The Girlfriends: Spotlight, E5: Rose Solves, At Least, 86 Cold Cases

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Hey, listener, I just wanted to give you a heads up that in this episode, we tell quite a lot of stories about rape and sexual assault.

If you're affected by anything that you hear, there are some resources you can access for support in the show notes, but also no pressure to listen.

If you do want to, though, there's lots of really inspiring stuff in there.

You're going to hear one detective's dogged quest to bring perpetrators to justice.

It's a great listen.

All right, take care.

The story starts on a Friday night back in 2004 and it starts as it will go on with a mind-blowing coincidence.

Oh, it was like a scene in the movie how it happened.

I was going to a basket bingo and I invited a couple of my best friends.

Rose Brady is a police sergeant.

And after years of working in homicide, she's just been put in charge of Baltimore County's SVU, the team investigating cases of sexual violence.

It's a frustrating job.

The crimes she's investigating are just the tip of the iceberg.

Her department is sitting on thousands of unsolved cases dating back decades.

So that Friday night, Rose wants to blow off some steam in the most wholesome way imaginable by playing basket bingo, which as far as I understand it is the same as regular bingo, only you play it for longer burger baskets.

I've looked into it, and it's a brand of these old-timey-looking woven baskets.

Longenburger baskets are a big thing, or they were back then 2004.

I mean, women will die for these baskets.

Well, if you win the bingo, your prize is a longumburger basket, and they fill it with all kinds of goodies.

Rose is heading to this basket extravaganza with one of her best friends, Mary.

who happens to work at a local hospital.

She worked in forensics and she worked for a Dr.

Breitnecker, who I didn't know who that was.

And we're driving her van, and I'm sitting in the front on the passenger side.

And she said to me, Well, when are you going to come and get Dr.

B's slides?

And I'm like,

What are you talking about?

I don't even, what are you talking about?

This is when Rose discovers that Mary's boss, the forensic pathologist, Dr.

Rudy Breitnecker, had in storage all the biological evidence from every rape exam he'd ever performed at the hospital.

Alarm bells went off for Rose.

It's like she'd hit on a solution to a problem she hadn't even realized could be solved.

When she said that, I said, going back to what date?

Because in 1977, a friend of mine had been sexually assaulted.

by a stranger and it'd never been cleared.

So I asked her, how far back do these slides go?

And she said to 1977, I was like, you have got to be kidding me.

Those slides could contain the DNA of the man who attacked Rose's friend, which now in 2004 could be used to solve her friend's case.

But not only that.

And I said, well, how many do you have?

And she said, we have like probably hundreds and hundreds.

Rose has stumbled upon the key to more than a thousand cold cases of rape.

I knew, and I think I told her this, that there's a gold mine there.

On this week's episode of The Girlfriend's Spotlight, the story of what happened once Rose and her team set their sights on Dr.

Breitnecker's database.

Our game plan was that we were going to get hits and we were going to lock people up.

They came up with a way to go back in time and close cases that had lain dormant for decades.

I've never had this feeling before in my life.

The hair on the back of my neck was starting to stand up.

I mean, it was unbelievable.

In the end, Rose's mission was simple, to give justice to women across Baltimore who thought that they would never see the day.

I'm Anna Sinfield, and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcast, this is The Girlfriend Spotlight, where we tell stories of women winning.

Today, Rose solves at least 86 cold cases.

These days, Rose Brady is retired.

Her life is a million miles away from the one she led as a police officer.

She actually lives on a mule farm now, out in the Maryland countryside, and she rides motorbikes.

She doesn't even own a trivial thing like a computer anymore.

She says she's given up on all that stuff.

But back in 2004, she was on the rise in Baltimore County PD.

Before taking over the special victims unit, she led the homicide team for nine years.

And homicide detectives, they're kind of like the jocks of the police department.

In homicide, you get whatever you need because you've got a murderer out there.

That was a no-brainer.

I got whatever I needed.

My detectives got whatever they needed, whether it was equipment, if I needed bodies to work on the cases that they needed help with anything.

We got it.

When Rose took charge of the SVU, she instantly felt a stark contrast.

I go over to sex crimes is what it was called at the time until we changed the name.

And my guys didn't even have the latest equipment.

So I always called us like the red-headed stepchild or something.

