In Her Honor

When Vicki Schieber of Chevy Chase lost her daughter to a brutal rape and murder in 1998, she was encouraged to seek the death penalty for her daughter’s killer. She chose forgiveness instead, and launched a crusade to end capital punishment

By Kathleen Wheaton

On a Saturday morning in February, Vicki Schieber, a motherly woman of 62 with soft brown eyes, wavy brown hair and a gentle Midwestern voice, drives from her home in Chevy Chase to Baltimore to visit a death-row inmate.

At the prison, a guard leads her down narrow cement corridors, steel-barred doors automatically slide open and then clatter shut behind her.

The visiting room is scarcely wider than a phone booth, bisected by thick panes of Plexiglas. Unlike some of the other six men awaiting execution in Maryland, the man on the other side of the window hasn’t claimed to be innocent of the contract killing for which he was sentenced to die 11 years ago. He’s 36, small and slender, with an open, boyish face that lights up when he sees Vicki—they’ve exchanged several letters, though they’ve only met once before.

In the car on the way up, Vicki tells me she’s befriended a murderer whose guilt is not in question because she “wanted to try and understand how someone could do something like that.” 

Her desire to understand is born of personal tragedy. In May 1998, her beautiful and accomplished 23-year-old daughter, Shannon, a first-year doctoral candidate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was raped and strangled by an intruder who climbed in through the balcony of her Philadelphia brownstone apartment. Four years later, Shannon’s killer was caught, and confessed to the rape and murder of Shannon and the rapes of 13 other women.

In Pennsylvania, as in many other states, the wishes of a victim’s family can determine a murderer’s fate. Vicki and her husband, Sylvester (Syl), had always been opposed to capital punishment based on their personal and religious beliefs. But confronting the man who murdered their daughter put that abstract principle to an excruciating test. In the end, principle triumphed over anger, and—despite intense pressure from the district attorney and the Philadelphia news media—the Schiebers asked that their daughter’s killer not be executed. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In the nine years since the murder, the principles that guided the Schieber’s decision have become a much larger cause. Vicki, in particular, has devoted her life to trying to abolish capital punishment in Maryland and the rest of the country. As a founding member of MVFHR, Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, Vicki regularly gives speeches in churches and law school classes, testifies before legislative committees and appears before editorial boards.

In the last phone conversation Shannon and Vicki had, the night of her murder, they talked about a job her mother had just landed as head of a trade association. 

“Go, Mom!” Shannon exclaimed.  

So Vicki does, her daughter’s words often echoing in her thoughts. “Shannon wanted to make a difference in the world,” she says. “But God said, ‘I have a better idea. Change the system in her honor.’”

The roots of their beliefs

On a recent evening at Our Lady of Mercy church in Potomac, Vicki spoke to an audience of mostly fellow abolitionists, who’d pinned anti-death penalty buttons available in the church vestibule to their coats. But when Vicki finished speaking, one man stood up and declared that the Bible recommends capital punishment for the most heinous crimes. Though clearly in the minority at Our Lady of Mercy, his position resonates with the majority of Americans, two-thirds of whom say they support the death penalty.

This spring in the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, a bill championed by Gov. O’Malley to end state executions hung in the balance by one vote. Those against repeal argued that making murderers pay with their lives provides justice for the victims and closure for their families. 

But Vicki begs to differ on both counts. “I have come to believe that the death penalty is not what will help me heal,” she told a U.S. Senate subcommittee last year. “Responding to one killing with another killing does not honor my daughter, nor does it help create the kind of society I want to live in.”

The kind of society the Schiebers had wanted to live in had its roots in the Midwest of their childhoods—Vicki grew up in Moline, Ill., and Syl on a farm in Missouri where the closest town had a population of 200. Both were the fifth of eight children in close-knit families, where money was tight but education boundlessly encouraged. They met while doing Ph.D. research (hers in social policy, his in economics) in Gary, Ind. “With us, there wasn’t any going down on one knee,” Vicki says, laughing. “It was pretty clear we were made for each other.” They settled in Chevy Chase, accessible both to her job at the University of Maryland in Baltimore and Syl’s with the Social Security Administration in Washington. There were good Catholic primary schools in the area for Shannon and her younger brother, Sean, both of whom were reading by the age of 3. There was a parish they liked, Blessed Sacrament. Most importantly, from 5-year-old Shannon’s point of view, they lived just up the street from the Meadowbrook stables.

