After 17 years, DNA tied a man to her rape. Under Massachusetts law, it was too late

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Seventeen years had passed by the time Boston police knocked on Louise’s door to say they had identified the man who allegedly raped and stabbed her in October 2005.

The suspect was now a father of two, a possible serial rapist and likely beyond the reach of the law, investigators told her. Police had taken so long to identify him that they missed the state’s deadline to prosecute her case.

In Massachusetts, the law says prosecutors have only 15 years to file charges after an alleged rape. Past that statute of limitations, it’s nearly impossible to bring charges. Still, prosecutors thought they might be able to move this particular case forward on a technicality.

Louise was afraid. She had spent years reliving the terror of that night and battling drug use that spun out of control after the attack. At times she failed out of rehab programs or stayed in homeless shelters. (WBUR does not identify victims of sexual assault without their permission and agreed to identify Louise only by her middle name.)

By 2022, she was 42, sober, living in her own apartment and raising two school-age sons. She could not slip back into her old ways.

But, as the daughter of a Marine veteran, Louise believed she needed to fight: She felt her community would not be safe until her rapist was in prison.

“You’ve got to stand for something,” Louise said.

Past the 15-year deadline in Massachusetts, no DNA match, eyewitness testimony or even confession can give a rape victim a chance at facing an attacker in court.

This statute of limitations places Massachusetts behind almost every other state in the country.

A review of criminal codes by WBUR and ProPublica found that as many as 47 states allow more time to charge rapes or similar assaults of adults than Massachusetts. For example, Vermont and Maryland are among a number of states that have no deadline to file charges for rape. Other states like Montana and Texas extend their deadlines when there’s DNA evidence.

In many states, Louise’s case could be decided in court on the strength of its evidence. But here, evidence would not matter. The case would be almost impossible to win.

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Lost chances

Law enforcement and rape crisis workers across Massachusetts said in interviews that they routinely encounter cases where no charges were filed before the state’s strict deadline. How often rape suspects avoid prosecution as a result is unclear.

Massachusetts is unusual in that state victim privacy laws bar police from releasing incident reports of rape to the public. Unless a suspect is charged in court, it’s often difficult to find any official records about a rape. And even when someone is charged, police can still withhold information about what they did — or did not do — to identify and capture a suspected rapist.

This makes it all but impossible for anyone outside law enforcement to scrutinize rapes that are past the deadline to prosecute.

In order to understand the extent of cases lost to the statute of limitations, WBUR and ProPublica spoke to researchers, prosecutors and lawmakers.

Rape crisis center leaders say survivors of sexual assaults that happened many years ago regularly ask whether the criminal legal system can help them. The Suffolk County district attorney’s office, one of the most populous jurisdictions in the state, is based in Boston and prosecuted Louise’s case. A longtime sex crimes prosecutor there said his office reviews several cases each year that it cannot pursue because of the statute of limitations.

About two years ago, the Bristol County district attorney’s office identified 21 rapes that it could have prosecuted were it not for the statute of limitations. They came to light when the agency used a federal grant to analyze DNA evidence in rape cases that had not been fully tested when it was first collected.

Bristol County District Attorney Thomas Quinn is one of the state’s few prosecutors who has spoken in favor of allowing charges after the deadline in cases with DNA evidence.

“This is to rectify a wrong, if you will, or a process that didn’t work,” Quinn told WBUR. “These are serious charges. Women are being raped.”

Details of Louise’s case only became public because Suffolk County prosecutors took the unusual step of filing charges even though they had missed the state’s charging deadline. This led to the release of some records about the rape that would otherwise have been shielded by the state’s privacy laws.

Those records show that years before the deadline passed in Louise’s alleged rape, police had already gathered many of the clues they would later use to identify a suspect, but did not solve the case.

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Louise: His name is Ivan

When she was 25, Louise’s life was starting to fall apart. She worked as a waitress and switchboard operator, and she was experimenting with drugs.

In the overnight hours of Oct. 22, 2005, a man she had been friends with demanded payment for drugs he had given her, according to a court record, then coerced her into having sex with a stranger at a hotel to pay off the debt.

After 2 a.m., the friend dropped her off in downtown Boston.

It was raining hard, the trains had stopped running and she wanted a ride to a friend’s house. That’s when she thought she saw a friendly face.

The man who drove up to her in a Lexus SUV introduced himself as Ivan and said he knew her from UMass Boston, where she had taken classes, she recalled. He said he was on a study break, and he looked the part. He had a young face and wore a baseball cap with a college name on it.