Rose says she also experienced judges being lenient with sentencing for perpetrators of sex crimes.

And then there were the general attitudes around sexual violence, which would even seep into the verdicts juries would deliver.

One of our cases was a prostitute.

She was working as, you know, in a hotel room, but the guy came in with a gun and not only did he rob her, but he raped her.

And you know what?

I don't care if you're a prostitute or not, you can still be raped.

And we've always had that attitude.

But anyway, this woman was brutally raped by gunpoint, and it was a jury trial.

So

this jury were having problems that a prostitute can't be raped.

He should have gotten like, I don't know, 50, 60 years.

And then we had a charge that was, I think he stole cell phones and stuff like that.

The jury comes back and finds him not guilty of the first degree rape, of the assault.

The only thing they would find him guilty of was the theft of her cell phone.

And the judge did the only thing he could do.

He gave him the maximum sentence for the theft.

So you even had, you know, people on a jury thinking a prostitute can't be raped.

Are you kidding me?

So frustrating.

You got me riled up there.

I can understand that you're riled up about that.

It's that's infuriating.

And it makes you feel like there isn't really, you know, the system we have in place isn't necessarily built to serve.

You just had to educate people.

Another crucial difference between Rose's experience of the two departments was what would happen to evidence when cases went cold.

In murder investigations, physical evidence would never be destroyed, even decades later.

But things were very different in the special victims unit.

I didn't find out until I went into sex crimes, but departments all over the country for years had destroyed evidence because basically you only have enough room in evidence rooms.

So, then they would start getting rid of evidence because you had new evidence coming in.

And people didn't know about DNA.

No one ever even knew that there would be such a thing as the evidence they took from that victim would actually point to a suspect.

So, a lot of the cases were destroyed.

But, Dr.

Breitnecker, the forensic pathologist at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, was kind of a visionary.

Starting in 1977, he kept all the forensic evidence from every rape exam he ever did.

And he did it all off his own back.

As a scientist, he was way, way ahead of, you know, everyone else.

And he always felt that the evidence that he took from the rape exams would someday lead to a suspect.

And that once he retired, his, you know, the friend of mine who ran the forensic unit in the hospital, she had literally was going to start destroying the slides because they didn't need them.

They just kept them because Dr.

Breitnicker asked them when he retired, he wanted her to keep it.

She didn't know this was going to happen.

So tell me about these slides, this kind of database.

What does it actually mean?

What do they look like?

It's just like you see on the old TV shows.

So they're a little glass slide and they would do smears from the evidence from a rape.

And what you're looking for on these slides is sperm.

So after Rose found out about the slides, just weeks into her new job leading the SVU, she decided on a plan of action.

She knew she couldn't solve all of the coal cases at once.

There were actually over a thousand of them, and her relatively small team still had new crimes coming in all the time.

So she told them to look for a very specific kind of unsolved rape case.

I had my corporal go literally through our log books and starting at 1977 and pulling every open case that we had.

And of course, the open cases were the ones that were stranger cases, which were the ones you wanted to find.

What Rose calls a stranger case means the victim was sexually assaulted by someone they didn't know, often didn't even see.

And so they couldn't identify their attacker.

The reason why I wanted to pursue them is because if they rape this girl and there's a stranger rape, then they're still out there.

So we still wanted to pursue it because we still had to find whoever that did it and get them in jail because they were still probably raping and they were.

Rose's idea was to find old unsolved cases like this and see which of the victims were originally examined by Dr.

Breitnecker.

Then she'd request the DNA evidence from the hospital and run it through this still-fledgling national database of criminals.

But it was slow and expensive to get this process up and running.

It could be months before her team would be able to crack one of the cold cases.

Only, once again, an incredible coincidence happened.

After the break, how a stroke of luck put Rose's team on the trail of a rapist who'd been evading detection since the 1980s.

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I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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I had only been in the union as a sergeant for, I went in September of 2004.

So it was Christmas time, and I'm actually off.

I'm the sergeant, so usually I can take off.

Lucky you.

And my corporal was in charge.

So I'm home, and we hadn't even started picking up the slides yet.

I mean, this was only four months into it, and we still had to figure out how to get them and do the subpoenas and stuff.

So I wasn't even thinking about getting

called like this.

And my corporal called me and he said, Sarge, we actually got a CODIS hit on one of our cases.

