JANE DOE JANUARY-Emily Winslow

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his apartment in Brooklyn. His DNA entered in the dye's criminal database after a drug conviction had been matched to evidence from a rape in Pennsylvania years earlier. Over the next year, Friar and his lawyer fought his extradition and prosecution for the rape and another like it, which occurred in nineteen ninety two. The victims, one from January of that year, the other from November, were kept anonymous in

the media. This is the story of Jane Doe January, Emily Winslow was a young drama student at Carnegie Mellon University's elite Conservatory in Pittsburgh when a man brutally attacked and raped her in January nineteen ninety two. While the police's search for her rapists proved futile, Emily reclaimed her life. Over the course of the next two decades, she fell in love, married, had two children, and began writing mystery novels set in her new hometown of Cambridge, England.

and restless crime novelist searches for clarity. Beginning her own investigation, She delves into Friar's family and past, reconnects with the detectives of her case, and works with prosecutors in the months leading to trial. As she recounts her long term quest for closure, Winslow offers a heartbreakingly honest look at a vicious crime and offers invaluable insights into the mind

and heart of a victim. The book they were featuring today is Jane Dull January, My twenty Years Search for Truth and Justice with my special guests, author Emily Winslow. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing this interview. Emily Winslow, Thanks.

actors was so small. There were just sixteen of us, and we were together, you know, from nine in the morning to eleven at night most days. It was an exhausting program. It was really difficult sometimes, but we had each other, and having that coherent group turned out to be exactly what I needed when I had to cope with what suddenly happened in the winter of nineteen ninety two. And further answer your questions, yes, I was a devout Christian.

I still am a practicing Christian, and at the time, the way that that played out is that and I think this is what you were indicating, is that I was waiting for marriage before being intimate with a boyfriend. So I was rather innocent, which was something that my acting teachers sometimes struggled with. And I was very idealistic, and I think I was a little bit adventurous. I had spent the previous summer in the Middle East by

myself because I wanted to see the pyramids. So that's that's who I was at twenty two at CARNEGIEA Millen University in Pittsburgh.

a studio apartment and lived alone. We were with each other, we were with other people all day long, constantly working with other people, and living alone was my retreat. It was I could I could go home and deep breaths and sort of center myself again. Uh, Shady Side was a place that seemed very safe because it was busy and it just seemed like a I guess, a typical nice neighborhood. It was well lit, it was charming, and yes, I felt very safe there.

my building who I had never seen before. Like I said, it's not that odd. We were, you know. I was just a block from Walnut Street, where there are lots of people from all over in Pittsburgh, So it wasn't that strange. But it was a little strange to see somebody right next to my building. But I thought, well, it's a public street, he has a right to be there,

and just went on my way. What made me remember him, because obviously that wouldn't have stuck in my mind, was that when I got my change and ran my errands and came back is I saw him again, Except he wasn't near my building. He was walking towards my building. And I'm not sure if he deliberately cleverly planned it the way it happened, in which case, gosh, that was clever, or if it just happened to be this way timing wise. But he had been behind me, If he had been

following me, I would have been suspicious immediately. That's creepy being followed. And I would have had a lot of alternatives, a lot of stores I could have gone into, a lot of restaurants, a lot of people I could have turned to. But instead, what was happening was He also happened to be walking towards the same door I was, but from a completely different direction, and so that was enough for me to think, Oh, he doesn't mean me.

He just happens to be. He must have been waiting for a friend in front of our building, and now he's going to go ring the doorbell and see if his friend is in. So I just kept walking towards the door. But I did think to myself, you know what, I am not going to hold the door for him, you know, as you would for a neighbor. It's always a kindness to, you know, hold the door. Said, they don't have to get out their keys. But I thought, you know what, I don't know him, I will I'm

just going to let the door close behind me. And I was close enough to the building, and he was far enough away from the building that actually that would have worked, except he started jogging to catch up with me and catch the door, which is exactly what happened.

