By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 13, 2007; B01

Tammy Deraps had just stepped out of her car, in the parking lot of her Fairfax County apartment complex, when two masked men ran toward her and pushed her into the back seat, warning her not to scream.

For the next half-hour, Deraps said, she was driven through western Fairfax in darkness and confusion and sexually assaulted again and again.

"I thought I was just going to be killed," Deraps testified, through tears. "I really thought I was going to die if I didn't cooperate."

In vivid detail, Deraps recently told a jury how she was raped repeatedly -- more than 15 years ago. After the attack, Deraps, then 19, moved from Chantilly to her native Maine, but she never stopped wondering whether those two men, whose faces she never saw, would ever be caught.

All these years later, Deraps, 35, found herself in a Fairfax courtroom, sitting just a few feet from her attackers. The phone call came out of the blue from a new kind of police squad: one devoted to investigating unsolved abduction and sexual assault cases.

The Fairfax squad, among the first in the nation, started in 2004 with one detective and a state grant to fund expanded DNA testing of old evidence. In the meantime, another detective has been added, and the squad has solved 14 rapes, dating to the early 1980s, primarily by matching DNA evidence to the state and national databases, which have grown exponentially in recent years.

And when the old cases have reached Fairfax juries, convictions have soon followed, and the sentences are severe -- typically much longer than those given to murderers. The two men who raped Deraps were tried separately. One was sentenced to 115 years. The other got three life terms plus 30 years. To be served consecutively, the jury said.

"Jurors view these cases like they happened yesterday," said Detective Mark Pfeiffer, who started digging into old cases in 2001 and became a one-man cold-case squad in 2004. "They're not showing leniency just because time has passed. In some cases, they view it as more aggravated because the victims have had to deal with it for so long."

Deraps, who was raped in 1991, got the call from Pfeiffer in 2005, telling her they needed to meet. Although news media typically withhold the names of sex crime victims, Deraps agreed to have hers published to help change the public's perception of rape as a crime that reflects shame or blame on the victim.

Since meeting Pfeiffer and Daniel Bibeault, the squad's other full-time detective, Deraps made four trips to Fairfax: twice to testify at trial and twice to see her assailants -- Donald Roper and Troy Holland -- sentenced.

Most police departments don't have the resources or manpower to form a squad devoted solely to sex crimes. Phoenix started the first one in 2000; Baltimore, Charlotte and Dallas also have one or two full-time cold-case sex specialists. Locally, Montgomery has detectives who work all manner of cold cases, from homicide to burglary, and the District has one detective who pursues cases whenever the DNA database yields a match. Fairfax has cold-case squads devoted to homicide and sex crimes and recently combined them.

As DNA databases grew, investigators began realizing the potential for solving cases other than homicides. Sex crimes seemed the most logical because sex offenders often leave at least trace physical evidence. And Virginia has seen its database grow from fewer than 10,000 names in 1996 to 255,713 in 2006. Also, unlike some states, Virginia has no statute of limitations on sex crimes.

And experts note that such assailants often commit other crimes, from break-ins to beatings to killings.

Fairfax has about 75 rapes a year, according to police, and about three-quarters of them are solved. The rest wind up in the cold-case database that Pfeiffer and Bibeault are building.

When Pfeiffer began delving into old cases, he was trying to develop a suspect in a series of rapes in the Hybla Valley area. He began organizing old files, but those in police headquarters only went back so far.

Pfeiffer asked department researchers to come up with a list of unsolved rapes, sodomies and abductions going back to 1973. The printout came back with 20,000 cases. After weeding out cases that were unfounded or not sex-related, police think the actual number of open cases since 1973 is closer to 2,000.

In 2004, the state crime lab received money to process DNA from unsolved sex cases. Pfeiffer decided to submit evidence from about a dozen old files. In about half of them, Pfeiffer said, the database provided a hit.

There were visits to victims who hadn't heard from the police in years. No one has refused to cooperate.

Then came visits to the suspects. Some were in prison. Some had been released from prison. Some had never been arrested. Once picked up, none confessed, Bibeault said. But none has walked, either.

Among the men convicted were Eliseo Rodriguez, who committed rape in 1990 and was arrested April 2005; Angel Anderson, committed rape in 1991, arrested in January 2004; Renaldo White, committed rape in 1983, arrested in September 2005; and Maurice Juggins, committed rape in 1989, arrested in November 2005.

Sgt. Dave Smith, the squad supervisor, said Rodriguez's victim testified that she used to go for a walk every day before her attack. She hadn't done so since. On the day Rodriguez was convicted, she testified that she was going to go for a walk for the first time in 15 years.

"They live with it every day," Pfeiffer said. "We're just trying to help them out," in part by eliminating a lingering fear in some that their attacker could return.

In Deraps's case, only Roper was in the DNA database. But Pfeiffer and Bibeault investigated further, developed Holland as a possible suspect, obtained a search warrant and found that his DNA matched the second unknown DNA from the crime.

"It stayed with me for a long time," Deraps said of the attack. She joined a therapy group briefly and went back to work, "but my parents and my family were the biggest reason I was able to function."

Deraps, who has since married and had two children, said: "It's always been in the back of my head. I always wondered if it was going to be solved. So when you get that phone call, you kind of don't believe it."