And I'm thinking, well, wait a minute, we haven't even gotten picked up the slides yet.

How is this possible?

CODIS is that national DNA database.

And this match was possible because someone in another department had the idea of running surviving DNA evidence from rape cases through CODIS.

It was a separate effort to use DNA to close unsolved cases.

And what Rose's corporal was about to tell her shocked Rose.

He said, and your name's in the report.

And I said, what?

And he said, your name's in the report.

Let me read this.

It's like, apparently you were a decoy.

And I said, you have got to be kidding me.

The name that matched on the DNA database was Thaddeus Clemens.

And it took Rose right back to the start of her career.

How I remembered that name from the 80s, 86 or whatever it was to 2004, but it always stuck in my mind.

When I got promoted to corporal, I went to Wilkins Precinct and there was another corporal there.

And he had told me about this rapist that they had.

Like, I don't know how many cases now was like five.

He had a whole booklet on like five or six rapes.

All these rapes were by the same perpetrator using the same MO.

He would grab the women, and they were really from teens to like 21.

They would always get off a bus in a certain area at nighttime.

And when they got off the bus, he would grab them from behind with a gun and he would put what we call welder's glasses on them.

And the welder's glasses are glasses that go in front and on the sides.

So literally, they couldn't, it's like a blindfold, honestly.

So they never saw him and he would take them to a vehicle and they couldn't get out because he had it fixed so that they couldn't open the door and jump out.

Wow.

And then he would take these, to me, young women, he would drive them to all they could describe was it seemed like it was a ball field from a school.

Then he would sexually assault them.

The police weren't able to catch the guy because none of the women ever saw him and he always drove a different car.

Back in the mid-80s, when this corporal told young Rose about the attacker, she could tell he was really concerned.

Sid was really worried that he's going to kill somebody because he always had a gun.

And if one of the victims started to fight him, then he was going to kill them.

So between the two of us, we came up with, I said to him, well, you know what?

I was around the same age.

I was in my 20s at that time.

And I said, well, let's do a decoy operation.

Why would you want to do that?

Okay.

So then, I mean, I've seen that on TV.

I said, I know they do this on TV.

Then he said, okay.

So one night, Rose found herself undercover trying to lure the attacker in out on the street where he stalked his victims.

I had officers in the trees.

I mean, I had so much coverage.

They were everywhere.

And I was walking up and down the sidewalk right around the same time on one of the bus routes that he had.

And

all of a sudden, I hear all these police sirens.

And I thought, what the heck is going on?

And one of the guys pulled up next to me and said, you're not going to believe this, but he just grabbed a woman three streets down.

I said, you have got to be kidding me.

And she actually got away from him and gave a description of a vehicle.

They pulled it over.

And they pulled a guy out of the truck and she couldn't ID him.

Now, remember, this was in the 80s.

So there was no such thing as DNA.

So if you couldn't ID, a victim of a sexual assault couldn't pick him out, they were going to walk.

But anyway, they had to let him go.

And his name was Thaddeus Clemens.

20 years later, as she sat on the phone to her corporal in the SVU, Rose remembered Clemens' case.

The corporal told her how they finally connected him to DNA that was still sitting in the evidence room.

Thaddeus Clemens was arrested for the sexual assault of a little girl who was a relative of his.

He was arrested for it, he was convicted of it, and that's what put his DNA into the CODIS database.

That's how we got him.

In 2005, Thaddeus Clemens was convicted of five rapes he committed between 1985 and 1988.

It seems to me that the case, while not the result of Dr.

Breitnecker's database, was a sort of call to arms to Rose and her team.

It showed that they could use old DNA evidence to close rape cases that had been open for decades.

And there were thousands of those.

It was time to start solving them using Dr.

Breitnecker's slides.

So once the funding was in place, they began to extract the DNA and run it through the database.

Soon, matches started coming through.

Every time we got a CODIS hit, well, I mean, we were boom, we were out there looking for the guy and locking him up, and that was a good thing.

The way they had to handle the cases, though, was totally different from a current case.

Totally different.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Cause yeah, you're not dealing with an immediate crime scene or immediate report or no, you literally had to go back 20 and 30 years and you need to locate the victim.

Sometimes they had to really do some great digging, but my guys were great with the computers and so they would locate the victim.