He caught the door, and I remember his hand catching the door right at the level of my ear, and I was I wished he hadn't caught the door, But I thought to myself, well, there are plenty of times I didn't want to bother, you know, digging my keys out and stuff, and so I might have jogged to catch the door behind a neighbor. So I just kind

of talked myself out of it. I wasn't anxious enough to turn around and leave the building, which I could have done, but I was a little bit suspicious enough that instead of going up the stairs and he would have had to follow me and gone right to my apartment, I decided to delay, and I fiddled with my mailbox a bit, just to just to you know, to kill time, and he walked up the stairs, and I remember feeling relief. I felt so relieved. I thought, Oh, see, what were

you worried about. He's gonna go upstairs and see his friend or maybe he lives in one of the apartments upstairs. And I've somehow I've never seen him before. But what I didn't realize at the time, and in fact I didn't realize it until over twenty years later, when I was looking at the notes that the police had made of how I described that night to them, is that by fiddling with my mailbox, I showed him my apartment number, and so what he was able to do was he

just went upstairs. And my apartment door happened to be next to this stairwell going up to the third floor, and it's a closed stairwell without a door, and he hid in that stairwell. And when I unlocked my door, he jumped and pushed me inside the apartment, shut the door, put his hand over my mouth, pressed me against the wall, and said, do you want to die?

a rapist who is not sadistic. They don't want to hurt their victim, but they are willing to hurt their victim as much as is required to get them to comply with exactly what they want. And that does describe him very well. And I did try to comply to the best of my ability. I wasn't always able to and then he had to use some more force. He

had to smother me twice because I was screaming. And I actually I think I heard I don't actually know if this is true, but I heard in the gossip that the upstairs neighbor had heard me screaming, but because I had stopped, they didn't do anything. And I don't hold that against them at all. I mean, we've all heard something that sounds distressing for a moment and then it stops. Well it stopped.

I must say. Actually he was fairly efficient about it. He knew exactly what he wanted and he went about getting it, and then amazingly, wonderfully, he just left. And that was an incredible moment because I thought for sure I was going to die, and when it seemed like he wasn't going to kill me, I thought for sure he was going to try to you know, make it so that I could not call the police, make it so that I could not easily, you know, get out

of the apartment in some way. But instead he just once he was done, he told me to rest vaguely gestured to my feet, and then left and closed the door behind him. And I was able to just leap up, lock the door. That was the most important thing, and then call nine to one one.

come into their you come into their care. So tell us about the again, the ordeal of the DNA, the rape kit itself part me right, Well, the so.

magazines that teenagers read. So I answered the the door kind of, you know, still in still holding my dress together, and of course they needed my clothes for evidence. Once I changed, they took me to the hospital, and the hospital staff were absolutely wonderful. It was McGee Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh. Probably the emergency room, I would imagine, although I'm not absolutely certain, and I remember there were lots and lots of nurses, and my doctor was a woman, and the nurses were.

compliance that made this not a rape. There was nothing in my compliance that made me complicit in this experience. And I really appreciated that.

But you know, you hear terrible stories about women who have you know, have been through terrible experience, been through a stranger rape, identify their attacker as an eyewitness in court, swear that it's true and they mean it, and then it turns out years later DNA shows that it was somebody else. I would never ever, ever want, you know, my eyewitness testimony of somebody I don't actually know, to

be what puts somebody away. So I am. That's one of the wonderful blessings of DNA evidence is that now I really truly know, Yes I did once once they caught him and I looked at photos of him. I absolutely recognized him. But I would never want that recognition to be the soul the soul evidence.

decades later after he was arrested. After the man was arrested, not detective Valenta. He sat down with me and he apologized for having to ask me these questions, but he said that he needed to know everything that happened because every different kind of time which would become a different charge when they caught him. And that was just the right thing to say to me. It was just the right mix of you know, we can do something about this,

and every bit of this matters. That was just very reassuring, and rather than making me tell it again myself, he just listed different things and had me say yes no, yes, no, yes no, and just made a little record of all the different acts that would be held against him when he was finally caught, and that was very well handled, at least for me in particular, that was very well handled.

at that time, there were unfortunately no databases yet. That wasn't until the late night that states started keeping records of criminal DNA that were well, not say, but you know, the records of DNA analysis of people who had been convicted for various crimes, and then the FBI, their database called CODIS came about in the late nineties that started incorporating all the states records one by one, and that's when you could start to use the evidence from stranger rapes.

