This is the first in a two-part series about the lingering effects of Detroit's rape kit backlog. You can find part two here.
A note to readers: This story contains references to sexual violence.
Between 2006 and 2014, a man named Lionel Wells sexually assaulted at least five teenage girls in Detroit. His DNA was recovered from the victims, and sealed in rape kits.
Those kits are crucial to identifying the perpetrators of sexual assault, but they need to be run through a battery of tests to yield any useful evidence. And Wells' predatory spree unfolded around the time of a horrific discovery: thousands of untested rape kits — including at least one with his DNA — sitting in an abandoned Detroit warehouse.
It took a decade to test all those kits, and prosecutors are still building cases based on the evidence they contained. But that requires reaching out to survivors of those crimes, and trying to earn their trust in a justice system that had already failed them once.
In this first of a two-part series on the backlog’s lingering legacy, one survivor shares her story — and what she did when faced with a painful choice.
“Terrifying”
It was February 2007. Bree was 17 years old and walking home when a man she didn’t know shoved what she thought was a gun in her back. (Bree is not her real name — at her request, Michigan Public is using a pseudonym to protect her privacy, as is our policy for minor victims of sexual assault.)
The man took Bree behind a nearby garage, sexually assaulted her, then told her to lay in the snow and count to 100 while he fled.
Bree reported her assault to the police. Then she went to the hospital, where she endured the process known as a rape kit — having evidence collected from her body and sealed in a box.
And then, she heard nothing. For years.
“I thought they just forgot about it,” Bree recalled. “[I thought] my case is going to be one of the cases that sort of got put to the back, like ‘OK, never mind.’”
That didn’t change until 2017 — 10 years later. That’s when a detective with Wayne County’s sexual assault kit task force contacted Bree to say they were only now pursuing her case.
Bree remembered that at first, she couldn’t tell the story of what happened without sobbing. “It was hard,” she said. “To re-think of it, and what happened. … It was kind of terrifying.”
Bree said she felt other emotions, too. Some anger and frustration that it took so long. But mostly relief and even joy that someone was finally seeking justice for her.
“It made me feel good,” Bree said. “It made me feel like they finally was doing the job that I had basically [been] wondering [about] for years, and thought that they had forgotten about.”
“It was not seen as a problem”
Bree didn’t know it, but her assault was being investigated years after the fact because it was one of the 11,341 sealed, untested rape kits accidentally found by a Wayne County assistant prosecutor in 2009.
The find made national headlines and launched a decade-long effort to test all those kits. But that was only the beginning.
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy also wanted to prosecute whatever cases they still could. That required reaching out to survivors, and persuading them to cooperate with a system that had betrayed them.
Rebecca Campbell is a Michigan State University psychology professor who researches rape kit backlogs. Detroit’s wasn’t the only one in the country, but Campbell said it was unique in scope and scale, with untested kits dating back to 1984.
Campbell said Detroit’s lack of resources contributed to the backlog. But there was another, more fundamental problem: Police simply didn’t take rape cases seriously enough to question their own track record.
“They never stopped to ask, ‘Wait a minute, why do we have all these unsolved rape cases? Why do we have all of these closed cases? Why do we have all of these kits?’" Campbell said. “It was not seen as a problem.”
Campbell is the lead author of a federally funded 2015 report, submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice, that is the most thorough, detailed exploration of the how and why behind Detroit’s backlog. She said there was a lot of police victim-blaming, especially when the person reporting a rape wasn’t the stereotypical perfect victim. And Campbell said that was especially true when it came to adolescent girls, who were seen as especially likely to make up false rape accusations.
Because of that history, Campbell said, it’s often difficult to get survivors of these crimes to cooperate when investigators come knocking years later. She noted that when reaching out to backlog survivors, the first thing anyone in the justice system needs to say is “sorry.”
“I'm sorry that your kit wasn't tested. I'm sorry that your case wasn't investigated thoroughly. And I'm sorry that we are upending your life ten years later,” Campbell said.
The long road to justice
For Bree, the decision to cooperate with investigators after so many years wasn’t an easy one. But a couple things helped sway her.
One was the relationship that developed between her and the officer in charge of her case, Detective Kelly Dupuis of the Wayne County sexual assault kit initiative. Bree said that over time, it grew into something like a sisterly bond. “It’s like you’re talking to one of your friends, or somebody you grew up with,” she said.
Dupuis said she feels the same way. She often ends up developing a sort of friendship with the survivors she works with, and tries to consciously offer them as much comfort and support as possible.
“It's a very difficult process to have to put the victims through again,” Dupuis said. “It's very traumatic to have to bring up all these old memories.”
Another factor that helped persuade Bree was finding out that the man who raped her had also raped at least four other girls. Investigators had linked the crimes together based on DNA from their rape kits.
Bree said she felt like she had to speak up not only for herself, but for the other victims of the serial rapist later identified as Lionel Wells. “And truthfully, I talked it over with my family,” Bree recalled. “And my dad was like, ‘Is you sure? Is you positive this is what you really want to do?’ And yeah, I do.”
And in the end, it was worth it for Bree. In 2022, with the help of a novel DNA investigative technique called genetic genealogy, Lionel Wells was convicted on five counts of rape, including Bree’s. He was sentenced to five concurrent 25- to 50-year prison terms.
Bree felt like she finally got justice, and she urges other backlog survivors to “push forward” if they can. “For me, talking about it has actually helped me through the years … [to] move on, move forward,” she said.
Lionel Wells is one of nearly 300 convictions the Wayne County Sexual Assault Kit Initiative has now secured from the rape kit backlog. And he’s one of more than 800 serial offenders that testing the kits revealed.
But there’s another sad, ugly piece to this story: Someone else served prison time for one of Wells’ crimes. We explore that angle in the second part of this series.