These days, Shannon’s bedroom in her parents’ Chevy Chase home is festooned with horse-show ribbons (she was co-captain of the equestrian team at Duke), and it’s here Vicki still comes when she misses her daughter, to lie on the bed with the solid wood frame Syl built. Shannon took the bed with her to Philadelphia, and after she died her parents returned it to her childhood room.

Tall and athletic, with long dark hair and a husky, Lauren Bacall voice, Shannon had, Vicki says, “every gift a parent could ask for”—including her father’s for math and her mother’s for making friends. Her brother, Sean, a year behind her in school and an aspiring writer, was her closest confidante. She volunteered in a church-sponsored program for the disadvantaged. She graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in 1992: student body president, a finalist for both National Merit and Presidential awards. She was wait-listed at Harvard but decided on Duke because of the North Carolina weather—there’d be more warm days on which to ride.

While she was a freshman at Duke, a terrible thing happened: On a crowded bus headed to a basketball game, the doors flew open as the bus turned a corner and a close friend of Shannon’s fell out and was killed. Devastated, Shannon considered transferring to another college, but instead followed what would turn out to be a family pattern in response to overwhelming grief: She threw herself into work, graduating with honors in three years with a triple major in math, economics and philosophy. When she was accepted to a rigorous doctoral program at Wharton, in downtown Philadelphia, Vicki and Syl were proud but also concerned that she find a safe place to live. 

The Wharton housing office recommended a gentrified patch of Center City around Rittenhouse Square, a neighborhood of old trees, picturesque brownstones, cafés and bookstores. The crime statistics in the area were low, but what neither the Schiebers nor the housing office nor most of the residents of Center City knew was that a serial rapist was prowling the neighborhood. 

Nobody knew about the rapist because the Philadelphia police were systematically downgrading rape reports as non-crimes, a practice that kept crime statistics low (the Republican Convention was slated to take place in the city the following year). If three rapes fitting a pattern took place in a given area, the police department was required to alert both beat patrolmen and the public. In the blocks around Rittenhouse Square in the year before Shannon’s death, a slender, soft-spoken young man had committed four rapes by climbing into the windows of young, single women in the middle of the night and placing a belt or pillowcase around their necks to keep them from crying out.

But only two were recorded as rapes. Another was classified as a burglary—the woman who went to the police was told that she probably didn’t remember correctly because she’d been drinking the evening before. Another complainant was dismissed altogether, with the suggestion that her attacker might have been her boyfriend.

Thus Shannon had no idea that the slight young man who tried to chat her up as she walked home from a movie was anything more than a nuisance; it had never occurred to her to install a security gate on the sliding glass door leading to her second-floor balcony. On the night of May 6, 1998, as she studied for her final exams, she e-mailed her father, promising to be home for a Mother’s Day brunch the following Sunday. She talked on the phone to her brother, Sean, who was planning to drive up and spend the night at her apartment before continuing on to visit college friends in Massachusetts. Shannon told Sean that she’d probably be up most of the night studying, and that it would be best if he came the next day and met her for lunch. Sometime after midnight on May 7, she decided to take a break and have a bath. Over the sound of running water, she did not hear her balcony door being pried open.

When she came out of the bathroom, a man was standing in the middle of her studio apartment. And perhaps because she was tall and strong and he didn’t look very big, she tried to fight him off—his blood was all over the apartment when the police arrived the next day.

At about 1 a.m., a medical student named Parm Greeley, who lived across the hall from Shannon, was watching television when he heard the sounds of a scuffle and Shannon’s distinctive low voice saying sharply “Get away from me.” But because he didn’t know Shannon very well and thought it might be some kind of domestic dispute, he went back to watching TV. Half an hour later, he heard a more disturbing sound—a scream for help that choked off abruptly. This time, he knocked on her door and asked if she was all right. When there was no answer, he called the police. They arrived minutes later, shone a flashlight on the closed balcony door and pounded with their nightsticks on the hallway door. There was silence.

Later, in court, one of the officers said that Greeley appeared “wishy-washy”; unable to say for certain whether the scream had come from Shannon’s apartment, although another neighbor who’d come out during the commotion testified that it was the police who’d suggested Greeley would be embarrassed if they forced the door and found nothing amiss. They left, telling Greeley to call 911 again if he heard any more noises. The next day, when Shannon failed to show up for lunch, Sean said he went to her apartment and saw her balcony door standing open. “In a bit of a panic” when she didn’t answer her bell or his shouts, he pressed the buzzers of all her neighbors. Greeley answered, and together the two men broke down Shannon’s door. When Sean saw his sister’s battered body on the bed, he collapsed in a faint. “It’s one of those moments when you think you are dreaming, and you think if you close your eyes, you can go back to your state of dreaming,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Again, Greeley called the police.