That's when you could start to do something with the evidence from rapes in which there was no suspect. But until then, these evidence kits, these rape kits, just got stored. It's not because the police didn't care. It's not because the forensic lab didn't think my case was worthy, not at all. It's because there was no one to compare it to. And by the time Pennsylvania got a database, by the time the CODIS database came into its own, my case was old news. And again it's not because

they didn't care. It's because they were just trying to keep up with the current caseload. And the detective in Pittsburgh who in twenty thirteen when this case came to court, who was in fact working on cold cases and did so out of great care for those old victims waiting for their turn. She did that on top of her normal workload in the sex crimes and child abuse unit. And even she with all her determination and skill could only manage to fit in an average of two cold

cases a year out of you know, the hundreds. So you know, the detectives I dealt with really cared, and the medical personnel I dealt with really cared. It was just a matter of bad timing technology wise. And then you know, being on the back.

put myself back into. You know, I took three weeks off of school and I just I stayed at a

friend's house. I moved in with friends immediately from the hospital, and then it was really important to have school to go back to, to have this structure to just slip into and have all these little milestones already decided and set before me, and to know that everybody around me knew what had happened and we could talk about it, and that the boys in my class, that we would touch each other in class, you know, or just as part of a scene or something, and I knew it

was a way to sort of adjust to saying these are good men. That was the bad men. These are different And it was just hugely reassuring. I'll never stop being grateful for their kindness and especially for the way that they took on what happened to me as sort of something that had happened to all of us. It was an offense against us as a group, and they were hurt by it too, and it was just wonderfully reassuring.

this is important. Hey I'm really hurt. Hey you know he was wrong. I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't have to push any of that because they acknowledged that so clearly, and that was that was great. I feel like that freed me to Yes, I could also be angry if that's what I felt, but I didn't have to be angry to prove anything. It was great. It was very very It was loving and important, and they did it very very well.

how do you go about rebuilding your life? And is this crime, this writing any part of that, is there any influence whatsoever at all? As other people asked you in your book, you read about it. So tell us about this transition and how is it that you become from acting to writing and how do you rebuild your life in actuality?

to let myself be a mess anymore. It was more like, right, now until we hit that year, no guilt, be as much of a mess as you need to be. It was giving me that freedom. It's like, look, I have It's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you know you have to get up at seven, and you've woken up and it's not seven yet, and it's like, Okay, I don't actually have to deal with this yet. And so giving myself that year, it wasn't

a pressure, it was the opposite. It was just a for right now, you don't need to worry about being a mess. Being a mess is completely appropriate. And so it was eighteen months to graduate, and you know, everything was the school, the program let me have some leeway. But for the most part I did everything same as everyone else, and I acted in all the same plays. And that was a wonderful, stabilizing normalcy having that to

work on each day I had. I don't know if I left acting or rather declined to pursue acting because of the rape. A lot of people ask me that because it was such a big change to get into this program, to actually make it through this program and then decide not to go to New York not audition, I honestly don't know if it was because of the rape, because how do you ever know who you would have been or what you would have done anyway, you know, the early twenties is a time of such change and

trying out different things, So it's hard to say. But before I had gone to this conservatory, I had been trying to choose between writing, acting, writing acting, writing acting, and finishing at CMU. I must admit I found writing to be a real release as an introvert, not just because I could do it alone, but also because it was judged from a distance. An acting school, you're given all the feedback you're given is so personal, and it's

right to your face. And it's not just about being good or bad at acting, but it's about you know, we're going to reteach you how to walk, We're going to reteach you how to sit. We're going to reteach you literally to breathe. They want to start from scratch and teach you how to breathe. And so one can just feel very fundamentally criticized over and over and over again. And of course as a writer, one can be fundamentally criticized, but at least it doesn't happen with people face to

face with you in the same room. So it seemed like, oh, that's a vast improvement. So that's why I decided, Okay, well let's do this. And I was doing some research for a play I wanted to write and ended up going to graduate school to complete that research. And you know, you asked me, how how do you get over it? And I think it's important to say that. I don't think I got over it or past it. It's I incorporated it. This this thing. It happened. It was terrible,

and it's part of me. I guess when people say over it, they mean how do you get over the negativity of the event controlling you? You know, and that certainly is an important thing to try to do. But I guess for me, I don't feel like I got away from it so much as I just accepted it and made something else out of it. I started writing about it very shortly after it happened, and that was how I won my first writing awards, and that was very gratifying.

