How did serial rapist elude capture for years?

BRISTOL, Va. – Police here never tried to question former nursing aide James Wright when he emerged as the prime suspect in the sexual assault of a nursing home patient in July 2007, a Herald Courier investigation shows.

Instead of contacting their prime suspect, police crossed Wright off their list and closed the case without an arrest after three days.

At the time, police already were working a rape case that opened three months earlier and involved the same nursing home, but documents show there was a different suspect. Yet, investigators never talked to him, either.

Even with another top suspect, the case eventually pointed to Wright, who has since been convicted of several sexual assaults at National HealthCare-Bristol.

Police files note that Wright became a suspect only after a private investigator hired by a local attorney began making inquiries. But even with hints dropped by the investigator, the idea that a serial molester might be running free still didn’t click with local law enforcement.

Instead, the Bristol Police Department did nothing until the Virginia Attorney General’s Office called in May 2009 to ask what officers knew about Wright.

The answer, one detective wrote in a memo then, was not much. But she responded that she would pass along any allegations to prosecutors so a decision could be made on how to proceed. Someone had to first make specific allegations, she wrote.

By then, Wright already had left the nursing home for a job at an assisted-living facility. He might not have been hired, however, had allegations that he’d physically assaulted his mother been caught by the Virginia State Police background check commissioned by his new employer.

When state investigators stepped in to corral Wright in August 2009, they had uncovered slightly more than a dozen attacks on patients in two adult homes – most attributed to Wright.

Four of those molestations and rapes happened after local police had crossed Wright out as their main suspect.

Questions

National HealthCare-Bristol workers began to suspect Wright was molesting patients as early as 2000. Yet no one mentioned him to police until July 6, 2007, case files show. The police report mentioning Wright is five pages long. One page includes witness testimony, three more pages are little more than checklists detailing when and where the alleged crime happened, and a single page includes a check mark through a box next to the word “unfounded.”

A patrol officer dispatched that day to meet a sexual assault victim and her family at the Bristol Regional Medical Center emergency room submitted the first four pages so the complaint could move on to the Criminal Investigations Division.

The narrative summary written by the investigating officer describes how an 80-year-old woman told nursing aides at National HealthCare-Bristol that some “boy” molested her.

Three days later, the Investigations Division marked the case as unfounded.

Though police did not pursue that woman’s claims, investigators with the Virginia Department of Health Professions, which regulates medical licenses, blamed Wright for the attack when yanking his license last year.

In all, state detectives say a dozen patients were sexually assaulted at NHC between February 2000 and August 2007, and another patient was molested at the Grand Court Assisted Living Facility in 2008. Wright has been convicted of four attacks and is serving a 60-year prison sentence.

Missing from the July 6, 2007, police report is an explanation for why Wright is listed as a suspect.

His former co-workers told the newspaper it is because he was the last man to clean the bedridden woman hours before she first complained, which was slightly after midnight July 4.

The next two days at NHC-Bristol were marked by a flurry of activity as supervisors queried nursing aides about the woman’s accusations, and a ranking NHC official telephoned the victim’s daughter.

By the time police and a city Adult Protective Services investigator were called to the hospital, the woman couldn’t remember an assault, or even complaining of one, the report states.

Whether her faulty memory is the reason police closed the case remains unclear because the report does not say.

Bristol Police Chief Bill Price and other ranking officers seemed baffled by the lack of details when discussing the report with the Herald Courier.

“I can tell you right now, they [police detectives] didn’t talk to Wright,” Detective Sgt. Steve Crawford said, adding that the report should have included a paper trail that details every step of the investigation.

The officer who closed the case, retired Lt. Richard Mahoney, said he could not remember the case. He was the deputy commanding officer of the Criminal Investigations Division when he retired in August 2009. It was his job to supervise detectives and review all of their investigations.

The former investigations department head, retired Capt. Andrew Kristofek, said he vaguely recalls the victim’s name, but not the reason the case was closed.

“If [cases] were unfounded and they had been looked into, it wouldn’t have come to me,” said Kristofek, who retired in July 2008.

A clearer explanation of why the case was closed might have been gleaned from an interview with the original investigating officer, Detective Michael Arthur.

After Chief Price agreed to arrange an interview between the Herald Courier and Arthur and the other officer who investigated the NHC cases, Detective Deedra Branson, he changed his mind before a meeting could be scheduled.

“I don’t condone those mistakes,” Price said afterward. “But it’s just like a Monday-morning quarterback: You can always go back and say there was a bad decision.”

