By Calli Bailey
Assistant Criminal District Attorney in Collin County
In North Texas in 2011, three police agencies learned that the suspect in three home invasions involving stranger-on-stranger sexual assaults were connected by a single male DNA profile. CODIS had told them that much. The victims’ accounts of their assaults also made it clear that it was the same attacker. But more than that, all three victims had something very personal in common: They were all alumnae of the same sorority, leading police agencies and the media to dub the assailant the “Sorority Rapist.” Law enforcement spent the next decade running down every tip, following every lead, identifying a fourth victim through a CODIS match seven years later, and ultimately, employing a new and emerging advancement in DNA testing to identify the person responsible. That man, Jeffrey Wheat, is now serving two life sentences, plus additional time for a total of four charges.
Background
Over my career, I have developed a deep interest in forensic science, an interest I would not have predicted when I started practicing law. Like many prosecutors, I did everything I could in college to avoid hard science classes (sign me up for “Rocks for Jocks” and oceanography!). But in 2019, I became Collin County’s first Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) chief. That same year, I was appointed to the Licensing Advisory Committee of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, where I am now serving my fifth year. As a result, I became the “DNA expert” for my office. By no means a true expert, I jumped head-first into the forensic science world and signed up for as many trainings and conferences as my office would allow. I have had two additional felony chief assignments since CIU and have tried multiple trials with DNA. But the Sorority Rapist case was the first time I saw the results of groundbreaking science have a long-lasting human impact.
This case had all the bad features of a cold case, coupled with all the bad features of a stranger-on-stranger rape. My DA investigator, Stephanie Strickland, had to track down detectives out of retirement. Some of those detectives had been retired as long as the case had been cold. One crime scene tech is now deceased. A DNA analyst moved to Australia and couldn’t return for our trial. The victim here in Collin County wanted nothing to do with me when I first reached out. My contact brought up horrible memories she had tried hard to repress over the last 10 years—but I kept calling. I showed up unannounced at her home and place of work. I called her daughter and begged her to convince her mother to talk to me. And she wasn’t the only rape victim I had to force to talk about the worst moment of their life. There were three others.
The news of these offenses terrorized the alumnae from not just one particular historically African-American sorority, but also African-American women across north Texas for years. We don’t get cases like this in Collin County—home invasion sexual assaults by strangers, let alone an offender who violates a victim in each of the four major counties in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. In addition, it was the first case in which a Collin County agency used forensic investigative genetic genealogy to identify the suspect.
But this case is also an example of the criminal justice system at its best, a true reflection of teamwork across multiple law enforcement agencies and multiple prosecutor offices and a symbol of survival and perseverance of victims who had long awaited answers and justice. It was almost 10 years before the victims in Collin, Dallas, and Denton Counties knew the name of their attacker, and it was an 18-year wait for the victim in Tarrant County.
The investigation
On April 2, 2011, officers from the Plano Police Department responded to a home invasion sexual assault that occurred sometime after 2 o’clock in the morning. The victim was awakened by an unknown man in her bed. She fought back and her attacker’s blood was transferred to a pillowcase on the bed. When the attacker responded by putting a pillow over her face and threatening her, she knew she would need to comply to save her own life. After the assault, the attacker forced her to shower, and he warned her not to call the police. He knew her name, and he knew that she was not married. The victim called her sister first out of fear, who encouraged her to call the police. The pillowcase was collected as evidence, as was a routine sexual assault nurse examination (SANE), both of which were forensically analyzed by the regional crime lab to develop a clear single-source male DNA profile. But there was no match in the CODIS database.
In September and October of 2011, Coppell Police Department (Dallas County) and Corinth Police Department (Denton County) responded to similar home invasion sexual assaults. In both cases, the attacker knew things about the victims, including that they were not married, and warned them not to call to the police. He made them shower or bathe, and he disconnected or hid all phones in the home. Each victim also underwent a SANE exam.
For small cities like Coppell (my hometown) and Corinth, these were the only stranger-on-stranger home invasion sexual assaults these investigators had ever seen, and some of those officers had 20 years of experience. The cases stuck with them all those years, just as it did for the victims. Everyone remembered it. My parents remembered it. Each officer had vivid memories of working these cases over a decade later when I met with them to prepare for trial, so finding the person responsible also meant that much more to them as well.