I can be proud of. That's what was truly therapeutic to me, taking it and turning it into something useful, turning it into something beautiful, turning it into something good.

to Cambridge, England. So tell us a little bit about and you don't go too much into it, and you do talk about your children a little bit, but obviously your husband is an extraordinary person and you're going through this. Before we talk about what happens in twenty thirteen, just tell us a little bit about part of this rebuilding process where you meet the love of your life and rebuild and have a family.

who eventually became my husband. I still have a letter she wrote me at that time saying that she'd met him and had a crush on him, and they became good friends and kept in touch for years after she came back to America, and after she came back to America's when she decided that actually I would be a better match with him than her, And she spent five years trying to set us up, which was really hard because we lived in different countries, but she finally managed

it five years later, and after we'd heard about each other from her for those five years, and when we finally met, we got married eight months later, which was just lovely. And we we lived in Silicon Valley, California because of his job, and we had baby number one, and then to New England baby number two, and then back to Cambridge, England because we thought that would be

a really great place to raise the kids. It's a beautiful city, it's an inspiring city, and the university is so generous and open with all kinds of educational activities and inspiration. And for me, the surprise was when I got here, it's Cambridge that finally was the last puzzle piece I needed to write my first novel. I had been writing for magazines, I had been a puzzle designer, I had been writing poetry and essays and plays that

I'd wanted to write a novel. And it was finally when I got here to this city that something finally clicked into place. And that's the novel that became The Whole World, which was my first crime novel, the first in the series. And I'm still writing crime novel set in Cambridge today.

And when i'd phone, you know, almost always whoever I had spoken to, you know, two years prior or three years prior, wouldn't work there anymore. So I'd be handed off to a random person who, of course, you know, those shady side rapes in nineteen ninety two were just you know, out of many, completely forgotten, so I'd have

to tell the whole story over again. And even if you know, when this case, when this prosecution was happening, and I had detectives and there were active who were actively working on my case, even then, phoning was stressful because you never knew what shifts they were working, so I'd be trying to figure out the time difference between

England and Pittsburgh and when should I call. It's not like they worked office hours and I could say, okay, it's ten am in Pittsburgh, they should be in What if they had worked the night before the overnight shift or something. So it was just never knowing when was the right time, never knowing who you were going to get, always having to explain, explain, explain to essentially a stranger.

And one of the saddest moments I remember was when I was changing my address book, my handwritten address book into digital, you know, I was typing everything in and I had in the last leaf of the book the names of all the detectives that I had spoken to over years, in years and years, just constantly changing, changing, changing, and I threw the address book away without copying the names out, because I thought, what does it matter, They're

gone one after another. That detective's left, that detective's left, that detective's left, doesn't matter. I just threw it away.

that point twenty one years since the rape itself. Over those twenty one years, of course, I had dreamed over and over and over again that I wanted this good

thing to happen. But I had always assumed that the process would be, you know, first the detectives finally agree to pull my evidence kit, which had not yet happened over those twenty one years of me asking them that they would finally agree to put it in line at the lab to be analyzed, and then of course that would take weeks or months, and then we might get a result, and then we might get a match, and

then they might there might be an arrest. I thought, you know, this would happen, you know, this would be steps along a fairly long process. But this came out of nowhere because they weren't arresting him for my evidence. They weren't arresting him for my case. What it happened was in nineteen ninety two. In November, which was ten months after my attack, very near me, just a couple of streets away, there had been another rape, and I

remember when it was reported in the newspaper. One of my teachers told me about it because it seemed very obvious that it was likely the same man, and the police thought the same thing. So they had actually pulled the kit of this November victim and analyzed her evidence and identified the man and gone to arrest him. He was at that time living in Brooklyn, And so when I got the news, it was amazing news, but it

really really came out of nowhere. And also it came for another woman's case, not specifically mine, although they were now determined to try to link it to mine. So it was full of hopefulness that, oh my gosh, this is finally happening. My case is going to go to court. But on the other hand, all this tension of what if my evidence still isn't viable. What if it is viable and it's not this man? What if what if

her case goes forward and I'm just left behind. I'm so close, but will I get that last that last you know, few months forward? And find that this is actually happening. And I feel like those few months waiting for the lab tests of my evidence and waiting for his extradition from New York to Pennsylvania probably felt longer than the intervening twenty years.