And it must be really shocking for the victims to suddenly get a phone call about a case that they would have moved on from.

Well, and I didn't want phone calls.

I wanted my detectives to see them in person because

exactly that.

And most of these people, their names have changed.

The women, they've gotten married.

And in many cases, their families didn't even know this had ever happened to them.

Wow.

You could be walking in and there could be kids there and teenagers and they never even knew it happened because it's so horrific for them and they just wanted to put it behind them.

So they didn't even tell their immediate family.

And I had told my detectives when they first went there, just make sure you tell these women that we've never forgotten you and the case has never been closed.

It was an open case.

So we never we never forgotten you.

And were these victims grateful for you guys coming in and still investigating?

Were they angry?

They were, but they were in shock.

Like it just brought it back.

You never forget it.

And so we felt bad about, we felt like we were re-victimizing them.

But then again, the comments that we got from them once they were convicted, found guilty,

it relieved them.

And as one of the victims told me, my very first case in 2004 was that her entire last 20 years, she was looking over her shoulder because she never knew if the guy that walked by her was the one that raped her.

It is the only way to give a victim of a sexual assault that's a stranger closure is if you find them and you arrest them because they never know.

They'll never know who did this to them.

Once a hit in the CODIS database came through on a case, Rose and her team devised a plan.

They wanted to make sure none of the perpetrators could talk their way out of the charges.

When we made an arrest, they wouldn't tell them what they were arrested for.

They were just saying, we've got to take you back to headquarters.

So think about 20 years later, these guys are no way thinking they're getting locked up for a rate they did 20 and 30 years ago.

They think they're getting locked up for something current.

So when my detectives go in there, the first thing they ask them, and they'll show them a picture.

Do you know this person?

And they'll look at it and they'll say no.

So they'll be adamant saying, I've never seen her before.

So, and they'll say, a name, you know, this name first before they show the picture.

No, I've never heard of that name.

Never seen her in my life.

Now, this is recorded because by the time we get to court, their defense attorney is trying to say that they were girlfriend, boyfriend, or they, you know, he was, she was a prostitute, horrible stuff.

And then in front of a jury, we'd play the taped video.

And here he is, you know, looking at this saying, I've never seen her in my life.

So that was so important because it also helped the victim.

If we had such a good case, which DNA to me is awesome, if the victim didn't have to testify, that was a good thing.

Yeah.

And most of our cases, they end up pleading and they end up pleading to like, they would get 30, 40, 50 years.

Rose's detectives would repeat this process over and over again across the years.

Every time we got another hit, I couldn't wait to to tell them.

And they were just so excited.

It's like, okay, put your case together.

Let's go get them.

And we didn't wait.

I mean, as soon as we got the hit, you know, I'm thinking, I'm not waiting.

I mean, these guys, they're still out there raping.

We have to get them.

I was not going to have another rape on my watch when we knew that this guy was a rapist.

We got hits on him.

Damn it.

That's kick-ass.

And tell me how the first signs of the next huge serial rapist case started appearing.

When we started submitting the slides, I started getting hits.

Like the first one I had, I had two hits from like

two different cases, two different victims, and the suspect unknown.

The DNA didn't trace back to a specific name.

Instead, it came back as a match to another one of the slides in Dr.

B's database.

So the same suspect raped these two women.

And then we got another hit, and it was the same guy.

And it was all, we called the Lock Raven corridor.

It was all in the same area.

And when I was up to the fourth hit, I was beside myself.

Rose could tell that these four DNA matches, which showed that four seemingly unconnected rapes were committed by the same man, could turn into a huge case.

And so I went to my major.

I pretty much wore out the carpet from my office to his.

And I said, I need help.

I need somebody.

My detectives don't have time to do this.

I need a help to start going through all our cases.

Because after I had four, it's like, well, if there's four, there's got to be more.

These four cases spanned from the 1970s all the way to the early 2000s.

Tell me about your personal connection to this case.

When I first came on, a friend of mine was sexually assaulted and it was never cleared.

This friend, an old colleague of Rose's, was the one she instantly thought of that night she heard about Dr.

B's database.

And Rose thought of her friend again when this unknown attacker's DNA got connected to several different cases, all in the same area.

It was exactly the same place where Rose's friend had been raped back in the 1970s.