At first, the Philadelphia police believed Shannon had been killed by a man she knew. They questioned Sean, Greeley and virtually every male acquaintance of hers since college. At her funeral, two detectives assigned to the case told Syl they thought Shannon’s murderer was probably in the church. But eight months later, DNA evidence from two earlier rapes that had been stored on different computers was linked to Shannon’s attacker. Then, in 1999, over Labor Day weekend, an 18-year-old art student living near Rittenhouse Square was assaulted by a man with the same DNA, who removed her window grate in order to climb into her first-floor apartment. “Don’t be scared,” he told her, before putting a pillowcase over her head. After that, his trail went cold for nearly two years.

Ethical and spiritual questions

After Shannon’s funeral, Syl, Vicki and Sean faced a dilemma: What would they do if her killer were caught?

“I never thought of asking for the death penalty,” Syl says. “If your principles change according to circumstance, then they aren’t really your principles, are they?”

Vicki realized she, too, would be unable to demand the murderer’s death. “But I went through all the phases of anger and grief. There’s this natural revulsion—” she pauses. “Why-why-why ran endlessly through my thoughts. One day I was driving around Bethesda and I saw a sign on the lawn of a church. It said, ‘Don’t put a question mark where God has put a period.’ And something clarified in my mind. I thought, Shannon’s killer did it to satisfy his own ends, in order to silence her so that he wouldn’t be caught. Asking the state to kill him to satisfy my own ends, well, it would have put me on the same moral footing with him.”

Sean, now 30, says, “My inclination was always the same as my parents’, with some nuance. I’m sympathetic to their thinking but I also understand that desire for vengeance. There’s intellectual understanding, and then there’s feelings.” Having attended Gonzaga College High School, he says that he and the friends who rallied around him had learned through their Jesuit education to wrestle with ethical and spiritual questions. “There’s the fact that the death penalty is unequally applied, and I had a distaste for being part of that. I also saw other victims’ families consumed with rage, and that was a path I didn’t want to go down.”

Finally, Vicki and Syl sat down with their many brothers and sisters and told them that they would not ask for the murderer’s execution. Every one of their siblings agreed to support them. “In the end,” Sean says, “nobody we knew wanted to try and talk us out of it.”

The Schiebers were determined that Shannon’s killer would not destroy them all. Sean set off for a teaching post in Spain his sister had encouraged him to apply for. Vicki plunged into her new job. Six months after Shannon’s death, the family sued both the Philadelphia police department and the city, claiming that poor training of officers had led to the decision not to break down Shannon’s door when a more aggressive response might have saved her life. They also argued that disregarding rape charges amounted to a civil rights violation against women. The police commissioner expressed dismay that the Schiebers would antagonize the very people searching for their daughter’s murderer. The mayor declined to meet with them. “Shannon was hell-bent to make this world a better place,” Syl told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “She can’t do that now, but we owe her.”

The ensuing scandal, after it became known that 25 percent of rape complaints in the city between 1995 and 1997 had been downgraded, led to a re-investigation of almost 2,000 shelved cases. The former Sex Crimes Unit, dubbed the “Lying Bitches Unit” by its chief, Roscoe Cofield, who retired for health reasons in 1998, was reorganized into the Special Victims’ Unit, with trained female officers and gleaming new facilities. Three hundred forty-six rape cases were reopened, leading to 36 arrests. Shannon’s killer was not among them.

An arrest and an apology

In 2001, he resurfaced in Fort Collins, Colo. An agile, soft-voiced man was raping women by climbing into windows in the early morning hours. In Philadelphia, a civilian police dispatcher noticed an all-points bulletin from Colorado describing a search for a man who fit the description of the one who’d terrorized Rittenhouse Square. A DNA profile was rushed to Colorado, where it matched, though its owner remained elusive. He rearranged refrigerator magnets into a lurid poem at the apartment of one victim; he told another, “I wish we would have met under different circumstances.” He mailed a taunting letter to the police.

Frantically, Philadelphia detectives Jeffrey Piree and Chuck Boyle combed public records such as drivers’ licenses and credit card receipts to come up with a list of men who’d lived in both cities on dates corresponding to the crimes. One by one, dozens of men were eliminated, narrowing the list at last to 30-year-old Troy Graves, who’d moved from Philadelphia to Colorado in 1999 and enlisted in the Air Force, where he became a missile technician with top-secret clearance. He’d also married the 26-year-old daughter of a Seventh-day Adventist minister, whose parents didn’t know of the marriage. Graves’ wife later admitted to police that she’d suspected her husband might have been involved in the Fort Collins rapes: He was in the habit of disappearing for hours in the middle of the night, returning to bed at dawn with scratches on his face. He’d told her he was gardening, although their small dirt yard was not flourishing.