absolutely certain they had the right man. But as long as he claimed that they didn't, this delay just went.

short period of time on his arrival. That's all part of having a speedy trial, right, So you know, we were just waiting and waiting. Once the extradition happened, it was all going to go very fast. In terms of the first time I was going to be testifying, and what I was picturing was when he would finally get into court. I imagined that I would get to learn all these things I wanted to know. I would get to learn who he is and why he did it? Does he rape anybody? Why did he choose me? How

did he end up in shady Side that night? Why there? Why my building? All these things I wanted to know. And yet once we got a prosecutor assigned to us, and once I went through the preliminary hearing, which is a sort of rehearsal of court, but much more casual. It's in the municipal court building instead of the proper courthouse, and it's you know, it's just got regular chairs, you know, nothing fancy, no witness box to sit in, and the judge, I kid you not chewed gum the entire time, which

actually relaxed me and made me laugh. I thought that was quite funny. Once I went through that process and we got assigned prosecutors and we were starting to actually build the case, I realized that I was the only person who wanted all that information. The detectives and the prosecutors only needed evidence and information about our cases. They only needed to know what happened to me and the other victim. They only needed to know what happened those nights.

And I realized that nobody was going to be looking for the explanations that I was craving, the explanations that, to me are part and parcel of finally finding out who this guy is. So it was after the preliminary hearing in January twenty fourteen that I came back to England and we were preparing for what would become the proper trial, eventually scheduled for October, that I realized if I wanted to know any of this, I was going to have to figure it out myself, and so I

put some bounds on myself. I absolutely never ever want to interact with him, so that's completely off the table. I also don't want to at all interact with his family, and in my book, I'm very careful to never use the names of any family members because you know, it's not their fault that they're related to him. Sure, and so I was pretty limited. But the Internet is a

wonderful thing and also a pretty maddening thing. Just because you find a page on the Internet that says something doesn't mean it's exactly right, doesn't mean it necessarily means what you think it means. A lot of times there would be a place name and it was unclear, well is that a county or a city. A lot of times there would be an incarceration date. Is that the date he went in, the date he went out, the

date he was sentenced, the date the crime happened. There was a lot of ambiguity, especially since I'm looking for the life of somebody who was born in I think nineteen fifty two, so of course most of his life is pre Internet. But I was able to use not only the Internet but also the Freedom of Information Act to find out about his history in the military and calling county clerk's offices to try to trace his record of arrests and incarcerations. And I was finally able to

put together story of his life. And it's not a story that answered the why questions, and it's not a story that gave me any kind of explanatory trauma.

And by researching and looking into his life, he just gradually became smaller and smaller, until he was just a person, you know, he was just the size of me and everybody else, And that, of course, was wonderfully comforting. And the other thing is that, you know, I had always hoped that I would hear him testify, although realistically, and probably if I had thought about it really hard, I probably would have always known he would never testify. It's not really in his favor to do so with all

the evidence against him. But I had always hoped to hear in his words, what was this to him? And while I'll never have that, what eventually was found and this was you know, when I was writing out the chapters where I'm doing the research. It genuinely happened this way. I did not manipulate the timing of this. This was the piece of information that I wanted most and had been trying from the start to get so hard. Was delayed by all kinds of things outside of my control,

and it arrived last. And what it was was he had been convicted of rape back in the seventies and served seven years in sing Sing and I'd been trying to get information about that case. You know, the mentions in the newspaper were exceedingly brief, and given my track record of the information I'd been getting about other arrest and incarceration, I wasn't expecting much.

I know, half an inch does not sound impressive, but when everything else i'd been getting had been a single sheet of paper, or like maybe three, if it's really generous, getting a half inch stack of paper in the mail was very exciting, and what I found in there which absolutely shocked me. So I had been referring to this rape for which he was arrested in in nineteen seventy six.