When Rose ran her friend's slide, it came back as a match to the unknown serial rapist's DNA.

Now, the investigation was personal.

Coming up, the matches keep mounting.

But then, a long-forgotten TV interview gives Rose's team their big

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The future of sound is now with LGX Boom.

And for a limited time, save 25% at lg.com with code Fall25.

Bring the boom.

X-Boom.

I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinske, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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One day in the late 70s, Rose's friend, a fellow police officer, had returned home to her apartment.

There was a stranger, a man, hiding out in the bushes near the entrance.

When Rose's friend opened her door, the man forced his way in and sexually assaulted her.

Over the span of two months in 1978, two other women in the same apartment building were attacked and raped by a stranger.

And now, in 2007, Rose had discovered that her friend's case was connected via DNA, location, and MO to what appeared to be the same serial rapist who had also attacked many other women in the same area over nearly 30 years.

This was already already a huge case, but now it was personal for Rose too.

If she was going to find the rapist and get justice for her friend, she needed more people on her team.

So Rose marched into her boss's office to make her demand.

So he actually gave me

a detective who was on light duty because she was pregnant, Eve.

And she loved it because I think she was stuck like answering phones or something.

And I had got a civilian.

I gave him the four cases we had.

And I said, okay, go back from this time all the way up till current, this area and this MO and pull every case that you can find that's similar to this.

Well, it turned out we ended up with, I think, 11 or 12 cases that we had slides.

Oh, wow.

And then I get another hit and another hit.

And I was beside myself because we're spanning 1978 to 2000.

So, you know, he's still out there somewhere.

So I think she pulled 20-some cases, her and the civilian pulled 20-some cases that could be this guy.

Rose's team had uncovered a serial rapist who, from what they could estimate, was even more prolific than Thaddeus Clemens.

Now, something you need to know about Eve, the pregnant detective on light duty who was helping out with the case, is that she also happened to be a trained forensic sketch artist.

One day, she had gone through the files and she came into my office and because I had her working next door and she said, Sarge, I've actually got a composite in one of these folders from a victim.

I said, really?

A composite, meaning a sketch of the attacker from the recollection of one of the victims.

This surprised Rose.

She didn't think any of the victims had seen the guy.

The ones I had been reading, they didn't wake up until he was already on top of them.

And, you know, if it was inside, he covered him with a blanket.

Outside, it was nighttime.

She said, yeah, it was one of the really old cases.

Evelyn told Rose that she wanted to try and age the original sketch to see what the guy might look like now, 20 years later.

She was doing it at home and she had a big table, you know, her dining room table, and she would have you do it in stages.

You know, you do eyes, a whole nine-yard, you do different parts of it.

So she'd had them spread all over her table.

This is the point where I have to issue another cosmic coincidence alert.

And this is like another story out of a movie, but I'm not kidding.

Everything was meant to be is what I'm going to say.

Her husband, who I happen to know, was a Baltimore City detective.

So he's looking at these drawings that his wife's doing.

And then he ends up having to go to something that we all have to go once a year.

Police officers have to go to what's called in-service training to do with policing, obviously, current law, case law.

Then you might do physical stuff, how to defend yourself, stuff like that.

And I find this out on Monday.

They come walking into my office, he and his wife.

He had a VHS tape, okay, so it's it's 2006, and he has it in his hand.

They're both looking at me and they say,

Sarge, I had to go to this in-service training, and an instructor did not show up.

I'm not kidding you on this.

An instructor did not show up.

So they put this tape in on a 48 hours interview.

Wow, like the substitute teachers in.

48 Hours is a true crime news documentary program on CBS.

The story that was played in Eve's husband's training was about a cold rape case from Baltimore in 1983.

The victim in the case was Laura Newman.

When she was 18, she was raped by a stranger.

She got home late at night after working her shift as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant.

And around 2 a.m., she was lying in bed when she heard the clatter of someone breaking in through a window.

She disregarded it, thinking she was maybe dreaming, which is when she was startled by a pillow pressed onto her face.

The case wasn't solved at the time.

Laura never saw her attacker, and the fingerprints lifted off her windowsill didn't match anyone.

But she never let her case go.

She kept calling the police department, asking them to look at it again.

So in the early 2000s, a couple of detectives re-ran the perpetrator's prints through the system.

Well, the fingerprints hit on this guy, Alfonso Hill.

