Trying To Trace a Rapist

By Frank Trippett/Homestead

Sooner or later everybody hears about Homestead, a dwindling Pennsylvania mill town of 5,092 souls just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh. It was the site of historic labor-management strife in 1892, when striking workers lost a bloody (ten dead) battle with armed, union-busting Pinkerton agents hired by the Carnegie Steel Co. More recently, after U.S. Steel (now the USX Corp.) closed a plant that had provided about 15,000 jobs, the town commanded attention as a victim of the economic tides that have sunk smokestack industries. Last week Homestead blurted into national attention yet again -- this time because of a police campaign to solve a series of rapes by seeking the fingerprints of almost every black man in town.

The attacks, which began in 1983, were all on elderly women, five white and one black. By throwing a sheet over the head of each victim, the culprit had remained unseen. Yet hair samples and sketchy impressions of some witnesses indicated that the rapist was black. It also appeared likely that he was a local: he always seemed to know which women could be found alone in houses unprotected even by a dog. All of which made residents especially edgy, and made Police Chief Christopher Kelly particularly eager to solve the case.

About a month ago, the chief deployed his 13-man force with orders to ask all grown black men, with the exception of the obese, to agree to be fingerprinted. "We have an obligation to try every option within our means," proclaimed Kelly, 33, a Homestead native who has been on the force for 13 years. He sternly denied any racist sentiment and insisted -- convincingly, since at 6 ft. 5 in. and 280 lbs. he looks like a fellow who could go bear hunting with a switch -- he would have asked for fingerprints of whites if he had thought the attacker was white.

Homestead's black leaders generally supported the fingerprinting tactic. The Rev. Donald Turner, pastor of the Second Baptist Church, volunteered his prints and urged others to cooperate. "We're not here to prove you are the rapist," he told members of the black community, which makes up 40% of Homestead's population. "We want to prove that you are not the rapist." Alice Kirkland, president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., said her group would not oppose anyone who wanted to volunteer prints, adding, "We've had no complaints from the residents so far." One of two black officers on Kelly's force, Sergeant Ellsworth Ford, a 13-year veteran, has been behind the drive so warmly he has given his recent days off to it.

To be sure, it was easy to find black resentment of the police. "They are just grabbing for straws," a 27-year-old unemployed mechanic said last week as he stood talking with a couple of friends on a downtown street corner. "When they come up to you, they almost make you feel guilty." In an equally disdainful tone, a 23-year-old in the uniform of Pittsburgh's Institute of Security and Technology added, "When there's trouble out there, the cops aren't ever around." Yet only a handful of black men, six or so, refused to be printed, while some 125 volunteered.

It was inevitable, however, that the unorthodox technique of going through the black community collecting fingerprints would eventually provoke a controversy. No matter how "voluntary" the program, the notion of methodically asking people who were not individually suspect to submit to an intrusive procedure simply because they were black raised some worrisome racial and civil-liberties issues. Said James Lieber, executive director of the Pittsburgh branch of the American Civil Liberties Union: "Blacks must relinquish their privacy or become suspect." N.A.A.C.P. Executive Director Benjamin Hooks said it looked like "police power run amuck." William Penn, director of N.A.A.C.P.'s local branches, feared an "open season on black people."

By the middle of last week, Kelly's investigation had turned into a national story, and Homestead briefly became a media circus. While idlers in the doorway of the Ragtime Saloon gawked at network television crews outside police headquarters, the chief pressed on with his campaign. On Wednesday his men rushed to request fingerprints from a "suspicious" black man reported downtown; they found that he was merely an innocent man from Pittsburgh who was standing around waiting for his brother. Otherwise, Kelly's teams kept up ! their door-to-door canvass, collecting prints and handing out alarm horns to women in the blue-collar neighborhood where the rapes had been concentrated.

Oddly, an even more unorthodox police procedure went unreported: Kelly's men had asked many of those they interviewed to volunteer blood samples to be checked against bits of the rapist's blood in police possession. "We got 45 samples," Kelly noted last week.

As it turned out, it was neither the fingerprints nor the blood samples that ended the hunt. On Thursday night, while Kelly and others were being interviewed on ABC's Nightline about the case, police arrested a man who was trying to sell a shotgun at a pawn shop in nearby Braddock. The gun had been stolen from a house where one of the rapes had taken place. The suspect: Dennis Foy, 22, is unemployed and lives with his family on the same block where one of the rapes occurred. His father, unemployed Steelworker Julius Foy, 57, had voluntarily given his fingerprints and had told police he would urge his son to do likewise. The younger Foy confessed, thus closing Homestead's latest little footnote to history and allowing it to go back to the task of muddling through.