I think I'd been calling it his first known rape, and I'd been couching it that way because, of course, d just because this is the first one that he was arrested for doesn't mean that it was the first one that he committed. But actually, once I got this packet in the mail, I believe that this was his first rape because what he did afterward is he drove

himself straight to the police station and confessed it. And there in those documents was his detailed confession of what I believe was the first time he did this terrible act. And you know, it's not a confession of what he did to me, but it, I guess it accomplished the same thing for me, seeing it in his words, not what he did to me, seeing his point of view

on him doing this act. I guess it was sufficient and I got enough information at that point that I was able to stop and say this is enough.

shuffled in there with the biggest defenders these detectives. Tell us a little bit about that, because I think it's just a profound scene in your book.

because by law it had to happen very quickly. And I thought, as I was preparing for that that well, I just assumed that it was obvious that the most profound thing of that trip to Pittsburgh was going to be seeing this man again after what was at that point twenty two years and you know, and I wondered, will I be frightened? Will I be angry? Will I even recognize him? Will he recognize me? Will I see him recognizing me? And how will he react to me?

Will he, you know, will he look ashamed or will he look angry or will he you know, uh leer at me? I don't know. It was it was all this, what is it going to be like to see him again? And I assumed that was going to be the most important thing that happened. Anyway. I went to Pittsburgh, and I reconnected with the detective who had questioned me at the hospital, who had since uh retired from the police and was now working at University of Pittsburgh. And he

was he was really wonderful. He had been uh helping me over email, helping me deal with the the current detectives and get the information that I wanted about how the case was going. I got to meet the current detective, I got to meet our prosecutor for the first time. And what ended up happening was that after testifying, when I phoned my husband to tell him what that had been like, when I emailed my friends back home to tell them what that had been like, I didn't talk

about seeing Arthur Fryer. I talked about the detective and the prosecutor and the judge who was chewing gum. The good guys seemed so much more significant. Interacting with them was so was just it was such a gift, how much they cared and getting to know them in person and seeing how they took care of me. And what you're describing in court is so. In the municipal courthouse,

as I said, they don't have witness boxes. Instead of sitting facing out to the audience is the wrong word, but you know what I mean, out to all the people in the courtroom. Instead, you just stand up and face the judge and just talk to him from a

standing position. And so when it was my turn to testify, we all stood in a line and it was me, my old detective, my new detective, the prosecutor, the defense attorney and Arthur Fryar at the end of that line, and the two detectives and the prosecutor were all tall men, and the prosecutor, specifically and deliberately, when he was asking me questions, positioned himself to block my view of Arthur Fryar, and that physical arrangement of them being so much bigger

than him that I literally couldn't even see Arthur Fryer. That that is a perfect metaphor for how I felt coming away from that experience, that the good guys were so much more important in my life than that person who had done that terrible thing.

and beyond the call of duty. So she becomes along with Bill and with Don Honan and April, these are the people that help you prepare for this again, I can't even imagine a treputation trepidation that you are feeling in this seven weeks of something that you've anticipated for your entire life. So tell us what is the process behind there, and what is the risk and what are the things that could go wrong? And tell us what is happening just prior to this anticipated trial.

The prosecutor was convinced that Arthur Fryar would plead, and actually, if you look at statistics bears that out conviction statistics, and so he was delivering that to me as good news. Good news, he's probably going to plead. We have a perfect case. He'll probably plead. Then we don't have to worry about a jury because, as you know, the jury has to all agree. One person doesn't like the victim, the jury. It can go wrong. It's unpredictable, even when

you have a great case. And I, on the other hand, was saying, no, no, I don't want that to happen because I want to testify. And part of the reason that testifying was so important to me is that a victim actually has two opportunities to speak in a court case. The first is to testify, and that's when you describe what the person did to you, You describe their criminal actions. That's what I wanted to say. The second thing where a victim has the opportunity to speak is in the

sentencing phase, and that's called a victim impact statement. And I absolutely dreaded the victim impact statement. And the reason why I didn't like that is because the victim impact statement, rather than saying rather than talking about what the bad person did, you're saying how what he did affected you. And I felt like the fact that I had built a good life afterward would be taken as minimizing his crime.

