by Dallas Morning News Editorial on November 24, 2019
Nothing we as a community can do or say will ever bring back Molly Jane Matheson, 22, or Megan Leigh Getrum, 36, the two vibrant and much-loved Dallas-Fort Worth-area women police say Reginald Kimbro brutally raped and murdered just four days apart in April 2017.
And nothing will ever change the fact that more than 40 days before Matheson and Getrum were raped, strangled and murdered, the Texas Department of Public Safety had officially notified the Allen Police Department that Kimbro’s DNA was found in a sexual assault forensic exam — also called a “rape kit” — taken in January 2014 by a local woman who survived a similar rape, strangulation and attempted murder after attending a party at which Kimbro was present.
In other words, nothing will ever change the fact that the Allen Police Department failed to arrest Kimbro for well over a month after the authorities there knew that DNA found on the January 2014 rape victim’s body was Kimbro’s, who was, from the onset of the case, the primary suspect.
In fact, as WFAA-TV (Channel 8) uncovered in a Nov. 15 investigative report, “One-hundred-and-five days would elapse between the time that the DNA results came back in the Allen rape case and when an Allen police detective obtained a warrant for Kimbro, who by that time was being held in the Tarrant County jail in the murders of Matheson and Getrum.” That, clearly, is inexcusable.
With Kimbro’s trial for capital murder in Tarrant County scheduled to begin soon, we reached out to Allen police this past week to ask why it took years for DPS to process the 2014 rape kit and report Kimbro’s DNA match to them, as well as why it took over 100 days to obtain a warrant for Kimbro’s arrest. They responded to our inquiry by saying they’ve been instructed by both the Tarrant County district attorney and the Collin County district attorney not to comment on any case involving Kimbro until both capital murder trials have ended.
That is perhaps understandable from a legal standpoint, given what appears to be at the very least undue delays and the possible mishandling of the 2014 rape kit and its DNA results linking Kimbro to a brutal sexual assault and attempted murder three years before Molly Jane Matheson and Megan Leigh Getrum were similarly raped and murdered. But from a moral standpoint, and from the standpoint of Matheson’s and Gertrum’s friends and family, it is, again, inexcusable.
Sadly, as Amy Jones, CEO of the Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center, told us this past week, it’s also far too common. “Very often when survivors do have the forensic exam — the ‘rape kit’ — it takes a very, very long time for them to hear anything back, and often they never hear anything.”
But, she continued, due to legislation signed into law in June 2017, just two months after the murders of Matheson and Getrum, “there are now going to be tracking numbers attached to every single rape kit that is performed in the state of Texas, so the survivors will actually know where these kits are in the process.”
Another piece of legislation, she said, will help the state come up with the funding to chip away at the backlog of rape kits that have failed to be processed.
Jones was referring to H.B. 281, which mandates the tracking of rape kits throughout the state and matches DNA results with national databases; and H.B. 1729, which gives Texans renewing their driver’s license the opportunity to donate $1 to the Department of Public Safety to help fund the costs of the equipment, training and personnel to tackle the cost of eliminating the rape-kit backlog.
“Making sure that there are enough labs available to test this information, making sure there are enough folks who are qualified to process the evidence, is absolutely crucial,” Jones told us, “because there are so many bottlenecks all along the way.”
How bad is the rape-kit backlog problem? According to the Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to healing and empowering survivors of sexual assault, Texas was the first state to enact all six pillars of reform recommended to address the rape-kit backlog problem. Yet there are still more than 2,000 rape kits awaiting testing in Texas alone.
As Ilse Knecht, Joyful Heart’s director of policy and advocacy, said when H.B. 281 and H.B. 1729 were enacted, “Only after law enforcement agencies track and account for the untested kits in their custody can communities begin to take steps to test those kits, hold offenders accountable and bring justice to sexual assault survivors whose cases have languished, often for years — or even decades.”
Tragically, these reforms were enacted too late to save the lives of Molly Jane Matheson or Megan Leigh Getrum. But that hasn’t stopped advocates such as Jones, Knecht, or Molly Jane Matheson’s mother, Tracy Matheson, from pushing for still more reforms to prevent future rapes and murders by repeat offenders.
This spring, H.B. 3106 — better known as “Molly Jane’s Law”—mandating that all state law-enforcement officials enter information into an FBI database for every sex offense they investigate — was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott.
“This will enable law enforcement access to information on potential serial rapists and sexual offenders in the future,” Abbott said at the signing ceremony. “No more should we ever again have a Molly Jane Matheson.”
We can only hope — and yes, pray — that these reforms do just that. And that the families of both Molly Jane Matheson and Megan Leigh Getrum find, if not peace, then some degree of comfort in the fact that their beloved did not die in vain.
We also encourage all readers to visit www.projectbeloved.org, which is part of the Matheson family’s Molly Jane Mission, which “strives to educate, advocate and collaborate to change the conversation about sexual assault and empower survivors to find their voices.”