CLEVELAND, Ohio – The man standing in front of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Nancy McDonnell admitted to raping a woman, a stranger he’d offered to buy beer for early one morning more than 15 years earlier.
Lee Jones dragged the 43-year-old behind Lutheran Hospital on the city’s West Side, leaving lacerations on her body and a scar on her lip that still remains.
The crime wasn’t a first for Jones who was in his 20s then.
Now, at 38, it was his seventh adult rape conviction (he was also found delinquent for rape as a teen.)
“You have to be punished for the awful, hateful crimes that you committed on all these individual women,” the judge said, according to a transcript from the hearing last January.
Lee Jones, 38Ohio Department of Rehab and Corrections
Jones, though, shared a different perspective, one that provides a window into psyche of serial rapists who attacked virtually unchecked for years and a criminal justice system let them.
“All of them was crack fiends, they was crack fiends,” Jones told McDonnell. “One was my ex-girlfriend.”
McDonnell retorted: “I don’t care if they’re crack fiends. I don’t care if they’re alcoholics. I don’t care if they’re criminals themselves.”
Jones persisted, taking aim the woman he had just admitted to raping behind a hospital.
“She was a crack fiend. She was broke and she was also a prostitute,” he blurted out.
Again, McDonnell tried to set him straight.
“No one, no one, can be raped. Not a prostitute, not a saint, not a nun, no one.”
The judge’s blunt message, punctuated with a 10-year sentence, appeared lost on Jones, who later appealed her decision and lost.
Judge Nancy McDonnell in court in 2016. The judge disagreed with defendant, Lee Jones, arguments to her at his sentencing for rape.Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer
If Jones thought nobody would notice his pattern, for a while at least, it seemed he was right.
In 2003, he was prosecuted for two rapes and landed in prison.
But it was years later before DNA from rape kits started to tie Jones to seven other rapes women reported between 1996 and 2002. He’s now been convicted in five of the cases; two more are pending.
Old cases offer hindsight
Jones’ case is one of hundreds recently re-opened that offer hindsight into how the Cuyahoga County criminal justice system handled rape cases before an effort to test thousands of rape kits were sent for testing.
In previous decades, fewer than a third of Cleveland rape cases even made it to a courtroom – especially if they involved adult victims that might be perceived as “less credible” because of drug use, mental health issues or sex work.
When those cases made it to court and garnered a conviction sentences often were often brief.
It’s now clear that the Lee Jones’ of the world were aware of that fact – and it helped them in picking their targets.
There’s some evidence that trend is changing, though slowly, starting with the soul-searching that came in the aftermath of the 11 murders and rapes committed by Anthony Sowell, now sentenced to death for his crimes.
In the years prior to discovery of the women’s bodies on Imperial Avenue in 2009, only 27 percent of sexual assault cases were charged by city prosecutors or presented to a grand jury, a 2010 Plain Dealer analysis showed.
In 2015, Cleveland’s Sex Crime & Child Abuse unit sent almost half of all reported rapes and 45 percent of felony sexual assault cases to the county for potential prosecution.
More improvement might be seen yet.
Last year, Cleveland and the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office piloted a process that allowed county prosecutors to review rape cases Cleveland rejected for charges. If a case wasn’t charged, both city and county prosecutors signed off on that decision. The pilot wasn’t continued but other routes that would allow county prosecutors to review those cases are being considered.
Cases with ‘vulnerable victims’ get more attention
Crimes that went virtually uninvestigated in the past often involved adults who were troubled, mentally ill or drug addicted, research shows.
Better investigations in those cases, ones that look for potential serial patterns, could prevent future rapes, according to researchers in Detroit and Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University.
Detectives and prosecutors for too many years used the so-called victim credibility issue to manage their caseloads, said former Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty. They’d ask victims questions like: “You sure want to go through this? Or they’re going to whoop you up on the stand.”