Graves was arrested on the afternoon of April 23, 2002, and within a few hours confessed to 13 rapes and to Shannon’s murder. The Philadelphia district attorney, Lynn Abraham, flew to Colorado and gave a press conference in which she declared her intention to ask for capital punishment for Graves despite the Schiebers’ opposition to it. “We were under such pressure to change our minds,” Vicki says. “The DA’s office called us almost every day to try to persuade us. Those who support the death penalty are considered ‘good’ victims, and those who don’t are suspect—the suggestion was that we didn’t want justice for Shannon.” The debate became increasingly public as the Philadelphia Daily News ran an editorial urging the Schiebers to press for Graves’ execution. In a published rebuttal, they wrote:  “…our beliefs about appropriate punishment have been severely tested. But we have no choice but to adhere to our principles. We know that Shannon would expect no less of us.” 

Shannon was the only woman Graves had killed, and several of his other victims came forward in support of the Schiebers. Finally, an agreement was reached: In exchange for not receiving a death sentence and for being allowed to serve his time in Colorado, Graves would provide a detailed account of his crimes. On May 31, 2002, he was sentenced to life without parole plus 250 years. Once in Colorado, he received a duplicate sentence for the rapes committed in Fort Collins and was sent to a maximum-security prison. “I never lose a wink of sleep worrying that he will get out and harm another young woman,” Vicki says. “He’ll never walk the earth again. Being against capital punishment doesn’t mean we weren’t pleased he was caught and put away forever.”

At the sentencing hearing, according to newspaper accounts, Graves trembled and wept. He offered an apology to his victims and promised to cooperate fully with profilers that, he said, “will hopefully help future investigations and maybe myself.” He and the Schiebers were not permitted to address each other. Seated behind Graves, they could not see his face. But Vicki recalls that his attorney turned around after the sentence was read and looked directly at them. “He said, ‘My client would like to thank the Schiebers for valuing human life. And he would like to say that he’s sorry for what he did.’”

Vicki says, “It made an enormous difference to hear those words. I know some people are cynical about that, though they don’t say it to my face.” Around Thanksgiving in 2002, she tracked down Graves’ mother, Michal, who was living in Arizona, and called her. Though initially wary, Michal soon broke down, describing her son’s horrific childhood at the hands of an abusive, heroin-addicted father. “Whatever happens, it’s always the mother’s fault,” she told Vicki, who by the end of their hour-long conversation was also in tears. “She said that we’d both lost a child, and I realized it was true.”

Vicki says she hopes before she dies to have a long conversation with Graves, but so far her requests to meet with him have been turned down, though she doesn’t know whether it’s Graves or the prison authorities who have denied her. She says she would like to hear directly from him about his testimony on the night of Shannon’s murder. The Schiebers continue to suspect that Graves may have been coached by Piree and Boyle, who flew with him from Colorado to Philadelphia—a charge they have denied. In his confession, Graves said that he never heard police at Shannon’s door, and that when he left the apartment, he closed her sliding glass door behind him. This account fits with the police department’s contention that Shannon was dead and her killer gone before officers arrived on the scene, so breaking down her door would have made no difference. The reason her balcony door was open the next day, district attorney Abraham suggested, was that Sean became ill at the sight of his sister and opened it, although both he and witnesses with him deny that happened. “Maybe the wind blew a sliding glass door open,” Sean says dryly.

The ability to forgive

In February 2004, the family lost their $3.8 million case against the city. The jury found that, although rape complaints had indeed been hidden, crimes against men had also been downgraded, so no gender bias was proved. (The claim against the two police officers had been thrown out earlier by the judge.) “That was a very dark day,” Vicki says. “It was never about the money—it was about the city recognizing a terrible wrong.” And yet she allows that much has changed in Philadelphia as a result of their suit, both in terms of police procedure and in the treatment of rape victims. In 1996, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, 18 percent of reported rape cases were dismissed; in 2001, only 8 percent were. This meant that more than 1,000 additional cases were investigated—the jump reflecting not an increase in crime but a willingness on the part of the police to take women’s accusations seriously.

