Officer Bill Dohner had taken her there. He found Dohner sitting in a chair, filling out a Form 75-48, which is the initial Report of Investigation. It is a short form, providing only the bare bones of what has happened.

Dohner nodded at Hemmings, who sat down beside him and waited until he had finished. Dohner handed the 75-48 to him. In a neat hand, he had written:"Compl. states a W/M broke into her apt, forced her to perform Involuntary Deviate Sex. Intercourse, urinated on her, tied her up, forced her into a van, amp; left her off at Bell's Mill Road amp; Forbidden Dr."

"Jesus," Hemmings said. "Where is she?"

"In there with the doctor," Dohner said, nodding toward the white curtained cubicle.

"Hurt?"

"No."

Dohner reached in his pocket and took out the cord he had cut from Mary Elizabeth Flannery's wrists. "This is what he tied her up with."

Hemmings saw that Bill Dohner had not untied the knot in the cord.

"Good job," he said. "Make sure the knot doesn't come untied. Give me a couple of minutes here to find out what we have, and then take the cord to Northwest and put it on a Property Receipt."

Dohner nodded. He held up a clear plastic bag, and dropped the cord in it.

"I got this from one of the nurses," he said.

A Property Receipt-Philadelphia Police Department Form 75-3-is used to maintain the "chain of evidence." As with the biologic samples to be taken from Mary Elizabeth Flannery's body, it would be necessary, presuming the case got to court, for the assistant district attorney to prove that the cord allegedly used to tie the victim's hands had never left police custody from the time Dohner had cut it from her wrists; that the chain of evidence had not been broken.

Property Receipts are numbered sequentially. They are usually kept in the desk of the Operations Room Supervisor in each district. They must be signed for by the officer asking for one, and strict department policy insists that the information on the form must either be typewritten orprinted in ink. Consequently, evidence is almost always held until the officer using a Property Receipt can find a typewriter.

"Anything happen at the scene?" Dohner asked.

"The Mobile Crime Lab got there when I was there," Hemmings said. " Nobody that looks like the doer has shown up. How long did he have her there?"

"I didn't get hardly anything out of her," Dohner said. "Just her name, and what this guy did to her. She's pretty shook up."

Hemmings finished filling out the form, acknowledging receipt of one length of knotted cord used to tie up Mary Elizabeth Flannery, signed it, and handed the original to Dohner, who handed him the cord.

"You might as well go, Bill," Hemmings said. "I'll take it from here."

"I hope you catch him," Dohner said, standing up and giving his hand to Hemmings.

Then he went outside and got in his car and started the engine and called Police Radio and reported that Fourteen Twenty-Three was back in service.

Mary Elizabeth Flannery looked with frightened eyes at the stranger who had entered the curtained cubicle.

"Miss Flannery, my name is Dick Hemmings, and I'm a detective. How are you doing?"

She did not reply.

"Is there anyone you would like me to call? Your parents, maybe? A friend?"