The evidence in the Dallas County case went to one crime lab, while the evidence in the Denton County case went to the same regional crime lab as Collin County’s evidence. Both labs received a CODIS hit within days of the initial processing, indicating the unknown male profile in both cases was a forensic match to the suspect profile in the Plano case. The Plano, Coppell, and Corinth Police Departments joined forces and worked tirelessly for years collecting DNA from persons of interest and following up on any and all viable tips. The suspect was even the subject of an “FBI: Most Wanted” episode.
Several years later, in 2018, Arlington Police Department (in Tarrant County) sent sexual assault kits on unsolved cases for additional testing in hopes that advancements in DNA technology would result in new leads. Doing so uncovered evidence from a 2003 home invasion sexual assault case that matched to the same offender from all three 2011 cases. It had been sent for testing in 2003, but DNA technology at the time wasn’t sensitive enough to develop a suspect profile to be entered into CODIS.
Enter forensic genetic genealogy
Also in 2018, Plano PD assigned a new detective, Daniel Bryeans, to review the case when the department received notification of the new CODIS match to the old Arlington case. That detective and his civilian sex offender registrar decided it was time to look into forensic genetic genealogy (FGG for short) to help solve this case. FGG takes traditional forensic DNA samples and converts them into samples suitable for genetic analysis before uploading them into public volunteer consumer genealogy databases. But that is almost the easy part. There is then what could be thousands of hours or even years of traditional historical and genealogical record research.
After being told to get lost by Ancestry.com (the largest consumer database company in this arena), the Plano detective turned to Parabon NanoLabs, headquartered in Virginia, to begin the FGG journey. Parabon’s Snapshot Investigative Genetic Genealogy Unit will take a forensic DNA sample and convert it to an SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) profile. SNP profiles contain vastly more information than traditional STR profiles, allowing the profile to find matches all the way to the ninth degree of a relative, versus traditional STR testing’s first-degree relationships. SNP profiles look at the entire human genome, versus the 13 to 24 specific locations used in STR profiles. The Snapshot Unit can use Parabon’s technology to predict the unknown profile’s ancestry and pigmentation to produce a detailed phenotyping report, complete with a composite sketch.[1] The SNP profile is then uploaded into the public volunteer consumer genealogy databases to determine whether there are any relatives of the SNP profile in the database and identify how closely related they are. Parabon uses the public database GEDmatch to conduct searches.
But after almost two years and hundreds of hours of database searching by both law enforcement personnel and Parabon genealogists without any concrete leads, Plano PD decided to contact a second, nationally recognized genealogy laboratory, Gene by Gene, which is in Houston. Gene by Gene utilizes similar technology to convert forensic samples into a SNP profile suitable for upload into its public database, FamilyTreeDNA. Both companies upload volunteer consumer kits from multiple sources, but it’s always possible that a consumer kit does not exist in both databases. It also could be that with the passage of time, more consumer profiles have been added to a database. So this time, in 2020, genealogists discovered a much closer relative to Plano’s unknown male profile. Plano PD then took those family tree results and spent additional months doing their own online records and social media searching before finding the suspect’s half-sister.
Identifying the suspect
After an interview with this woman, who was a Texas resident, Plano PD obtained search warrants to collect DNA samples from two people whom they believed would be direct relatives of their suspect—one from his child and one from his brother. The FBI guidelines for FGG call this “target testing.” Forensic comparison by Bode Technology confirmed that the two target test subjects were immediate relatives of Plano’s suspect. And after almost three years utilizing investigative genetic genealogy, Plano PD identified the suspect as Jeffery Wheat, formerly of Carrollton, Texas.
After a multi-state coordination with Mississippi and Arkansas law enforcement agencies, Wheat was arrested in January 2021. He had been working as a long-haul truck driver with a residence in Mississippi. Mississippi State Highway Patrol helped install a tracker on his truck, and he was arrested in Arkansas with the assistance of Arkansas state police. Arkansas authorities also helped Plano PD obtain a warrant for Wheat’s DNA. When Detective Bryeans went to collect the DNA, he told Wheat that he had a buccal swab for each case they were investigating so that he could send one swab to each police agency. Bryeans collected 12 swabs just to see if Wheat would react to the large volume, but he had no reaction.