And I didn't think that was fair that me having made something out of this, that me having had a great support system, that that made what he did less bad, less worthy of punishment. Where I was reading you know, uh newspaper stories of other rape cases in Pittsburgh, and the victim impact statements would be full of you know, my career never recovered, my marriage fell apart, never had sex again, you know all these you know, attempted suicide,

all these enormous things. And the feeling I got is that that that was how you That was how you purchased a cent since you purchased a sentence by proving he ruined your life. And I think that is a terrible price to ask a victim to pay, to have to say, yes, he ruined my life, and that's the only way you're going to get a good, strong sentence. I don't want the court case to be about me at all. So I resented the heck out of the

victim impact statement. And I felt like if he pled that that's all I would be left with.

could happen. What does happen and why?

was also unconstitutional. Case would have to be withdrawn. What this law was It had to do with the statute of limitations. Now, this is a lot like the DNA evidence. You know, people knew about DNA evidence from the late eighties early nineties, but statutes of limitations took much longer to catch up. Statutes of limitations were from you know, he said, she said, days when there wasn't something concrete

proof like DNA evidence. And so I remember following for years how states were trying to account for DNA evidence. And there were two ways that seemed to come up over and over again. One was no name warrants. That's where some jurisdictions would try instead of that they didn't have the person to accuse, they didn't have the person

to charge and arrest. Instead, they would say, I charge John Doe, the person with this pattern of DNA, so that they could say, yes, we did charge this crime within the statute of limitations, Maybe they'll catch him, you know.

Decades later, what Pennsylvania did to try to get around the statute of limitations for their old cases that had DNA evidence was they passed a law I believe called something like a DNA exception, which is that if you have new DNA evidence that points to a previously unsuspected person, then you have a fresh year on top of that statute of limitations, and that year begins from the time that that DNA match comes comes to be discovered, and you have a year to charge this person bring them

to court. And that law had been used successfully several times to bring old rapists to justice in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately in our case, because that law was passed in I believe two thousand and four, when our cases were already out of statute of limitations. What the Supreme Court had decided, and as much as it breaks my heart, I understand why they felt this was right. You know, in order to break a law, it has to be a law

that exists when you commit the act. Right, you can't arrest somebody for a law that you make after the fact. And in the same way, the Supreme Court said, unless a crime is still within their statute of limitations when the DNA exception law was passed, it cannot be applied. So our case, having already been out of statute of limitations when the DNA exception law was put into put onto the books, we were not eligible to benefit from it. And so the case just evaporated just like that.

to make sure you looked at the jury. This is in this way I could have made sure that they could hear you. That's where the judge would be, you know they What happened was we grieved the case together, and that was hugely important, Just like with my my drama class. It was about us experiencing a loss together, not just me experiencing a loss and them, you know, looking after me. We were all grieved by what had happened and we share that, and you know, it was hard.

It was hard coming to grips with that this was not going to end the way that I wanted it to end, not least because you know, if you have a conviction and you get a sentence, you can say something like, yes, this terrible thing that was done to me, this was worth you know, thirty years of a man's life. That's how bad it was. You know, you can it gives it a value. That's you know that that's somebody else that a bunch of other people have agreed, yes,

this crime was worth that. That's how significant it is. And you know all of that, all of that was lost. But what what I had been pursuing for those two decades that I kept calling the Pittsburgh Police was, you know, it was unfinished business. I knew there was more to be done. We had this evidence kit had never been tested. There was more that we could do. Let's do it. Let's do it, Let's do it. And even though we didn't get the ending we wanted, all of us had

done all that we could. And that was that was a finish of sorts. And just as you know, at the preliminary hearing that the good guys became more important, were revealed to me, more important and more significant in my life than the man than the bad man. That's how That's how I referred to him in my mind for twenty years. But I didn't know his name. I still don't like to say his name.

and determined and kind, and then my class. It expands even farther. Well, it's that whole, you know, year and a half that I finished university, and and my friends and my teachers and my family were all so kind. And then it goes on to to include this prosecution. And you know, obviously the rape. The rape was a

terrible thing. Obviously if you just look at that half hour, if you just look at what Arthur Fryer did, But if you think of it as some that started with the rape and became a much larger thing, that larger thing is full of good people and so much kindness.

Fryer again a testament of you moving forward. What happens to Arthur Fryer and what's your reaction? Uh?