“We’ve learned we have to confront our own biases and look at who gets raped. We can’t just wait for the so-called perfect victim, the suburban housewife whose home is broken into,” McGinty said in an interview before leaving office last year.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley, who defeated McGinty, said he will continue support for the the work of the multi-agency Sexual Assault Kit task force, and his office will continue to work to prosecute rapists who pose a danger to the community while also listening to and supporting victims.
Assistant County Prosecutor Rick Bell, who has been with the office for more than 25 years, said the attitude change toward rape cases started more than a decade ago, but rape kit testing caused more of a seismic shift that forced investigators and prosecutors to view their roles differently and to embrace the need for advocates to support and listen to the concerns of victims.
That doesn’t mean investigators and prosecutors don’t still have tough discussions about their own biases and about how judges, or more unpredictable juries, will perceive those victims if they testify.
During one such debate at a task force meeting, McGinty became exasperated that a case against a violent rapist might not go forward because of the victim’s history.
“I don’t care if she was the Whore of Calcutta, she didn’t deserve to be raped,” he blurted out.
McGinty later explained his exasperation stemmed from knowing that the most vulnerable victims were “canaries in the coalmine” who did were doing law enforcement a favor when they bravely reported being raped.
Bell said prosecutors who pick juries for rape cases have noticed that citizens are more aware of the power of rape kits and the DNA they hold and are more willing to accept that serial rapists will target victims they think nobody will believe.
Caution about pressuring victims
Across the country, there’s caution among victims, advocates and some policymakers that after decades of ignoring cases, a newfound zeal for investigating and prosecuting cases and blanket state laws mandating all rape evidence be submitted for testing could result in fewer victims – not more — reporting crimes to police.
The intention of taking a potential serial rapist off the streets is noble, but taking away a victim’s choice at any step in the process can have unintended and negative consequences, Sondra Miller, president & CEO of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center said.
Miller said law enforcement has come a long way in understanding trauma and she hopes they’ll continue to become more victim-centered.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office Violence Against Women last month cautioned law enforcement against submitting all rape kits for testing without a victims’ consent, especially so-called anonymous kits collected from victims who chose not to file a police report.
Ohio’s law requires all kits be submitted.
“OVW’s position — which is shared by a large and diverse community of professionals working inside and outside the justice system on behalf of victims– is that any approach to addressing sexual assault must prioritize the rights and needs of those most affected by these crimes: the victims themselves” the office stated.
Bell said prosecutors understand that each case is different and so are the victims’ responses, which prosecutors take into consideration with the help of victim advocates.
‘She was my girlfriend’
Lee Jones is behind bars until at least 2058, regardless of what happens in his current cases.
One of this court-appointed attorneys attributed his behavior, in part, to being struck by a car while collecting cans on the highway at age 9. After that, his family said, he was never the same.
So why keep charging him with old rapes?
Assistant County Prosecutor Mary Weston, who handles cold cases, says every victim deserves a chance at justice in their case.Rachel Dissell, The Plain Dealer
Assistant County Prosecutor Mary Weston often argues that victims deserve it, even if justice for them is a decade or more late.
In court, she read the words of the victim whose lip is still scarred from Jones’ attack more than 15 years ago. The woman was too ill to attend the hearing.
“My life hasn’t been the same since the incident. Ever since then I’ve been nervous. I’ve had high blood pressure, stress. I’ve been fearful of men, and he caused me to stay isolated. It took me a while to get back to normal because I couldn’t understand why he did that…I have been sober 15 years, by the grace of God, and I just want to say I hope he gets a sentence that ensures this won’t happen to any other woman.”
The year after Jones attacked that woman, he raped another woman in 2001 at knifepoint, prosecutors say.
He currently faces charges in that case, and a second case first reported to Cleveland police in 2002.
Jones recently wrote to the judge in the new cases explaining why he wasn’t charged at the time. He said police questioned him but let him go because “she was my girlfriend.”
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