When Wheat’s identity made the news, the Arlington victim informed her lead detective that her daughter worked with Wheat at a Brinks security branch, and her daughter worried that he may have even installed the victim’s home alarm system. During the offense, Wheat told that victim that he knew where her security alarm system was, made her take him to it to disable it completely, and told her that she really should have turned it on. Plano PD’s investigation also revealed that the 2011 victims’ sorority had used a credit card processing company that employed Wheat, which would have given him access to personal identifying information.
The prosecution
Despite having one victim in each of the four major Metroplex counties, Wheat was in Collin County custody and thus would see a jury in our jurisdiction first. But this case was unprecedented for us: a multi-county serial rapist, on top of being the first FGG case to be tried here. We wanted to do it right, and we wanted to do it with the full support of each of the other three counties. (Quick shoutouts to my fellow prosecutor counterparts: Britney Gendron and Paul Hiemke in Denton County, Leighton D’Antoni and Haley Pratt in Dallas County, and Stephanie Simpson in Tarrant County.) When all prosecutors gathered to discuss what trial would look like (presenting all four cases whether in guilt or punishment) and what we believed the cases were worth, there was unanimous support to seek a maximum sentence. This defendant deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison.
As we got closer to our trial date, I kept in touch with each prosecutor office. Everything was coming together. The victims were strong. They were going to show up for us. We had located enough law enforcement witnesses to get over authentication and predicate hurdles. Our plan for trial was to briefly mention genealogical research as an investigative tool for solving this case, but not to put on that evidence in tedious detail. The FGG part of this investigation spanned almost three years, so to put that on during trial would have taken days if not weeks. Our traditional STR testing from Wheat’s known buccal swabs was ironclad and irrefutable (1.09 octillion times strong, in fact). It confirmed to whom the FGG investigation led us.
Ultimately, the tireless law enforcement investigation, thorough trial preparation, and multi-county coordination left the defense with no choice but to accept responsibility and plead guilty to the maximum sentence in hopes of avoiding stacked sentences in each county. To be honest, I was very disappointed by this initially. The trial prosecutor in me could not wait to try this case. But it was also very clear that it was the right thing to do for these women. Logically, no prosecutor would pass up a plea to a maximum sentence and a waiver of appeal. Wheat took life sentences in Collin and Tarrant Counties on first-degree burglary of a habitation with intent to commit sex assault, the maximum on Denton County’s second-degree sex assault indictment, and 30 years on Dallas County’s first-degree aggravated sexual assault indictment (to offer him equivalent parole eligibility to the non-aggravated 2011 burglary charges).
Now we just had to work out plea logistics. Conveniently, our judge had just coordinated a remote plea with Dallas County last fall on a capital murder defendant who had additional cases in Dallas, so her court staff was up for the challenge of coordinating three other counties’ personnel for a remote plea in this case. The importance of this case and the unprecedented nature of the sentencing hearing was not lost on any of the participating counties. All personnel went out of their way to make themselves available and to make the process as seamless as possible.
The most difficult part of the entire sentencing hearing was for the victims as they made their victim impact statements. To see their attacker for the first time after over 12 years required a level of courage and perseverance that most of us will never know. And yet, Wheat sat expressionless during the sentencing hearing—no emotion, no sign of remorse, just … cold. As cold as these cases had sat for years.
In conclusion
These are the cases that stay with you for the rest of your career: cases where victims become victors. Where the combination of tenacious police investigation is met with the power of forensic science. Where a serial rapist who haunted the nightmares of the entire Metroplex was held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. The strength of this case and the unwavering support of everyone involved speaks for itself, but it was truly the honor of my career to see it through to its conclusion. For the women in my community, I hope I never have another one like it.
For the prosecutor in me, I can’t wait to see where forensic genetic genealogy takes the criminal justice system in the years to come. We should not underestimate the strength of women or the strength of forensic science.
If anyone has questions about this case or forensic genetic genealogy, you can contact me at [email protected].
Endnote
[1] Read another article about a Texas cold case helped by Parabon NanoLabs at www.tdcaa.com/journal/snapshot-of-a-killer.