They arrest him for second-degree rape, and he confesses.

It was such a remarkable story that 48 Hours wanted to interview everyone involved.

Even Hill, who, despite his lawyer's probably very salient advice, agreed to go on TV.

They're telling me, Sargie, it looks just like Evelyn's composite that she's aged.

And that's like, there's no way.

I said, so you're telling me he's incarcerated right now?

And he's been incarcerated for a couple of years.

Yes.

I said, well, he should have hit.

Because Hill was in prison, his DNA should have already been in the CODIS database.

All of these rape cases should have gotten a match to Hill right away.

I said, it can't be him.

Well, I'm just telling you, Sarge, it looks just like him.

So I said, all right, I'll look at it.

I put this VHS tape in the office when my detectives found one or a player.

We put it in and we've got the composite next to us.

And I'm telling you, I've never had this feeling before in my life.

The hair on the back of my neck was starting to stand up because

this was the guy.

Wow.

I mean, it was unbelievable.

But I'm still thinking, it's not possible.

So I call Maryland State Police because they run the actual CODIS database.

And I was in first name basis with the woman, Michelle, that was running it by then.

And I'd say, Michelle, are you sure you don't have this guy in the database?

Sarge, I don't have him.

Rose hung up, but she couldn't shake the similarity between Hill and their suspect.

So she dialed Michelle's number again.

So then this time I gave her a name.

Like an hour later she calls me.

She told Rose that Alfonso Hill's DNA hadn't been put into the national database yet because Maryland State Police were extremely backed up with all the DNA that was now being uploaded.

She suggested that her team should go to the prison, get their own swab of Hill's DNA and run it against the serial rapists themselves.

Not a problem.

I go right into the office where my detectives were working that case.

I said, get a search warrant.

Let's go.

We're going to go up to, I think he was in Hagerstown.

It's like, we're getting his swabs.

Even when I was in homicide, I don't think I ever got results back this fast.

I'm sitting in my office a week later, and all of a sudden, I hear all these people walking and all this commotion.

And all of a sudden, all these, my detectives, the biologists, are all standing in my doorway.

And I'm looking at them.

And I said, please tell me that Alfonso Hill that it's him.

And they said, it's him.

I was like, oh my gosh.

Hill was still serving time in prison for the rape of Laura Newman, but Rose's team had DNA evidence that he'd committed many more.

When they confronted him with it, he seemed to realize that there was no point in denying it.

Once he was charged with these rapes, he pleaded guilty to them.

After decades of assaulting women in Baltimore, In 2008, Alfonso Hill was finally held responsible for his crimes.

He had been applying for parole, and now he would likely never be free again.

All but one of the survivors came to his court hearings.

It was an opportunity for them to finally stare him down.

Every single one of them, except for one, wanted to be there.

It was just something you just don't see.

We take him to the courtroom, and they're all sitting together.

And all of a sudden, the door opens, and I'm looking at my survivors, and it's like laser.

I mean, as soon as that door opened, he started walking towards him.

He's like, laser, because remember, all but one of them have never seen his face.

The state's attorney reads every single one of these horrific cases.

And the judge, who'd been around a long time, he was speechless.

And then all of a sudden, after they read the last one, and before the victims could even go up there and do their impact, he said, you know, that's a shame Dr.

Breitnacker's not here because what he's done and what he thought before anyone else did is why we're here.

Well, it turns out that Rose was way ahead of the judge.

She also wanted Dr.

B, who is now in his 70s, to be there for this moment.

So she asked her colleague, Linda, to bring him to the courtroom.

So Linda has to make he such a humble man and had to make him stand up.

Let me tell you, everybody in that courtroom clapped.

I mean, he got to see

what

he did.

That's so beautiful.

How did he react to that moment?

He just,

he just looked at everybody and, you know, did the hand like, okay, you know, thank you, you're welcome.

You know, he's just very, he's a big man and he's Austrian.

So he's got a very heavy Austrian accent.

And he was embarrassed, I guess, that, you know, we made him stand up.

But in everybody clapping, even the, even the deputies.

I mean, everybody.

Well, he deserved it.

So, I mean, he's passed away.

I went to the funeral.

He passed away a couple of years ago.

This would have never happened for all these women without him.

What an amazing guy.