She said the man offered to pay for sex and she refused, court records show. He drove her to a secluded area in Everett, and raped and stabbed her, she told police. When Louise escaped his car, he chased her down with a knife and she fell.

“He kept stabbing me,” she said in an interview. “I remember my head jerking back because the knife was in my head.”

The man fled to his car after the struggle. Louise sought help at a nearby house.

At the hospital, it took more than 100 stitches to close the stab wounds that covered her body. Doctors told her the knife barely missed her major organs.

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Louise let a specialist swab her body for the man’s DNA. While she said she did not disclose at the time that she had been coerced into sex work earlier that night, she told investigators everything else she knew: Police records said she gave the name her attacker used, his race, which she said was either white or Asian, and a description of his car. At the time, she told police that he said he had attended UMass Boston and was now at Tufts. She hoped this information would lead to an arrest.

Had police checked with UMass Boston, they would have discovered that 18 men named Ivan attended the school in the years surrounding the attack, according to student records reviewed by WBUR. The man who police ultimately connected to DNA evidence in Louise’s case was among them.

Everett police interviewed Louise several times and reviewed surveillance camera footage, she said, but the calls and visits from police waned over the coming months.

Louise stopped calling the police to check on her case as the years went by. She said she had moved on from using painkillers to relying on heroin, cocaine and other drugs to make it through the day. She feared that her rapist would return to kill her, and the drugs were her way of coping with severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, she said.

In 2008, Boston police received new evidence suggesting that whoever attacked Louise could be a serial rapist, a detective later said in court records. The department’s crime lab found that DNA from her case matched an unsolved 2006 attack. That victim was picked up in Boston’s North End, then stabbed and raped in suburban Wellesley.

It’s unclear how police responded to this new information. With the help of WBUR and ProPublica, Louise used an exception for survivors in the state’s privacy law to obtain her Everett police report. But the two-page record details nothing of the investigation beyond the first 24 hours after the attack.

Everett police declined to comment on the case. The Middlesex County district attorney’s office, which had jurisdiction at the time of the attack, did not comment. The Suffolk County district attorney’s office, which took over the case after Boston detectives in its jurisdiction identified a suspect, said it did not have details about how prior agencies handled the case. Boston police did not provide a response to multiple requests for an interview.

Louise said she does not recall whether police or prosecutors told her that DNA tests showed her unknown assailant may have attacked another woman.

Years later, when police finally identified a suspect, it would be too late to hold anyone accountable. The deadline to charge a suspect with attempted murder in Louise’s case had passed after 10 years and the deadline for rape had passed at 15 years.

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Extending the statute of limitations

Currently, the only states that have shorter deadlines than Massachusetts and don’t make exceptions for DNA evidence are North Dakota and New Hampshire, a WBUR and ProPublica review of state laws found. The most restrictive is New Hampshire’s six-year deadline.

Decades of research into how rape is reported and investigated has driven lawmakers outside of Massachusetts to extend their statutes of limitations.

During the 2000s, several states passed exceptions for cases with DNA as it became clear that this kind of forensic evidence could help solve even very old cases.

Other states followed as police departments began to disclose in the 2010s that they systemically failed to test DNA evidence in rape cases. Meanwhile, a growing body of research found that police regularly performed inadequate rape investigations, deciding reports were unfounded before interviewing witnesses, collecting evidence or testing DNA. Across the country, most reports of rape do not result in prosecution, research shows.

“They judge the victim,” said Michigan State University professor Rebecca Campbell, who has authored multiple studies on how police conduct rape investigations. “That’s what I found in my research, and it’s been replicated by other research teams and other jurisdictions throughout the United States.”

The widespread problems prompted national reforms. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice launched its National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative to devote hundreds of millions of dollars to testing previously ignored DNA. This effort produced enough evidence to finally bring charges in some of these cases, and lawmakers in other states revised their deadlines so prosecutions could move forward.

The move to extend the deadline has been a bipartisan cause in many states. Just last year in Oklahoma, former state Sen. Jessica Garvin, a Republican, led a successful effort to eliminate the state’s statute of limitations in cases where there is a confession or DNA evidence. The bill passed unanimously.

“We were able to accomplish that last session with really very little, if any, pushback,” Garvin said. “It’s not a Republican issue. It’s not a Democratic issue.”

In Massachusetts, legislation that would extend the deadline has been introduced during every session since at least 2011. But every time, it has failed to gain steam.

Defense attorneys have opposed any changes, saying that making the deadline longer risks violating the rights of the accused.

