Raymont Hopewell entered the state prison system on April 11, 2004, for attempting to sell $20 worth of cocaine to an undercover police officer. Under Maryland law, authorities should have taken a sample of his DNA to compare against evidence collected from unsolved crimes.
Had the DNA test been done, it would have matched evidence found at the scenes of two unsolved crimes on Baltimore's west side: the 1999 rape and murder of Constance Wills, 60, and the 2002 rape and murder of Sarah Shannon, 88.
But Hopewell's DNA was not taken in 2004, and the matches were not made. Instead, after five months in state custody, Hopewell escaped without providing a sample.
The next year, police say, while Hopewell was free, he would kill three more people, assault four others and rape one woman before he was arrested in September 2005. His DNA was finally taken and, for the first time, police began to connect him to five killings over six years.
Hopewell, 35, will be tried in those crimes in September. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer would not comment for this article.
A conviction would raise troubling questions. If authorities had collected his DNA in 2004, could the later violent crimes have been prevented? And if the police had performed DNA analysis promptly after a 2005 killing, wouldn't they have known that a serial killer and rapist of elderly women was on the loose in West Baltimore?
Those who survived last year's attacks and the families of those who were killed are asking why Hopewell wasn't arrested and charged sooner. They are upset that the state DNA law passed in 2002 - which required collection of DNA from felons - was not enforced when Hopewell entered prison in 2004.
"If it's mandated they do it ... there's a good possibility that what happened to my mother may not have happened," said Roy Mack, whose mother, Sadie L. Mack, 78, was killed in May 2005. "Maybe a lot of other things he's done wouldn't have happened either."
State officials admit to failures in initial implementation of the DNA law. The Maryland State Police, charged with collecting the DNA, did not have the manpower to do the job. They say they have fixed the problem by enlisting state prison workers to help in collection.
"The bottom line is there was a problem. We saw there was a problem," said Karen V. Poe, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. But before the problem was addressed, she said, Hopewell had escaped custody.