It does seem like so much of your work here has just had you've had a lot of coincidences.

How do you feel about that?

Yeah.

Do we call it fate?

I don't know.

Meant to be.

I mean, God's will, it was time to get these cases cleared.

I don't know because it just seemed to fall these cases like this.

Crazy.

Yeah, in these incredible ways.

Obviously, your amazing work too.

Well, it's my detectives.

They did the investigations.

How many of these cold cases did you close in total in your whole time at the SVU?

From what I remember, it was 86.

86.

You must be so proud of that number.

That's incredible.

So I think it was around 86.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Amazing.

But that work's still being done as we speak.

Yeah, they have actually, the department actually has a cold case unit now.

Incredible.

We got one after I retired.

They finally put one together.

Oh, yeah.

That's great.

So, look, I've got one final question.

I guess it's a bit of a reflective one.

I'm wondering, kind of, what your message would be to survivors of sexual violence who are listening to this podcast, because I know already that there are many, and a lot of those people will have cases that are cold and haven't been solved.

Well, look at whatever department that handled your case, whenever it was, call them because most departments across the country have cold case sexual assault teams now.

And if you're a survivor, there's some place you can go to for help.

There's plenty of victim agencies that will help you get through the emotional part of it because don't live with it without telling people.

There's so much help out there, but you have to ask for it.

Yeah.

But it is out there.

I guarantee you it's out there.

And don't don't walk alone.

No, don't walk alone.

I mean, that feels very inclusive of the kind of girlfriend's mantra of we're all in it together on this podcast.

I know that sexual violence cases are a particularly tough listen for women.

It's not exactly something that we need to be curious about, because it's something we all have to be sadly attuned to.

One out of six women in the United States have experienced sexual violence.

And research from the Rape, Abuse and Incest Network suggests that for every 1,000 rapes that happen in the United States, only 384 are reported to the police, and only seven end in a felony conviction.

It's depressing data.

And for a series that claims it tells the stories of women winning, this episode is full of far too many women losing out in the worst possible way.

But what Dr.

B and Rose have done is a real win to me.

Their dogged determination has brought convictions into a woefully unprosecuted space and proven that solving cold cases doesn't just bring about historic justice, but it can protect people today.

Next time on the Girlfriend Spotlight, Madison and Christine become digital detectives.

So we just started adding new folders of this victim, this victim, this victim.

And let's be honest, like, I was very motivated to help you, but it's nothing's more motivating than your own boobs being on the internet.

Hey, it's Anna.

You've reached the girlfriend's hotline.

Leave your story after the tone.

Okay, gotta go.

Love ya.

When I was skiing in Colorado, I fell and broke my arm.

And I was in a lot of pain, but I was mainly just very sad and very low because I had a lot of plans that are up in the air and the healing time is really long.

When I texted my closest group of girlfriends from home to tell them I'd broken my arm, I sent them a mirror selfie in the hospital room with my sling and most of their first responses were just commenting on how great my hair looked, which made me laugh.

If you have your own story like the one you just heard and you'd like the whole girlfriends gang to hear it, then please send it to us.

You can record it as a voice memo under 90 seconds, please, and email it straight to thegirlfriends at novel.audio.

Please don't include your name, we're keeping things a little anon.

We want stories like say that one time you faked an emergency on an awful date and your bestie bailed you out with a phone call, we love her, or that time when all of your girls showed up on your doorstep with five pizzas, two tubs of ice cream and three bottles of Sauvignon Blanc because the man of your dreams just dumped you.

I want stories that are meaningful or silly.

I want big, I want small.

I'm desperate to hear them.

So send them over.

This season, the Girlfriend Spotlight is supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide.

They do amazing work to help women's rights organisations and movements to strengthen and grow.

If you'd like to find out more or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls across the globe, you can go to womankind.org.uk.

The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeart podcasts.

For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield.

This episode was written and produced by Jake Otayevich.

Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr.

Our researcher is Zayana Yousuf.

The editor is Hannah Marshall.

Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers.

Production management from Joe Savage, Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolf.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson.

Music supervision by Jake Otayevich, Nicholas Alexander and Anna Sinfield.

Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein and Gemma Freeman.

The series artwork was designed by Christina Lemkuhl.

Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development.

And special thanks to Katrina Norvell, Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcast, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME.

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I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

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Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

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