Witnesses, surveillance footage and other evidence that may clear a suspect becomes more difficult to find as time passes, said Shira Diner, a board member of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“The further and further you get away from the alleged commission of the crime, the harder it is for someone to ever mount a defense,” she said.

The last time state lawmakers changed the statute was in 1996 after victims came forward to say they had delayed reporting their rapes because of community backlash or poor treatment by police.

Legislators lengthened the state’s deadline to prosecute rapes of adults from 10 to 15 years.

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Connecting the dots

In late 2021, the Department of Justice initiative awarded Boston $2.5 million to reexamine up to 100 of the city’s most serious unsolved rapes. The funds paid a small group of investigators to comb through old case files to search for clues.

The new team revisited Louise’s rape within months. This time they determined that her case and the North End rape were similar to earlier attacks, court records show.

Most were unsolved, but a man named Ivan Cheung was arrested in one of them. Boston University police took him into custody in 2003 after they found him in possession of a knife and the belongings of a woman who was allegedly raped at knifepoint. The Boston Police Department, which took over the case, said in court records that they suspected the victim was covering up her ties to the sex work industry. Prosecutors dropped the charges several weeks later.

When the new team of investigators revisited this case in 2022, they noticed that Cheung resembled the assailant Louise described in her attack: a man named Ivan who had attended UMass Boston. At the time of the rape, he owned a Lexus SUV.

This focus on Cheung led to a breakthrough. That June, undercover officers tailed him to a mall parking lot in Dorchester, where they watched him smoke and toss away a cigarette.

DNA from that cigarette matched two assaults: Louise’s rape and the North End attack.

By September, police had arrested Cheung for Louise’s attack, the North End rape and two other open cases involving teenage girls. He was living in the Boston area and working as a financial services executive.

The arrest was possible because investigators received the time and resources to take a fresh look at old cases, said Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Ian Polumbaum, who prosecuted the case.

A detective showed Cheung a photo of Louise and asked if he had raped her and others. Cheung told police that he did not recognize the women and that there was no way his DNA could have been found on any of them, court records show.

“I’m telling you no f—ing way. I don’t even know her name. I don’t even know her face,” he said during the recorded interview with police. Cheung and his attorney declined an interview with WBUR.

The only way Suffolk County prosecutors could move forward with Louise’s case and the North End attack was on a technicality: A state law suspends the deadline if a suspect lives out of state. Prosecutors said Cheung traveled frequently, but they couldn’t prove he had relocated. In October 2023, charges against Cheung for the attacks on Louise and the North End victim were dropped.

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With her case over, Louise said she pinned her hopes on the two remaining cases connected to the suspect. Police said in court records the alleged victims were 13 and 14 and being trafficked for sex at the time of their attacks. Because they were so young, the state’s statute of limitations did not block their cases from moving forward, and there was a chance a judge would allow Louise to testify if they went to trial.

But those two cases had other problems: They had no DNA evidence, and prosecutors acknowledged that the evidence tying those cases to Cheung was not as strong. In one of the cases, Boston police had not interviewed the alleged victim until nearly two decades after her attack, and she was unwilling to testify, court filings show. In the other, a judge noted in a ruling that police conducted no forensic medical exam of the victim and appeared to make no attempt at locating a crime scene.

“The police response was severely deficient,” Suffolk Superior Court Judge Christopher Belezos wrote in the December 2024 ruling.

The district attorney told the judge they needed Louise’s testimony to show the rapes were so similar that Cheung was the only possible assailant. But Belezos barred Louise from testifying, saying her case was too different: The attacks had happened in different locations and their descriptions of their assailants’ race and cars did not match.

Prosecutors dropped Cheung’s remaining charges in January.

“ It was frustrating, but at that point, legally we had no choice,” said Polumbaum. In court records, Cheung also denied any involvement in these alleged attacks.

Now that the court battle is over, Louise is fighting to keep her peace of mind. She crowds her spare hours with therapy and support groups, and she fills her apartment walls with symbols of renewal, change and faith. A pink foil decal with the word “Believe” hangs among prints of butterflies, dragonflies and birds.

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When WBUR interviewed Louise, it was the first time she had discussed her rape publicly. She said those interviews, and the failure to convict Cheung, helped her realize she wanted to do more.

In June she testified before the state Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary to urge them to pass House Bill 1987, which is pending. It would allow prosecutors to charge suspects after the deadline in some rape cases with DNA evidence.

“ It really needs to be changed for the safety of all, for the public at large,” she testified. “That’s why I’m speaking.”

WBUR’s Patrick Madden contributed reporting, and WBUR’s Jesús Marrero Suárez contributed research.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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