For some unexplained reason, the case was reopened June 19, 2009 – a month after state investigators queried local police about Wright.

When reopened, the case was again assigned to Arthur.

Arthur, reached by telephone before Price considered arranging an interview, said he needed permission from supervisors to discuss the case, but would call back as soon as he received an answer. He never called back.

Familiar refrain

Wright was never linked to the 77-year-old woman who in April 2007 said a strange man with tattoos climbed on top of her in her nursing home bed.

Yet it is that case that ultimately led to Wright’s arrest after complaints by her family eventually caught the interest of state investigators, a police report states.

Instead of looking at Wright, Detective Branson, who did not respond to interview requests, focused on an NHC worker thought to match descriptions made by the victim. But she listed the investigation as inactive nearly two weeks after it began.

Branson’s file does not say whether she considered Wright when his name popped up on Detective Arthur’s investigation at NHC-Bristol three months later. Nor does the file state whether she even knew of Arthur’s case.

For the next two years, Branson’s case remained in a sort of limbo. The only activity evident throughout that time are a series of memorandums detailing an unexpected visit by a private investigator, and phone calls from a Nashville newspaper reporter and a state investigator. Each person voiced suspicions about Wright, the memos state.

Branson’s memos show that she never spoke with the victim, but an NHC in-house social worker relayed to the detective the family’s assertion that a man with tattoos did work at the nursing home. Wright has no tattoos.

Warnings about Wright might have flashed in July 2007 if only Virginia’s criminal background checks for job prospects at adult care facilities were allowed to dig deeper than criminal convictions.

A week after Bristol police listed and then cleared Wright as a top suspect, he applied for a job at the adult home Grand Court Assisted Living.

Supervisors there saw only a pristine history when peering into Wright’s criminal background, a check performed by the Virginia State Police.

The check did not include the allegations that Wright once threatened to kill his mother.

That’s because the Virginia State Police search never turned up the three emergency protective orders Wright’s mother filed against him in late 1999.

Queries for adult care facilities do not pull up all the information in Virginia’s law enforcement database, VSP spokeswoman Corinne Geller explained in an e-mail.

“By state code, Emergency Protective Orders are contained in a separate database and are only accessible to law enforcement – again as dictated by state law,” Geller wrote.

Only an applicant’s felony history shows up in an employment check. And Wright had no arrest record, nor was he charged with any crime when Grand Court gave him a job.

Less than two years after Wright accepted the job, an 83-year-old woman from Grand Court walked into the Bristol Virginia Police Department lobby and said she had been sexually assaulted.

“She advised sometime after she went to bed she woke up fighting with a man,” a patrol officer wrote. “She advised she was fighting him and he grabbed her arms and said ‘We don’t want to do this.’ She stated she then fell back asleep ...”

At the bottom of the report, the officer wrote that the woman might have some signs of dementia.

The report was later assigned to Detective Arthur, the same investigator assigned the NHC-Bristol case that briefly listed Wright as the prime suspect.

The report on the Grand Court rape doesn’t state whether the case is still active or has been listed as unfounded. Nor does it state whether Arthur interviewed the woman or anyone else.

Wright was never charged, or even listed as a suspect, in the case. In fact, the case never had a suspect.

The Board of Nursing did blame Wright for the attack when stripping him of his nursing aide license after his 2009 arrest.

It is not known if Wright told Grand Court recruiters about the protective orders. The reference check form filed by the facility recruiter who approved Wright’s hire does not mention any legal troubles. It does state a solid recommendation from NHC, however.

The protective orders could have been found without police help, though, since the records are public information and are filed in the Washington County Juvenile and Family Relations Court.

The first order, filed by a sheriff’s deputy, suggests that Wright had a history of attacking his mother.

“He has assaulted her in the past and she states he has assaulted her this evening and threatened to kill her,” a Washington County Sheriff’s deputy wrote Aug. 3, 1999 – a full decade before Wright was arrested and later convicted as a serial molester.

In response, a magistrate barred Wright from contacting his mother at all for seven days.

Another order was filed three months later, this time on allegations that Wright, while arguing with his mother, threw his dinner onto the kitchen floor. A magistrate barred Wright from contacting his mother for three days.

A third order, filed a month later, accused Wright of attacking his mother.

“Ms. Wright also advises that her and her son verbally argued for some time then he pulled her hair,” the deputy wrote.

A magistrate banned Wright from contacting his mother for a day.

mowens@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2549