Vicki says she would also like to tell Graves that she has forgiven him. She realizes that he may be the one who refuses a meeting—that he cannot face the woman whose daughter he murdered, and to whom he owes his own life. The idea of forgiving such a trespass is one that some who support her in theory find difficult to fathom, and she’s often asked, during her speaking engagements, how she did it. She feels that both her Catholic faith and her upbringing are part of the answer. When she was a child of 8, her 16-year-old brother was killed by a drunk driver as he was delivering newspapers, and she observed how her mother dealt with that loss: “She didn’t hold on to anger, she gathered her strength and was able to go on, to continue to love, for the rest of us.”

But spending time with Vicki makes it appear that the ability to forgive may be a trait—like being able to do mental math or carry a tune. “All I know is that it was a gift that I got, and I’m so grateful for it. It’s given me such positive energy to go do what I now do.”

A year ago, she quit the job she and Shannon once exulted over in order to devote herself full time to the cause of abolishing the death penalty in Maryland, driving two or three times a week to Annapolis to lobby legislators on behalf of the Maryland Catholic Conference. She serves on the board of Maryland CASE, Citizens Against State Executions, as well as on that of MVFHR, which seeks to ban the death penalty worldwide as a human-rights violation. Last year, she testified before the New Jersey Legislature, which has suspended lethal injections in the state pending review. On Feb. 21, 2007, following Gov. O’Malley’s  speech urging repeal of the death penalty, Vicki testified before the Maryland Senate and House judiciary committees along with Kirk Bloodsworth, an Eastern Shore waterman who spent eight years in prison—two on death row in Baltimore—for the murder of a 9-year-old girl before DNA evidence exonerated him.

Frequently, she’s found herself testifying alongside the families of murder victims who favor capital punishment. “There’s a woman who’s been waiting through 18 years of appeals to have her daughter’s killer put to death. She’s pounding on the table, demanding justice. She’s so angry that that person is still alive.” 

Vicki says, “I understand how she feels. But you have to let that anger go. You have to heal.” Public defenders have occasionally asked Vicki to speak to a victim’s family who has asked for a killer’s execution, but she says she’s never been able to persuade anyone in that situation to relent. “In their minds, their loved one and the murderer have become inextricably linked. They can’t think of one without the other.”

The best place to change hearts and minds, she believes, is among high school and college students. Early one recent Friday morning, she and Syl address a pin-drop-silent classroom of seniors at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. Several in the class later write notes to the Schiebers, saying they’ve pondered their views on the death penalty for the first time. Teacher Colman McCarthy, who every year invites the Schiebers to his Peace Studies class, says it’s a lesson his students speak of long afterward. He says he’s observed that bereaved parents either close their grief off in an effort to move on, or turn it outward and become crusaders for reform. “Mothers Against Drunk Driving is an example of how effective such reformers can be,” he says. “They speak with authenticity.”

The defeat of the death penalty repeal bill in March, by a single vote, was a blow to Vicki, although the moratorium on executions in Maryland continues, because of questions about the lethal injection method. “At some point, I hope and believe [the repeal] will pass,” says state Sen. Brian Frosh of Bethesda. “In the meantime, all we can hope is that we don’t put an innocent person to death.”

Vicki, too, says that she is full of hope for next year. “Changing minds is a slow, evolving process,” she says. “But since I see minds change every day, I believe it will happen.” She plans to rent an apartment in Annapolis in order to spend more time lobbying and less on the road. But she and Syl also plan to sell the house in Chevy Chase and retire to a place they’ve bought in the country. There’s a calm view of a lake and space for Syl’s woodworking shop. They’re writing a book together about Shannon; Sean is newly married and Vicki and Syl are expecting a grandchild.   

“It’s not what happens to you in life, but how you deal with it,” Vicki often says. Relentlessly optimistic, with a ready, contagious laugh, it’s easy to forget, in her presence, that the cause she has taken up is one imposed on her by the incomprehensible actions of someone else. She sometimes begins her speeches by saying that she would give anything to not be as knowledgeable on the issue of the death penalty as fate has made her become. 

The people she reaches out to, and who reach out to her—the medical student who couldn’t forgive himself for not breaking down his neighbor’s door, a rape survivor who attended Sean’s wedding, a man awaiting execution—are not people she ever expected to know. And the people who remind her daily of Shannon are people she probably never will know: the pretty, dark-haired woman smiling back from a newspaper wedding announcement, a tall young mother passing by with a stroller.

Bethesda writer Kathleen Wheaton has written for the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner, Town & Country, Smithsonian and other publications.